05/04 Links Pt2: Mourner in Zion Dara Horn reviews Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s memoir; The Chilling Truth Behind the New School’s War on Hillel; Vogue’s Glossy Whitewash of Francesca Albanese

From Ian:

Mourner in Zion Dara Horn reviews Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s new memoir.

I have never met Rachel Goldberg-Polin—though saying this feels somehow false, since at this point, every English-speaking Jew on earth is in a parasocial relationship with her. We have seen her at rallies fighting for her then still-living son; we have heard her voice on podcasts weeping for her executed child; we have seen her on television, her fight and her pain always on public display. And since Jews are a global family, I have, inevitably, also had some indirect contact with her. A mutual acquaintance told me that, remarking on the title of my book People Love Dead Jews, she suggested that the next one should be called People Hate Live Jews (ultimately I chose something even worse). This second-hand comment has stayed with me because it felt like more than a dark joke. It hinted at something that the public Goldberg-Polin, despite her enormous emotional exposure, rarely if ever expresses: rage.

Part of the galvanizing appeal of the cause of the hostages for worldwide audiences was that the hostages fit into the category of the kind of Jews that non-Jewish (and Jewish diaspora) audiences are more comfortable with: Jews who are powerless. This is one of the reasons for the broad acceptance of Holocaust memorialization, a history in which Jews are generally presented as powerless and pitiable victims. Goldberg-Polin is a woman of unfathomable energy and courage, but this unexamined and unconscious attitude toward Jews was part of what made it possible to share her public grief on mainstream American media outlets like 60 Minutes. It would be inconceivable, for instance, for the mother of a fallen IDF soldier to do so.

In Israel, in contrast, young Jews who have been killed fighting in Gaza are mourned alongside the civilians murdered or kidnapped on October 7. Everyone understands they are in the same fight for their lives, against an enemy that makes no distinction between soldiers and civilians. In her book, Goldberg-Polin dramatizes this equivalence with a moving personal story. She describes her fellow synagogue congregant Oshrat’s son Yuval, who constantly yelled Hersh’s name as he fought in Gaza, hoping to find his friend. At the end of Goldberg-Polin’s shiva, Oshrat was the one who recited the ritual statement “Get up from your mourning” and “took my broken paw in her cool, confident hand, and pulled me up into my New World.” A few months later, when Yuval was killed in Gaza, “it would be my hand to put into Oshrat’s broken paw, pulling her up into The New World where we both now live.”

When We See You Again is a deliberately apolitical book, almost stridently so, and, almost certainly, necessarily so. Beyond some important (and tragically not obvious) statements about mourning civilians on both sides, Goldberg-Polin makes no comments at all about the military or other choices of the Israeli government, which hostage families in Israel often vocally opposed. There was an inescapable—and for Hamas, intentional—tension in the official dual war aims of returning the hostages and defeating Hamas. The cause of freeing the hostages rightly became a near-universal obsession in Israel and the wider Jewish world, both because of the long Jewish tradition of ransoming captives and because of the sheer human horror of elderly people and children, even babies, being kidnapped, and innocents of all ages being shackled, beaten, starved, tortured, and in many cases sexually assaulted. But this meant negotiating with people who are “not like us,” people who regard murder, kidnapping, rape, and torture as legitimate, and it meant accepting their ever-more-outrageous demands, most consequentially the release of hundreds of convicted terrorists, many of them murderers. In 2011, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was, of course, returned to Gaza, along with a thousand other convicted terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit. The recent hostage horror show threatened to turn Jewish existence into a sickening real-life Trolley problem, in which “Bring Them Home Now” might be a track toward generating even more bereaved mothers in the future.

In discussing Hersh’s death, Goldberg-Polin invokes an ancient folktale retold by Victor Frankl as “Death in Tehran,” though it is more popularly known under Somerset Maugham’s title “Appointment in Samarra.” The point of the story is that no one can escape their predestined appointment with death. But, as she knows better than anyone, her son’s murder was not a natural disaster or force majeure; it was the result of human perpetrators making monstrous choices in “lands where we should not go,” including not only Gaza but also Qatar and Iran. Perhaps this is what drew her to a story called “Death in Tehran.”

Goldberg-Polin’s memoir is about her terrifying immersion in personal grief, not a confrontation with the political evil that produced it. But as she guides her readers through that gutting grief with all her luminous goodness and courage on display, it is easy to imagine her finding her why, in her (and our) horrific new world, where we all desperately need more goodness and courage like hers.

The prophet Jeremiah also gave us the divine response to the original mother Rachel’s wail from Ramah: “Restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears. For there is a reward for your labor… and there is hope for your future.” There is.

Seth Mandel: The Chilling Truth Behind the New School’s War on Hillel

Buried in a 2007 decision by Israel’s high court is the key to understanding an important part of the Arab-Israeli conflict that has migrated to America and the rest of the West.

The case illuminates recent events at the New School and elsewhere.

A Palestinian connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization, was petitioning the Israeli courts to nullify a decision that would stop him from being able to travel abroad. Officials argued that he’d be a security threat. His attorneys argued that he was also running a “humanitarian” NGO, al-Haq, and thus had a right to continue that work abroad.

The infamously left-wing court agreed, through gritted teeth, that the security officials had presented a convincing case that the man was a threat: “Nevertheless, the current petitioner is apparently acting as a manner of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, acting some of the time as the CEO of a human rights organization, and at other times as an activist in a terror organization which has not shied away from murder and attempted murder, which have nothing to do with rights; rather, they violate the most basic right of them all, the most fundamental right that without which there are no other rights—the right to life.”

That description of al-Haq and its director—terror operatives masquerading as NGO directors and using their “human rights” group as a free pass to kill Jews—is a Rosetta Stone for our age. And why would an NGO director be the perfect job for a terror operative? The Israeli high court revealed this, too:

“A director of a human rights group has a special status similar to that of journalists or humanitarian workers; the security concerns must be concrete to justify hindering his freedom of movement.”

Today we are plagued by these “special status” holders.

Last week in New York, the student senate of the New School, a private university, voted to stop all funding of the local chapter of Hillel, the campus Jewish center. Though framed as some sort of stand against Israeli aggression, this move was obviously and undeniably anti-Semitic. Terror groups and their American public-relations pets tried to claim that Hillel was guilty of funding war crimes because it supports the IDF.

One of the sources of information for this claim? The Hind Rajab Foundation, a Hezbollah-linked Mr. Hyde dressed up as humanitarian Dr. Jekyll.

How Europe's classrooms are being turned into factories of antisemitism

What are Irish, Spanish, and Norwegian children learning about Israel and the Jewish people? What happens when a teacher shows a classroom of children photographs of Palestinian children from the Nakba alongside photographs of Holocaust survivors liberated from a death camp? When do textbooks describe Auschwitz as a "camp for prisoners of war"? When does an education system teach that Jews promote violence? When do new curricula present the war in Gaza as "genocide"?

Across Europe, a slow but dangerous shift is underway. A one-sided narrative is seeping into classrooms – sometimes officially, more often as the personal views of teachers shaped by the society around them. The result is a generation that may grow up with a distorted image of Israel, Judaism, and history.

Three countries illustrate the problem with particular sharpness: Ireland, Spain, and Norway. In Ireland, a near-total public consensus against Israel has taken hold, expressed across the entire political spectrum and throughout the media. In Spain, where 82% of the public believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, even news outlets that are supposed to be objective use the term in their reporting.

The anti-Israel line taken by the media and by a government that leans on the radical left – reinforced by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's own claim that Israel is committing genocide – has created a public atmosphere in which Israel is seen as a malevolent and murderous actor.

Norway presents a similar picture. 88% of members of the country's largest trade union – which includes Norway's largest teachers' association – voted in favor of a boycott of Israel.

Here, too, power lies with a left-wing government that depends on the radical left. The discourse around "the genocide Israel is committing" has been ongoing since early 2024, and most of the media takes a pronounced anti-Israel line.

Ireland: when an error becomes policy
Orly Degani, a board member of the Jewish Community Council of Ireland, has been closely monitoring what is being taught in Irish schools. The picture that emerges from the textbooks, she said, is alarming. "Auschwitz is described in them as a 'prisoner of war camp' rather than an extermination camp. Judaism is presented as a religion that believes the only way to achieve justice is through violence.

"Another book, intended for children aged 4–5, puts forward the narrative that Jews did not like Jesus – classic antisemitism passed down from generation to generation." According to Degani, the problem is not necessarily malicious intent on the part of teachers, but a lack of knowledge and oversight. The Irish education system allows a wide range of bodies to publish textbooks, as long as they cover the subjects set by the government – but there is no meaningful oversight of the content.

"The government decides on the subject areas, and then any educational body that wants to can go and print a textbook. When we explained to the Ministry of Education that this produces problematic content, they said it was not within their control and that it was the publisher's responsibility."

The examples Degani cites are not theoretical. An official examination by the State Examinations Commission listed Palestine as a place where there are "many Jews." "The exam went through checks," Degani said. "It was approved by educational authorities, and it went out to every school. What does a child think when they receive that page?"

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05/04 Links Pt1: Australia was ‘golden’ but not anymore, Jews tell royal commission; Iran fires missiles and drones at UAE; South Korean ship attacked near Strait of Hormuz

From Ian:

The Violence They Wanted By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. Israel, overall, is thriving. Its terrorist enemies are on life support and their main patron is paralyzed and destitute. At the same time, it’s never enjoyed closer ties with a multitude of Arab neighbors, some of whom it’s providing with defense assets. The Israeli stock market and birth-replacement rate both keep breaking records.

You’d think that if a movement had failed as conclusively as the supposed free-Palestine crowd, it would either rethink its approach or begin to fall apart. But it’s done the opposite. With this record of failure on its stated aims, the movement is now becoming bolder and, sadly, more accepted by important figures outside its ranks.

What, then, keeps it going? Why are unapologetic Hamas supporters now driving through the gates of the Democratic and liberal establishment to stake their claim at its heart?

Because, while Gazans are miserable and Israel is flourishing, the “anti-Israel” thugs have succeeded in one powerful way. Around the world, they’ve unleashed an unprecedented storm of hateful violence. In synagogues and schools, at religious celebrations, and on campuses and the streets of Jewish neighborhoods, they’re getting Jews killed for being Jews.

It’s what sustains them because it’s what they wanted from the start. And history shows that cowards bow before those who embrace uncompromising violence. The beasts are attacking, and the cowards are bowing.

The Jews, in the face of threat and despite the reality of death, stand upright—in Israel and the Diaspora. We must because no one else will, because the threat isn’t going away on its own, and because it is only courage that defeats depravity.

Jay Solomon: The Iranian Terror Group Targeting Europe’s Jews

Counterterrorist experts tracking HAYI believe most of its recruitment is happening online, rather than by the IRGC activating local cells or dispatching terrorists into Europe. These experts said HAYI is using Telegram, in particular, due to its high engagement rate and relative anonymity.

In one recent Telegram chat, an anonymous recruiter asked a potential operative in the UK: “What expertise and abilities do you have?” The potential operative replied: “Open to hearing what you need, depending on what I would get in return.”

“Print out a photo of Trump and Netanyahu, set it on fire in one of London’s famous streets, and send a video of it,” the recruiter then wrote. “This is the first step to building trust, and I will pay for it,” the recruiter continues. The payments would be made in cryptocurrency, according to the Telegram messages, which were viewed by The Free Press.

U.S., European, and Israeli officials are particularly alarmed by HAYI’s use of teenagers and criminal gangs, many of whom appear to display no loyalty to Iran or the IRGC. And those arrested often aren’t Muslim.

The foiled March 28 attack on Bank of America’s headquarters in Paris offers a case in point. French police arrested four men, aged 16 to 21, while they attempted to ignite a large pyrotechnic device at the bank’s entranceway in the city’s eighth arrondissement. Police investigators learned that the eldest man recruited the teenagers by offering them between 500 and 1,000 euros to carry out the operation.

HAYI’s apparent use of amateurs in Paris likely diminished the effectiveness of its operations. But that doesn’t mean they lacked ambition, according to Parisian police authorities. France’s Le Monde, citing forensic experts at the Paris Police Prefecture, said the device planted by the HAYI team was “very high power” and could have generated a “fireball several meters in diameter.”

HAYI’s terrorism and social-media operations are intertwined to maximize their propaganda value, counterterrorism experts said. The recent attacks on Jewish targets in the Netherlands, including a synagogue and religious school, were followed minutes later by online posts of videos and comments. “The close proximity of these channels to Iranian-aligned networks, combined with the near-immediate reporting and access to attack footage, suggests that they were informed of the incidents almost in real time, either directly by the perpetrators or via intermediaries,” Julian Lanchès of the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague wrote last month.

U.S. officials said there has been no evidence that HAYI has sought to conduct operations inside the U.S. But there is mounting concern about that possibility now that the U.S.-Iran war has entered its third month.

Tehran has shown a growing willingness to operate inside the U.S. in recent years, often using proxies and criminal gangs. Last year, two members of an Eastern European criminal syndicate were convicted of trying to assassinate Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American journalist who lives in New York, on the orders of the Iranian government. And in 2022, a Lebanese American man named Hadi Matar stabbed and nearly killed novelist Salman Rushdie at a cultural festival in upstate New York. Matar is facing charges of providing material support for Hezbollah. In March, another Lebanese-American man allegedly rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue in a terror attack that the FBI says was “Hezbollah-inspired.”

The surge in anti-Israel activism on U.S. college campuses also could provide an organization like HAYI with a rich environment to draw recruits to its cause, counterterrorism officials told me. “Could it translate across to the U.S.?” asked Roger Macmillan, a London-based counterterrorism expert who has closely tracked HAYI’s emergence over the past two months. “Of course it could.”

Palestinian Authority's 'Reforms': Incitement in Classrooms, Empty Promises to the West

[T]he European Parliament has condemned Palestinian Authority textbooks for the seventh year in a row, citing the ongoing defamation of Jews, incitement to violence, and the promotion of jihad (holy war) as well as "martyrdom." Members of European Parliament also called for future PA funding to be strictly conditional, based on genuine reform. Demanding conditions and accountability is overdue but extremely welcome.

"[T]he PA [Palestinian Authority] has repeatedly and explicitly rejected calls to reform its curriculum. In public statements... senior PA officials—including the Prime Minister, Minister of Education, and curriculum directors—have all affirmed their unwillingness to make even minor changes to school textbooks." — Impact-se, November 2025.

"A central component of the PA curriculum's antisemitic narrative is that it categorically rejects Jewish presence in the region. Not only has content teaching Jewish history and the origin of the Jews been ejected entirely from PA textbooks since 2016, but the current curriculum explicitly refutes the very existence of a Jewish people.... The PA curriculum encourages students to believe that they share the same goal: of expelling the colonizing 'invaders,' the Jews, from the Palestinians' indigenous homeland, presumably to Europe, as they are presented as entirely foreign to the region." — Impact-se, November 2025.

In fact, the reverse is true. In 1977, senior Palestine Liberation Organization official Zuheir Mohsen openly admitted in an interview in the Dutch daily Trouw: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism."

The Jews have lived in the area, such as Judea, continuously for nearly 4,000 years; they are the indigenous people as much as the Arabs are.

The PA's own Ministry of Education recently admitted that textbooks currently used in schools "have not been revised at all."

No one is asking the Palestinians to embrace Zionism. However, any society that aspires to statehood and peaceful coexistence -- also not at all certain -- must prepare its next generation for nonviolence, mutual recognition, and respect. So far, there is scant evidence that these results are even in the bottom quadrant of the Palestinian leaders' goals.

This systematic indoctrination has poisoned the minds of generations, making reconciliation far off, if possible at all.

The funding of terrorism must stop. Aid should not subsidize incitement. It should demand the total cessation of terrorism and the total cessation of terrorist funding.

Until such a time, the PA's promise of reform will continue to ring extremely hollow, and peace will be out of reach.

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Over 92% of the Lebanon casualties are adult males. That is unheard of for urban fighting.

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The Lebanese Ministry of Health's Own Numbers Undermine the Civilian Casualty Narrative

In April, based on the Lebanese Ministry of Health's numbers, I wrote that roughly 80% of Lebanese deaths in the current war were adult males — far above their approximately 37% share of the population. 

That by itself is improbable if Israel is bombing and destroying indiscriminately, the way the media likes to imply. 

But it turns out those incredible numbers are not even close to the reality.

Their latest infographic shows that there have been 2,679 deaths, of which 2,459 are adult males - which is 91.8%. 

Comparing the April 17 and May 3 numbers, we see the number of women killed and injured has gone down, not up, meaning that they ministry was classifying some people wrongly. 

91.8% males is very impressive. But even that is an undercount, for two reasons.

When we look at the small print in the infographic, we see this:

The Health Ministry, against all international standards, is counting 18 year olds as "children."

A back of the envelope calculation estimates that  between 50-100 of the "children" killed were really 18 years old. So the percentage of adult males may be in the 93-95% range.

But that's not even all of it. 

A Reuters investigation published May 3 — the same day as the ministry's latest dashboard — reports that Hezbollah's own sources say the ministry numbers are incomplete. Three sources, two of them Hezbollah officials, told Reuters that the ministry's figures do not include many of the group's casualties, and that several thousand fighters have been killed, though Hezbollah does not yet have the full picture. A Hezbollah commander told Reuters that scores of fighters went to the frontline towns of Bint Jbeil and Khiyam intending to fight to the death, and their bodies have yet to be recovered.

That means that there are plenty, maybe even over a thousand, terrorists not yet on the Ministry of Health lists.  

This is almost certainly unprecedented for modern warfare (since the days when armies only fought armies.)

The data does not prove that every adult male death is a Hezbollah fighter. It proves something narrower and more verifiable: that the casualty distribution is wildly inconsistent with indiscriminate fire, that Hezbollah's own sources confirm the ministry numbers are a significant undercount, and that the framing of this war as a campaign of civilian devastation rests on numbers that were never true and that even the ministry's own subsequent revisions have moved even further away from.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Compare how the NYT used to report on Tucker Carlson and how they do it now

In 2022, the New York Times assigned nine reporters to watch over a thousand Tucker Carlson episodes, where they concluded that he ia conspiracy theorist and as close to a racist as they could say without being sued.

Now, for the first time the New York Times gave Carlson an extended interview. It was overwhelmingly respectful. It did not accuse him of the things that the NYT said about him in 2022. They claim that they asked some tough questions but in the end they let him have free reign to say what he wanted.

They edited videos of him in 2022 to make him sound like a crazed and obsessive conspiracy theorist. Now they show on their online cover Carlson sagely stroking his chin in slow motion as if he is some great thinker.

The interviewer herself actually adopted Carlson's own conspiracy theory thinking in how she framed her question on Israel and Trump:

Israel has tried to exert its influence on a number of presidents. Many presidents have been asked to decapitate Iran, to do a joint military operation in the Middle East. This is the first time, really, that this has happened, where the United States and Israel are doing a joint military operation against a Muslim country. Other presidents were subjected to the same pressures, the same donors. Bibi Netanyahu has been there since the ’90s. What do you think has materially changed that made Trump more susceptible to that influence? 

The assumption behind the question is that Trump is somehow under Netanyahu's spell, or Bibi can blackmail him - exactly what Carlson claims. And this is the NYT's' own question!  

It couldn't possibly be that Trump, who has railed against Iran's nuclear program since before his first term, actually wants to destroy it. No, it must be the Jews or Zionists who are forcing him to want to do it against his own better judgment. 

There are only two differences between Carlson in 2022 and Carlson today: he now publicly opposes Trump and he is obsessed with bashing Israel. So the New York Times rehabilitates him because it agrees with those two positions - and the fact that he is a crazed conspiracy theorist who has no evidence behind his accusation of what "they" are doing is no longer disqualifying for the NYT. They don't even ask him about the main topic of their 2022 investigation. 

As Hasan Piker knows, if you want to get a fawning interview with the New York Times, the more you scream about Israel, the better. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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05/03 Links: Let's Put an End to Ingrained Jew Hate in Britain; Here’s how to crush Tehran in three moves; The Deafening Lies about Israel; Clash Report, Unmasked

From Ian:

Lord David Frost: Let's Put an End to Ingrained Jew Hate in Britain

I thought Jewish people were surely as safe in Britain as anyone else. Apparently the British Jewish community must now live in fear. It sees its schools and synagogues under airport-style security and watches its children drilled in responses to attacks - while the rest of the population need do none of these things.

Sadly, security at Jewish institutions has been necessary since the mid-1990s in response to largely foreign-inspired Palestinian and Islamist terrorism. But what we have been seeing recently is different. Our Jewish fellow citizens fear to wear Jewish symbols in the street, to overtly identify as Jewish, and, it seems nowadays, even to go about their normal business in Jewish areas. In short, they are facing a growing campaign of intimidation and systematic incitement to violence.

This has happened because we have let it happen. The political and social response to the Gaza war - caused, let us not forget, by a horrific pogrom of murder, rape, and mutilation - has created a hostile environment. The Government's recognition of "Palestine" - an action which has made precisely zero difference on the ground - has only served to legitimize all those who want to think that "Zionists" are bad people and deserve everything they get.

We don't have to put up with the terrorizing of Jewish people in Britain. We are going to have to over-correct until something like normality has returned. For now, pro-Palestine marches should be prohibited. Open expressions of antisemitism in the mass media, in mosques, or on the streets need to be banned and prosecuted. We should deport foreign nationals who are guilty of this and revoke British citizenship for those who have acquired it. We need exemplary prosecutions and sentences for any kind of violence or intimidation of the Jewish community.

In short, we need to get tough if we are to reset the norms of civilized behavior in a democratic liberal state. I don't particularly welcome any of this. But for now, either we ignore the problem and see it get ever worse and ever harder to tackle, or we face up to it while we still can. Do we want to be the generation that let the Jewish community be intimidated into silence or out of the country? Shame on us if we do. But I think, even nowadays, we are better than that.

Kemi Badenoch: Extremists spreading Jew hate have no place in Britain

This is what the Green Party is pandering to – that alliance between the so-called progressive Left with the Islamist extremists – to the extent that they don’t even talk about the environment anymore. It is this ideology which has infiltrated many parts of our society and normalised hostility towards Jews.

The first place to start is a moratorium on marches relating to Israel and Palestine because they are being used as a cover to promote violence and intimidation against Jews. When these marches first started, I was Equalities Minister. My view then was that those who glorify the massacre of Jews have no place on our streets.

Next, we should crack down on hate preaching, extremist organisations, and ideologies that glorify violence and undermine Britain.

Back in 2021, a convoy of cars draped in Palestinian flags drove through Jewish neighbourhoods while a man’s voice, amplified by a megaphone, shouted: “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.” These men were arrested, but the CPS dropped the charges. If people get away with this sort of hatred, and this sort of behaviour has no consequences, then these crimes will escalate.

The Prevent programme must be more vigilant when it comes to cases that pose a credible threat to Jews. There is a disturbing mismatch between the proportion of Prevent’s caseload on Islamist extremism, which is just 10 per cent, and the head of MI5 saying that three quarters of their counter-terrorism caseload is Islamist extremists.

The Golders Green stabbing suspect, Essa Suleiman, was known to Prevent, but his case was closed. Now is the time for a comprehensive audit of counter-terrorism investigations involving anti-Semitic motivation to ensure nothing is missed. The Prime Minister needs to be bold if he’s going to deal with this threat. Warm words and more money for security are not enough.

The Iranian regime and its proxies are fuelling anti-Semitism on British soil. Just this week we learnt that the Iranian Embassy in London urged Iranians in Britain to recruit their children as martyrs and “sacrifice their lives for the homeland”. Britain should not be a recruiting ground for extremism.

I have offered to work with Sir Keir Starmer to fast-track legislation to ban the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). But he should implement Jonathan Hall KC’s recommendations and designate the IRGC as a hostile force and criminalise recruitment or displays of support for them.

Britain has been a sanctuary for Jews for hundreds of years and must continue to be so. Israel cannot be the only safe country in the world for Jews, who have been driven out of so much of the Middle East. We must all play our part in making anti-Semitism shameful. It cannot remain acceptable in supposedly polite dinner party conversations.

The Conservative Party is clear: if you want to spread hatred and violence towards Jews, you are not welcome in Britain.

Australia to hold first antisemitism commission hearing after Bondi Beach interim report

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is set to begin its first block of hearings on Monday, following the presentation of an interim report regarding the Bondi Beach massacre.

The commission, formed in the wake of the December terrorist attack to investigate government and societal failings, will hold the hearings through May 15.

The first hearings will focus on defining antisemitism and examining its historical and contemporary manifestations, and listening to the experiences of Jewish Australians, as well as on metrics for assessing levels of antisemitism in institutions and society.

Several major Jewish Australian institutions said in a joint statement that the hearings would be an opportunity for community members to have their voices heard, and that they hoped the commission would use their testimonies to develop practical recommendations.

“Giving evidence about these experiences takes courage,” said the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Australian Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Zionist Federation of Australia, National Council of Jewish Women Australia, Dor Foundation, New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, and Jewish Community Council of Victoria.

“Many of those appearing are speaking publicly for the first time. They are doing so because they believe this country can be better and because they want the commissioner to hear their truths and recommend changes that will make all Australians safer.”

The Jewish groups said that students would speak about rising campus hostility, while congregants would share what it was like to visit Jewish sites under armed guard and how workplaces had become uncomfortable.

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"The Jewish Question" Was the 19th Century's Acceptable Form of Antisemitism

(Part 1 of a series on "The Jewish Question")

Across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the phrase "the Jewish Question" — die Judenfrage in German, la question juive in French, the Jewish problem in English — saturated European discourse. 

But what, exactly, was the Jewish Question?

Strangely, there is no single answer. 

The phrase was ubiquitous. There were multiple books titled The Jewish Question or The Jewish Problem. There were countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, and learned essays addressing it. One scholar catalogued 1,230 sources (books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, meetings) on the topic in a single decade from 1875-1884. 

But looking at these sources does not help define the question. They presume the reader already knows.

It appeared in Hegelian philosophy and in evangelical missionary tracts. It was the title of Bruno Bauer's 1843 treatise and Karl Marx's 1844 reply. It was used by French revolutionaries debating emancipation and by German racial theorists demanding separation. It appeared in respectable London newspapers as routine political vocabulary, requiring no definition because every reader was assumed to know what it meant. By 1939, when the Nazi government published Germany and the Jewish Problem, the phrase had been a fixture of European discourse for nearly two centuries, deployed across every political ideology, in every Western language, by every kind of publication.

The one thing nearly everyone using the phrase seemed to agree on was that the Jewish Question was not antisemitism. On the contrary. It was meant to be the alternative to antisemitism. It was the considered intellectual response to a real problem, the kind of thing serious people engaged with in contrast to the rabble who merely hated Jews.

For example, on November 7, 1881, the Pall Mall Gazette of London printed a brief telegram from Berlin under the headline "Prince Bismarck and the Jewish Question." The Tageblatt, organ of the German anti-Jewish Conservatives, was replying to remarks Bismarck had reportedly made condemning anti-Jewish agitation. The Conservatives wanted to clarify their position. "We have always condemned the brutalities of Jew-baiting," they wrote, "but these must not be confounded with the Jewish question, which is well founded. The Jewish question exists in spite of the supposed opinion of Prince Bismarck, and if the Prince adheres to the statement attributed to him, the Jewish question will exist even against him."

The German Conservatives — the leading anti-Jewish party of their moment — were drawing a line between two things they regarded as entirely distinct. On one side was Jew-baiting: vulgar, brutal, the kind of thing respectable people condemned. On the other side was the Jewish Question: serious, well-founded, a matter that any thinking person was obliged to engage with. The Conservatives located their moral position in being against the first while being committed to the second. They were not antisemites, by their lights. They were responsible men, addressing a real problem, in contrast to the ignorant bigots who physically attacked Jews.

For the educated nineteenth-century European, pogroms were awful and blood libels were medieval superstition. But the Jewish Question — that was something else. That was a matter of serious analysis.

So what was the analysis? What did the Question actually claim?

The texts will not tell you directly. They presume the reader already knows. The only way to recover what the Question meant is to work backward from the solutions its serious analysts proposed. If we can identify the solutions, we can reconstruct the questions they were meant to answer. The result is illuminating, and not in the way the analysts intended.

Four solutions, four problems

Consider four representative texts.

In 1883, Arnold Frank, a licentiate of the Irish Presbyterian Church, published The Jewish Problem and Its Solution through the Bible and Colportage Society of Belfast. Frank was an evangelical Protestant of unimpeachable respectability. The solution he proposed was conversion, pursued through evangelism. The Christian world, he wrote, had a duty to win the Jew for Christ — "if it were for nothing else than self defence," because Jewish religious influence undermined Christian belief. Working backward from this solution, the question Frank was answering becomes clear: Jews refuse the true faith and undermine those who hold it. What should we do? For Frank, the Jewish Problem was a religious problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was their continued existence as Jews, which conversion would remedy.

A century earlier, in December 1789, the French revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre rose in the National Assembly to defend Jewish emancipation. He was a liberal and a constitutional monarchist, on the progressive side of the debate, advocating equal rights for Protestants and Jews against those who wanted to maintain the centuries-old exclusions. The solution he proposed has echoed through every subsequent discussion of Jewish citizenship: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to Jews as individuals." Working backward, the question becomes: Jews constitute a corporate body within the state — with their own laws, their own institutions, their own communal courts — incompatible with the unified citizenship the Republic requires. What should we do? For Clermont-Tonnerre, the Jewish Question was a political-organizational problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was Jewish communal existence, which dissolution of Jewish institutions would remedy.

In 1844, Karl Marx published Zur Judenfrage — "On the Jewish Question" — replying to Bruno Bauer. Marx reframed the entire debate. The solution he proposed was structural: the abolition of the social conditions that produced both Judaism and capitalism. The closing line of the essay is unambiguous: "the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism." Working backward, the question becomes: Jewish economic activity — usury, commerce, what Marx called "huckstering" — is capitalism in concentrated form. What should we do? For Marx, the Jewish Question was an economic problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was the persistence of the social form Judaism allegedly expressed, which revolutionary transformation would remedy - and leave the world with no Judaism.

In 1879, Wilhelm Marr published Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum — "The Victory of Jewry over Germandom" — and helped popularize a new word for an old position. Marr coined "antisemitism" specifically to give Jew-hatred a scientific veneer, distinguishing his position from what he portrayed as backward religious prejudice. The solution he proposed was racial separation, which his successors would push toward catastrophic conclusion. Working backward, the question becomes: Jews are a biologically distinct people whose hereditary characteristics make them permanently incompatible with German national life. What should we do? For Marr, the Jewish Question was a racial problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was their biological inheritance, which no conversion or civic emancipation could touch.

These are not four facets of one problem. They are four different problems with four different referents and four different proposed remedies. Frank's religious problem cannot be solved by economic transformation. Marr's racial problem cannot be solved by conversion. Clermont-Tonnerre's organizational problem cannot be solved by changes in the social conditions of production. Marx's economic problem cannot be solved by the dissolution of communal courts. The four frameworks did not merely disagree about details. They disagreed about what kind of thing the Jewish Question even was.

And yet all four called what they were addressing "the Jewish Question." All four believed they were treating the same subject. Across a century of discourse, no one seems to have been particularly bothered by the fact that the people writing about "the Jewish Question" did not agree, even at the most basic level, on what the Question actually was. Yet everyone agreed that there was a question.

What the shared phrase actually meant

Each framework began from the conviction that Jewish existence was the kind of presence that required management. Frank knew Jews were a religious problem because his theology said so. Clermont-Tonnerre knew Jews were a political problem because his Republicanism said so. Marx knew Jews were an economic problem because his materialism said so. Marr knew Jews were a racial problem because his pseudo-science said so. Each was correct given his framework. But the framework did not generate the conclusion that Jews required treatment. The conclusion preceded the framework. The framework provided respectable contemporary vocabulary in which the prior conclusion could be articulated.

This becomes visible when you examine what happened as proposed solutions failed. Spain attempted the religious solution in the fifteenth century, demanding conversion or expulsion. The conversos who chose conversion were persecuted as crypto-Jews for generations afterward. If the problem had really been religious, conversion would have ended it. It did not. 

France attempted the political solution in 1791, granting full civic emancipation conditional on the dissolution of Jewish corporate identity. But Napoleon convened a Grand Sanhedrin to determine if Jews can really live in France as normal citizens. A century later, the Dreyfus Affair revealed that emancipated French Jews remained suspect as Jews. If the problem had really been organizational, civic equality would have ended it. It did not. 

The Soviet Union attempted the economic solution after 1917, abolishing the bourgeois conditions Marx had identified. Soviet antisemitism flourished anyway, eventually producing its own state-sponsored persecutions. If the problem had really been economic, abolishing capitalism would have ended it. It did not. 

Germany attempted the racial solution under the Nazis, and the catastrophe needs no description.

Each "solution" failed in the same way. A specific proposed answer was implemented, the proposed answer did not resolve the discomfort with Jewish presence, and a new framework was selected to articulate why Jewish presence remained problematic. Religious gave way to political gave way to economic gave way to racial. Each successor framework presented itself as the deeper analysis that the previous framework had missed. None of them ever considered the possibility that the Question itself was not what it claimed to be.

Real political questions, when their proposed solutions fail, generate refinement of analysis. The Eastern Question was reformulated repeatedly across the nineteenth century as Ottoman conditions changed, but each reformulation was a closer approach to the actual referent — the Ottoman Empire's relationship with European powers. The Irish Question evolved from Catholic Emancipation through Home Rule through partition, but the evolution tracked actual changes in the Anglo-Irish relationship. When the referent was finally addressed, the Question dissolved.

The Jewish Question never got refined. It got replaced. Each new framework was not a closer approach to a real referent but a fresh respectable vocabulary deployed when the previous one had become embarrassing. The pattern is the diagnostic of cognitive architecture rather than honest inquiry. A question whose stated referent keeps changing is a question whose actual referent is something else.

The actual referent — the one all four frameworks shared, beneath their respective vocabularies — was the assumption that Jewish existence as Jewish existence was the kind of presence European societies could not simply accommodate. The Question was always what should we do about our Jews?, with the answer "something" already settled, and the rationale to be supplied by whichever framework the era found most respectable.

The respectable form

This brings us back to the German Conservatives of 1881 and to the most important feature of the Jewish Question as a discursive form. Each of the four frameworks I have described did not merely articulate the assumption that Jewish presence required resolution. Each one presented itself, in its own moment, as the moderate and enlightened position — explicitly defined against a cruder antisemitism it considered beneath itself.

Arnold Frank was not a medieval Christian persecutor. He was a Belfast Presbyterian writing in the post-Enlightenment evangelical tradition. He did not endorse pogroms or forced conversion at sword-point. He represented the Protestant reform of Christian-Jewish relations: love them, pray for them, send missionaries, persuade them. By the standards of the world he had inherited, Frank was a moral progressive. He understood himself as advancing beyond the ugliness of medieval Christendom toward a more humane Christian witness to the Jewish people. And the position he took was that Jewish existence as Jewish existence should end, gently, through evangelism rather than coercion.

Clermont-Tonnerre was not a defender of the ancien régime's Jewish disabilities. He was a leading voice for Jewish emancipation in a National Assembly debate where some delegates wanted to maintain the centuries-old exclusions. His famous formulation — everything to Jews as individuals, nothing to Jews as a nation — was understood at the time as a defense of Jewish rights against those who wanted to keep Jews as a permanently inferior caste. He was on the liberal side of the argument. And his liberalism took the form of demanding that Jewish corporate existence be dissolved as the price of admission to French citizenship.

Marx was not a populist scapegoater of Jewish bankers. He was, in his own self-understanding, the deeper analyst, locating Jewish economic behavior within the structural critique of capitalism, distinguishing his position from the vulgar Jew-hatred of the conservative populists. He was a radical, and he understood his radicalism as the alternative to the cruder forms of antisemitism that produced pogroms and individual scapegoating. And his alternative was that Jewish existence as expressed in social form be abolished along with the conditions producing it.

Marr is the hardest of the four to call respectable, but in his own moment, he positioned himself as scientific and modern against what he portrayed as backward religious bigotry. He coined the word "antisemitism" precisely to give the position a scientific register, distinguishing it from the superstitious Christian Jew-hatred of the past. His self-understanding was that he was offering a sober racial analysis — modern, biological, Darwinian — in contrast to medieval prejudice. And his sober racial analysis demanded racial separation that culminated, two generations later, in industrialized murder.

Each framework, then, performed the same operation. It identified a cruder, more vulgar form of antisemitism prevalent in its environment. It defined itself explicitly against that cruder form. It articulated the same prior assumption — that Jewish existence required resolution — in the respectable contemporary vocabulary of its moment. And it understood itself, by its own lights, to be antisemitism's opposite: the moral progress over what came before.

This is what the German Conservatives were doing in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1881. They were not confused or hypocritical. They had located the moral high ground in being against the brutalities while embracing the well-founded Question. That is a stable, coherent, durable cultural-political achievement: the construction of an acceptable antisemitism, articulated in whatever vocabulary the era considers serious, sincerely understood by its adherents to be the antithesis of the vulgar form they reject.

The achievement is what made the framing so durable. Each generation could point to a worse version — one that they did not endorse — and locate themselves on the right side of history relative to it. The Reform Christian was not a Crusader. The French Republican was not an absolutist excluder. The Marxist was not a Pale of Settlement antisemite. The racial scientist was not a credulous superstitious peasant. Each could, with full sincerity, distinguish his position from antisemitism as he understood antisemitism — while occupying a position that carried forward the same load-bearing assumption that animated every cruder form.

The structural reading

When you place the four frameworks beside one another, the diagnostic is unavoidable. Frank wanted Jewish religious existence to end. Clermont-Tonnerre wanted Jewish communal existence to end. Marx wanted Jewish economic existence to end. Marr wanted Jewish biological existence to end. Each framework specified a different mode of Jewish existence as the relevant one and demanded its termination. None of them were content with Jewish existence continuing as itself.

The society's treatment of Jews was never considered the problem. The Jews themselves were the problem. And soon enough, even the respected academics admitted this. In 1879, Heinrich von Treitschke — professor at the University of Berlin, the most prominent German historian of his generation — said it without ornament in the pages of the Preußische Jahrbücher: 'Die Juden sind unser Unglück.' The Jews are our misfortune. This phrase was first published in the most prestigious journal of German political thought as an enlightened viewpoint. 

The Nazis recognized it for what it was. 

The Jewish Question was the socially acceptable form of antisemitism. It was sophisticated: serious analysis, considered solutions, learned treatises, careful debate. It carefully distinguished itself from the earlier, crude manifestations of antisemitism. And the world, by and large — including most but not all  European Jews themselves — accepted this framing. 

Almost no one considered that there was an alternative way of looking at Jews in Europe, of dissolving the Jewish question altogether. Yet there was an another way that emerged — in the New World. And only when compared against Europe can the genius of the American system be recognized, which is the topic of the next essay.

Tragically, the progressive Europeans did not recognize that the liberal, serious, progressive Jewish Question itself, that they debated endlessly as the enlightened alternative to pogroms and blood libels, is what would directly lead to genocide.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Yes, Neturei Karta is antisemitic

Anti-Zionists love to trot out Neturei Karta as "real Jews" and as proof that they are not antisemitic since they welcome the fringe of Orthodox-looking Jews to their protests.

But what if Neturei Karta itself says antisemitic things?

Rabbi Yaakov Weiss, a NK leader in England, was interviewed by Al Araby, about the UK's decision to look more carefully at approving anti-Israel protests in the wake of a string of increasingly serious antisemitic attacks.  He said, "This serves the Zionists. They (the Zionists and their supporters in Britain) are looking forward to this, to attacks on the Jewish community, and silencing protests against Israel and Zionism."

He is claiming that Zionists, the vast majority of Jews, support attacks on their own  Jewish community because that helps, somehow, to silence anti-Israel protests. 

When antisemites say that most Jews are not really Jews but Khazars, that is antisemitism; When Neturei Karta says that they are the only real Jews and everyone else are not real Jews, that is no less antisemitism. And to claim that most Jews welcome attacks on Jews is simply slander. 

Neturei Karta blamed "Zionists" for October 7. They did not say a word of condemnation for the murders or rapes and did not say anything negative about Hamas, whose leaders they had met a number of times. 

Neturei Karta may be technically halachically Jewish. But there is nothing remotely Jewish about them. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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05/02 Links: With gallows humor, UK author Howard Jacobson takes on post-Oct. 7 ‘bloodlust’ for Jews; Whisper it, but Trump’s blockade is working; Why Anti-Zionism Is Really Just Envy

From Ian:

With gallows humor, UK author Howard Jacobson takes on post-Oct. 7 ‘bloodlust’ for Jews

Jacobson can’t disguise his disdain towards far-left politicians such as the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the new leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski, a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist Jew. He labels Polanski “a despicable clone of Jeremy Corbyn,” while saying Corbyn at least has the excuse of ignorance. “He really is an ignorant man and doesn’t know what Zionism was and really does think it was a colonial enterprise from the start,” Jacobson says. “Zach Polanski doesn’t have that excuse.”

Jacobson recognizes that “the Zionist heart has hardened,” but believes this was inevitable both because “no grand ideal … can ever stay loyal to its first principles” and because “there’s been so much pressure put on it [by] the enmity it faced once the world decided to turn against Zionism.”

But he maintains his staunch belief in the nobility of the founding Zionist dream, which he terms “the liberation of the Jewish mind, as well as the liberation of the Jewish body.”

If Charmian desperately tries to help her husband cling on to sanity — “it can’t all be catastrophe, Ferdie,” she tells him — his mother has a view of the world shaped by history’s darkest hour. “She never did think humanity had learnt its lesson or ever would,” Ferdie recounts, quoting Agata’s dismal words: “I will not waste my time saying Never Again.”

Do the last two years validate that assessment? In the days after October 7, Jacobson recalls sensing an “exuberance … in some academic circles, on campuses throughout the Western world, [and] on the streets of our great cities.”

After eight decades of supposed restraint in the wake of the Holocaust, he says, “permission” had finally been given to “do to the Jews, and then say about the Jews, all the things we’d been brought up not to.”

Jacobson believes the results are horrifying. “The moral walls erected around Belsen and Auschwitz [are] finally coming down, and that’s terrifying,” he says.

The “raucousness” of the demonstrations in Britain, the manner in which people would “shout and scream” if they were denied their weekly “right” to protest exactly as they wished, didn’t just offend Jacobson’s Jewish sensibilities. “It bothered me as an Englishman too,” he says, adding it felt alien to the “free and easy way that life in London … and England has always been.”

But, Jacobson was recently reminded, the sympathies of England’s silent majority may not be with the strident minority.

As he traveled by cab to do a promotional interview, a London taxi driver asked Jacobson what he was going to be talking about on the radio. The author told him about “Howl.”

The driver asked to pull over for a minute, turned to face Jacobson, and said: “I just want you to know that out there in this country, we’re with you, you know.”

A perplexed Jacobson asked him what he meant.

“We’re not buying it,” the driver replied. “We’re not all buying that horrible [antisemitic] Jewish stuff, we’re not. We’re with you.”

It is no wonder Jews want to leave Britain

I am the one with the big personality around the Friday night dinner table. I have spent my whole life being told to ‘stop it with the dramatics’ as I sip my chicken soup. A day does not go by where my family – proud Jewish Brits – long for me to lower my voice or roll their eyes at my overexaggerating tendencies. So you can only imagine my horror when my friend – one of the most rational people in our social circle – said exactly what I was thinking: that Britain is no longer safe for British Jews. If Green party leader Zack Polanski made it to Number 10, my friend said that he would leave immediately. He told me in candid detail that he would stay in Israel until a visa was accepted for him to go to America. I was startled. Is the situation for the Jewish community really that bad? The latest attack in Golders Green shows that my friend – and many other British Jews – are right to be afraid.

When Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, members of the Jewish community started to explore the idea of leaving the UK. Who could blame them when faced with the realities of living as a Jew in 21st Century Britain? A lot of my non-Jewish friends were somewhat surprised when I told them that it was standard protocol that synagogues are heavily guarded. Being educated in two Church of England schools, I had the luxury of assimilated protection from outside threats in that regard, although I still felt the danger when going to my place of worship. But when I think back to my old school days, memories flash before me of being told to ‘get in the oven’ by ignorant classmates. When meeting another Jew at university who was also educated at a private school, we bonded over similar shared experiences. It’s a reminder that the scourge of antisemitism is always present, but now war in the Middle East has enabled it to float to the surface and into the mainstream.

Childhood memories include skipping the children’s service at my synagogue to chat with my dad as he was on guard duty, only for him to tell me to go back inside for my own safety. Should any place of worship in the UK even be in such need of security? This is a proud country which has freedom of religion. And why do Jewish schools in the UK need prison-like walls? So why do synagogues need to be so heavily guarded? Jewish children in Britain have been forced to hide their blazers in public for fear of putting a target on their backs. These issues aren’t confined to schools, of course; a friend working in the media told me she was scared of even outing herself as Jewish to her colleagues.

The rate of people leaving the UK to emigrate to Israel hit a 40-year high in 2025, with an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year. That was already on top of an increase of over 70 per cent in 2023. This is not necessarily just members of more orthodox denominations, but young adults who are feeling the impact directly on the streets and in the workplace. I spoke to one of my friends in Israel – a 29-year-old living in Tel Aviv, who told me in explicit terms that they feel safer in a warzone than on the streets of the UK. “We moved to Israel with the security of knowing we would feel secure in a war zone rather than in a country who has abandoned its most loyal yet petrified minority group, the Jewish community,” she said.

Jake Wallis Simons: Whisper it, but Trump’s blockade is working

Foreigners who commit evil belong in the depths of the water, apparently. That’s according to Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, who is badly wounded, living like a rat underground and reduced to handwriting his words of wisdom, or having them handwritten for him.

Did nobody point out that when his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, posted on X that an American warship was less dangerous than “the weapon that can send that warship to the bottom of the sea”, it heralded his death 11 days later?

No sense of irony, these people. Speaking of irony, rumours abound that the new dictator might be dead and the regime is hushing it up. A mural recently unveiled near Qom “mistakenly” included his mugshot in a gallery of martyrs, and the state-run Tasnim News Agency “mistakenly” referred to him as the “martyred leader of the revolution”. Oops!

Yes, the regime isn’t doing particularly well. Factions are squabbling, the leadership – or what is left of it – is in disarray, it can’t decide if its figurehead is alive or dead, while its armed forces, air defences and munitions production capabilities are devastated.

Whisper it, but Economic Fury may be working. For almost 50 years, the regime has weathered Western sanctions by covertly selling oil to China via shadow ships. So far, the US navy has intercepted 44 such vessels, with an estimated value of up to $6billion (£4.8bn).

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05/01 Links Pt2: Israel’s first lady: British Jews have always supported Israel. Now, they need us; How Wokeness Came for the Jews; Mahmoud Khalil wants your sympathy

From Ian:

Israel’s first lady: British Jews have always supported Israel. Now, they need us

Israel has fought many battles to survive over the decades, with Jewish communities across the world raising billions of pounds for critical services and providing tens of thousands of volunteers in times of crisis.

Thousands of people, from London to Sydney and New York, went over to help after the Oct 7 massacre by Hamas, many of them caring for traumatised survivors, while funds raised by Jews abroad helped rebuild the Israeli communities most affected by the attacks.

But, as an extraordinary wave of anti-Semitism has hit the Jewish diaspora, there has been a subtle change in who is looking after whom. Which is why Israel’s first lady Michal Herzog, wife of its president Isaac Herzog, happened to be paying a visit to Britain this week, when two Jewish men were stabbed in a terror attack in Golders Green.

Herzog describes Wednesday’s attack as “very disturbing”. But, tragically, it wasn’t a surprise. In fact, it was a desire to support Britain’s Jewish population in the face of shocking levels of anti-Semitism that compelled her to arrange her visit in the first place, with the intended focal point being Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue, where an anti-Semitic attack resulted in the death of two men seven months ago.

“The diaspora communities were always so wonderful to us,” she says. “They came to volunteer and help, not to mention the philanthropy. But it is a two-way street and that has become more apparent since October 7. We help each other in every possible way.”

In February, the Herzogs travelled to Australia to meet the families of the victims of last December’s Bondi Beach massacre. They were warmly welcomed by the Australian Jewish community and the Australian government, but the couple also faced ugly protests by Palestinian supporters, who hounded them, even when they were talking to survivors of the attack.

For the first lady, an instinctive feminist, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Western anti-Israel hatred has been the denial of horrific sexual assaults carried out by Hamas terrorists on Oct 7.

“One UN rapporteur, Pramila Patten, did come and do a report about the sexual violence and she was attacked for it,” says Herzog. “For months afterwards, whatever war she was talking about, people in the crowd would scream at her about Israel. The fact that women won’t defend just one group of women – Israelis – can only be anti-Semitism.”

Witnessing such behaviour convinced her and her husband to do more to engage with Jewish communities around the world. “Seeing the demonstrations, some of them fierce, some violent, just made us realise how important that mission is,” she says. “I think people realise that whatever begins with the Jews never ends with them.”

Herzog, 63, a former top lawyer and the daughter of a celebrated military hero, was born on a kibbutz in Israel, but spent part of her childhood in Brazil and Argentina, where her father was a military attaché. It means she has an idea of life as a diaspora Jew and the anti-Semitism that can accompany it – something many of her fellow Israelis are only just beginning to grasp.

Jake Wallis Simons: Jews have Israel. It’s the future of Britain that I fear for

Jews are also deeply patriotic. My Jewish grandfather, who was hugely proud of serving for the RAF in the War, was typical. It has been some years since I attended a Sabbath service, which invariably takes place against the hum of gossip (and the occasional SSSSH!), but once you have passed through security and sat through the Torah reading, there is always a prayer for the Royal family, the only part that is recited in English.

These are the people who have been betrayed by Britain. The awful truth is that successive governments have preferred to placate the country’s most bigoted minorities rather than protect its most patriotic ones. Can nobody draw a line between the jihadis of Hamas and those who blew up the Manchester Arena and the Tube, or who stabbed people on London Bridge? Does nobody draw the obvious conclusion when the statue of Winston Churchill is defaced by Gaza thugs, or when they attack RAF Brize Norton? Did the Prime Minister, who expended far more energy criticising Israel during the war than condemning Hamas, not understand that he was emboldening the enemy?

Truly, Britain has been fanning the flames with one hand and funding more fire extinguishers with the other. In addition to Israeli-style security measures, we need a counter-propaganda campaign to overcome incitement in universities and schools, the NHS, the media and the arts, the Civil Service and even Parliament. We need to suppress the hate marches, starting with a moratorium, as Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terror legislation, has argued.

We need systemic reform – a dedicated anti-Semitism unit for the CPS, for instance, as former attorney general Michael Ellis has proposed – and we need no-questions-asked deportations of foreign nationals who offend. We need an end to uncontrolled immigration, both legal and illegal, a robust programme of assimilation, and careful measures to suppress extremist entryism. We need to crack down on dodgy charities. We need to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, the Revolutionary Guards and other terror groups, and a revolution in education that restores our sense of national pride.

But now I’m doing Starmer’s job for him. Don’t get me wrong: it isn’t the Jews who need all this. They may be first in the firing line, but there is a reason they have survived for thousands of years. We’ve got Israel. It is the future of Britain and the West that is the worry.

How Wokeness Came for the Jews By Abe Greenwald

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If you’re looking to stir up mob hatred of a designated enemy, you can’t do better than the Jews. Three years of whiny anti-whiteness made woke into a punchline, but anti-Semitism is serious business. The committed Jew-hater enters an ancient tradition with a long instructional literature and counter-history. There are mentors and potential sympathizers around the globe. Just follow the playbook: Accuse the Jews of blood libel, hidden influence, and ill-begotten gains. Establish them as the motive force behind everything that’s wrong, and don’t let up. You’ll even find fellow travelers on the right.

When the woke replaced whites with the Jews, they were back in business. “White privilege” became “Jewish supremacy”; “white fragility” was dropped for the supposed Jewish hypervigilance over anti-Semitism and intolerance for criticism of Israel.

Jews, unlike whites, are associated with an ideology and political movement of their own: Zionism. That makes things a lot easier for the woke. They can attack Zionism—already mischaracterized and demonized for ages—as one of history’s great evils. And they can, when they even bother, hide behind anti-Zionism to disguise their Jew-hatred.

This all began way before Israel launched its ground invasion into Gaza. But once that happened, the anti-Jewish campaign exploded. Now there were images (fake or out of context) and reports (false or slanted) to bolster the grisly accusations. On campuses, at rallies, and on social media, the woke jihad produced leaders and spokespeople. The Biden administration and the Democrats began to pay them heed.

Eventually, the woke jihad threw up political contenders. New York’s sitting mayor was the first to reach office. Now there’s Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed running for the Senate and Graham Platner (complete with a giant Nazi tattoo) doing the same in Maine.

And just as the liberal Democrats once took up the woke cause of anti-whiteness, they’ve now fully accommodated the left’s naked anti-Semitism. The Democratic establishment, along with the liberal commentariat, has come around to endorsing every leftist anti-Semitic candidate or influencer that comes their way.

The war in Gaza has been stalled for months, and the left barely mentions it anymore. But they don’t have to because this was never about Palestinians or liberation. It was about siccing the mob on the Jews, once again, and turning Jew-hatred into political power. You don’t need Gaza when you can talk about the dark hand of AIPAC, the immorality of U.S. aid to Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu dragging us into war. The new woke and their establishment enablers have an array of anti-Jewish lies to choose from. Believing the wind at their backs, they’re going with all of them at once.

ABC panel discusses Bondi massacre without any mention of Jewish community or radical Islam

Michael Gawenda Outs Australia’s left-liberal media quartet
There was a time when The Age in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald were fine newspapers of record. This was especially the case after the arrival of The Australian as a national newspaper in 1964 – since it put pressure on the (then) broadsheets in Melbourne and Sydney to improve. Both became strong performers in the 1970s and 1980s. But not anymore. Now in tabloid size [Nine Newspapers calls it “compact”, I believe. – MWD Editor] they are essentially expressions of the left (or “liberal” in the North American sense of the term) political point of view.

This was demonstrated in the article on 29 April in The Australian by James Dowling and Stephen Rice titled “Age legend to air left-wing media’s failure on anti-Semitism at Royal Commission”. The reference was to Michael Gawenda.

Michael Gawenda was a man of the moderate left – until anti-Semitism became an increasing reality in Australia. A former contributor to leftist The Digger magazine, he became, in time, editor of the left-of-centre Melbourne Age.

As The Australian revealed last Wednesday, Michael Gawenda has provided a submission to the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion. In it he has identified Australia’s influential left-liberal media quartet. Namely, in alphabetical order, the ABC, The Age, The Guardian Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Reflecting on the fact that the anti-Semitism spike in Australia occurred after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Gawenda had this to say:
I think the left liberal media – the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC, the Guardian – have basically not done the sort of job that I would expect mainstream media organisations to do. They have minimised in their commentary the effect on Jews of what is clearly an increase in antisemitism. They have favoured minority Jewish organisations and used them as if they represent some sort of mainstream Jewish opinion. That media was shocking in its treatment of the antisemitism envoy’s [Jillian Segal] report. So I think they’ve done a ­terrible job. I think it’s got to do with the fact that journalists see themselves now, not as reporters, but as social activists wanting to change the world rather than report the world.

And so, it has come to pass that Michael Gawenda, a one-time successful Age editor, cannot get published in the newspaper he once edited on account of his support for Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and outspoken opposition to anti-Semitism in Australia. Can You Bear It?

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