Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, March 13, 2026

03/13 Links Pt2: Normalizing the grotesque; The Concept of Jewish Collective Guilt Goes Mainstream; US defends Israel at ICJ against South Africa’s allegation of genocide

Provoking outrage was the point. Mamdani wanted to take the photo of his love-in with his anti-American friend and shove it into the public’s face, implying, “Suck it up, America, because you can’t do anything about it. We have the power now, and we’re getting stronger.”

Mamdani’s goal was to normalize the grotesque. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a very different kind of New York Democrat, called this “defining deviancy down” 33 years ago in an essay about American culture and society being pulled apart. That’s what Mamdani, Duwaji, and Khalil are doing — trying to pull our culture, society, moral framework, and self-assurance apart.

Like the Islamist forces they support, their deepest desire is to change — that is, destroy — who we are, what we believe, and how we conduct ourselves. That’s why Duwaji posted in joyous celebration of Hamas’s tortures, rapes, and massacres in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The point of Mamdani’s dinner and photo, of Khalil’s activism, of Duwaji’s delight in slaughter is to repudiate the norms that have always guided public speech and conduct in America.

Hamas terrorists did the same on Oct. 7, normalizing the grotesque. They didn’t just slaughter Jews, but captured their enormities on video — they hacked off the head of one victim with an agricultural hoe — and published the evidence on social media around the world. They calculated, rightly to the shock and horror of many of us, that this would attract rather than repel support.

TRUMP GETS THE LAST LAUGH
Horrors, the perpetration of which would once have revolted and alienated every sane person in the West, instead sparked mass support. Hamas terrorists, like their supporters in Gracie Mansion, defy norms to normalize what used to be utterly unacceptable. They seek to wreck the moral parameters of Western civilization. The more that extremists, especially public figures on the Left, reject the traditions of a coherent society, the more they sow doubt in the minds of the population.

It should be disqualifying for the New York mayor to sup with a terrorist sympathizer, but Mamdani wanted to jam his crowbar deeper into a fissure splitting our society. He expected this to encourage his leftist base and demoralize his foes. It probably has. It is a measure of the fantastic success the Left-Islamist alliance has had in its campaign to undermine this couvntry.

Maryland Dems propose bill targeting nonprofits tied to Judea and Samaria

Maryland Democrats introduced a bill that would prohibit certain nonprofit organizations registered to solicit charitable donations from supporting “Israeli settlement activity” in Judea and Samaria and allow lawsuits against groups that violate the measure.

Titled the “Not on Our Dime Act,” HB 1184 was introduced on Feb. 11 by Gabriel Acevero, Ashanti Martinez and Caylin Young, Democratic members of the Maryland House of Delegates. At a March 11 hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee, representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations debated with Lauren Arikan, a Republican delegate, on whether the legislation should also include charitable organizations that support Iranian-linked causes.

“We’re going to have to have these difficult conversations,” Sean Stinnett, a Democratic delegate, said at the hearing, asking supporters of the bill why Jewish advocacy groups felt it was “singling out Israel.”

“There is no other country that is currently building illegal settlements that is condemned by the United Nations, by the ICJ, by the U.S. Department of State under the Obama and Biden administration,” a CAIR representative responded, claiming that Washington is funding this activity with “billions” of dollars.

The bill says a nonprofit registered with the state “may not knowingly engage in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity.”

It describes “unauthorized support” as aiding or abetting actions by the Israeli government or Israeli citizens in what it defines as “the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Under the proposal, Maryland’s attorney general could file civil lawsuits against nonprofit leaders accused of violating the law and seek “not less than $1,000,000 in damages.” Private individuals could also bring lawsuits seeking injunctions and damages.

Nonprofits found liable would be removed from the state’s registry of charitable solicitations. The state would be required to ensure that organizations that are no longer registered stop soliciting in Maryland, according to a policy note attached to the bill.

Turning Terror Into Context by Abe Greenwald

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What about the part that the New York Times isn’t telling you—or at least not in bold type? Where’s the headline reading “More Than 100 Children in Temple Israel Pre-K at Time of Attack”? Or how about this for a story on the terrorist’s family back in Lebanon? “Synagogue Attacker’s Brothers Suspected of Being in Hezbollah”?

Not at the paper of record. The important thing for the Times, and many other outlets, is to bring everything back around to supposed Israeli crimes.

Even if we were to pretend that Israel is guilty of every invented charge hurled at it, what does that have to do with 100 Jewish American children sitting in classrooms in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on a Thursday afternoon? The only moral statement one need make about yesterday’s attack is that it’s right and just that the perpetrator is dead.

From October 7, 2023, to this day, every last bit of the psy-op against Israel and the Jews has relied on inverting both morality and truth. Hamas attempted a genocide, so Israel is accused of genocide. Zionism is, among other things, a means of preventing genocide, so Zionism itself is framed as a genocidal ideology. Hamas targeted innocents, slaughtered babies, and raped women, so Israel is accused of all three. Hamas kept food from Gazans, so Israel is accused of a starvation plot. Jews are indigenous to Israel, so Israel is accused of colonizing a native population. Jews are attacked across campuses and elsewhere in America, so we’re lectured on Islamophobia. The Iranian regime has been waging a half-century-long war to destroy Israel, so Israel is accused of starting a war with Iran.

Here's another regularly inverted truth: Children die in Israeli airstrikes for the simple reason that genocidal Jew-haters keep trying to rid the world of Jews. This is what liberals might call the “root cause.” If the family of the terrorist who carried out yesterday’s attack was killed in Lebanon, that’s entirely the fault of Hezbollah. That his brothers are suspected of being in Hezbollah perfectly encapsulates the larger pathological loop: In their effort to extinguish the Jews, Jew-haters kill their own—at which point they must go out and try to kill more Jews.

Whether they succeed or fail, the media will be sure to get their message out.

03/13 Links Pt1: Regime Change Without Nation Building; The Strange Coalition Defending Tehran; US strikes Kharg Island in Iran, Islamic Regime 'Crown Jewel

From Ian:

Jonathan Schanzer: Regime Change Without Nation Building

Here is where it is useful to remember that the people of Iran are arguably the country’s greatest resource. They are educated. A less radical, more pragmatic regime existed in Tehran in the memories of everyone older than 55, and the experience of living under theocratic tyranny has been the only experience young Iranians know.

Is Iran ripe for regime change? In 2009, Iranians overwhelmingly voted for liberalization, only to have the mullahs fix the result—leading to an uprising that had to be crushed, though not nearly as brutally as the killing spree in January 2026 that showed the regime’s truly murderous colors in the mass slaughter of tens of thousands. Indeed, Iranians have in recent memory sought to carve a different path and, just two months ago, were in open revolt. This is not a quiescent population whose will has been shattered.

Unfortunately, little is known about the opposition on the ground right now. But Iranian unity will be crucial to any effort to reach a stable end state in this war. We’ll soon see if the Persian-speaking majority can join forces with the complex patchwork of Iranian minorities.

Self-defined experts on these matters look at the prospect of Iranian common cause with deep skepticism. But we Americans are hardly the best judges of the ways to achieve common ground. Our divisive politics have in recent decades rendered American foreign policy schizophrenic, with key principles shifting violently every four or eight years. The debates over military intervention, regime change, and even America’s place in the world have yielded chaos and confusion, both at home and abroad.

While Americans have been exceptionally vociferous in expressing their varying political views in recent years, the Iran war has finally brought a major fault line to the surface. This heated battle on both the left and the right is between neo-isolationists and interventionists. For those who believe no good can come of war and that America fails when it fights, no argument exists that will penetrate their hard shell of determinist defeatism. But foreign policy theorists in the neo-isolationist camp—those who do not want to appear to be isolationist but rather realist—warn that whatever America does is merely a distraction from the real issue of the 21st century. That issue is our “great power competition” with China. Any cent we spend for any purpose other than countering China is a penny wasted. Of course, since China is allied with Iran and sees Iran as an extension of its sphere of interest, an American defeat of Iran would serve the purpose of putting China on notice that we will not look kindly on another totalitarian regime’s effort to spread its shadow across the globe. Nor will we sit idly by.

The task before Donald Trump is finding a middle ground that appeals to the isolationists and interventionists, on the left and the right, all of whom fervently believe that they are putting “America First.” To secure his place in American history, and to end this war on his terms, he must find a way to validate both camps while engineering a decisive victory in Iran that heralds a new Middle East, sets back rivals like China and Russia, and does not empty out the U.S. Treasury.

None of this is simple or intuitive. But history is replete with American regime-change experiments that did not bankrupt America and did not thrust it into a forever war. Should Trump find a way of repeating that history, and not the failures of the early 21st century, while vanquishing the greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East, “America First” won’t just be a political slogan. It will be a blueprint for other important battles amid the litany of geopolitical challenges that lie ahead.

Brendan O'Neill: War on Iran was not ‘unprovoked’

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase ‘unprovoked war’. It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. This week, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and scores of hoary peaceniks wrote a letter to the Guardian insisting Britain should have nothing to do with America and Israel’s ‘unprovoked war’ in Iran.

Here’s my question: is the rape and murder of Jews not a provocation? Was the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust – 7 October – not a provocation? The tyrants of Tehran were the paymasters of the jihadist brutes who carried out that slaughter. They lavished guns and training on that army of anti-Semites that invaded Israel by air, sea and land not even three years ago. That wasn’t a provoking act?

Is it not a provocation to rain thousands of missiles onto a neighbouring country? Is it not a provocation to subject a nation to a ballistic swarm that causes the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians and the deaths of scores of innocents, including 12 Druze kids playing football? That’s what Hezbollah has done these past three years. Hezbollah received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Islamic Republic to pursue precisely such violent badgering of the Jewish state. That isn’t a provocation?

You can say many things about America and Israel’s war in Iran. Some say it’s valiant, others that it’s reckless. But one thing you can’t say, not if you want to be taken seriously, is that it is ‘unprovoked’. Unless, of course, you think the mass murder of Jews should have no repercussions. That, just like in the 1930s, or the 1490s, mobs of anti-Semites should be free to kill Jews with impunity. If I were you, I’d keep that view to myself.

Traditionally it was the pursuers of war who engaged in linguistic trickery to justify their actions or disguise their true motives. Tariq Ali calls it the ‘grammar of deceit’. Today, such semantic duplicity is more readily found among war’s opponents.

Indeed, President Trump, in contrast with his predecessors who dolled up their warmaking as ‘peacekeeping’, has spoken with uncommon frankness about the nature of war. He has told of the ‘death, fire and fury’ that will be visited upon the Iranian regime. Ugly, but honest. It’s the other side, Trump’s noisy doubters and Israel’s legion haters, who are using language as a weapon not of clarification but of concealment.

‘Unprovoked war’ – that isn’t only factually wrong, it’s intentionally dissembling. It draws a thick veil over the events of the past three years. It absolves the Islamic Republic of its sins of violent anti-Semitism. It memory-holes the war crimes funded by that regime and conditions us to think of Iran as an innocent party under ‘imperial’ assault by the Jewish State and its American lackeys. It is a lie masquerading as a critique.

John Spencer: War Reveals the Truth: Russian and Chinese Weapons Are Outmatched

Modern warfare is no longer defined by individual weapons platforms alone. It is defined by networks. Western militaries have spent decades investing in systems that integrate satellites, aircraft, drones, sensors, cyber capabilities, and precision munitions into a unified battlefield architecture. This allows forces to detect targets faster, share information instantly, and strike with extraordinary precision.

Russia and China have attempted to replicate elements of this model, but the battlefield evidence suggests their systems remain less integrated and more vulnerable to disruption. Battlefield performance carries geopolitical consequences.

In 1982, during the Lebanon War, Israeli fighters destroyed more than 60 Syrian aircraft supplied by the Soviet Union without losing a single plane. Soviet air defenses that had been widely exported suddenly appeared far less formidable. Moscow’s reputation as an arms supplier suffered.

Something similar is happening again today, and the battlefield evidence is mounting.

When Russian air defenses fail to protect Russian forces in Ukraine, defense planners around the world take notice. When Chinese-supplied air defense systems fail to prevent precision strikes in South Asia, potential buyers pay attention. And when Iranian defenses built with Russian and Chinese technology fail to prevent repeated penetrations by U.S. and Israeli forces, the message becomes unmistakable.

The battlefield is the ultimate arms exhibition.

Countries that spend billions of dollars on military equipment are not buying hardware for parades. They are buying systems that must function in the most demanding conditions imaginable. Every destroyed radar, every neutralized air defense battery, and every successful penetration of an air defense network sends a signal to the global defense market.

That signal is increasingly clear.

Western military technology, particularly that developed by the United States and Israel, continues to demonstrate a decisive advantage in real combat conditions. From stealth aircraft and precision-guided weapons to advanced electronic warfare and integrated intelligence networks, these systems are proving their effectiveness across multiple wars.

Russia and China will continue to export weapons. Many countries will still buy them because they are cheaper or politically easier to obtain. But the evidence from modern battlefields is mounting.

Russian and Chinese systems have not saved Iran. They have not protected Russian forces in Ukraine. And they did not prevent India from striking precisely where and when it chose during Operation Sindoor.

War is the harshest evaluator of military technology.

Right now, the verdict from the battlefield is unmistakable.

US military supremacy shines as China fails big in Iran, Venezuela

China has become the laughingstock of the international community.

For years, its leaders showcased their powerful HQ-9B missiles as the best air defense system. But they were lying. In less than a year, their system has failed catastrophically in Pakistan, in Venezuela and now in Iran.

The U.S. remains by far the most modern and feared military power in the world, and President Trump has proven it. In one day, U.S. and Israeli forces wiped out Iran’s military leadership, along with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In one day, U.S. forces entered Venezuela and extracted Nicolás Maduro without a single U.S. fatality.

Recall that it took President George H.W. Bush several days to capture General Manuel Noriega in Panama; the tracking and elimination of Osama Bin Laden took almost 10 years. Here is a historical fact for which no is crediting the current administration: Operations Absolute Resolve and Epic Fury have set a new standard.

Returning to China, the HQ-9B missiles and JY-27A radars were always impressive at military parades, but they have performed poorly in actual combat. They are blind, deaf, and mute.

The HQ-9B, also known as Red Flag 9, is a cheap copy of the powerful U.S. Patriot missiles and the Russian S-300. In theory, they have built-in radar systems to track and engage multiple targets simultaneously. In practice, they have demonstrated the opposite.

Since May of last year, serious concerns have been raised about the HQ-9B’s inadequacy. In India’s Operation Sindoor against Pakistan, the Chinese missiles were soundly defeated for four consecutive days. They were unable to defend, destroy or track anything.

China’s JY-27 radar is a system capable of identifying and scanning targets between 280 and 390 kilometers away. It specializes in the early detection of fast, supersonic F-22 and F-35 fighter jets. But in real combat, when Maduro was captured in Venezuela, the Chinese radars became a point of national humiliation and shame, failing to detect even one of the 150 aircraft that penetrated Venezuelan airspace.

Operation Absolute Resolve also humiliated Russia. Venezuela had invested more than $2 billion in S-300 missiles. Despite their power, they were rendered immobile by powerful American fighters, bombers and electronic warfare aircraft.

If Jewish "progressives" had their way, scores of children would have been murdered at Temple Israel yesterday

From all reports of the horrific terror attack at Temple Israel in Michigan yesterday, a bloodbath was averted because of the professional, armed security that the synagogue had in place.

In all likelihood this was partially funded, directly or indirectly through Jewish Federations, by the Department of Homeland Security.

But "progressive Jews" don't like synagogues to be protected by armed guards.

An April 2024 open letter to Congress signed by pseudo-Jewish organizations like the Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Bend the Arc, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Synagogues Rising and others insisted that the best way to protect synagogues - which, they claim, are only threated by white supremacy - is through "Community Based, Non-Carceral Approaches."

Their "plan" is to partner with other groups and somehow that would stop Hezbollah-aligned actors or Islamist terrorists from targeting Jews.

They call it "safety through solidarity."

Really.

Oh, by the way, they hate the word "terrorist" altogether, saying

We refuse to see our family members and friends (or anyone) labeled as “terrorists” or on the “path to radicalization.” We demand community-based, non-carceral safety approaches that leave no one in our communities behind, and actively challenge our society’s reliance on criminalization and surveillance.

See? No one is a terrorist, they are just misunderstood well-meaning people. Including someone driving a car with bombs and guns into a synagogue and preschool.

If only the guards gave Ayman Mohamad Ghazali flowers and an invitation to an iftar meal after he crashed into the building, all would have ended up well. How dare they use guns, treating him like a criminal!

So when you see empty statements of sadness from JVP or Bend the Arc, remember - if Temple Israel had listened to them, there would have been carnage.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Europe Should Thank Israel for the Fall of Assad

For years, Israel conducted a sustained campaign against Iranian military infrastructure in Syria. The stated purpose was narrow: prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah. That mission was largely accomplished. But the cumulative effect was broader — a systematic degradation of the military value of the real estate Iran was trying to occupy. Israel made it difficult for the IRGC to act with impunity in Syria. And Israel's rout of Hezbollah helped bring about Assad's fall.

Europe, which had little to say about any of this, was among the primary beneficiaries. And it should be thanking Israel.

In 2015, Iran announced a self-imposed 2,000 km ceiling on its ballistic missile range. Iranian officials presented this as a measured, responsible posture — 2,000 km was sufficient to cover Israel, American bases in the Gulf, and every Arab capital. There was no need, they said, for longer-range systems.

Western analysts accepted this framing with varying degrees of skepticism. European governments, in particular, found it useful. At 2,000 km from Iran, Paris is safe. Berlin is safe. Rome is safe. The limit meant that whatever Iran was doing with its missile program, it was a Middle Eastern problem, not a European one.

The problem is that the limit was fiction from the start — a diplomatic construct rather than a technical reality.

Iran already operates two systems that exceed it. The Soumar cruise missile — a reverse-engineered descendant of twelve Soviet Kh-55 missiles illegally sold to Iran by Ukraine in 2001 — has an assessed range of approximately 2,500 km. (Iran initially claimed 3,000 km for the system at its 2015 unveiling before walking that back under scrutiny.) Multiple Western assessments, including the CSIS Missile Threat Project, place the Soumar's real capability at 2,000–2,500 km, with some intelligence assessments extending that to 3,000 km depending on configuration.

The Khorramshahr ballistic missile is officially rated at 2,000 km — but only when carrying its full 1,500 kg warhead. Analysts at IISS and CSIS have long noted that reducing the payload to approximately 750 kg would extend the Khorramshahr's range to roughly 3,000 km. Iran chose the heavy warhead configuration to stay within its declared limit. The propulsion capability to exceed it was always there.

The "2,000 km limit" was not a constraint on what Iran could build. It was a constraint on what Iran chose to declare — calibrated precisely to keep Western Europe feeling safe.

Now consider what changes when you move the launch point from central Iran to Syria's northwestern Mediterranean coast — the Latakia region, heart of Assad's Alawite base. The distance from central Iran to Latakia is approximately 1,500 km. That shift, applied to Iran's real capabilities rather than its declared ones, produces a threat map that covers nearly the entire European continent.

This shows the range from northwestern Syria to Europe at 2,500 and 3,000 km, as well as the range from northwestern Iran to Europe at 2,500 km.

Iran has announced, but not publicly tested, the Soumar cruise missile family which is said to have a 2,500 km range largely invisible to radar as it hugs the ground. At 2,500 km from the Syrian coast, the threat envelope covers Athens, Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, and Rome. This is most of the European Union, including much of Germany — the continent's largest economy and the political anchor of NATO's eastern flank.

The Soumar and its variants use mobile transporter-erector-launchers — trucks that can be dispersed, hidden, and relocated between firing positions. Northwestern Syria, with its mountainous coastal range behind Latakia, is precisely the terrain suited to this kind of dispersal. This would make them harder to eliminate.

The Khorramshahr ballistic missile can reach 3,000 km with a reduced payload. At 3,000 km from the Syrian coast, the threat envelope expands to include Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Bern, and Oslo — effectively the entirety of the European Union.

A ballistic missile traveling from Syria to Paris in under fifteen minutes, even with a "smaller" 750 kg warhead, is a serious threat in its own right.

Israel spent a decade ensuring that if Assad ever fell, Iran could not simply move into the resulting vacuum with a ready-to-use forward platform on the Mediterranean coast. That outcome served Israel's immediate security interests directly. It also quietly served the security interests of every European capital within the rings on this map.

European governments, across left and right, spent much of the 2013–2024 period expressing concern about Israeli military operations in Syria. These operations, they argued, risked escalation, violated sovereignty, and destabilized the region. European diplomats made statements at the UN. Human rights organizations issued reports. By 2023, some European governments were beginning to advocate for a degree of Syrian rehabilitation — a return of Assad to regional standing, a normalization of the regime's relationships with Western-aligned Arab states.

Imagine what that would have meant today. Iran is already shooting missiles in Turkish airspace. US bases in Germany and elsewhere in Europe would have been easily within range if Assad was still in power.

European governments are not going to issue statements thanking Israel for military operations they officially criticized. The diplomatic architecture does not permit it, and the domestic politics of most European countries make any such statement impossible.

But the arithmetic does not require a diplomatic statement. The map does not need a press release. It simply requires that the question be asked: where would those missiles be today, if Assad were still in power — and if Israel had not spent a decade making sure they were never safely emplaced?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Before the US and Israeli airstrikes, opponents of military action against Iran made a vivid and consistent case for restraint. Attack Iran, they warned, and it will close the Strait of Hormuz, unleash its proxies across the region, strike American bases, target civilian infrastructure in allied countries, and drag the entire Middle East into chaos. The retaliation would be massive, indiscriminate, and impossible to control.

They were right.

Since Operation Epic Fury began, Iran has attacked civilian infrastructure in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, Turkey, and Cyprus. It struck a British military base. It hit airports and embassies and hotels across the region. It continued firing after its own president publicly declared it would stop. Nearly every catastrophic prediction the anti-war camp made has come to pass.

But follow the logic.

Even the doves knew — and their warnings made clear they believed — that Iran is not a rational actor responsive to logic and incentives. It cannot be reliably deterred, cannot be trusted to honor agreements, and will use any available instrument of coercion to cause maximum harm. Some of them will acknowledge privately what the regime states publicly: that Iran's leadership genuinely believes it is hastening a divine apocalypse, that chaos serves a theological purpose, that the Mahdi arrives when the world burns. This is an eschatological project with ballistic missiles.

If that picture is accurate — and the last two weeks have done nothing to contradict it — then it is an argument for early confrontation, not endless patience. Because every year of patience was a year Iran added to its arsenal. As I showed here, Iran was producing over 100 ballistic missiles per month against the six or seven interceptors the US could manufacture in the same period. That gap compounds. An irrational actor that is also becoming militarily untouchable is not a problem that diplomacy resolves; it is a crisis that diplomacy defers until the moment of maximum danger.

The anti-war logic, followed to its own conclusion, is a pro-war logic. It establishes that Iran is dangerous, unpredictable, possibly theologically motivated, and immune to the kind of rational calculation that makes deterrence work. Having established all of that, it then argues for giving such an actor more time, more missiles, more infrastructure, and eventually the conventional umbrella behind which it completes a nuclear program.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. It contradicts them. If Iran is irrational, and it is getting more powerful, then the only rational choice is to stop it earlier rather than later.

Even without the theological argument, Iran's actions appear designed to cause enough economic pain and regional disruption that pressure mounts on Western governments to stop the war. Iran is threatening to crash the global economy if it doesn't get what it wants.

But think about what that means going forward. If Iran is willing to use the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz today, it can use that same threat tomorrow. And the day after. A nuclear-armed Iran with a vastly larger missile arsenal could hold that sword over the world's head indefinitely — not as a wartime desperation measure, but as a permanent feature of the geopolitical landscape. Every Western government, every moderate Arab state, every global shipping route would live permanently under the veto of a regime that both the hawks and doves describe as irrational, apocalyptic, and unappeasable.

Why would anyone give an irrational actor the keys to a sports car he has already promised to crash if he doesn't get what he demands?

The anti-war camp warned us exactly what Iran would do. The lesson they should have drawn — and that events are now teaching — is that you don't wait for such an actor to become more powerful. You act while the cost is still bearable.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/12 Links Pt2: The Horseshoe Effect and Anti-Jewish Incitement; Gunman shot dead after ramming vehicle into Michigan synagogue

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The ethnostate illusion

Jews have benefited hugely from the civilized society that allowed them to prosper in America and Britain. So they have a duty to lend their voices to the defense of the West against Islamization and cultural takeover.

Unfortunately, virtually the only Jewish voices to be heard are those demonizing this as “white supremacy,” racism and “Islamophobia.” In Britain, Jewish leaders have supported government proposals to introduce protection for Muslims that will have a chilling effect on necessary debate about Islamic extremism.

This is very wrong in itself. But it’s also guaranteed to make resentment of the Jews even worse by appearing to prove the charge that the Jews “don’t care about the rest of us.”

“So what?” many Jews would say in response; “antisemitism lies beyond reason and it’s eternal, so there’s no point even trying to fight it.”

This is simply wrong. As I say in my new book, published this week, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, there’s plenty that can and should be done to combat it.

True, antisemitism can never be defeated, but Jewish passivity makes it worse. Failing to produce arguments and evidence to show that claims of Jewish power over U.S. policy are groundless reinforces the belief that they are true.

Jews have to stand up for themselves in the right way. The Jewish world has consistently been doing so in the wrong way, and then wonders why it hasn’t gotten anywhere.

In my book, I set out a strategy for both individuals and community leaders that turns many of these flawed assumptions upside down. Community leaders should start speaking truths that Jews shy away from, such as the prevalence of Muslim antisemitism or Israel’s legally watertight claim to the land. Individuals should use difficult encounters about Israel as an opportunity to surprise their foes and so open their minds by at least a crack.

Even in today’s poisonous climate, this can have a remarkable effect. In any event, Jews—who have an obligation to stand up for truth against lies—should take on those foaming right now about “war-mongering for Israel” simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Seth Mandel: The Horseshoe Effect and Anti-Jewish Incitement

Those Epstein files are public largely because of the efforts of folks like Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, and Tom Massie, a Republican from Kentucky. Khanna and Massie have coined the phrase “the Epstein class” to refer to a wide variety of people who don’t include Ro Khanna and Tom Massie and their friends, though it has mostly just poured fuel on the fire of Epstein-related anti-Semitic conspiracy theories not too dissimilar from Owens’s idiotic “Baal-worshiping” stuff.

Khanna’s cynicism is the subject of an excellent column by James Kirchick in the Washington Post today. Khanna responded to Kirchick’s reporting by accusing Kirchick of protecting “the Epstein class” and being a shill for Israel’s government. Then he defended Pat Buchanan.

Ah, Pat Buchanan, trailblazing anti-Semitic populist. The old Republican hand and former presidential candidate is having a moment. A new generation of young right-wingers are discovering him and hoping to carve his face into Mount Rushmore. A couple of Republicans in the Senate want him to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As should be clear from Khanna, Buchanan’s bipartisan appeal isn’t policy-based. Rather, it’s the insinuations that American Jews are disloyal citizens acting on behalf of the Israeli government. Platner sounds a bit like him but so does someone who once called out Buchanan’s anti-Semitism: Tucker Carlson. The influential conservative podcaster and former Fox News host has morphed into a Pat Buchanan cover band.

In addition to accusing Israel of controlling Washington, Carlson now also recites the classic pogrom-incitement propaganda of accusing the Jews of planning to conquer Al Aqsa, the old mosque at the Temple Mount complex. It’s an idea Tucker shares with his left-wing buddies in the Squad like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who goes back to the well of Al Aqsa incitement more than some Palestinian leaders do.

This is what is termed the horseshoe effect, where right and left go far enough to meet on the other side. When it comes to Israel and the Jews, the political horseshoe is more like a closed circle, dizzying and without exit.

And by the way, another possible motive for attacks on Jews these days all over the world is the activating of Iranian agents who are retaliating for Israel’s refusal to let the mullahs have a nuclear bomb. Iran’s terror regime has defenders on both sides of the aisle too, for what it’s worth.

The point is that in the past, knowing an anti-Semitic terrorist’s specific motivation was useful information, a knowledge trail that one could follow to see how to prepare for the next attack. But right now it feels like that trail would just send you around in a circle. America’s domestic radicalization problem is the new melting pot, where all the ingredients get mushed together into a one-bowl meal. If, somehow, you still have an appetite.

Seth Mandel: Canada’s Colossal Failure on Anti-Semitism Since October 7

Just after a Purim celebration on March 2, a synagogue in Toronto was hit with gunfire. Four days later, shooters fired into a different Toronto synagogue while people were still inside. A half-hour after that, shots were fired at a third Toronto synagogue.

It’s fair to say this is cause for alarm. Especially when you consider the recent history of such incidents. In the summer of 2024, a Jewish girls school in Toronto was hit with gunfire. A few months later, the same school was shot at again. Two months after that, it was shot a third time.

Also in 2024, in the span of a month, yet another Toronto synagogue had its windows and doors smashed up twice. By November 2025, that synagogue—Kehillat Shaarei Torah—was vandalized 10 times. Then there was the Jewish schoolbus that was torched, and the popular bookstore that was vandalized because it is owned by a Jew… welcome to Toronto.

This doesn’t include all the incidents of nonviolent anti-Semitism, which were numerous and saw a steep increase each year after October 7.

The pattern is easy to figure out: Anti-Semitic activists go around targeting Jewish institutions, and the more dangerous the attack, the more likely it is to be repeated.

Yet the mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, has decided the way to address rising anti-Semitism is to pour fuel on the fire. In November, she went before a national Muslim group and added her voice to the “genocide” blood libel against the Jewish state.

03/12 Links Pt1: The UN Can Condemn Attacks on Civilians. Just Not Israeli Ones; 60 wounded after Iranian missile strike in northern Israel; Israel targets Iran’s Basij members

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Trump’s decision to fight Iran is historic — but he needs to finish the job

For years excitable figures have warned that any attack on Iran would start World War III. The fact that the regime in Iran has spent decades trying to develop a nuclear weapon was always a problem for these people. After all, if a terrorist regime is developing a nuclear weapon and says it is going to use that weapon, what exactly is the world meant to do? Sit back and let it happen?

That’s what much of the world seemed happy to do. Or rather, they hoped that someone would take the problem off the world’s hands for them.

And so it fell to the governments of Israel and the United States of America to step up. To do what the German chancellor recently called the world’s “dirty work” for the rest of the planet.

But there are reasons why World War III has not remotely kicked off.

The first is that for the past three years the Israelis have taken out each of the Iranian Revolutionary Government’s terrorist armies one by one.

They smashed Hamas in Gaza, killing all their senior leadership and thousands of their terrorists.

They destroyed the infrastructure and leadership of Iran’s terrorist army in Lebanon — Hezbollah. They did that from the land, the skies and through history-making operations like the pager attack which killed or disabled thousands of Hezbollah’s terrorists.

They did it by taking out the leadership and weapons stores of Iran´s terrorist army in Yemen — the Houthis.

And now for the past two weeks, with America leading the way, they have taken the battle to the head of the snake.

People should be under no illusions. The success of this American-led campaign has been extraordinary.

The world’s biggest sponsor of terror has been hit in every single place where it hurts.

Khamenei Cemented the U.S.-Israel Alliance

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should be credited with elevating the Israel-U.S. military alliance to an unprecedented peak. Demonizing the "twin devils" of America and Israel was central to Khamenei's ideology and his regime. His followers murdered Americans, Israelis and Jews worldwide. The network of terror and nuclear ambition that this malevolent matchmaker built ultimately forced the U.S. and Israel to integrate their militaries in ways that would have been almost unimaginable a few years ago.

The moment that symbolized this transformation came with Khamenei's death. Central Intelligence Agency information from a human source pinpointed the location of the supreme leader. The intelligence was passed on to Israel, which sent 100 aircraft into Tehran to attack Khamenei's compound, killing him alongside other top officials.

Today, the operations are completely merged. American and Israeli F-15s and F-35s are flying almost side-by-side simultaneous strike packages, guided by shared intelligence. Hundreds of Israeli sorties have already been refueled by U.S. Air Force tankers. For the first time, the Israeli and American militaries are fighting the same war, in the same battle space, at the same time. Khamenei created the conditions for the most powerful military alliance the region has ever seen.

America Is Fighting a War that Iran Chose

Critics of the latest U.S. military attacks against Iran argue that the Iranian threat was insufficiently imminent to justify self-defense. However, this campaign continues an ongoing and long-term armed conflict with Iran. Iran's assaults against U.S. personnel, bases, ships and Israel over the years triggered the right to act in self-defense in response to an actual or imminent unlawful armed attack under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That U.S. right of self-defense continues until Iran's willingness or capacity to continue such aggression ends.

International law does not require a distinct self-defense justification for every attack conducted once the right of self-defense is triggered. Once that right is initiated, military action is justified to achieve the overall self-defense objective, in this case terminating Iran's capacity to strike the U.S. and its allies.

There are strong arguments that the conflict has been ongoing for the 47 years since the Iranian Revolution. Iran has been held responsible for the deaths of 603 U.S. troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, 241 service members in the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, three soldiers in Jordan in January 2024, and dozens of U.S. civilians. That the U.S. has historically chosen to tolerate acts of Iranian aggression or respond in limited ways in no way negates the reality of this conflict.

It is logical and legally valid for the U.S. to target enemy military sites when and where such strikes are most likely to accomplish objectives and produce maximum advantage. This approach is inherent in the numerous times U.S. presidents and military officials have stated the U.S. will respond to Iranian aggression "at a time and place of our choosing."

International law does not require the U.S. and its allies to endlessly endure and absorb Iranian aggression. The U.S. military is engaged in decisive action to permanently stop Iranian attacks. America is fighting a war that Iran chose.

Regime Supporters: Iran Has Weapons So Secret, Their Effects Are Undetectable (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Tehran, March 12 - As the US-Israel alliance continues its methodical dismantling of Iran's military infrastructure in Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, a peculiar strain of denial has gripped certain corners of the internet. Observers report that what was once mere anti-Israel rhetoric has mutated into fervent belief in "super-secret" Iranian superweapons – armaments so stealthy, so advanced, that their deployment results in precisely zero detectable casualties, explosions, or even mild inconveniences for the intended targets.

Proponents of these phantom arsenals argue that the lack of evidence is, in fact, the smoking gun. "Iran's got these invisible hypersonic missiles that phase through defenses like ghosts," proclaimed one forum poster, citing "deep sources" that suspiciously resemble fanfiction from a 2020s sci-fi subreddit. "You don't see casualties because they're so secret they erase themselves from reality after impact. That's why Israel and the US keep pretending nothing happened – they're covering up the total devastation!" This logic conveniently overlooks the barrage of very visible, very conventional Iranian missiles that have been intercepted or fallen short since the conflict escalated in June 2025, post-Khamenei's elimination.

It does, however, dovetail with inline claims that Tel Aviv has become an uninhabitable hellhole of smoke and ruin, invisible behind the real-time video feeds showing no such thing.

When pressed on why Iran's proxies like Hezbollah have suffered verifiable losses, the response pivots to "decoy operations" meant to lure the West into false security. "That's the magic working – everyone's too bewitched to notice they're defeated," explained a self-styled analyst on a podcast that boasts more ads for survival gear than listeners.

Experts attribute this epidemic to cognitive whiplash from Iran's rapid setbacks. "When your regime's vaunted missile factories go boom under precision strikes, you invent weapons that don't need to exist to win," noted Dr. Ima Skeptic of the Institute for Rational Thought. "It's desperation dialed to eleven, where invisibility equals invincibility."

"Of course you can't be too careful," she cautioned. "Disbelieving the claims would also be Islamophobic."

The same activists and self-styled journalists make similar claims about Israeli "false flag" attacks that somehow hoodwink Turkish, Azerbaijni, Qatari, Emirati, Saudi, Bahraini, and Omani radar operators into thinking Iran has launched missiles and drones at those countries, while in fact, according to the claim, Israel has blown up the buildings and installations in those countries without anyone noticing all the preparation necessary for operations on such a scale - echoing "Israel did 9/11" tropes popular among the same crowd.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

On the night of March 11, Israeli drones descended on security checkpoints across Tehran, killing scores of Basij militiamen within minutes. Iran's state-affiliated Fars news agency confirmed the attack, acknowledging at least ten security personnel dead — other sources put the toll far higher. The message was unmistakable: Israel can now reach inside Iran's capital, pick its targets at will, and strike at the very apparatus the regime uses to repress its own people.

This is something qualitatively different from the thunderous opening of Operation Roaring Lion. These weren't F-35s screaming in from the west. These were drones — patient, cheap, and expendable — doing the work that once required a pilot to strap in and fly a thousand miles.

Israeli officials have signaled explicitly that this escalation is deliberate and will intensify. On March 5, Israeli officials announced a shift to the "next stage" of the campaign, moving beyond the initial goals of air superiority and missile degradation toward targeting what they described as the "foundations" of the Iranian regime — its internal security apparatus, its command structures, the instruments of domestic repression. The Basij checkpoints fit that template precisely.

This new stage of the war, with heavy reliance of drones, can be seen as part of the larger strategy.

The opening days of Operation Roaring Lion were a feat of almost superhuman intensity. Israeli fighter pilots flew to Iran and back three times a day — a sortie tempo that stunned military observers worldwide, triple the usual rate. The trick, as pilots eventually disclosed, was pharmaceutical: modafinil, a wakefulness-promoting drug already authorized by the U.S. Air Force for long-duration operations, allowed crews to sustain the punishing schedule. Besides overwhelming Iran's launch capabilities before it could adapt, the initial attacks were meant to make the skies of Iran safe for slower but more numerous drones.

Stimulants can only push the human body so far, but drones can stay in the air for many hours. The math shows that drones are a far more effective platform once air defenses are defeated. Israel's active drone inventory stands at roughly 1,015 platforms — nearly four times its fleet of approximately 284 manned combat aircraft. During last June's Operation Rising Lion, 70% of all IAF flight hours were already being flown by UAVs rather than manned aircraft.

The flagship platform is the Hermes 900 "Kochav" (Star), built by Elbit Systems: over 30 hours of endurance, operational ceiling of 30,000 feet, payload capacity of around 300 kg, operational range exceeding 1,000 km. At roughly $6.8 million per unit — a fraction of an F-35's cost — losing one is an accounting entry, not a national tragedy. In the current campaign, Hermes 900s have been flying around the clock over Iran, with AI-driven algorithms fusing data from electro-optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, and hyperspectral sensors to locate missile launchers, radar systems, and mobile air-defense batteries. Wreckage recovered in Iran has confirmed they are also carrying combat payloads — twin or quad pods of air-dropped munitions. They are not merely watching.

Most of a drone's mission time is transit; any single platform may loiter over Iran for only six hours or so before heading home. But with over a thousand drones and a centralized AI-targeting architecture, Israel can sustain continuous coverage over Iranian territory through coordinated rotation — launching platforms in waves so that each drone arriving on station relieves one departing. What looks like a constraint on individual platforms becomes, at fleet scale, something close to a permanent presence. Crucially, because the targeting data is shared and continuously updated across the network, each incoming drone doesn't start blind. It inherits an accumulated intelligence file from its predecessor: known positions, movement patterns, the behavioral signatures of specific units. The individual drones may only be watching for several hours, but the network never sleeps.

For strike missions that don't require recovery, Israel also fields loitering munitions — kamikaze drones that solve the range problem by simply not returning. The Harop, with operational figures suggesting up to 1,000 km range in some configurations, can be air-launched from a fighter that carries it most of the distance and releases it well clear of dangerous airspace. The pilot turns around; the drone completes the mission autonomously.

This is all assuming Israeli drones are being launched exclusively from Israel. This may or may not be true. What we already know about US-Israeli cooperation during this operation is striking enough on its own. American F-22s were deployed at Israeli Air Force bases; American refueling aircraft operated from Israeli airfields serving both nations' planes; Israeli pilots shared real-time targeting data with US command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, integrated into a single AI-driven kill chain in which the nearest available asset — US or Israeli — received automatic engagement authorization. The two forces were not merely coordinating. They were merged.

US aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman sit far closer to Iran than Israeli airfields do, cutting transit time dramatically. Gulf states, whatever their public statements about not hosting offensive operations, have powerful reasons to see the Iranian regime destabilized and have been operating in deep intelligence partnership with both Israel and the United States. Azerbaijan — which has long-standing defense ties with Israel and was itself struck by Iranian drones during the conflict, likely as punishment for suspected cooperation — remains an intriguing possibility for forward drone staging, though that remains unconfirmed. The operational incentive to use closer launch points is obvious; the diplomatic incentive to deny it publicly is equally obvious. So while it is operationally possible that Israel's drone fleet is operating exclusively from Israeli soil, it very possibly has a considerably shorter route.

If anyone believed that Israel's opening surge represented its maximum sustainable effort — that once the pilots came down from their modafinil-fueled sprint the campaign would necessarily slow — they were wrong. The initial phase was designed to create the conditions for the phase we are now entering, one that requires no stimulants, no heroic sortie rates, and no pilots at risk. A drone fleet of over a thousand platforms, rotating continuously, inheriting an ever-richer intelligence picture, striking when and where it chooses against a degraded and demoralized adversary — this is not a lesser form of air campaign than what came before. It may be a more effective one.

When Israeli officials say the attacks will accelerate, it is not hyperbole. It was always part of the plan.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

If Britain Owes an Apology for Palestine, Start With the White Paper That Condemned Hundreds of Thousands of Jews to Death

Forty-five British MPs and peers have signed an open letter demanding that Prime Minister Keir Starmer apologize for the Balfour Declaration — the 1917 statement in which Britain expressed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The letter argues that Britain had "no right" to make such a promise and that it bears "historical responsibility" for the creation of Israel.

This is quite a moral accounting. But if Parliament is in the business of confronting Britain's historical role in Palestine, there is a far more specific, far more deadly act of British policy that deserves an apology first — one whose consequences can be measured in hundreds of thousands of Jewish corpses.

It is the White Paper of 1939.

In May of that year, with Nazi Germany already in full persecution mode and war weeks away, Neville Chamberlain's government issued a policy document that capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at just 75,000 people over five years — after which further immigration would require Arab consent. The explicit rationale, stated openly in cabinet discussions, was to preserve Arab goodwill. Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, who drafted the policy, told his colleagues that Britain "could not afford to forfeit the confidence and friendship of such a large part of the Muslim world." Chamberlain himself put it even more bluntly: "If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs."

The timing was catastrophic.

At the very moment the gates of Europe were slamming shut on Jewish life, Britain deliberately locked the one door through which hundreds of thousands might have escaped. Palestine was not merely a desirable destination: for Jews trapped in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Germany, it was the only realistic option. The United States had its own restrictive quotas. Most of the world had already demonstrated at the 1938 Évian Conference that it was unwilling to absorb Jewish refugees. Palestine, under British administration, was the escape hatch, and Britain sealed it.

The decision was immediately and loudly condemned as a moral catastrophe by the most credible voices in British public life. Winston Churchill, then in the political wilderness, rose in the House of Commons on May 23, 1939, to denounce the policy as a betrayal of solemn commitments. Former Prime Minister Lloyd George called it "an act of perfidy." The Liberal MP James Rothschild warned his colleagues during the debate itself that for the majority of Jews seeking to reach Palestine, the choice was "migration or physical extinction." The League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission unanimously concluded the White Paper transgressed Britain's mandatory obligations - it was a violation of international law.

They were right. And the consequences were exactly what they predicted.

The SS Struma is perhaps the starkest symbol of what the White Paper meant in practice. In December 1941, nearly 800 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Romania boarded a barely seaworthy converted cattle barge, hoping to reach Palestine. Their engine failed in Istanbul harbor. For weeks, Britain and Turkey negotiated their fate. Britain's position was unambiguous: the refugees could not go to Palestine. After two months in squalid, suffocating conditions, Turkey towed the ship into the Black Sea. It sank, almost certainly torpedoed. Of 791 people on board, one survived. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. characterized British refugee policy in this period as "a sentence of death" for Jews trying to escape.

And Britain wasn't done. Even after the war, as Holocaust survivors attempted to reach Palestine, the British government intercepted ships, imprisoned refugees in detention camps on Cyprus, and continued enforcing the White Paper until 1948. The very people who had survived the death camps found themselves imprisoned again — by Britain.

Now, in 2026, British parliamentarians wish to apologize for the Balfour Declaration, which pledged support for a Jewish homeland. They wish, in other words, to apologize for being too pro-Jewish — while the document that condemned Jews to extermination passes without mention.

The selective moral memory on display here is staggering. The Balfour Declaration did not kill anyone. The White Paper did. If Britain is serious about confronting its history in Palestine, it should start with the policy whose victims were not abstract political categories but real human beings — men, women, and children who died in gas chambers and cattle barges because a British government decided their lives were worth less than the naive hope for Arab political goodwill that never materialized.

That apology has never been issued. It is long overdue.

It would be great if a UK based organization would spearhead this to be submitted to the UK Parliament Petitions site. If it gets enough signatures, the UK must respond. Here's a sample petition:

03/11 Links Pt2: Zionism for Everyone; Documentary: How the Bondi Beach terror attack unfolded; IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

From Ian:

Alana Newhouse: Zionism for Everyone

How do people change?

Some change involves things that happen to us, which isn’t what interests me. I’m curious about what happens, individually and to societies, when people face an unhappy reality—however it came to be—and decide to change what looks, at least at that moment, to be their fate.

In his 2015 novel, Submission, Michel Houellebecq sketches a portrait of a near-future France, in which an Islamic party allies with the Socialists to take over the country. The story follows a literature professor faced with a decision to convert to Islam for career advancement, as the country’s social and political landscape is transformed by Sharia law. His own disillusionment is heightened by his Jewish girlfriend’s decision to escape the Islamization of France by moving to the Jewish state. He almost goes with her but then doesn’t, uttering the book’s now-famous line: “There is no Israel for me.”

I remember snagging on that sentiment the first time I read it. I could see why a disgruntled non-Jewish academic might hesitate to make aliyah, but to the extent that Houellebecq’s fictional portrayal contained a commentary on the real world, the conclusion felt wrong. There quite clearly is, or could be, an Israel for this person. It’s France, if it could just get off the course it’s on.

This is hardly impossible. In fact, throughout history, humans have changed the way they organized or conceived of themselves in order to take advantage of new opportunities or to address new challenges or threats. Such moments of inflection are often brought about by advances in technology, from the invention of the wheel, to the building of roads, to the invention of the printing press, to time- and space-shrinking inventions like the telegraph and the radio, which in turn bring about large changes in the way human beings see themselves and envision their relationship to some large community—and which also introduce new dangers.

We are in one such moment.

The robots are coming, people. There are artificial wombs. We are genetically editing out diseases that have terrorized humanity throughout recorded history, heading to Mars, fighting wars with drones, rewilding parts of nature, and raising extinct animals from the dead (or something).

Are these developments good or bad? Who knows! That’s the thing about new inventions; their effects are—always, entirely—dictated by how humans interact with them.

In our case, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. The digital technologies emerging today are incredibly powerful; like unbacked stallions, they’ll be able to be used, for pleasure and profit, by secure, skilled, intentional humans. But they will also require weak ones to run on. (“This is definitely not a technology where everyone wins,” in the words of Palantir’s Alex Karp.) Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we’re all facing a future in which some people will enjoy the possibility of safe, ambitious, beautiful human lives, and others will become robot fuel and zombie food. It’s scary and confusing, and every day gets more so.

At just this wild moment, filled with questions so incredible they’re effectively spiritual—at what point does a genetically edited person become equivalent to a machine? are rocks animate?!—the world suddenly entered a vortex where, instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is … Zionism.

In Tehran he fooled the regime, in Israel he built an empire. Now he prays for a new Iran

Like all young men in Iran, when Roni Aynsaz graduated from high school, he was required to serve in the military.

That’s when Aynsaz’s story took its first Hollywood-esque turn.

Today, he’s a successful 52-year-old businessman and the co-owner of the SCOOP shoe chain with dozens of stores across Israel. But before his conscription, young Aynsaz was a member of Tehran’s small Jewish community and, as such, destined for low-level positions, either in the military or in the civil service.

Instead, Aynsaz made a decision that would change the course of his life and many others’: When presented with the form to declare his religion, he circled “Muslim” instead of “Jewish.”

He soon found himself working in the Islamic Republic’s legal system under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, often helping fellow Jews under investigation by removing their files.

Eventually, he was discovered and fled the country to establish himself in Israel, founding SCOOP and additional businesses.

His early experience in subterfuge recently came in handy. Aynsaz has become a sort of Israeli celebrity as the winner of the Israeli version of the reality TV series “The Traitors,” which aired on Channel 12 last spring.

More than 30 years after fleeing Iran, he continues to maintain close ties with its people, including family and friends, he told The Times of Israel in a phone interview against the backdrop of the war in Iran.

“For the people in Iran, the war is very difficult,” Aynsaz said. “On the one hand, they are happy that the government might fall; on the other, people are sad for those who are getting killed in the war, because there are also innocents who are dying.”

“I will also tell you that people are angry at [US President Donald] Trump, because he said he wants someone from within Iran [to lead the country] and not Reza Pahlavi,” he added, referring to the exiled son of the last shah, who is a popular figure among many Iranians who oppose the regime.

IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

For decades, the community center in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights was covered with a huge Syrian flag. This week, that flag was nowhere to be seen. The hundreds who filled the community center came to console the family of Master Sgt. Maher Khatar, a native of the town and an IDF combat soldier, who was killed in Lebanon.

In the 1980s, those few Golan Druze with Israeli ID cards were victims of a religious and social boycott, considered to have betrayed the Syrian nation. Dr. Ramzi Halabi, from the Israeli Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, said this moment symbolizes the breaking of the last barriers between the residents of the Druze villages in the Golan and the State of Israel. "The Druze in Israel...have long since defined ourselves first of all as Israelis, and hope that in the next stage the identification with Israel will reach the Golan Heights."

Dr. Salim Barik, a political scientist who studies the Druze, said the process of the Israelization of the Druze in the Golan began with the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. "It started in 2011 when people said, 'Syria is falling apart, so it's clear we won't return to Syria and it won't be able to liberate the Golan Heights. The story is over - we're Israelis, let's become part of Israel.'"

"What strengthened this trend most was the massacre in Sweida.... About 800 Druze were slaughtered there, thousands were wounded and displaced, and villages were torched. Today there's a genuine fear of Muslims."

Sheikh Zahir al-Din said, "Israel stood by our side in Sweida when accursed people massacred our brothers, and we'll never forget that. I asked someone here who was pro-Syrian how he agreed to let his son enlist in the IDF. He replied: 'At the time, we had children and relatives in the Syrian army. Now there aren't any, and if my son enlists he'll fight ISIS, and I'm very pleased about that.'"

03/11 Links Pt1: Iran’s threats of military destruction have proven utterly hollow; Iran’s missile fire rate has collapsed by 92%

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Iran’s threats of military destruction have proven utterly hollow

When it comes to the rest of the regime’s performance, the kindest interpretation is that they are focussing on attritional endurance rather than decisive retaliation, hoping that political and economic pressure, combined with the structural resilience that the regime has developed since the 12-day war last June, will force the American president to curtail the war with the new leader still standing. The most likely interpretation, however, is that amid the shock and awe of the American-Israeli campaign, they have been reduced to reacting defensively rather than strategically. Panicking, in other words.

Of the 2,000 Iranian drones and more than 500 ballistic and cruise missiles fired into neighbouring countries since the start of the war, the overwhelming majority have been intercepted. The few that sneaked through have caused a handful of deaths and injuries and destroyed some military equipment, but no major base has been disabled. In recent days, the launch cadence has dropped by as much as 90 per cent, suggesting a collapse in stockpiles, launchers and command and control. And as for the second pillar of Iranian belligerence, its foreign proxies, they have been equally unimpressive.

After a hesitant start, the most important of these, Hezbollah, has in recent days swung into action, raining hundreds of missiles into Israel’s north (some of which have fallen short). But Jerusalem’s response has been aggressive; the lesson of the aftermath of October 7, which saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced within their own country as a result of Hezbollah fire, has been well learnt. Today, the IDF’s doctrine is simple: attack us and you will be the one forced to flee, not us.

The Israeli incursion into Lebanon, which has so far cost the lives of a small number of soldiers, should be seen in this context. Analysts believe that Hezbollah may be rationing its rockets to avoid a suicidal total war and preserve its options for the future. But after the pager operation and subsequent battering it sustained in September 2024, the fanatical militia is also in a degree of disarray.

The other big question mark hangs over Iran’s nuclear programme, much of which lay in ruins even before this war began. Buried deep underground near the city of Isfahan, 270 miles south of Tehran, lies the regime’s bloody crown jewels, about 400kg of uranium that has been enriched to 60 per cent. This material, which in certain contexts could be weaponised in a matter of weeks, is the regime’s buried treasure; if allied boots do hit the ground during this war, they will likely belong to commandos sent to secure the site, excavate the uranium and spirit it safely out of the country.

The overwhelming likelihood is that defeat, and not just a cosmetic one, lies ahead for the worst regime on the planet. If I was a betting man, I would not give much for Ali Larijani’s chances of surviving the month, or indeed for those of the regime’s new leader. Nobody knows what kind of a country will emerge after the dust has settled. Nobody knows if we will see chaos or peace. But given Trump’s resolute posture and the vast firepower at his disposal, the president will likely be having his shoes polished in the Oval Office long after Larijani is dead.

Bernard-Henri Levy: Netanyahu Is Pulling Trump's Strings? Antisemites Will Believe Anything

Some experts say the U.S. war with Iran was inspired by Israel and imposed by Israel, and that the U.S. is merely the executor of "Israel's war." I don't deny that the two countries have converging interests, or that their military and intelligence agencies are operating in close coordination. But that is called an alliance.

Would anyone have said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was being manipulated by Charles de Gaulle? Or that Winston Churchill - who in 1919 said Bolshevism should be strangled in its cradle - became Stalin's puppet 22 years later?

In this case, Israel has one concern: neutralizing a threat that it rightly considers existential. The U.S. has its own concerns: defending its allies (Arab countries as well as Israel), weakening a strategic axis that runs from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing, and washing away the humiliation that has remained for 47 years - the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and holding of American hostages for more than a year.

To believe that a country the size of New Jersey could twist the arm of a country of 350 million, equipped with the most powerful military and the most sophisticated network of bases in history, and governed by a president of unrivaled egotism? To imagine that Donald Trump would have given any foreign prime minister the gift of a war of this magnitude? It is simply grotesque.

But the more serious problem is that this fable revives a very old and toxic lie. This is how people thought in the 1930s - those who saw in "the Jews" a community of conspirators pushing nations toward war, pulling the strings of catastrophe, and scheming to provoke conflicts from which they expected to profit.

The Forgotten 444 Days in Tehran

In 1979 Iranians held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. From 1979 to 1981, the captives seized from the American Embassy were humiliated, paraded around blindfolded for cameras and jeering crowds and threatened.

Diplomatic immunity is a concept that goes back to ancient times. It evolved over centuries to an accepted standard between governments. Even Adolf Hitler respected diplomatic immunity.

The Iranians used diplomatic immunity when it was in their murderous interest. They used diplomatic immunity to bring in the bomb material used in the car bomb detonated outside a Jewish center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, killing 85 and wounding another 300.

Tens of thousands of human beings would be alive today, and the entire Middle East wouldn't have been destabilized for half a century, had the Iranian theocracy been stopped at the start.

Dr. Houman David Hammati: On Iran, We Stand with Israel and America

47 years ago, I stood at a window in Tehran as a 3-year-old boy, smelling burning tires and hearing the chants that would steal my country. I do not celebrate war. No decent person does. What I celebrate - what millions of Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora have prayed for in secret for decades - is the possibility that a regime which has no right to exist may finally be forced to go.

This is the same regime that armed and cheered the Oct. 7 massacre against Israel for no reason other than pure genocidal hatred; murdered tens of thousands of its own sons and daughters who dared to walk peacefully in the streets demanding the most basic freedoms; gouges out the eyes of young women for the "crime" of wearing makeup; hangs teenagers from cranes for posting a tweet; exports terror, poverty, and darkness to every corner it can reach including the U.S.

No nation, no people, should have to live under that. Not Israelis. Not Americans. And certainly not Iranians. I am a son of Iran who has spent his life mourning a stolen homeland. What we are witnessing is not aggression - it is necessary surgery to remove a tumor that has metastasized for 47 years. The tumor is the Islamic Republic that has hijacked Iran.

To the brave pilots of the Israel Air Force and the men and women of the U.S. military now carrying out this mission: You are not invaders. You are the answer to the prayers of millions who have whispered "enough" in the dark since 1979. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. The Iranian people - the real Iran - will never forget.