How Everyone Becomes a Target: The Philosophy Behind the Michigan Antizionist Cell

A federal indictment, a tenuous network of victims, and the philosophy that turns a portfolio dispute into a license to kill.

On June 10, a federal grand jury in Detroit unsealed a sixty-three-page indictment charging eight people with an eighteen-month campaign of violence: jars of butyric acid hurled through the windows of family homes, nails scattered in a driveway, houses marked with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to designate targets for death, a vow by one defendant to become a woman's physician and poison her slowly, and a plan to follow another target home and "burn it down." Kile B. Jones has assembled the full documentary record; the defendants are presumed innocent of every count.

The perpetrators were University of Michigan students and recent students, several of them honors students, one a medical student, operating within the TAHRIR Coalition — the umbrella of dozens of campus organizations led by Michigan's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The indictment alleges that the coalition's own social-media accounts broadcast the threats, that its lead student group was asked for "money for autonomous actions," and that the cell's targets matched the coalition's published demands.

And whom did they attack? They seem to have little in common. The university president and chief investment officer, who declined to divest the endowment. The personal injury law firm that employs a regent. The provost. A campus police officer who had policed the protests. A fellow student suspected of talking to the FBI. And the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — a communal charity with no role in university governance, no control over the endowment, no connection to the decision the campaign was ostensibly about — defaced on the first anniversary of October 7. The targets share no obvious thread. A car-accident lawyer, a refugee cop, a charity, a classmate: what list contains all of these, and why?

The conventional answer is that hatred overwhelmed them, that the violence was a breakdown of reason. The evidence points the other way. In the very exchange where he discussed poisoning a patient, one defendant explained that he wanted to act because it was "the only way to clear my conscience." Not to silence his conscience — to clear it. The violence was the discharge of his moral sense, not its suppression. These students experienced themselves, throughout, as the few with the seriousness to do what was required. Their philosophy didn’t just allow violence against families of regents who still invested in Israel as a small percentage of the entire endowment. It demanded it. 

Step one: a theory of who is guilty

The first move is to replace acts with positions. Ordinary moral and legal reasoning assigns guilt for what a person did: you are culpable for your conduct, and innocent where you did not act. The framework these students absorbed assigns guilt for where a person sits. In the structure of oppression, culpability flows from your location — your identity, your institution, your associations — rather than from anything you chose to do. A regent who votes against divestment is guilty; but so, in principle, is anyone the structure places on the wrong side, whether or not they lifted a finger.

This is originally derived from Marx, down through Maoist and Soviet class theory, filtered down to today. People aren’t guilty for what they do, they are guilty for what positions they occupy in the class system. In recent years this idea has extended to anyone who is perceived as being “privileged.” (Which always seems to exclude the ones who are deciding who is privileged.) 

When you extract humans from the decision of who is guilty, you have erased any concept of personal responsibility — not only on the victim side but on every side. 

This is a coherent and fundamentally immoral philosophical position, and it is very popular. But the TAHRIR folks made it even worse. 

Step two: "directly or indirectly"

The second move is the one that removes every limit, and it appears in the indictment in the conspirators' own operating language. The targets, the document states, were those believed to support Israel "directly or indirectly." 

The enemy isn’t Zionists; it is anyone perceived as not being anti-Zionist enough. That can include literally everyone. For example, when Hamas and Fatah argue with each other, they each accuse the other one of being Zionist. 

The endowment holds shares in firms that do business in Israel: that is a real, traceable relationship, however attenuated by the time it reaches a regent's vote. But "indirectly" has no boundary at all, because indirect connection is transitive and the chain never terminates. If the regent is complicit through the endowment, then the firm that employs the regent is complicit through the regent, and the charity that shares his community is complicit through that, and the officer who guards the people who manage the building is complicit through the institution, and onward without any principle that says stop here. Once indirect association counts, the boundary of the guilty category is no longer fixed by anything. It is set by whoever is drawing the connections, and it can be drawn to include anyone.

This is not a slippery-slope worry about where the logic might go. It is a description of where the documented attacks already went. The best way to see it is to map the actual targets that were attacked (not just threatened,) and count the steps from the center of their universe, Israel.

The gray chain is the institutional one, and even it stretches thin. Israel, then firms with Israeli business, then the endowment that holds those firms, then the board of regents that governs the endowment, then one individual regent who sits on that board, then the personal-injury law firm that employs him: by the time the campaign reaches the firm it actually attacked, it is five links from the source, and not one of those links is about anything the law firm did. The university branch is no tighter — endowment, university, and then a fellow student or a campus police officer, each reached by membership or employment rather than by any decision about Israel. (The officer is the one partial exception worth conceding: campus police broke up the encampment, so the cell may have had a grievance against him as police, independent of Israel entirely — which, if anything, means the "supporting Israel" rationale was a pretext even by their own logic.)

The amber chain is stranger and more telling. The Jewish Federation has no organizational link to Israel whatsoever — no shares, no governance, no employment. Its path to the center runs Israel, then Zionists, then Jews, then the Federation: three steps, each one a substitution of categories rather than a real relationship. A state becomes an ideology, an ideology becomes an ethnicity, an ethnicity becomes a particular charity that happens to be Jewish. The Federation sits the same distance from the center as the board of regents — three rings out — but the board got there through three organizational facts and the Federation got there through three acts of redefinition. That is the Protocols logic rendered as a network diagram: by the final step, "connected to Israel" has come to mean "is Jewish," and the map shows the exact rung where the meaning was swapped.

We’ve seen this logic before.Bristol professor David Miller maps these elaborate diagrams of his fevered imagination of complicity that invariably land on Jews. Students for Justice in Palestine came under fire in 2022 for mapping out institutions in Massachusetts under the same guilt-by-position logic that ended up reaching every Hillel in New England, the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston and the jewish Arts Collaborative.

What the picture demonstrates is that "directly or indirectly" has already done its work. The people these students actually attacked were, by the campaign's own theory of connection, three to five links removed from the thing they were angry about. The arbitrariness is not a future risk. It is the documented present.

Step three: the license to kill the nodes

A map of the guilty is not yet a reason to hurt anyone. Positional guilt plus "indirectly" tells you who is on the wrong side, and draws the side as wide as you like, but on its own it justifies a boycott, a denunciation, a divestment demand — not acid through a window. The final element is what converts a node on a diagram into a body.

That element is Frantz Fanon's doctrine of redemptive violence. The Wretched of the Earth argued that violence by the colonized against the colonizer is a cleansing, recreating act rather than a regrettable necessity — the means by which the oppressed remake themselves into free agents. This is the doctrine that lets a medical student describe planned poisoning as the way to "clear my conscience." Within the Fanonist frame, the violence is not the abandonment of his morality; it is its fulfillment. Restraint would be the failure.

Fanon was describing an armed colonial settler and the colonized subject shooting back. His colonizer was a person with a gun and a farm on expropriated land, an active agent of a violent occupation. Nothing on the Michigan map is close to that. But when Fanonism is combined with the never ending mapping of who is bad, we arrive at a situation where literally anyone who is perceived as being on the wrong side of history — defined by what position they are in, not what they do — they are subject to being murdered in the name of justice.

That’s how you get to young people saying that their conscience cannot stand it if they don’t attack the families of the people they perceive as being four or five degrees separated from Israel. 

That is the combination, and it is the whole of it. Positional guilt supplies the brush. "Indirectly" makes the brush infinitely wide. The map shows the brush has already painted a car-accident lawyer and a Jewish charity. And their flavor of Fanonism hands anyone holding the brush a license to kill whatever it has painted, for the killer's own moral redemption. 

Each element is survivable alone. A theory of structural complicity, by itself, produces seminar papers. Fanon, by himself, applied to actual colonial war, produces a contestable but bounded argument. It is the multiplication that has no edge: an unlimited target set crossed with a therapeutic license to destroy its members.

Everyone is a node

The logic never ends. If the law firm is a legitimate target for employing a regent, then so is any company the endowment invests in, and so is anyone who works for that company, and so is any student who accepts a scholarship funded by it or a job offer from it. Each is connected to Israel by exactly the kind of indirect link the framework has already ruled sufficient, and each is therefore paintable, and therefore — under Fanon — killable for the satisfaction of the one who decides it. The same logic that placed a refugee cop on the list places the sophomore who took the internship. There is no node the framework excludes, because the only thing required to become a node is a connection, and the framework has defined connection so that everyone has one.

This is where the philosophy, not the temperament, is the danger. It has no brakes. Nothing in this philosophy says that the person who bought a lamp from a garage sale by the cousin of a manager who once hired an Israeli security guard is not equally guilty.  A moral framework with no internal brakes will, given enough sincere adherents, eventually produce followers who sincerely think that braking is immoral and everyone they do not like must be hounded, harassed and attacked.  

It would be comforting to treat the indictees as an aberration. The harder truth is that they are a faithful execution. They took published philosophies literally, strung them together, followed where they lead, and were stopped not by anything in the philosophy but by the FBI. 

There were other components here — the vanguardism that produced the cell structure by imitating militant movements of the 1960s, the genocide-emergency framing that set the tempo, the long-falsified Third-Worldist romance that the academy keeps teaching with its body count edited out. Each deserves its own accounting. But they are accelerants on top of the core mechanism. The mechanism is simple enough to state in a sentence, and damning enough to end on: give people a theory that makes everyone guilty by association and then makes killing the guilty an act of self-purification, and the only question left is who among them will be sincere enough to act on it.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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"'Liquidate Zionism'": The Bund Treated the Hebron Massacre Like Their Descendants Treated October 7

Whenever today's progressive anti-Zionists have claimed to march in the tradition of the pre-1948 anti-Zionists, I have waved the comparison away. Most Jews who were ambivalent about or against Zionism before the Holocaust — Reform Jews, the bulk of the Orthodox world — became its most energetic champions after it, once the alternative to a Jewish state had been demonstrated in the gas chambers. And opposing Zionism as a political idea in 1926, when it was a proposal, bears little resemblance to demanding the dismantling of a living nation of nine million people in 2026. The two acts share the nomenclature and almost nothing else.

There is one exception,  the one the activists themselves keep naming. But the lesson they learn from it is the exact opposite of reality.

When the socialist anti-Zionists insist that their hostility to Israel descends directly from the Jewish Labor Bund, they are right. The Bund is having its moment: Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a loving history of the movement, became a New York Times bestseller, drew praise from the New York Times Book Review for a party that supposedly "fought antisemites head-on," and carries a blurb from Naomi Klein. The book presents the Bund as secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist, a usable past for a generation that wants its anti-Zionism to feel Jewish and humane.

The inheritance is real. The Bundists were as consumed by hatred, and as fluent in excusing the murder of Jews, as the progressive anti-Zionists who have claimed their mantle. The clearest proof sits in how the Bund met the slaughter of Jews in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Safed in 1929 — a reaction immediate, documented in the Bund's own newspaper, and essentially identical to the reaction of the Western socialist Left to October 7.

The Hebron massacre ran across August 23 and 24, 1929, when Arab mobs murdered 67 Jews, many of them students at the old yeshiva, and ended a Jewish community that had lived in the city for centuries. Across Mandatory Palestine the toll reached 133 Jewish dead. The Safed massacre occurred on August 29. Two days later, on August 31, a Saturday, the Bund filled Warsaw's Splendid theater with an overflow crowd of three thousand. The banner headline over the report in the Bund's Naye Folktsaytung the next morning read "Liquidate Zionism."

They didn't say that they merely opposed Zionism. They said Zionism itself must be destroyed. This is not political disagreement - it is eliminationist rhetoric that can (and did) leads to violence.

That was the literal demand from the podium, repeated and applauded. The speaker, identified as Comrade Hersh, told the hall that "as long as Zionism exists, the slaughters in Palestine will return and return," and closed to thousands of clapping hands with a call to "mobilize the masses and liquidate Zionism." The paper described the rally as a "mass judgment over the Zionist dreams," staged while the Hebron dead were barely buried.

The vast majority of the Jewish world was in mourning for the victims. The Bund saw the massacre as an opportunity. And many newspapers in 1929 denounced the Bund for its callousness while Palestine was still in turmoil.

The resolution the three thousand adopted laid out the theory beneath the slogan to "liquidate Zionism." and every move in it has a direct descendant on campus after October 7.. The blood spilled in Hebron, the resolution declared, "is the heaviest judgment against all of Zionism." The Zionists who organized memorial rallies for the murdered were charged with "exploiting the victims of the tragic events and the self-evident grief of the Jewish population" — the murdered Jews recruited, days after their deaths, as props in a Zionist confidence trick. The events meant "a collapse of Zionist activity, of all Zionist hopes."

The Bundist newspaper's treatment of the Arab murderers shows that their pruported anti-racism was always a myth - and that myth remains.  "Given the low cultural state of the Arab population," the resolution explained, "and given the absence of democratic forms of political life, the accumulated hatred inevitably had to burst out at the first opportunity into the form of beastly outbreaks, bloody attacks, and bestial murders." The Arab who murdered a yeshiva student was not a moral agent who could be condemned. He was a primitive in whom hatred, once introduced by Zionism, had to discharge — as predictable and as blameless as a flood. Moral responsibility in the resolution belongs entirely to the Zionists and the imperial powers, the educated and the European-facing; the actual killers are weather. To clear the murderers, the Bund had first to strip them of the dignity of choice, which is its own bigotry wearing the mask of sympathy. 

The structure is exact a century later. The perpetrators of October 7 dissolve into the inevitabilities of resistance and occupation, their agency removed in the same gesture that claims to defend them, while the only party left holding moral responsibility is the Jewish state that "created the conditions." The Bund's "low cultural state" is the grandfather of "what did you expect them to do." Both formulas spare the killer by denying him the capacity to have done otherwise.

The Bund's own categories blinded it to who had actually died. A movement that could process a massacre only through the lens of the worker and the class struggle had no room for the murdered students of the Hebron yeshiva, who produced nothing, organized nothing, and wanted no part of any revolution. And the bodies refuted the thesis where they fell. The Jews slaughtered in 1929 were disproportionately the old religious communities and Arabic-speaking Jews who had the least to do with Zionist settlement — Jews killed for being Jews, not for being Zionists. The Bund blamed Zionism for the murder of Jews who themselves stood outside Zionism, which is the whole antisemitic maneuver in miniature: a Jew is dead, and a Jew's politics are summoned to explain why he had it coming.

The resolution closed on prophecy. The 1929 bloodshed marked "a collapse of Zionist activity, of all Zionist hopes," and Hersh was certain the slaughters would recur until Zionism was liquidated. Nineteen years later the Jewish state they had pronounced dead was born, and it has now outlived their prediction by seventy-eight years and counting. The failure of the forecast has never once disturbed the philosophy that produced it, because a worldview that explains every Jewish death as the wages of Jewish nationalism was never built to be falsified.

Crabapple and her admirers present the Bund as proof that their anti-Zionism carries an illustrious pedigree, that they invent nothing, that their forebears were principled. In 1929 a Jewish socialist could hold the Bund's three core convictions out of innocence: that liberation "here where we live" was a real future for European Jewry, that the socialism the movement served would deliver justice, and that Zionism was a colonial dead end about to collapse. The past century answered all three at maximum volume. The "here" was reduced to ash at Treblinka, with no Jewish state to flee to — the Bund did not fade into irrelevance, it was murdered, and its leaders Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter were executed not by fascists but by the Soviet socialism the movement had treated as humanity's hope. The Bund bet against a Jewish refuge and for the international left, and was annihilated in the space between the two errors. The Zionism it ridiculed is the reason "never again" carries any weight at all.

So the pedigree the activists claim is a death certificate they have mistaken for a coat of arms. Crabapple is proud of the conference resolutions  that instrumentalized the massacres of Jews in Palestine while accusing the Zionists of doing exactly that.  The current anti-Zionists have curated a brave and tragic movement down to its most shameful hour and made that hour the heirloom. The ancestors at the Splendid had the excuse of not knowing how the story ended. Their great-grandchildren have the Holocaust, the gulag, and seventy-eight years of Israeli statehood in the record.

If any philosophy has been falsified by history, it is the philosophy of the pre-war Bundists. They had an excuse for their blindness. Today's socialist Jews have no such excuse. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/16 Links Pt2: How ‘Settler Violence’ Became a Tool for Sanctioning Jews; Foiled plot targeting AIPAC-affiliated politicians at WH UFC fight; Batya Ungar-Sargon: ‘It’s over for Jews in Europe’

From Ian:

Mark Goldfeder and Eugene Kontorovich: How ‘Settler Violence’ Became a Tool for Sanctioning Jews

The Biden administration’s play was designed to open the floodgates of European and other Western sanctions. In turn, the European sanctions, which are even worse, are themselves a dress rehearsal for what we can expect under a future Democratic administration in the United States.

One of the sanctioned organizations, Regavim—also a plaintiff in the Texas case—has been exposing the European Union’s role in promoting violations of the Oslo Accords by sponsoring the ongoing Palestinian land grab in Area C, the area left under full Israeli control by those agreements. Regavim’s research and whistleblowing activity, it turns out, is also considered settler violence.

Regavim’s work forensically documents how the “settler violence” sausage is made, thereby clarifying the function not only of leftist NGOs in Israel, but also of groups like Dawn MENA in the United States. The production cycle goes like this: A deceptive NGO report becomes a settled account, trumpeted by human-rights organizations that are themselves funded by the European Union. Reporters and international bodies cite the NGOs without independent corroboration. Policymakers cite the resulting consensus. The European states that funded the NGOs making the claims then impose sanctions accordingly. What passes for evidence is often nothing more than a chain of ideological citations. And when a handful of these stories were finally forced to address facts, the narrative fell apart.

Take the case of Amana, a company that has built tens of thousands of homes throughout Judea and Samaria for decades. The Biden administration made sure to sanction Amana on its way out, two weeks after it lost the election in November 2024. As justification, it cited Amana providing a loan to Manne, whom it had sanctioned in August of that year. Another justification was that “the settlers and farms that Amana supports play a key role in developing settlements in the West Bank, from which in turn settlers commit violence.”

Following the Biden administration’s lead, last month the European Union sanctioned Amana for “initiating, financing, and facilitating at least 30 violent outposts and settlements.” The word violent in that sentence is doing Herculean work. What makes an outpost “violent”? Amana pours concrete and lays roads. But under the definitions used by the United Nations, anything from exercising self-defense to an individual committing petty theft is classified as violence. This then allows the European Union to state with a straight face that Amana “facilitated violent outposts” without identifying a single act of violence that Amana directed, funded, or encouraged. This is not a legal standard. It is a word game.

Based on spurious accusations and bogus legal reasoning, the Biden administration, and now the European Union, turned the very idea of Jews living in the West Bank into a sanctionable offense and an inherent violation of Palestinian human rights.

Criminal and political violence—typically vandalism and property crime—directed at Palestinians by Israeli Jews (not necessarily settlers) in the West Bank does exist. It is both wrong and rare. Israel’s leaders and rabbis condemn it categorically, in contrast with the Palestinian Authority, which pays pensions to its terrorists. The clearance rate on such incidents is low, but that is also true of property crime in U.S. and European cities.

Our lawsuit alleged that while the sanctions were facially neutral—aimed at any perpetrators of violence in the West Bank—they were applied discriminatorily, exclusively targeting Jews. The settlement agreement states that the government will not “target private organizations and Israeli citizens living in the West Bank,” a hint that this is exactly what Democrats have done and want to do again.

Framing settler violence as a crisis worthy of global concern reinforces a narrative of predatory fundamentalist Jews dispossessing Palestinians. The low level of criminal activity by Jews in Judea and Samaria is a domestic Israeli law enforcement matter and should be treated as such. Thankfully, the Trump administration recognizes this. In the Justice Department’s settlement agreement, the government declares that it “categorically rejects any policy that would infringe upon Israel’s sovereignty.” Using such language to discuss measures relating to the West Bank is, in fact, a quiet but potentially significant policy change that should be celebrated.

A Mostly Violent Protest Movement

The indictments brought in the Eastern District of Michigan last week against eight 20-somethings deeply involved in anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus pull back the curtain on what that movement is really about.

Announcing the indictments, FBI director Kash Patel described a "campaign of violent, criminal acts" in which the Michigan eight engaged in a coordinated campaign of intimidation against university leaders—the president, the provost, the chief investment officer, members of the board of regents, and university police officers, plus "anyone they believed supported" the State of Israel—after the school shut down their illegal "solidarity encampment."

They threw noxious chemicals through the windows of victims’ homes, taped demand letters to their doors, defaced the Jewish Federation of Detroit on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, and spray-painted private homes with messages like "Intifada" and "Free Palestine."

Then they tried to intimidate a witness, identified in the indictment only as a University of Michigan student the defendants believed was cooperating with federal authorities. Defendants Paige Feyock, a Wellesley graduate and University of Michigan medical researcher, and Zainab Hakim, a 2024 University of Michigan graduate who was then hired by the university for a full-time job in the Center for South Asian Studies, hatched a plan to confront the witness. In mid-July 2024 Feyock aired her concerns about a "snitch" who was "going to send us to federal prison." In early August, she told her pals she and Hakim planned to get coffee with the witness: "ima strip search [him] ... to see if he is wearing a wire. not taking no chances with him." After the fact, she reported, the victim "knows not to talk."

The alleged criminality on display in Ann Arbor is hardly an isolated incident. At UCLA, so-called protesters set up a "Jew Exclusion Zone" barring Zionists from a portion of the campus. At Columbia, pampered rich kids stormed and occupied a university building and held two janitors hostage. At Harvard, a pair of graduate students accosted a fellow student walking across campus.

We’re picking up what they’re putting down. The nucleus of the "pro-Palestine" protest movement more closely resembles the violent left-wing movements of the past, from the Weather Underground to the Symbionese Liberation Army and Black Lives Matter, that have used terror, violence, and intimidation in an attempt to achieve their political aims.

The Weather Underground didn’t end U.S. imperialism. The SLA didn’t spark an uprising against capitalism. We are still living through the backlash to BLM and the George Floyd protests.

How will the "pro-Palestine" movement fare? The leading candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, had one of the alleged thugs on his payroll and not a whole lot to say about the indictment except that he blames the Trump DOJ for selective prosecution. One of the Democratic Party’s nominees for University of Michigan regent is a Dearborn attorney, Amir Makled, who has represented anti-Israel protesters on campus and is more or less a proxy for the alleged criminals. The party chose Makled in favor of Jordan Acker, the pro-Israel regent whose law firm, home, and car were vandalized by the Michigan eight.

The predictable idiocy of Palestine Action

To put it as simply as possible for the benefit of some remarkably simple minds on the far left of politics, the British government cannot, under any circumstances, afford to be seen as weak on national security. And when a group proudly infiltrates a British military facility and broadcasts it to millions, then the government effectively has little option but to ban it, or else demonstrate its weakness for the entire world to see.

In some ways I believe the RAF incident was inevitable. If a direct action group continues to carry out similar sorts of attacks, but with no significant results, their alternatives are either to up the ante or to see members siphoned off to join groups which are prepared to go even further. To stay relevant in the hysterical arena of pro-Palestinian activism in the UK, Palestine Action had to become more extreme or see itself slide into irrelevance.

But in other ways the latest descriptions of Palestine Action mask the real story, the ever-shifting attempts to market it in a way best designed to grab public sympathy. I don’t believe that a single one of the high profile individuals damning the proscription decision, for example, has referred to the RAF base infiltration in their screeds condemning the ruling. One possible reason is because that designating this as a simple civil liberties fight is far more likely to gain wider public sympathy.

Such efforts have been constant; a moving of the goalposts dependent not on what is actually true, but what works best to score pity points. People may have forgotten, for example, that there were an awful lot of attempted defences of Palestine Action last year prior to its proscription that described it as a “non-violent organisation”.

It is hard to understand how such descriptions had arisen – the group itself never explicitly described itself as non-violent – and the only feasible conclusion is that the people claiming this really wanted it to be true and therefore simply decided to act as if it was true – something of a leitmotif in 21st century activism. Since then, of course, many of Palestine Action’s most doughty defenders have moved on to arguing that that the member who fractured a policewoman’s spine didn’t intend to do it, and that it wasn’t a bad fracture, really.

This fight is unlikely to be over. No doubt Ms Ammori will now try and take this to the Supreme Court, and if that fails, to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, other groups mimicking Palestine Action techniques have begun to spring up – for example, one calling itself “People Against Genocide”, which features the red triangle of Hamas – a group specifically dedicated to genocide – on its banner.

It remains to be seen whether they will be as stupid – and arrogant – as Palestine Action proved itself to be.

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06/16 Links Pt1: The US has emboldened Iran and abandoned Israel; The Iranian People Are Forgotten; Trump Pushes Israeli Restraint on Hizbullah, Iran

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Cyrus no more

The shock and distress in Israel are palpable. President Donald Trump’s apparent volte-face on Iran is being felt as an abandonment.

Israelis are used to the indifference or hostility of American presidents. They managed to survive the malevolent manipulation of the Obama administration and the intimidation and threats of the Bidenites.

But in Trump, here was a president who brought about something no-one had thought would happen — the United States and Israel fighting side by side to defeat one of the greatest evils in the world.

On that terrible day of October 7 2023, when Israel was subjected to a barbaric invasion that exposed its weakness against a seven-front attempt by Iran to exterminate it with hundreds of thousands of missiles pointing straight at it, who would have thought that within a couple of years Iran and Hezbollah would be on their knees with their senior ranks taken out, their missile stocks radically depleted, Iran’s air defences obliterated and its nuclear weapons programme, which had been on the cusp of coming to murderous fruition, set back by years.

It was Trump, to his enduring credit, who made that possible. Accordingly, he was hailed as a new Cyrus, the 6th century BCE Persian king who freed the Jews from captivity and helped rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

Yet this week, the same Trump seemed to be pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. By signing an agreement with the very Iranian regime that he should have been continuing to destroy, he has instead thrown Tehran a lifeline; reduced America to a paper tiger; accordingly put a spring in the step of Russia, China and North Korea, as well as emboldening Islamists seeking to destroy the west — and having undermined Israel’s security, aggressively turned on Israel for presuming to defend itself.

The US not only excluded Israel from discussions leading up to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) but also, while currently keeping its terms secret from the world, has refused even to show them to the Jewish state.

That’s Israel, America’s close ally and indispensable “unsinkable aircraft carrier;” Israel, which Iran is making every effort to wipe off the face of the earth; Israel, whose soldiers have been dying not just to save their own country but in defence of an America that refuses to put its own troops in danger but is all too happy for Israelis to die in defence of itself and the free world.

Contrary to much misreporting, the MOU is not a deal that ends the war. It’s rather a framework for negotiations during a 60-day ceasefire. In a blizzard of claims and counter-claims, we don’t know what its terms are. But what’s undeniable is that Trump has chosen this moment, when the Iranian regime was weakening by the day, to take his knee off its windpipe by lifting the US blockade of Iranian ships. Going into the 60-day negotiation, he has thus chosen to make Iran stronger and the US weaker.

The US has emboldened Iran and abandoned Israel

The Islamic Republic of Iran kills its own people and sponsors terrorism in Israel, Lebanon, Britain and far beyond. The world will be a better place when this brutish regime is destroyed. Unfortunately, the reckless US assault on Iran has made this prospect even less likely than it was – at least in the short to medium term.

From the start of the war to last weekend’s ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Iran, the White House has acted like a child who spies a hornets’ nest, pokes it with a big stick, kills a few of the creatures while stirring up many more, and then runs back home to leave others to deal with the ferocious after-effects. And the Islamic Republic is a thousand times more lethal than the biggest nest of hornets.

Whatever peace deal is eventually agreed between the US and Iran over the following weeks, Israel’s security is the biggest loser from what began as a joint US-Israel operation. Indeed, in recent weeks, the White House has gone silent on two of Israel’s key goals, which it originally backed: destroying Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities, and severing Tehran’s support to its terrorist proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen. A third objective – disabling Iran’s nuclear capabilities – has been pushed into the future on the crazy assumption that the words of the Islamic Republic can be trusted.

Nearly six weeks of air assaults did weaken the theocracy in some military aspects, though far less than the White House hyperbole claims. But the Iranian regime has also been emboldened by the war. It has shown that it can defy the US, albeit at the expense of the struggling Iranians it rules over.

With the regime left in place, it will soon rearm and refinance itself, maybe even with the help of maritime transit fees from the Strait of Hormuz and some easing of sanctions. Moreover, President Trump’s portrayal of the Islamic Republic as people he can make a deal with has given it an international legitimacy that it previously lacked. And by accepting Tehran’s incorporation of the Lebanese conflict into any peace deal, the White House has bolstered Iran’s aim of being recognised as a regional Middle Eastern power.

It is important now to absorb the lessons of this US-led calamity because it is very unlikely to be the last such rash military venture – especially as the US struggles to manage its decline from its hegemonic, superpower status.

Trump Ended the War on His Terms, Leaving Israel with the Consequences

The understandings reached between the U.S. and Iran are not a historic agreement and certainly not a new nuclear deal. They are mainly an American attempt to stop a war that Trump no longer wanted. The president needed an exit. Now he is presenting it as a victory. But most of the difficult issues have not been resolved.

The nuclear program has not been dismantled. The fate of the enriched uranium remains disputed. Oversight is unclear. The 60-day negotiation window that is now supposed to open does not guarantee a breakthrough. It is more likely to become a mechanism for delay and buying time. Trump, having already declared success, will find it difficult to quickly return to a full-scale war. The more likely scenario is prolonged management of indecision.

Israel emerges from this campaign stronger militarily, but more constrained diplomatically. It proved its ability to strike Iran and operate alongside the U.S., but it also learned that Washington decides when to stop, what counts as victory, and how much Israel will be able to keep operating the day after.

Israel sought a decision. Trump sought a victory image. That gap erupted around the Israeli strike in Dahieh. From Israel's perspective, it was part of the ongoing campaign against Hizbullah. From Trump's perspective, it was almost an act of sabotage against his diplomatic move.

Regional states will not rush to conclude that Iran is out of the game. They saw that the U.S. knows how to apply tremendous military force, but is not built, politically or economically, to conduct a prolonged war until full victory over Iran. Many of them will return to maintaining channels with Tehran, understanding that, even after a severe blow, Iran remains a player that cannot be ignored.

Israel's main concern now is freedom of action. Any Israeli operation against Iranian facilities, senior officials or strategic assets could be seen in Washington as an attempt to torpedo the agreement Trump is presenting as a personal achievement. In Lebanon, Israel may retain greater room to maneuver. But any significant strike in Dahieh or against Hizbullah will be examined through one question: Does it endanger the understandings with Iran?

Elliott Abrams: The Iranian People Are Forgotten

The American agreement with Iran completely abandons the Iranian people. In December and January, Iranians took to the streets in huge numbers in 200 cities. The regime responded with mass murder, shooting unarmed demonstrators and killing between 7,000 and 35,000. On June 13, President Trump posted: "We look forward to working with Iran." When he announced the deal with Iran the next day, Trump said, "I never cared about regime change. This is the third group we've dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet."

This is a strategic error of the greatest importance. It's obvious to Iranians, and should be to us, that the Islamic Republic is unreformable. Iran's rulers are the people who murdered thousands of their fellow citizens in cold blood a few months ago and more recently struck at economic and civilian targets of all their Gulf Arab neighbors as well as Israel.

The only long-run solution to Iran's aggression and repression is popular sovereignty. The new agreement will not change the Middle East because the Islamic Republic will always remain at the heart of the region's violence and instability. Its ruling elites have shown again and again that "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" are central pillars of their belief system.

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Hotel staffer sends "Free Palestine" message to TV in room of religious Jewish guest

From Novara Media:

Travelodge has apologised after a welcome greeting reading “Free Palestine” was displayed on the TV of a hotel room.

A Jewish guest checked in to Travelodge Manor House in north London on 3 June to find the pro-Palestine message displayed on his TV screen. The guest also alleged that a member of staff had behaved in a hostile way towards him.

Travelodge launched an investigation into the incident, but has been unable to find out who inputted the message or establish if it was displayed for previous occupants of the room.

The hotel chain initially described the message itself as “antisemitic”, and is now planning on rolling out antisemitism training for its staff in response.

It is apparently easy for any hotel clerk to customize a message for a guest on a room by room basis.

A front desk clerk (or anyone with access to the admin interface) could:

Look up the guest's room number after check-in.

Log into the hotel's TV management dashboard.

Select that room and input/upload a custom message or override the welcome screen.

Push it instantly — it appears as a pop-up, banner, or full welcome screen when the TV turns on.

Obviously the people at the front desk are the only ones who know that the guest is an Orthodox Jew and what their room number is.

The system is in place to help make one's stay more comfortable. Here it was used to harass a hotel guest. 

The incident shows that there is no distinction between "pro-Palestine" and antisemitism - according to the haters themselves. It also shows that the hate of the "free Palestine" people is wholly disconnected from anything Israel is doing. 

"Free Palestine" is a socially acceptable substitute for "F*** you, kike."

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The Candy Tax: A lesson in civics for US students (book excerpt)

Most schools don't teach civics anymore. The reasons are mundane: schools teach to standardized tests. But this is a mistake. Citizenship includes obligations, and obligations mean understanding and participating in the important questions of the day.

This is an excerpt from my book Reclaiming the Covenant: America's Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring it Continues. It describes a fun way to teach how bills work in Congress, where the students affect the decisions by writing letters to their representatives and Ai ensures that even the teachers don't know what will happen.

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06/15 Links Pt2: Coleman Hughes vs. Peter Beinart; Boy George: ‘I would never turn my back on my Jewish friends’; Post-Platner Democrats must ask: ‘Are we the baddies?’

From Ian:

David Collier: From anti-Zionism to Antizionism

One of the most disturbing political developments in the modern West is watching self-described progressive universalists adopt one of the most aggressive nationalist movements on the planet while failing to recognise it as nationalism at all.

That contradiction is the beating heart of antizionism.

Antizionism presents itself as opposition to nationalism while marching beneath a national flag. It speaks the language of universal human rights while denying Jews the very national rights it demands for others. And because the movement refuses to recognise itself for what it is, it increasingly treats opposition not as disagreement, but as complicity with evil.

Spurred on by Islamist rhetoric, fed by decades of Soviet-era propaganda, and radicalised inside social media echo chambers, modern antizionism draws much of its energy from antisemitism – a prejudice far older than the State of Israel itself.

And that is what makes the movement so dangerous: The moral certainty with which it carries itself. The belief that any action, slogan, intimidation, or even violence can become justified once directed against the world’s designated evil: Israel.

And the most unsettling part of all?

They believe they are the good guys.

Stop using the hyphen. Antizionism is a modern hate movement.

Boy George: ‘I would never turn my back on my Jewish friends’

Pop icon Boy George says he would “never turn his back on his Jewish friends”, despite being targeted by pro-Palestinian activists.

The colourful singer who achieved worldwide fame in the 80s with his group Culture Club, lived in Golders Green during the 90s and was in the area on the day on the day two Jewish men were stabbed.

He was interviewed ahead of a charity auction which will see some his most outrageous clothing sold to raise funds for struggling musicians.

George, 65, whose biggest hits include Do You Really Want to Hurt Me and Karma Chameleon, has incorporated the Star of David into some of his clothes.

He said: “Over the years it’s been a really personal thing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have compassion for Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that I agree with what’s going on in Israel, but I am always going to defend the people that I love.

He added: “I have a lot of Jewish friends and there would never be a situation where I’d turn my back on them.”

He also spoke about Culture Club’s Jewish drummer Jon Moss, and his great friend, club promoter Phillip Sallon.

George told The Sunday Telegraph: “Jon Moss was one of the great loves of my life. He’s Jewish, and I remember when I met Philip Sallon [known as the ‘King of Clubs’ in the 80s] he said: ‘I’m a Jew, I’m a homosexual and I’m f--king proud of it.’”

The auction will feature some of his hats from British milliners Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy, and the striking Hasidic Samet hats that he’s worn throughout his life.

He says he's always worn the hats as a subliminal symbol of support and one coming under the hammer is a felt black hat, given to him by Moss.

In May he hit the headlines after appearing on Patrick Kielty’s Irish talk show.

Having been in Golders Green on the day of the attack, which saw two Jewish men allegedly stabbed by a Somali-born British national, he expressed his support for the Jewish community.

In response, Kielty referenced “the backdrop of that obviously is the horrors of Gaza and this is a complex thing”.

It led to a fierce backlash online, with the charity Holocaust Awareness Ireland condemning the Kielty's response because the show airs on the Irish state broadcaster.

George, who appeared in Eurovision singing alongside San Marino’s entry, was also singled out by pro-Palestinian activists who criticised him for participating, as well as for his statements supporting Israel’s continued participation in the contest.

Brendan O'Neill: How synagogues became fair game for the Israelophobic mob

In fact, the political class helped to whip up the anti-Zionist mob. The day before the Edgware event, London mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted: ‘I condemn any attempt to sell property in the settlements in the West Bank, be that in London or anywhere else in the world.’ Again, the organisers firmly deny that West Bank property was on sale. The mayor’s comment came off like incitement of the mob. He was making it clear that he, too, was morally repulsed by what was due to unfold in Edgware, effectively giving a green light to every wanker who wanted to rage about it. Let’s see if he now tweets: ‘I condemn anyone who tells London’s Jews to “watch their backs”.’ I won’t hold my breath.

There’s one thing the synagogue mob didn’t reckon with – the determination of Edgware’s Jews to defend their place of worship. Huge numbers of Jews and their friends gathered to tell the keffiyeh bigots that ‘They shall not pass’. It was like a mini-Cable Street, only this time ‘the left’ was firmly on the other side – not the side of Jews who only want to live free of harassment, but the side of that twisted Islamo-left nexus that has made a bloodsport of taunting ‘Zionists’. The Jews danced and sang and waved the Israeli flag and the Union flag: a display of genuine anti-fascism against the fake anti-fascists of the Jew-state haters.

The magnitude of these events cannot be overstated. The unthinkable is not just thinkable now – it is doable. In vile mimicry of those 1930s mobs that swarmed synagogues and boycotted Jewish goods, now ‘the righteous’ scream about Zionism at the doors of synagogues and boycott Jewish State goods. In Manhattan, keffiyeh gangs raged outside the Park East Synagogue, also on the pretext that it was hosting an Israeli real estate event. A Jewish girl had her hair violently yanked by a masked bigot. Placards featuring Jeffrey Epstein said: ‘Free America from Isra-hell.’ The synagogue mobs of the 1930s likewise looked upon the Jews as a paedophilic race from which Germany should be ‘freed’. There have also been synagogue protests in New Jersey, LA, Canada and France.

At the New Jersey protest, Jews were called ‘Zionist pigs’ and ‘baby killers’. At the Paris protest, hundreds of Jews were trapped inside their synagogue as stones rained down on the building. And now in Edgware, Jews are told by a frothing mob to ‘watch their backs’. Can we be real? These are not protests – they’re practice pogroms. We are witnessing the sinister resuscitation of the medieval belief that Jews are pigs who kill children and thus their ‘Synagogues of Satan’ are fair game for mob fury. Not content with making life harder for Jews in the West, now the keffiyeh army tells them they are forbidden from escaping to Israel. So where can they go? Don’t answer that.

It is a testament to the battering our civilisational values have taken since 7 October that 1930s-style mobbings have returned and no one in power seems to give a damn. Good on the Jews who stood up to the keffiyeh bigots in Edgware – next time I want to see many more non-Jews standing with them.

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06/15 Links Pt1: Trump’s ‘peace deal’ leaves all the big questions unanswered; Netanyahu: Iran will not have nukes ‘with or without an agreement’

From Ian:

Trump’s ‘peace deal’ leaves all the big questions unanswered

There is as yet no clear answer to any of the key questions that prompted the original military action. No solution to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear plans, its backing of proxy armies, its brutal oppression of the Iranian people, or even its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, no answer to the problem of the Islamic Republic itself, the Islamist source of so much instability in the Middle East and increasingly beyond.

Replete with potential for seeming concessions and fudges, this ceasefire does not appear to be a victory for the US. It looks and feels like a testament to the Trump administration’s desperate desire to end the war – which the vast majority of Americans now oppose – regardless of the cost to itself and to its chief regional ally, Israel.

Indeed, one of the main casualties of this conflict has been the White House’s relationship with Israel. Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered into this war in seeming lockstep in their opposition to the Iranian regime. But the two allies’ geopolitical interests have since diverged. Finding himself under increasing domestic pressure due in part to rising energy costs, Trump has zeroed in on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and therefore making peace with Iran. The Israeli state, meanwhile, has rather more existential concerns and has continued to focus on destroying Iran’s proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is understandably rather less interested in making peace with a regime that remains constitutionally hellbent on its destruction.

With Israel’s ongoing war with Iran’s proxies frequently intruding on negotiations between the US and Iran, Trump has even started publicly criticising Netanyahu – a tension that Iran, Hezbollah and the rest have frequently played on. That’s why Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into northern Israel when US-Iran peace negotiations appear to be reaching sensitive points. As Jake Wallis Simons has observed, it’s designed to elicit a response from Israel and further drive a wedge between the two allies. Just last week, Trump called Netanyahu a ‘difficult guy’ who has ‘no fucking judgment’.

So we now have a situation in which negotiations to end the joint US-Israeli war with Iran seem to have sidelined Israel almost entirely. And no wonder. There is little about the mooted deal that Israel would deem worth supporting. Not least the demand that Israel cease operations against Iranian proxies – something that, according to Haaretz, the Israel Defence Forces will not do. The Times of Israel put the matter succinctly a couple of weeks ago:
‘The Iranian regime still exists. It still possesses much of its ballistic missile arsenal and its stockpile of enriched uranium. And it also controls the Strait of Hormuz.’

From Israel’s perspective, the Islamic Republic, armed with the Strait of Hormuz, looks more threatening now than it did a few months ago.

None of this is to suggest that the Islamic Republic, already an economic horror show, is emerging from this conflict unscathed. The military assault of the past few months has devastated Iranian sea and air power, and has wiped out a whole stratum of leadership, including the Ayatollah Khamenei himself. Nevertheless, it has survived in the face of the Great Satan, and that is more than enough for it to feel emboldened.

In the next couple of months, the US and Iran may well reach an agreement that both the White House and Tehran can dress up as a victory. But for as long as the Islamic Republic and its proxies menace what they deride as ‘the Zionist entity’, peace in the Middle East will remain as elusive as ever.

JPost Editorial: Israel cannot applaud an Iran deal that leaves key threats intact

A ceasefire is valuable if it locks in Iranian defeat. It is dangerous if it locks in Iranian survival.

The reported 60-day negotiation period is the most troubling part. Sixty days sounds orderly in Washington. In the Middle East, it is enough time for Iran to move assets, rebuild confidence, reframe the war at home, and test how badly the US wants quiet. Tehran knows how to use delay. Hezbollah knows how to use delay. Israel has paid for those delays before.

Lebanon may be the immediate danger. Any arrangement that restrains Israel while leaving Hezbollah in place is unacceptable. Northern Israel cannot be secured by language in a US-Iran memorandum. Kiryat Shmona, Metula, and the Galilee need Hezbollah to be moved, disarmed, and deterred.

Trump deserves credit for understanding Iran’s danger better than many Western leaders. He left the Obama deal. He imposed pressure. He backed Israel at critical moments.

That record makes this moment more serious. Trump should not attach his name to a weaker version of the mistake he once condemned.

If this agreement removes Iran’s nuclear threat, cuts off its proxies, protects Israel’s freedom of action, and gives the regime no path back to strength, the administration should publish the details and defend them.

If it does less than that, Israel should not applaud.

Neither should Congress.

Andrew Fox: Anatomy of a debacle

This piece has been weeks in the writing, awaiting a conclusion. Now we have it, this long article is an autopsy of the calamity we have watched unfold for the last few months. As with all my writing on the Iran War, I will keep this free. All I ask is that you share and subscribe if you do not already.

Yesterday, Trump announced the deal he had spent weeks insisting he did not need.

The White House has called it a peace deal. At this stage, it is a memorandum of understanding, scheduled for formal signature in Switzerland on Friday. The text remains opaque: we do not yet know the final terms. However, the outline is clear enough to grasp the political meaning. Washington appears to have bought time. Hormuz is to reopen. The naval blockade is to be lifted. Iran receives some combination of oil waivers, asset releases, sanctions relief, or economic breathing space. The nuclear file moves into a 60-day negotiating window. Trump gets a ceasefire and lower oil prices. Tehran gets survival, liquidity, and time.

That is the endpoint of the debacle, at least for now. A war launched with maximalist assumptions has reached an interim understanding that leaves the regime in place, Hezbollah in the field, Iran’s missile architecture as the central fact of regional security, and the nuclear question in the long grass. What forced Washington’s hand was the oil clock. Emergency reserves, rerouting schemes, naval workarounds, tanker insurance, Asian demand destruction, and political patience were all running down at once. Trump rushed to a deal because the alternative was a global oil shock that would hit American gas stations just in time for the domestic political season.

The war was supposed to show that American and Israeli power could reorder the region. Instead, it showed how quickly tactical dominance can become strategic dependence. Washington could destroy targets inside Iran, but it could not force Tehran to surrender its political position. It could not open the Strait of Hormuz by military means at an acceptable cost. It could not push Saudi Arabia into war. It could not impose normalisation with Israel on the Gulf states. It could not get Europe to join the campaign. It could not convince China to pull away from Iran. It could not stop Gulf states from privately seeking understandings with Tehran to keep themselves off Iran’s target list. It could not protect allies from cheaper Iranian missiles without burning through expensive Western interceptors at a rate that made every other theatre nervous.

The global image of American power has been significantly diminished. The United States remains capable of extraordinary destruction. The war has made something else equally clear: destruction is not the same thing as control. The limits of American hard power have been brutally exposed.

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Controversy in Italy over religious painting with an Orthodox Jew counting money

From Shalom.it (Italy):

The Jewish Community of Naples has called for the immediate removal of one of the installations created for the Feast of the Four Altars in Torre del Greco, a historic city event that combines religious celebrations, art, and cultural initiatives.

At the center of the protest is a work inspired by the Last Supper, displayed in the Largo Costantinopoli area, which features the figure of "an elderly bearded man with a black hat handling money," an image the Community believes evokes "a classic anti-Judaism stereotype."

In a letter addressed to Mayor Luigi Mennella and also forwarded to the relevant authorities, the Council of the Jewish Community of Naples called the display of an image deemed "offensive and defamatory towards Jews" in a public space "unacceptable." The document calls for the installation's removal and announces the possibility of legal action against those responsible.

The contested work was created by artist Salvatore Seme. In the explanation accompanying the installation, the artist states that he was inspired by an episode from the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus sits at the table of sinners and tax collectors. The work, titled Frantio Panis, offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the Gospel scene; the figure in question, he claims, represents the tax collector Levi counting money.

Because that's what modern tax collectors look like, right?

The artist responded, and it didn't help matters:

“I am saddened and surprised,” said Seme, “by this reaction from the Jewish community, especially by being accused of Nazi-Fascism when I am the complete opposite, like most artists. To create the Altar, I was inspired by the theme and interpreted in a modern way two passages from the Gospel of Luke. It tells of the episode where Jesus sits at the table with sinners, including Levi, the tax collector, and Christ tells parables of mercy. To make the work, I studied the Gospel, and it was never my intention to offend anyone.” 

Why was Levi depicted with those features? 

“How do you represent a tax collector of the time—in a modern way?” Seme replied. “It seems absurd to accuse artists of antisemitism. I regret that someone felt offended by my work; the message was entirely different and not the banal one of antisemitism. Everyone is free to interpret art as they wish. What scares me is that just talking about Jews brings accusations of racial hatred and Nazi-Fascism.” 

Let's think. He wanted to portray a modern tax collector as a sinner. When I asked various AIs to draw one, none of them drew stereotypical Jews. Isn't that strange?

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/14 Links: Trump says peace deal with Iran completed; The Case Against Another Iran Deal; Operation Rising Lion: One year later; Somaliland president on first visit to Israel

From Ian:

We Are Told that Israel Has Lost the World

Since Oct. 7, we are told that Israel has lost the world. It has squandered international goodwill. It has alienated its allies. It has isolated itself through its conduct in Gaza. Israel was attacked in the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, responded by fighting a just war against the organization that carried out that massacre, and somehow emerged as the primary culprit in the eyes of much of the international community.

There is only one problem with this theory. It assumes Israel enjoyed remarkable support before Oct. 7. When exactly was this golden age? Was it when student groups were calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Jewish state? Was it when anti-Israel activism became a permanent feature of university life? Or was it at the UN, where Israel has long occupied a unique category of international obsession?

From 2015 through 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted more than twice as many resolutions against Israel as it did against all other countries combined. At the UN Human Rights Council, democratic Israel has routinely attracted more condemnation than regimes run by dictators, warlords, and revolutionary clerics. Apparently, the world's most pressing human rights crisis is not Syria, Iran, North Korea, or Russia.

We are told Gaza transformed Israel into an international outcast. Curiously, many international institutions seem to have reached that conclusion years before Gaza. The idea that Oct. 7 destroyed decades of goodwill would be more persuasive if anyone could point to the decades of goodwill.

Before Israeli forces had entered Gaza in significant numbers, before casualty figures dominated headlines, before military operations had fully unfolded, many people had already decided who the villain was. A remarkable amount of outrage appeared before Israel had done much of anything in Gaza at all. Israel is subjected to demands rarely made of any other country. It is expected to defeat enemies without defeating them and eliminate threats without using force.

If support disappears the moment it is tested, was it ever support at all? An ally who vanishes during a war was never much of an ally. And support that exists only during periods of calm is not support in any meaningful sense of the word.

The Case Against Another Iran Deal

Iran has treated international commitments as instruments of convenience, complying when under acute pressure and accelerating forbidden activities when that pressure eases. Verification has always been the Achilles' heel. Iran's territory, history of undeclared facilities, and demonstrated ability to delay or obstruct inspectors make robust, real-time monitoring extraordinarily difficult.

Even the 2015 JCPOA's relatively intrusive provisions proved insufficient once political will in key capitals wavered. Enforcement mechanisms, whether snapback sanctions or military consequences, have depended on sustained U.S. and allied commitment - something that has proven elusive across administrations.

Military pressure alone has not transformed the regime's ideology or behavior. The Islamic Republic's core opposition to U.S. influence and support for regional proxies has survived leadership losses and battlefield setbacks. Long-term strategy against Iran has repeatedly foundered on domestic political shifts.

Iran's leadership has learned to play for time, calculating that U.S. policy coherence rarely survives a single presidential term. Any agreement that depends on consistent enforcement across future administrations asks for something the American political system has not delivered on Iran policy in decades.

The current posture - sustained but episodic pressure combined with openness to a possible new deal - assumes that a verifiable and enforceable agreement is achievable with a leadership whose ideology prioritizes resistance and whose external patrons have incentives to help it evade constraints.

A decisive and overt regime change campaign represents the alternative that confronts these realities directly. It does not rely on persuading Iran's current leadership to abandon core strategic assets or on maintaining perfect verification against a determined cheater. Instead, it targets the source of the problem. We must weigh the risks of action against the mounting, compounding perils of inaction.

Jake Wallis Simons: The Iranian ayatollahs don’t want a deal. They want apocalypse

Over the past few days, Iran has shot down an American helicopter, attacked Kuwait's international airport, menaced Hormuz with drones, and launched missiles at Israel. This is not the behavior of an adversary that is desperate for peace.

Meanwhile, Iran has been secretly sealing off its subterranean cache of highly enriched uranium. This will make securing the material, America's main objective, immeasurably more difficult, even if an agreement is signed.

The regime has always had the same beliefs. Apocalyptic war against the West will cause a Messianic figure to emerge from invisibility and lead the Shia faithful to global domination in the endtimes. That remains its reality. You can't do a deal with that.

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