Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, March 22, 2026

Iran Is Losing the War It's Fighting. It's Winning the One You're Reading About

Three weeks in, the U.S. military has struck more than 8,000 targets. Iran's air defenses are almost completely destroyed, its command structure decimated, its proxy network in tatters. By any military measure, Iran is losing.

And yet you wouldn't know it from the coverage.

The New York Times tells us Iran has "shown no sign of backing down." The Wall Street Journal runs a sophisticated piece explaining why Tehran "believes it is winning." CNN elevates a disgraced former official's claim that Israel dragged America into war. The Associated Press makes that claim its headline.

This is Iran's cognitive war — and it is being fought largely with Western reporting, on Western platforms, by Western journalists.

The strategy is straightforward. Iran cannot defeat the U.S. military. It can, however, convince Western publics that the war is unwinnable, that the pain is unsustainable, and even that someone reasonable is waiting on the other side of a negotiating table. If that perception takes hold, political pressure does what Iranian missiles cannot.

What Iran needs to sustain this strategy is amplification it cannot provide itself. Iranian state media has no credibility with Western audiences. But the New York Times, CNN and AP do.

They are doing Iran's job for them.

The mechanism was caught in real time last week. When former counterterrorism official Joe Kent resigned and appeared on Tucker Carlson's show to claim that Israel had manipulated America into war, HonestReporting's AI Labs tracked what happened next. Within minutes, Russian state outlet RT was amplifying the specific claim. Pro-Iran networks followed, using language lifted directly from Iranian state framing. Pakistani, Kashmiri, and Latin American accounts joined the cascade. Identical phrasing appeared across multiple platforms simultaneously — a signature of coordinated inauthentic behavior, not organic virality.

And then CNN ran it as the central takeaway. AP made it a headline. ABC followed with nearly identical framing.

No Iranian handler called a CNN producer. They didn't have to. State-linked Iranian allies identify the useful narrative, amplify it to salience, and let Western news values — conflict, dissent, "both sides," and a natural aversion to anything Trump supports — do the rest. By the time it's a headline, the origin is invisible.

Iran's cognitive war rests on an implicit premise: that there is someone to negotiate with, some reasonable outcome available if only Washington would stop the bombs. This premise is false, and its falseness points to something the coverage almost entirely ignores.

Israel's decapitation campaign worked. The leaders who had the credibility, relationships, and political capital to engineer a compromise even if they wanted to are dead.

What remains are survivors who don't have the clout, the charisma or the imagination to do anything but to continue with their predecessors' intransigence. There was and is no Iranian Gorbachev waiting in the wings, and such a figure is not possible, because the Islamic Republic's foundational ideology requires permanent hostility to Israel and America.

This means Iran's triumphalist rhetoric — Foreign Minister Araghchi calling Iran "another Vietnam for the U.S." — isn't only foreign-facing propaganda. It's the only internal narrative available. No one left standing has the authority to propose otherwise.

The media reads this as Iran being unbowed. The more accurate read: Iran is trapped. It is burning through finite munitions to sustain an infinite-sounding narrative, with no one authorized to convert even a successful information campaign into an actual settlement.

There is also an argument so obvious it almost goes without saying — which is perhaps why it goes without saying. Iran is, at this moment, attacking civilian infrastructure across the Gulf and in Israel. It is bombing energy facilities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE; shipping through the Strait of Hormuz moves only with Iranian permission.

If the West stops this war before permanent results, this produces an Iran that has learned that attacking civilian targets works - and it will continue to do so. It is the clearest indication of how confusing the cognitive war for the kinetic war results in a worse kinetic war next time.

Countering the cognitive war requires naming it. Not vaguely, but specifically. Here is the claim, here is where it originated, here is how fast it traveled, here is who amplified it, here is what the outlet did with it. The HonestReporting documentation of the Kent cascade is the model.

It also requires insisting on the right metric. Iran has convinced much of the press to measure the war by duration and pain — by that measure, every day that passes is Iranian "resilience." The correct measure is irreversibility. Every destroyed launcher, every dead commander, every degraded node cannot be easily replaced. Iran's ability to do this again is the question. Whether they're still firing today is not.

The kinetic war and the cognitive war are not equivalent. One deals in permanent facts. The other deals in managed perceptions. But if Iran convinces the world that it can maintain its pressure forever and that is cannot be defeated, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every Western outlet that buys into that narrative is prolonging the conflict, either this round or guaranteeing a next round.

Iran is demonstrating its intentions in real time. The cognitive war asks you not to notice.

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

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Al Azhar condemns Iranian aggression against other Muslims, Iran isn't happy

Egypt's influential Al Azhar University issued a statement condemning Iran's aggression against other Muslim states:

Al-Azhar al-Sharif strongly condemns the continued unjustified Iranian attacks on its Gulf neighbors—represented by the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain, the State of Qatar, the State of Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Sultanate of Oman—as well as a number of other Arab countries and neighboring states, represented by Jordan, Iraq, Türkiye, and Azerbaijan.

Al-Azhar calls upon the Islamic Republic of Iran—as a Muslim neighboring state—to take an immediate decision dictated by Islam and imposed by its Sharia: to cease the attacks on these brotherly Arab and Muslim countries unconditionally, to respect their sovereignty over their lands, and to refrain from infringing upon it in any way, near or far; in order to preserve the lives of the innocent who bear no guilt in these conflicts and have no stake in them whatsoever.

Al-Azhar affirms that targeting residential areas, airports, hospitals, and energy facilities in countries that were not party to any conflict constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law and a clear departure from what Islam mandates in protecting lives, property, and human dignity. It reminds of the words of Allah Almighty: "And do not kill the soul which Allah has forbidden, except by right" [Quran 17:33], and the cry of the Prophet (peace be upon him) to the Muslims: “All of the Muslim is forbidden to the Muslim: his blood, his wealth, and his honor.”

Notice that Al Azhar has no problem with Iran attacking Jewish civilians.

But Iran was not happy. It published a response by Ayatollah Mohammad Javad Fazel Lankarani that explicitly referred to "Jews" as the targets:

Doesn't Al-Azhar ask itself why the countries of the region have given their lands and airspace to the infidels and Jews?
Don't you ask yourselves: What do they aim for with their presence and control over this region?

Don't you realize that they seek to plunder the wealth of Muslims and destroy their people and their property?

Has Al-Azhar forgotten the various verses that forbid accepting the hegemony of the disbelievers and the Jews?

If there is one thing the Iranians and Al Azhar can agree on, it is that attacking Jews is perfectly fine.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/21 Links: Allies in name only: Israel left alone against Iranian aggression; Over 100 injured, 11 seriously, in strikes on Arad, Dimona; What Looks Like Resilience in Iran Is Its Collapse Plan

From Ian:

Allies in name only: Israel left alone against Iranian aggression

Essentially, they say: Iran is not such a threat to global peace and security. Israel and the US may be the greater shared threat. Therefore, this is not our war. We will only defend our narrowest of interests a bare bit.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has sought to wrap repudiation of the US and Israel in highfalutin diplomatic terms. “We lack a mandate from the United Nations, the European Union, or NATO for the war,” he said. “Diplomacy and de-escalation” are the preferred route for handling Iran, he predictably added.

Yeah, sure. As if “mandates” from impotent international edifices are more important than winning the war that has been engaged. As if European-led diplomacy has ever effectively defanged or dissuaded Iran from pursuing its path of genocidal aggression.

I say that such studied neutrality in the great struggle against Iran is collusion with the enemy. All the “calm and level-headed” excuses for sitting out this war (of course, excepting “defensive assistance” to several oil-rich Gulf countries) is a grand collapse of Western spine and principle.

I also cast off anodyne sentiments about “heartfelt feelings for all victims of conflict in the region” and other such throwaway international statements. Without determination to quell Iran – and again, without specific expressed concern for Israel and Israelis too – these mushy musings equal profound moral failure.

Indeed, the frostiness exhibited by the “leaders” described above recalls the adage that you rudely discover who your true friends are (and are not) when the chips are down.

Alas, the ethical limpness and political animosity described here regarding the struggle against Iran is of a piece with the rotten global standard in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, going back decades.

The response of UN and EU leaders to every Palestinian-Israeli conflagration long has been to condemn the “continuing cycle of violence” (and then press for endless negotiations while boosting Hamas blood libels about Israeli war crimes). As if Israel and the Palestinians each were cavalierly engaging in murder just for fun or out of comparable burning hatred. As if “both sides” were “suffering casualties” and equally responsible for the “cycle” of warfare.

What is missing from the above comments in relation to both the Iranian and Palestinian fronts is a no-nonsense diagnosis of enemy aggression. Few are willing to reference Tehran’s almost five-decade-long record of assault against non-Shi’ite Arab, Western, and Israeli interests. Nobody has the guts to remark upon the death-glorifying political culture of Palestinians that repeatedly chooses war and terrorism over peace negotiations.

This nonalignment keeps the storyline in a neat, supposedly non-judgmental, and purportedly “level-headed” comfort zone – bereft of any right-minded backbone, free from any commitment to explicitly recognize and concretely fight evil. Alas, such detachment is tantamount to betrayal of Israel and the US, and is perfidy against the future of Western civilization.

The Buenos Aires Bombings

The decades of institutional failure that defined Argentina’s response to the AMIA bombing reached an inflection point with the 2023 inauguration of President Javier Milei. Whereas Kirchner was willing to accommodate Tehran, Milei has anchored Argentina firmly within a Western–Israeli security axis, designating Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC’s Quds Force as terrorist organisations and joining the Combined Maritime Forces to combat Iranian-backed threats in international waters. In April 2024, Argentina’s Federal Court of Criminal Cassation, the country’s highest criminal court, formally declared the AMIA attack a crime against humanity and attributed responsibility to senior Iranian officials and to Hezbollah, thus lending the weight of the country’s highest criminal tribunal to what investigators had argued for thirty years. In 2025, Milei’s government used newly passed legislation to authorise the trial in absentia of ten Iranian and Lebanese suspects—among them former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian and Ahmad Vahidi, the former Quds Force commander who directed the unit responsible for planning the AMIA operation and who has been subject to an Interpol red notice since 2007. On 28 February 2026, US and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and decapitated much of Iran’s senior military leadership, including IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour. Vahidi, who is wanted for the murders of 85 people in Buenos Aires, now commands the IRGC.

What Argentina’s experience reveals is not simply that Iran projects violence across continents, though it does. It also shows that such projections are more likely to succeed when a target’s state institutions are vulnerable. The lawlessness of the Tri-Border Area enabled the logistics. The corruption of Judge Galeano provided impunity. The political calculations of successive governments delayed justice. Each failure compounded the last, and for thirty years the gap between what is known and what has been adjudicated has remained almost unchanged. The names of the planners are on file at Interpol. The mechanics of the attack are documented in thousands of pages of investigative records. The dead have been counted, mourned, and memorialised. But justice has never been served.

Recent US–Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have triggered fresh security alerts across Argentina at Jewish institutions, airports, and border crossings. The Buenos Aires bombings serve as a reminder that Iran’s willingness to strike at Israeli and Jewish targets outside the Middle East is not merely hypothetical. Argentina has already been a front in this war, and the traces of that history remain visible on its streets today. Concrete barriers line the entrances of Jewish community centres across the city, standing as a permanent physical acknowledgment that the threat that destroyed the AMIA building has never fully receded. Thirty years on, the most important question is whether the lessons of that experience have been learned by those who failed to deliver justice—and by those who may yet need it.

A Historic Moment: The Case for Ending Both the Iranian Regime and Hamas Once and for All

The critical question is whether we will stop at weakening the Iranian regime or Hamas or move toward ensuring that they can never again recover as long-term threats to their neighbors or global security. At this moment, leaving those regimes in place – the ruling mullahs in Iran or Hamas in Gaza — is probably the most dangerous option.

Authoritarian regimes such as Iran's, and terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State and the Taliban, rarely respond to setbacks by abandoning their ambitions. Instead, they pause, regroup, and rebuild.

Russia and China, each with its own anti-American calculations, could provide political cover, technological assistance, and indirect support that would allow Iran to resume its nuclear program. China has already been supplying Iran with "almost everything but troops" during this war, and supplying Russia with military materiel for its war against Ukraine.

If Iran's regime and Hamas are allowed to recover, their primary strategic objective will likely become to rearm as quickly as possible, and we will be right back at war again.

Stopping halfway through such efforts only allows threats to reemerge dangerously in the future. History will judge whether these two opportunities presented today were seized — or allowed to slip away.

03/20 Links Pt2: Douglas Murray: Deranged Tucker Carlson backstabs Trump; Melanie Phillips: ‘Mamdani is a monster’; Chuck Norris dies at 86

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Joe Kent sums up everything that’s wrong with the MAGA Israelophobes

There are two things to be said about Kent’s frothing missive. The first is that it is incredibly dumb. George W Bush and Tony Blair, not Israel, were responsible for the calamity of Iraq. In fact, some Israeli officials warned against invading Iraq. They told the White House ‘Iraq is not the enemy – Iran is the enemy’. And it was the barbarians of the Islamic State who inflamed mayhem in Syria by violently subjecting large swathes of that nation to their cruel, bigoted writ. Treating Israel as the cauldron of all human wickedness absolves the true culprits – in this case, Islamist monsters – of responsibility for their crimes.

As for Iran – as has been well documented over the past three weeks, Trump has long been worried about the Islamic Republic. As the Atlantic says, he ‘telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades’. In his two terms as president, ‘he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity’. Painting not only a brash president but mighty America itself as the plaything of Israel is historical illiteracy on stilts. Indeed, this week Trump publicly rebuked Israel for striking Iran’s South Pars gas field. Not very poodle-like of him.

The second, more serious thing to say about Kent’s animus for Israel is that it has the pungent whiff of anti-Semitic conspiracism. The damning of Israel as the author of all war, as the chief manipulator of the Western powers, as the dragger of our nations into the pit of ‘decline and chaos’, has clear and eerie echoes of the Jew-baiting of old. Where it was once the Jewish people who were seen as the source of our cultural decline, now it’s the Jewish homeland. Same shit, different century.

Kent sums up everything that’s wrong with the MAGA Israelophobes, that wing of Trumpism that is fast disappearing into the sewer of Jew-linked conspiracism. These people are morally indistinguishable from the woke mob they claim to hate. Not one word of Kent’s self-regarding letter would be out of place in the mouth of a blue-haired campus loon screaming obscenities about ‘Isra-hell’. Both the crank right and gender-bending left see the Jewish nation as the rotten seed of our moral crises. There’s a fascist feel to their neurosis.

It didn’t surprise me when Kent’s first big post-resignation interview was with Tucker Carlson, the man who sacrificed his skills of critical thinking at the altar of blind rage for Israel. Or that Kent has reportedly had associations with certain members of the ‘groyper army’. Trump is right to say ‘it’s a good thing he’s out’. But why was he in? I can’t be the only person horrified that the head of counter-terrorism was an anti-Israel nut. You might as well have Mehdi Hasan up there. The Israelophobic intrigue of the Very Online right runs directly counter to the open, hopeful spirit of the tens of millions of Americans who took a punt on Trump. In fact, it threatens to undermine it, by replacing that working-class yearning for greater democracy with the obsessional delusions of the digitally addicted.

The MAGA movement needs to sort itself out. Just as the old left was dragged down by the carbuncle of wokeness, so American populism is at risk of serious ailment from the crankery of its digital flank. These movements might seem miles apart, the former believing you can have a cock and be a lesbian, the latter being more ‘tradwife’. But they are as one in their vain, self-exonerating hatred for the world’s only Jewish state. Listen, Israel isn’t the cause of your wars or your depression or your girlfriend troubles or your baldness – grow up and take responsibility.

As NYC Oct. 7 hate crime offenders get sentenced, a victim wonders what justice looks like

In November 2023, weeks after the Hamas invasion of Israel, two women tore posters of Israeli hostages off a lamppost on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

A Jewish woman who was walking her dog confronted the pair, saying, “Why are you ripping down posters of victims?”

“I don’t think these are real people. I think this is AI-generated,” one of the women, Stephanie Gonzalez, said. “I believe whoever is in Palestine is real. Whoever’s in Palestine is truly suffering.”

The other woman, Mehwish Omer, gave the Jewish passerby the middle finger, according to video of the incident the victim filmed and shared with The Times of Israel.

As the pair began to walk away, things escalated further: They attacked the Jewish woman, smacking her phone out of her hand and shouting, “Go fuck yourself,” as the victim pleaded, “Don’t assault me.”

“I’m going to assault you. I don’t care,” Gonzalez said.

The women then ripped a Star of David necklace off the victim’s neck, grabbed her by the throat, and clawed her face, causing bleeding in her eye and leaving red welts on her forehead and down her right cheek.

The attack took place on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a mere week before the victim’s wedding.

After a police search, the attackers were arrested a week later and charged with a hate crime assault.

Now being resolved in New York courts, the case was one of a series of hate crimes that took place in the aftermath of the Hamas onslaught on Israel that saw 1,200 murdered and 251 taken hostage to Gaza.

Gonzalez, Omer and the victim, who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, appeared this month for a court hearing that illustrated complications surrounding hate crime sentencing and the lasting trauma caused to victims.

“For two and a half years, I really have lived with this,” the victim said. “My soul has not been able to rest.”

MinterEllison pulls logo from Sydney Biennale after DJ storm

Law firm MinterEllison asked the Sydney Biennale to remove its logo from a list of major partners, distancing itself from the arts festival due to DJ Haram’s inflammatory opening-night speech praising “martyrs” and attacking Israel.

MinterEllison, a pro bono legal adviser to the biennale for more than 20 years but not a financial sponsor of the festival, had been credited on the biennale’s website as a major partner as recently as Tuesday.

DJ Haram created a storm after her comments at the Sydney Biennale opening night at White Bay Power Station.

But by Thursday the logo had disappeared. When contacted by The Australian Financial Review about the logo on the site, a MinterEllison spokeswoman said that “following comments made at the White Bay event on 13 March 2026, we requested its removal”.

“We did not want our branding to suggest any association with, or endorsement of, those views,” the spokeswoman said. “We firmly and unconditionally condemn antisemitism in all its forms – that is a core value of this firm.

“Our pro bono legal relationship with the biennale as an institution is continuing. It is separate from this year’s exhibition and from the actions or views of any individual performer or artist.”

On Saturday, the Financial Review revealed the content of DJ Haram’s speech of March 13, which included leading a chant of “long live the resistance” and referring to “the Zio-Australian-Epstein empire”, a phrase appearing to link Israel to the crimes of convicted sex offender and New York financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The speech has been condemned by NSW Premier Chris Minns and Arts Minister John Graham, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

03/20 Links Pt1: The West should double down on the Iran war; That Was Before October 7; Guterres and the gutless United Nations; Iranian missile hits Jerusalem’s Old City

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: That Was Before October 7

For some reason, the world still hasn’t quite grasped how much has changed since that day, at least for Israelis. One reason is the terrifying “what if” that Israeli policymakers have had to ask themselves: What if Hezbollah had invaded along with Hamas on October 7, when Israel’s defenses were down and it had to fight to regain territory within its own borders?

What if Hamas’s control of the highway near the Gaza Envelope meant a Lebanese convoy could be on the scene within two hours? By many accounts, it took IDF units twice as long to reach Kibbutz Be’eri that day.

Even without the prospect of an actual Hezbollah ground invasion, consider: Hamas pushed Israel’s border residents into retreat, essentially moving the border itself for a brief period. Hezbollah periodically forces the same effect on residents of the north just by using rockets. And while both of those groups were working to herd Israelis into the center of the country, Iran was developing the capability to overwhelm Israeli air defenses with its ballistic-missile arsenal.

Each of those three threats must be neutralized. There cannot be a force in Gaza able to slaughter communities on the other side of the fence. There cannot be an arsenal in Lebanon that forces the evacuation of Israeli towns. And Iran cannot be allowed to retain or reacquire the means to make the country dwell in bomb shelters.

October 7 revealed what can never happen again. That’s why a yellow line divides Gaza. Lebanon is getting its own line, whatever color it ends up being designated.

New lines, new rules, new terms—all set by Israel. That’s how this works now.

The old rules put Israel’s enemies in a great position to strike at the Jewish state’s vulnerabilities. But, well, that was before October 7. They will not get a second shot at it.

Seth Mandel: The Media’s Attempt to Drive a Wedge Between the U.S. and Israel

Trump is indeed responsible for elevating Kent to his recently vacated position. But thankfully the administration very publicly vested exactly zero credibility in Kent. He was given a job with an important title, but he was not responsible for policymaking and his influence was nil. Kent is under FBI investigation, and he decided to leap before he was pushed.

So who is Kent influencing against Israel? Democrats don’t need his help, unfortunately, independents repeatedly rejected him as a candidate for office because of his ties to white nationalists, and Republicans back Trump in the war with Iran.

The third and final example is at least a point of legitimate debate: the question of whether the U.S. and Israel have contradictory war aims.

CNN uses the Israeli attack on Iran’s Pars gas field to frame this question. That attack was followed by an Iranian retaliatory strike on Qatar’s section of the gas field, sending energy prices up. Trump disavowed any knowledge or approval of the initial Israeli strike, but that is not remotely plausible. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Trump doesn’t want a repeat of that incident.

It’s also clear that Israel will respect the president’s wishes. Indeed, at yesterday’s press conference, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this point explicitly. Trump, he said, is “the leader. I’m, you know, his ally. America is the leader. Israel is, as the national security memorandum described us … they called Israel the model ally. That’s how they call it, the model ally. It’s not a superpower.”

You can see the progression here of attempts by narrative-setters to degrade Israel’s credibility. First it was that Israel is joining Trump’s war, and Trump’s war doesn’t poll all that well. Then it was “Israel is responsible for this war.” But nobody believes that, and Trump has been happy to own this war; he sees it as a legacy-defining conflict. Then it was “Israel’s interests clash with U.S. interests.” But that, too, fails to ignite because Israel comes right out and says it’ll follow Trump’s lead on every aspect of the war. And now it’s “Israel’s reputation will continue to suffer if it sticks with this war.”

That has been the case since October 7, 2023. Israel has been forced to choose between survival and shallow, fleeting popularity with the president’s critics. Israel is not going to “fix” its unpopularity by committing suicide, and this type of concern trolling is ineffective against people fighting for their survival.

Spectator Editorial: The West should double down on the Iran war

The regime may yet be proven right. America’s Nato allies equivocate over efforts to restore freedom of navigation – a core interest of the West. The traumas of past interventions have encouraged formidable resistance within the US political establishment to deploying ground forces. European political leaders, including our Prime Minister, are courting short-term popularity by resisting what they see as Trump’s ‘adventurism’.

But what would the consequences be if this war was allowed to end with the Iranian regime still in place? Our allies in the Gulf – from Oman to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – would be left to reflect on our inconstancy. They would be left, too, with a wounded and resentful Iran, plotting its revenge. Tehran would have renewed incentive to fund terrorist proxies and nuclear missile technology, the better to deter and overawe its neighbours. Russia and China would feel confirmed in their view that a weakened West has neither the strength nor the stamina to resist their own adventurism. Iran’s people would see the democracy they dreamt of vanish beyond the horizon, and those who had been anything other than fierce in their loyalty to the regime would be crushed underfoot.

What of the West? Those celebrating such an outcome would be the ‘post-colonial’ left, who would rejoice in an epochal reversal of American power, and the ethno-nationalist right, who rage against Israel, Jewish influence and ‘the Epstein class’ which, as they see it, dragged us into a costly and counter-productive debacle. These are the forces within western society that disdain western civilisation itself – liberal, open, capitalist, creative, Judeo-Christian and confident. These people would feel emboldened in their drive towards identitarianism, division and communal enmity.

Victory in Iran, by contrast, would give that country the chance to show the world what a free, successful, post-Islamist but majority-Muslim society could achieve. It would liberate the talents, voices, and consciences of millions. It would undergird the stability and prosperity of Gulf powers and their orientation towards the West, with the leadership of nations such as the UAE in the vanguard. It would liberate Israel from existential threat and enable both an accommodation with its Palestinian neighbours and western support to that end. It would re-affirm the ability of the West to secure its strategic goals through united deployment of military strength and thus bolster the defence of Ukraine and the security of Taiwan. It would place control of oil and gas in the hands of western allies to counter the huge economic advantages that China has built up.

Victory is far from easy or assured. It will require a commitment of time, troops and patience that has so far not been articulated. But if that commitment is not made then the price will be far higher than what we might endure in the weeks ahead. We can either finish the job in Iran, or it will finish us.

New Oscar Category Created To Honor Candace Owens: Best Portrayal Of Psychosis (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Hollywood, March 19 - The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has unveiled its boldest innovation yet: Best Portrayal of Psychosis, a category honoring immersive, unscripted depictions of delusional thinking, paranoid elaboration, and reality-defying conviction delivered across digital platforms. The inaugural award already boasts a frontrunner, "conservative" commentator Candace Owens, whose recent output has fused personal vendettas, geopolitical conspiracies, and antisemitic delusions into a sprawling, high-production-value psychological epic.

Since the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, Owens has channeled her grief — or resentment— into the multi-part YouTube series Bride of Charlie. The project fixates on Erika Kirk, Charlie's widow and current Turning Point USA CEO, portraying her as a deceptive figure who allegedly manipulated her way into power. Owens scrutinizes Erika's background: questioning her birth date, humanitarian work in China, family ties, and post-tragedy demeanor, often framing Charlie's marriage as a profound betrayal. Subtext drips with jealousy — Charlie "chose" Erika over their once-close bond, removing his wedding ring the night before his death, erasing photos, and leaving Owens sidelined from what she implies was her rightful emotional centrality. "He loved his family... but he loved me more," the narrative whispers through layered accusations of opportunism, financial schemes, and indifference to Charlie's fate.

Yet cinema critics note that this personal obsession serves as merely one thread in a larger tapestry of unraveling. Owens weaves in elaborate antisemitic delusions, accusing shadowy "Zionist" forces, Israeli operatives, or a "Jewish cabal" of orchestrating Charlie's murder — sometimes linking it to France's Emmanuel Macron, the military-industrial complex, or even Brigitte Macron's alleged secret identity as Jean-Michel Trogneux. These claims echo her longstanding pattern: promoting theories of Jewish control over media, government, Hollywood "secret gangs," and historical events such as the JFK assassination or transatlantic slave trade. She has invoked "synagogue of Satan" rhetoric, labeled pro-Israel figures "satanic pedophiles," and tied perceived enemies to demonic or occult influences — all delivered with unwavering certainty that dismisses counter-evidence as part of the cover-up, in what observers call a "masterful" on-screen performance.

Academy spokesperson Mira Delusion called it "a tour de force of sustained psychosis." "Candace doesn't simulate delusion; she inhabits it fully. The Brigitte Macron saga alone — staking her reputation on a disproven gender conspiracy now facing defamation suits — shows total immersion. Layer on the antisemitic webs connecting Charlie's death to global Jewish plots, and the Erika fixation becomes the emotional core: romantic rejection reframed as cosmic betrayal by a hidden elite. Opera can't compete with this."

Voters praise the authenticity — no script breaks, no ironic distance. "She builds these intricate, self-reinforcing realities where every fact-check is proof of suppression," one Academy member said. "It's like watching a live-action Pi meets The Truman Show, but the protagonist refuses to acknowledge the walls."

While other figures flirt with conspiracies, Owens's output stands apart for its volume, production polish, and fusion of personal resentment with antisemitic paranoia. Her defiant embrace — celebrating past "Antisemite of the Year" nods while doubling down — only amplifies the performance, etched in a logic even she probably does not comprehend.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

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

This is not satire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

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

From Ian:

Ersatz Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Wimps and warriors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several identifiable moves characterize the propagandistic version:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)