What Happens When You Apply “Decolonial” Theory to Arab History in Palestine? (Video)

(Originally published on my Substack)

I recently read an academic paper in Critical Education called “Decolonial Praxis: Confronting Genocide in Gaza with TribalCrit and Human Rights Education.” Its author, Sean Corrigan, argues that Tribal Critical Race Theory, a framework developed to analyze the experiences of Native Americans under colonialism, has “analytical potential” when transferred to Palestinians and Israelis. He combines it with Human Rights Education to teach students about Israeli “colonialism,” “white supremacy,” and “genocide,” explicitly with the goal of encouraging activism among students.

I thought this was a great idea. I just couldn’t understand why the analysis should start in the 20th century.

So I made a video called “Muslim Supremacy in Palestine, 638–2026: A TribalCrit / Human Rights Education Analysis.”

It is partly a spoof of contemporary academic jargon. But the history it teaches isn’t a spoof at all.

Because it is far easier to prove Muslim supremacy in the area of Palestine than Jewish supremacy.

Corrigan quotes the first principle of TribalCrit: “Colonization is endemic to society.” The framework asks us to look at conquest, political domination, unequal status, indigenous sovereignty and the way dominant societies normalize their own power.

OK, but the region has seen plenty of conquests.

Arab Muslim armies conquered Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century. Jerusalem came under Muslim sovereignty in 638 and again with Saladin.

Jews, who had been badly treated under Byzantine Christian rule, at times even excluded from Jerusalem, actually benefited in some ways from the Muslim conquest. They were again permitted to live in their ancient city. But they were not equals.

Jews and Christians became dhimmis: protected communities living under Muslim rule. Protection came with explicitly inferior political and legal status, special taxation and, depending on the period, restrictions on worship, public religious expression, dress and other aspects of life.

Even under the most benevolent Muslim rules, Jews and Christians still had fewer human rights than Muslims. The structure stayed the same.

If a society today divided its citizens by religion, gave one religion superior legal status, imposed special disabilities on the others and conditioned their protection on acknowledging the supremacy of the dominant group, any progressive would call this “apartheid.”

Which is why one slide asks: What would Human Rights Education call this today?

The video then looks at the durability of the assumption that Muslim sovereignty is the natural condition of Palestine, while non-Muslim sovereignty is an aberration that history will eventually correct.

Muslims eventually defeated the Crusaders and restored Muslim control of Jerusalem. Israel has repeatedly been compared in Arab and Islamist discourse to the Crusader states: an alien enclave that may survive for decades or even centuries but whose defeat is ultimately inevitable.

If Israel is another Crusader kingdom, accepting its existence today does not necessarily mean accepting its legitimacy. You can lose a battle, accept a temporary boundary and wait for Saladin.

That brings us directly to the PLO’s 1974 Ten-Point Program, commonly called the “stages plan.” It called for establishing Palestinian authority over any territory that could be obtained while continuing the struggle for the rest. Partial Palestinian sovereignty did not necessarily require permanent recognition of Jewish sovereignty.

This creates a question that almost never appears in decolonial analyses of the conflict:

Was the problem always that Palestinians lacked a state, or was one problem that accepting a Palestinian state next to Israel would mean accepting Jews as an equal sovereign people? This hypothesis explains facts that the usual colonial narrative has trouble with.

Anti-Jewish violence in Palestine preceded Israel. It preceded the settlements. It preceded the 1967 occupation. Jews were attacked at Nebi Musa in 1920 and massacred in Hebron in 1929.

Then came the Mufti of Jerusalem’s alliance with Nazi Germany.

Then came the repeated rhetoric of driving the Jews “into the sea.” I previously collected contemporaneous newspaper reports and a British Foreign Office document showing that this was not a Zionist invention created decades later. The same imagery appeared again in Egyptian propaganda in 1967.

The point is not that every Arab government had exactly the same war aims or that every Muslim wanted Jews dead. The point is what the rhetoric regarded as the proper outcome: Jewish sovereignty disappearing altogether.

Hamas eventually made the underlying religious claim explicit. Its original charter describes Palestine as an Islamic waqf, consecrated to Muslim generations until Judgment Day. Jews can exist. Christians can exist. But permanent Jewish sovereignty over Islamic land cannot.

That looks remarkably different when viewed through the same Human Rights Education framework Corrigan uses against Israel.

Corrigan describes TribalCrit as a framework concerned with indigenous peoples obtaining “sovereignty,” “autonomy,” “self-determination” and “self-identification.”

Yet Jews originated in this land. Their religion, national memory, calendar, language and historical consciousness remained centered on it throughout exile. Jewish communities continued to exist there under successive Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British rulers.

As soon as Jews recovered sovereignty, the decolonial vocabulary flips. Jewish power becomes colonialism. Jewish national self-determination becomes settler colonialism. Jewish sovereignty becomes supremacy.

The millennium of political arrangements in which Jews were subordinate to somebody else largely disappears from the analysis.

That is why the final line of the video says:

A society can normalize the supremacy of one community so deeply that the loss of that supremacy is later redescribed as colonization.

The presentation is deliberately provocative. Yet it is accurate. I’m just applying the same rules that progressives apply to Israeli Jews to Muslim Arabs throughout history.

Corrigan says TribalCrit is transferable. I transferred it. It produces some very interesting results.

Here’s the video.

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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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08/23 Links: True History of the Middle East with Simon Sebag Montefiore; Review: 'The Jewish Hospital' by Jonathan Hammel; The IDF's Transformation since October 7

From Ian:

A Place for Healing Amid the Holocaust

REVIEW: 'The Jewish Hospital' by Jonathan Hammel
Yad Vashem estimates nearly 200,000 books have been written about the Holocaust. We gain some fragments of insight from such works as André Schwarz-Bart's Last of the Just, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Nikolaus Wachsmann's comprehensive history, and even Mel Brooks's parodies.

To decide to write a new book about the Holocaust is a curious endeavor in the face of that vast body of literature and its nearly endless variety. But the true story of the Jewish Hospital of Berlin is so unlikely, even absurd, that it justifies yet another addition to that literary genre.

Jonathan Hammel's historical novel recounts how the Nazis allowed a hospital staffed by and serving only Jews to exist throughout the entire duration of the Third Reich. He does it through the story of his grandmother, Gerda Schild Haas, who worked as a nurse in the hospital.

The setting is March 1943, a full year after the Wannsee Conference where Reinhard Heydrich and 15 officials of the Reich agreed to the final solution of the Jewish question. Earlier plans for emigration of Jews to welcoming countries failed as there were no welcoming countries. Later emigration to neighboring countries only led to death as the Nazis swept through Eastern Europe and killed as many Jews as they found. But a more efficient and organized solution was in the offing.

The rationale for this hospital reveals the ludicrous and insane mindset of the Nazi bureaucracy. Apparently, they believed the 70,000 Jews of Berlin needed to be in good physical shape before they were transported to the labor camps like Sachsenhausen where they survived an average of about two weeks or to the death camp of Auschwitz where they lasted about two hours. Any pregnant women would deliver their babies there and then go on transports to their death.

Some of the characters in the book have been given pseudonyms, including the author's grandmother. Gerda Schild Haas is called Lena Schild, and her close friend Sophie Gollschmidt portrays Stella Goldschlag, a notorious Nazi collaborator forced to spy on her fellow Jews. Schild eventually is sent to Theresienstadt camp, the Potemkin village created by the Nazis to pretend that Jews were well treated whenever any investigation was performed. The actual head of the hospital, Dr. Walter Lustig, retains his name. Lustig was a physician who lost his license as part of the Nuremberg Laws but worked closely with the Nazis in his efforts to keep the hospital open, prevent the staff from being deported to the camps, and ensuring his own survival.

Several incidents that the staff of the hospital actually experienced are presented in this fictional account. Attempts at deporting 50 percent of the staff were avoided by playing off the bureaucratic wrangling between the Gestapo and the SS squads over jurisdiction of the hospital. Children were housed there, and some avoided deportation. Jews who worked in the hospital were recruited as Nazi spies to identify Jews who were living openly in Berlin under assumed names and identities. Adolf Eichmann and Alois Brunner appear in the novel and were involved in overseeing the hospital as part of their portfolio in organizing the destruction of European Jewry.

Tevi Troy: New York Isn't the Same for Jews

When I was growing up in Queens in the 1970s, about 2,000 Jews would worship on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur at my synagogue.

If there were police outside, they were there only to direct traffic, not to provide protection.

This year, every synagogue in New York has a security committee; police presence is a necessity - not because of traffic.

While Jews once felt safe walking the streets of the city - or at least only as threatened as everybody else - now they feel, with good reason, as if they have targets on their backs. In July, 70% of hate crimes in New York targeted Jews.

The pervasive threat is a constant topic of conversation. Why don't comparable non-Jewish institutions need the same layers of security?

What's happening in New York is about more than one mayor running an administration oddly focused on demonizing Israel.

The atmosphere is changing the character of what was once America's most Jewish city and making it simply another place.

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Haaretz Food Critic Gets Hernia Trying Not To Mention Palestinians (PreOccupied Territory)

Haaretz Food Critic Gets Hernia Trying Not To Mention Palestinians

Sorry I'm late!

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

Tel Aviv, August 20 — A veteran restaurant writer remained hospitalized this morning after the restraint from refraining from political commentary in his review caused a blood vessel to push through a weak spot in adjacent tissue.

Amir Ben-Ami, longtime food writer for Haaretz Taste, had promised editors to keep the piece strictly about the cuisine for once. Colleagues say he sat at his desk for six hours, face contorted, one hand clamped to his side, muttering “just the seasoning… just the plating… nothing else.”

The trouble began with the appetizers. Ben-Ami’s first draft described the labneh as “aggressively occupying the center of the plate.” He deleted the phrase at once, grimacing. Next came the lamb: “two distinct states of doneness coexisting uneasily on the same dish.” Delete. The sauce: “a unilateral reduction that refused all compromise.” Delete, harder this time.

By the main course his breathing had grown labored. “The chef has settled the question of authenticity once and for all,” he typed, then slammed the laptop shut and paced the room, pressing both palms against his abdomen. A neighbor reported hearing repeated cries of “No context! No context!” followed by the sound of vigorous backspacing.

An early version of the dessert paragraph read: “The crème brûlée presents a hard exterior that yields, under pressure, to a softer reality many diners still refuse to acknowledge.” Ben-Ami excised the entire sentence, then the following one, then the one after that. At approximately 1:14 a.m. he emitted a sharp cry and collapsed.

Paramedics found him on the floor beside a half-finished review whose margins were filled with crossed-out geopolitical metaphors. Doctors at Ichilov Hospital confirmed a complete rupture of the abdominal wall caused by “prolonged isometric tension combined with extreme ideological restraint.”

Colleagues who examined the surviving draft noted that Ben-Ami had successfully avoided every direct reference. The published version, released with an editorial disclaimer, praises the “balanced flavors,” “well-defined borders between courses,” and “a finish that leaves no outstanding issues.” A footnote states that any resemblance to larger regional matters is coincidental and deeply regretted.

Doctors expect Ben-Ami to recover fully, provided no one discusses the wine list in his presence. Hospital staff have already banned all discussion of olive oil origins within earshot of his room

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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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Was Mark Ruffalo's statement antisemitic? Effectively, yes.

Mark Ruffalo has been attacking the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger. On Friday, though, he introduced a rather remarkable new reason to oppose it: Israel.

Ruffalo reposted a video of Oracle executive Safra Catz discussing assistance Oracle provided to Israel after October 7. Catz said there were things Oracle had done for the Israeli military that she could not discuss publicly and referred to some of the company's technology as "really profoundly scary." Ruffalo then connected Oracle, Israel, Larry Ellison, David Ellison and the Warner Bros. deal into a single argument against the merger.

If you are wondering what the IDF has to do with an entertainment company, you aren't alone.

Paramount responded unusually strongly. A spokesperson said the company was "troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute," and called Ruffalo's invocation of "genocide" and "apartheid" in connection with the transaction "a bridge too far." Variety's report

Ruffalo was outraged by the accusation.

"The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest," he responded. He insisted that criticizing Israel, a military technology contract or the executives involved "is not the same as criticizing Jewish people," and emphasized his love and respect for Jews.

Let's look at the actual words Ruffalo wrote:

This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition.

These “really profoundly scary technologies” will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.

...Larry Ellison will own most of “Para Bros”. Larry is a classic Oligarch. They are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.

There is quite a lot packed into those few sentences. When you diagram the argument, the problem becomes much easier to see.

Some of the arrows are perfectly ordinary. Larry Ellison made much of his fortune through Oracle. Larry is financially backing his son David's deal. David Ellison runs Paramount Skydance. Paramount seeks to combine with Warner Bros. Discovery.

But then there are three extraordinary leaps.

The first is from Oracle technology is used by Israel to Oracle technology is used for genocide.

Ruffalo has no idea what the technology was used for. Neither do we.  It might involve intelligence, cybersecurity, logistics, communications, hostage recovery, missile defense, battlefield management or any number of other military functions.

Ruffalo supplies the missing information himself. Israel is committing "genocide"; Oracle helped Israel; therefore Oracle technology helped power genocide.

 The hidden premise is that technology provided to Israel during this war is presumptively used for criminal acts. If any other country used any other software for its military, no one would assume it was being used for war crimes. Only Israel. 

The second leap is even stranger. Ruffalo goes from Oracle possesses scary technology to that technology will most likely be merged into Warner Bros.

Why?

Oracle isn't merging with Warner Bros. Oracle and Paramount are different companies. Larry Ellison's wealth having come from Oracle and Larry helping finance his son's acquisition does not cause Oracle's database technology to migrate into a movie studio. Money doesn't carry software inside it.

Yet Ruffalo doesn't merely speculate vaguely about this possibility. He tells his readers that these technologies "will most likely be merged" into the media conglomerate.

How can that make sense?

Then comes the third leap. Ruffalo predicts that this same technology will eventually be "used on you."

Again, how? What is Warner Bros. going to do with classified technology Oracle supplied to the Israeli military? Use it to track viewers of Batman movies? Attack subscribers of HBO Max? Murder CNN viewers?

This all sounds like some conspiracy theory, but even conspiracy theories have some logic. And so does this one, if you approach all these incredible leaps as a Jew hater. 

And that is where Paramount's antisemitism accusation becomes much more interesting.

There are old antisemitic ideas that make Ruffalo's otherwise bizarre inferential leaps seem perfectly natural. One is that extremely wealthy Jews don't merely operate separate businesses and pursue separate interests; they form interconnected family and financial networks that coordinate political power behind the scenes. The most notorious version of that fantasy is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Jewish financiers, businessmen and political actors are secretly cooperating to dominate society according to that mindset.

Another old trope concerns Jews and Hollywood: Jewish money and ownership of entertainment institutions supposedly give Jews the ability to shape what non-Jews think, see and believe.

Put those assumptions into Ruffalo's argument and suddenly all of his disconnected dots connect.

Oracle helps Israel. Israel is doing something evil. Oracle belongs to Larry Ellison. Larry's money goes to his son. His son controls Paramount. Paramount acquires a huge chunk of Hollywood. The technology used by Israel therefore enters the media empire, and eventually that Jewish-controlled technological-media apparatus will be "used on you."

Without those background assumptions, the chain is nonsense. With them, it has an internal logic.

It doesn't make any sense except to antisemites - and to Mark Ruffalo. QED.

Ruffalo's defense therefore misses the issue. The accusation is not that he criticized Israel, Oracle or the Ellisons. It is not even that he used the words "genocide" and "apartheid."

The problem is the connections he draws between them. Because without these antisemitic inferences, saying that Oracle genocide software will be used by Paramount against American citizens sounds as unhinged as it is. 

That is why I think Paramount has a point. Either Ruffalo is completely insane, or he holds the antisemitic assumptions necessary for his theory to make any sense. 

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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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08/22 Links: Islamism and the silence of the ‘progressives’; Why is Iran's regime still standing?; Paramount accuses Mark Ruffalo of using antisemitic tropes; China Erases Its Jewish Past

From Ian:

Islamism and the silence of the ‘progressives’

The confusion concerning the right is almost amusing. Islamism is a movement of the reactionary right upon every criterion anybody has yet proposed: theocratic, restorationist, preoccupied with sexual order and the obedience of women; anti-Semitic across the greater part of its strands, and hostile to pluralism as a matter of doctrine rather than of temper. Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979), born in what would become Pakistan, wrote that his Islamic state would bear a resemblance to the fascist and Communist states, and that no man might regard any department of his affairs as private. Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb prescribed offensive jihad in order to establish divine authority over the whole Earth. These are not caricatures assembled by enemies but published positions, argued at length by Islamism’s own principal theorists. They would be astonished to discover that European academics account them ‘progressive’ by default.

That so many liberals, leftists and ‘progressives’ should prove incapable of recognising a reactionary movement unless its adherents happen to be European is a parochialism so profound that it has become invisible to those it afflicts. It rests on the unexamined premise that reaction is a white speciality, and whatever that premise may be, it is not anti-racism.

We have been here before, and recently enough that novelty cannot be pleaded. In June 2020, Khairi Saadallah murdered three men in a park in Reading, 17 days after his release from prison. His defence advanced mental illness. Mr Justice Sweeney rejected it, and found the killings to be terrorism, committed for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause. The men were James Furlong, David Wails and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, three friends who had gone out to enjoy a summer evening in Forbury Gardens. Ritchie-Bennett had lost his husband to cancer six years earlier, while Furlong left a long-term partner. The local Pride organisation knew all three of them. Whether their sexuality had anything to do with why they were chosen was raised at the time and then, by some quiet process of attrition, stopped being raised at all. I too had forgotten their names until the days after the Christopher Street Day attack.

One academic writing on LinkedIn, offered warmly and I am sure sincerely, claimed that when there are atrocities in the Middle East to be marched against, it is Muslims who turn out alongside gay and bisexual and women’s groups, and that all of us ought to bear this in mind. Two things are wrong with that. Firstly, there’s the flippancy of producing it at all within hours of this attack, as though the pressing question were which alliances must now be shielded from the consequences. The second and larger problem is that the claim is not true, except in a few streets in Western Europe. Muslims and gay people do march together in London and Berlin; nobody disputes it. But homosexuality remains a criminal offence across much of the Muslim world, and a capital one in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Brunei and the northern states of Nigeria. A fact about who attends demonstrations in two European capitals has been offered as though it were evidence about a doctrine practised, and enforced, on three continents.

There is worse in the sentence, and I doubt it was intended. Muslims stand alongside gay people, it is stated, as though these were two separate populations, drawn up in ranks against a common enemy, with nobody standing in both. The formulation has nowhere to put a gay Muslim: which is to say nowhere to put the person with more at stake here than anybody arguing about it. Berlin has a queer Muslim congregation, and a mosque founded by a woman who needs police protection in order to run it, and some of those in the Tiergarten on that Saturday night last month will have been both things at once. Nobody decided to leave them out, it is simply that the framework herein has no place for them, so it leaves them out automatically, and it will do so again the next time somebody drives a van into a crowd.

There will be another case of this kind. When it comes, nobody should have to choose between the collective indictment of Muslims and the collective acquittal of Islamism. The first is bigotry and the second is a lie. Name the dead before discussing the electoral consequences of their deaths. State what the murderer believed, who preached it to him and what the authorities already knew. Defend Muslims against reprisals, certainly; but defend also the gay, female, secular, liberal and apostate among them against the reactionaries who claim ownership of their lives. These are not competing obligations and only the dishonest have an interest in pretending that they are.

And do this before the usual people arrive to explain that candour will assist the far right. Nothing has assisted the far right more reliably than the surrender to it of facts that everybody else is too frightened to mention. The next atrocity will be followed by the same liturgy: grief, warning, euphemism, evasion and, finally, amnesia. It need not be. Refuse the first euphemism. Ask the forbidden question before the fanatic supplies the only answer. And when reaction comes disguised as religion, extend it neither the courtesy of silence nor the compliment of lowered expectations. One is not obliged to choose which eye to close. Next time, keep both open.

Before lecturing Israel, Britain and France should look in the mirror

France and Britain like to lecture Israel in the name of Western values. That is precisely why it is time to hold up a mirror to them: Both countries are undergoing profound demographic, cultural and political changes, while political Islam and radical movements are exerting growing influence on public and political discourse. A group does not need to become a majority to influence political parties, elections and foreign policy.

The beginnings of this process can already be seen today, including in the debate over Israel and the Middle East. This does not mean, of course, that every Muslim is an extremist, nor that an Islamist government will take power in London or Paris tomorrow morning. The argument is different: No one can guarantee who will govern either country 30 or 50 years from now, or what values those governments will uphold. Governments change. Nuclear arsenals remain.

Europe, in fact, is currently moving in the opposite direction. France is strengthening its nuclear deterrent and seeking to expand its role in the continent's security. Britain and France are deepening their cooperation, while Germany is moving toward closer strategic cooperation with the French deterrent. But serious security policy does not consider only who controls a weapon today. It must also ask who could inherit it tomorrow.

France and Britain should therefore begin, now, a long, responsible and controlled process that would ultimately lead them to voluntarily relinquish their national nuclear arsenals. Not tomorrow morning, not unilaterally and not at the cost of abandoning Europe's security.

Precisely because such disarmament could take many years, the decision should be made while these countries are still governed by leaders seeking to preserve the liberal and democratic values of the West. Those who wish to defend Western values must also protect the West's most dangerous weapons against the possibility that, one day, they could fall under the control of governments that do not share those values.

Germany bears a particular responsibility in this regard. Germany's commitment to "Never Again" cannot be merely a remembrance of the past. It must also mean an enduring responsibility for the security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

Exactly because Berlin is now deepening its nuclear-deterrence dialogue with Paris, it should lead Europe in asking the question no one wants to confront: Is it wise to build the continent's security for the coming decades around national nuclear arsenals when we cannot know the future political character of the countries that will control them?

Beware Turkish tanks on the Golan

At the moment, NATO cannot afford a complete rupture with a country that controls the Turkish Straits and hosts US nuclear weapons. But at the very least, a "reciprocity standard" should be applied to Turkey. Contracts with that country must be tied to its foreign policy and military conduct.

Human rights standards should pertain to Turkey too. Erdoğan has jailed more journalists, judges, generals, and academics than any other country in the world, including China. He is building 40,000 new jail cells to handle the overload. He is creating an authoritarian system to suit his imperial purposes.

So, Erdoğan needs to be cut down to size, and his madly ferocious foreign and military policies put in a box. American and European leaders who prioritize stability in the region ought to weigh in against Erdoğan's overly ambitious and aggressive schemes.

They should not be censuring Israel when it necessarily acts to drive Erdoğan back from the brink.

Remember: The past three years of devastating enemy attacks on Israel taught Israelis an important lesson – which is the need to maintain a proactive defense posture including strategic ascendancy against enemies near and far.

Consequently, Israel will not return to the containment policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph. This approach allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time; what some Western officials mistakenly called periods of "stability."

That approach blew up in Israel's face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon, and with the march of Iran's nuclear bomb program to near completion and Iran's ballistic missile array to near-annihilation-of-Israel potential.

The lessons Israel has learned apply to Turkey too. From Idlib to Erbil, Israel will attack, if necessary, not defend. It will insist on jihadist-free buffer zones along its borders with Lebanon and Syria. It will not tolerate the placement on its doorstep of equilibrium-breaking strategic weapon systems nor abide the advance of threatening foreign armies and navies.

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08/21 Links Pt2: Maureen Lipman: ‘Universities are grooming a whole generation of anti-Semites’; How Tucker Carlson Mainstreamed the Gaza GenoLIE

From Ian:

Antizionism unites people who disagree on almost everything.

Politics built on grievance and blame can be extraordinarily effective because it offers a simple answer to complex problems: Identify a common enemy and unite otherwise disparate groups against it.

Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University Ruth Wisse asserts that antisemitism and antizionism are unusual among modern ideologies because they are exclusively negative. Even socialism, communism, and totalitarianism promise people something in their attempt to win them over.

Pointing the finger at Jews has a long record, which historians and archaeologists date back to the Jewish Exodus from the Egypt of the pharaohs in the 13th century BCE. But here I want to focus on its modern political forms. These “anti-isms,” as Wisse calls them, turn complicated social, cultural, and political problems into a single story of blame. Their power lies not only in whom they target, but in their ability to create coalitions among groups that may otherwise have little in common.

A useful starting point is Germany in 1879, when Wilhelm Marr founded the League of Antisemites. The German Empire had been created only eight years earlier from 25 states and remained divided by regional loyalties, religious tensions, and political friction.

Marr recast classical religious prejudice against Jews as a secular, pseudo-scientific political movement. He blamed Jewish emancipation and modern capitalism for Germany’s problems and sought to reverse Jewish civil rights and remove Jews from the country. In a fractured society, blaming Jews created a common cause.

The same political mechanism appeared in different settings. In Soviet Russia, the Yevsektsia was established in 1918 by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik government as a Jewish antizionist unit tasked with bringing the Jewish working class into the Soviet system. It closed synagogues, banned the teaching of Hebrew, and prevented traditional Judaism, Zionism, and rival political movements from operating.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, developed a different Islamist political project: removing Western colonial influence from the Islamic world and building government around sharia law. Its core principle is that Islam is both a religion and a state, with social Islamisation progressing from individual piety towards political power and, ultimately, aspiring to reunite Muslim nations under a revived pan-Islamic caliphate.

In 1945, the Arab League was organised as an antizionist league in Cairo, before the creation of the State of Israel. Arab societies had oil, land and large populations, while European imperial powers were exhausted by World War II.

Yet the Arab world remained politically divided and pan-Arabism had failed to unite it. Antizionism and antisemitism became powerful unifying ideas across otherwise competing states and movements and currently remain a unifying thread underlying Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi Islam.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini later popularised the language of “the Little Satan” for Israel and “the Great Satan” for the United States during the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. His stated aim was to first eliminate Israel, then the United States, and then the Western world, accusing it of deceptive and corrupting power that uses political, cultural, and economic influence to weaken Islamic societies.

Poland in 1968 offers another example. Although antisemitism was officially illegal, university protests were blamed on the “Zionists,” and the government purged 13,000 Jews and revoked their citizenship. How did authorities decide who was a Zionist? They targeted Poles with Jewish names. Political belief was not the test. The operative assumption was “Zionist unless proven innocent,” a pattern that has echoes in the treatment of doxed Jewish creatives and academics in Australia in 2024.

Today, coalition-building may be one of antizionism’s most important political functions. At Harvard University October 7, 2023, 33 grievance groups formed a coalition against Israel as it was being attacked by Hamas.

Police officer fired after describing 7 October as ‘resistance’

A police officer has been fired after a misconduct trial found he spent months posting and engaging with antisemitic content, celebrating the deaths of Israelis and describing the 7 October 2023 as an “act of resistance”.

A panel held between 6 and 8 July at the Met’s disciplinary hearing centre at Palestra House on Blackfriars Road, Southwark, heard that PC Mohammed Nizam posted, reposted or ‘liked’ a number of messages and pictures on social media between September 2023 and July 2024.

These include responding to a post from London Mayor Sadiq Khan expressing distress at the terrorist attacks in Israel on 7 October with an image reading “you f***ing w**k stain”; liking a post responding to a Jewish commentator accusing him of continuing to “play the Holocaust card to justify Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza”; liking a post referring to the “Zionist-controlled mass media”; re-posting a post mourning the death of an IDF soldier with “suck it” and re-posting a tweet stating that “Israel controls all the Muslim countries but Gaza”.

According to the trial’s report, Nizam accepted the alleged conduct “without reservation”, explained that his mental health had deteriorated following the 7 October 2023 attacks. He described becoming increasingly distressed by images of violence and the killing of children in Gaza, stating that he felt “incensed” by what he saw online.

He accepted that some of the posts he ‘liked’ were antisemitic, acknowledged that he had not considered the impact of his actions and maintained he is not antisemitic, expressing sympathy for the Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks.

He did accept that several of the comments he made would be deemed antisemitic under the IHRA definition. Expressing remorse, he stated that he deeply regretted the posts and recognised that such comments were wholly inappropriate for a police officer.

Nizam added that since the investigation began, he has undertaken “significant personal reflection and education”, “broadened the sources he consulted, including reading Jewish News daily, attending events aimed at improving understanding of antisemitism” and sought advice from members of the Jewish community.

Additionally, he has contacted the Jewish Police Association, who “provided guidance and recommended materials to help him understand the harm caused by antisemitic content”, attended an online seminar on antisemitism, an event at a synagogue commemorating the Holocaust, and an exhibition displaying artefacts from terrorist attacks.

Officer Nizam said he has deactivated all relevant social media accounts and believes he has undergone “enormous personal growth.”

Washington-Based 501(c)(3) to Host Fatah Terrorist Convicted in 1993 Murder

Palestine House of Freedom, also known as Dar Alhurriya, a federally tax-exempt nonprofit headquartered near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to host an event Thursday with Nasser Abu Srour, a Fatah member convicted of participating in the brutal 1993 murder of an Israeli security officer.

Abu Srour will appear virtually from Egypt, where he has lived since Israel released him in a 2025 hostage-prisoner exchange. The event will run from 6 to 8 p.m. on Aug. 20.

Admission is free, but the registration page solicits “tax receipt eligible” donations to Palestine House of Freedom. The organization also says copies of Abu Srour’s prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, will be offered as gifts in exchange for donations.

The Murder Missing From the Event Description
Abu Srour was serving a life sentence for participating in the January 1993 murder of Haim Nahmani, a 25-year-old officer with Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service.

Contemporaneous reporting said Nahmani was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in an apartment in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood on Jan. 3, 1993. He had arrived to meet Maher Abu Srour, a Hamas terrorist who had been acting as an informant.

Palestinian sources have also independently acknowledged both his affiliation and participation.

A 2023 Arabic-language profile published by the Palestinian Vision Center for Political Development states that Abu Srour joined Fatah, participated in operations against Israelis during the First Intifada and established an armed cell with his cousins Maher and Mahmoud Abu Srour. It explicitly says he “participated in killing a Zionist officer.”

Fatah’s own media outlet has likewise reported that Abu Srour was serving life for participating in the killing of an Israeli officer.

In a 2013 prison interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Abu Srour described himself as a soldier rather than an innocent bystander.

“I was a soldier in the army of Palestine,” he said. “What do soldiers do? They fight.”

Abu Srour added that he had done his part in the struggle and would “continue” through other means. He predicted that, without a diplomatic solution, there would be “a third, fourth, fifth and sixth intifada.”

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