Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

"Jewish Left" conference cares about everyone - except Jews

A conference will take place next month at Boston University, the "Conference on the Jewish Left." It will host many anti-Zionist voices, Jewish and non-Jewish, from Peter Beinart to Yousef Munayyer. (The poster has the wrong date, it is February 28.)

It is already telling that the organizers treat anti-Zionism as the default meaning of “the Jewish left.” David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were part of the Jewish left, yet no one associated with this conference would regard them as ideological ancestors. The term has been quietly redefined to exclude the very people who once embodied it.

But what interests me most is not the guest list. It is the slogan under which the conference is being held, a phrase we have all heard countless times: “None of us are free unless all of us are free.” Is this an authentically Jewish idea? Is it even a coherent one?

As a description of reality, it collapses almost immediately. There has never been a moment in human history when all people were free, and there never will be. Freedom is always partial, uneven, contested, and fragile. To claim that no one is free unless everyone is free is to define freedom out of existence. It means that until North Korea falls, until China has a different regime, until the Arab world grants equal rights to Jews and gays, until every prisoner everywhere is released, no one is free. Impossibility becomes the moral standard.

Ethical systems that render all incremental good meaningless tend to end either in paralysis or in performance. Why bother improving conditions in one place if the rest of the world remains broken? If none of us are free anyway, moral action becomes symbolic rather than substantive.

Judaism rests on the opposite premise. Moral action matters precisely because the world is broken. Saving one life matters even if others cannot be saved. Reducing suffering here matters even if suffering persists elsewhere. Obligation does not wait for universal resolution.

The slogan also smuggles in a false moral symmetry. It implies that all unfreedoms bind all people equally at all times. No one actually lives this way. The phrase is never applied universally. It is invoked selectively, aimed at particular causes, and quietly ignored everywhere else. No one believes their own freedom is negated by the existence of political prisoners in every dictatorship on earth. The slogan sounds absolute only because it is never meant to be enforced as such.

One can say that it is “just a slogan,” but slogans are not neutral. This one is used as a weapon. It pretends to be universal while being applied only to causes that happen to align with the anti-Zionist left. If the conference is to be taken seriously, its ethical commitments have to be taken seriously as well, and this slogan does not survive even cursory examination.

This is where Jewish ethics parts company most sharply with the sentiment. Jewish moral reasoning is structured rather than flattened. Responsibility radiates outward in concentric circles. You are more responsible for those closest to you, not because distant suffering is unimportant, but because moral obligation without prioritization becomes incoherent. Ethics requires triage. It requires proximity. It requires acknowledging limits. Choosing to chant “free Palestine” while ignoring “free Iran” when you live nowhere near either is not a moral stance. It is political selectivity. Jews claiming to care deeply about Palestinians while dismissing fellow Jews who live under the threat of Palestinian terror is not universal ethics. It is antisemitism, thinly veiled in the language of Jewish values.

The slogan is not a guide to moral action. It is a credential.

Only then does the setting of the conference reveal the deeper hypocrisy. This ostensibly Jewish conference is being held on Saturday, February 28.

Most Jews today are not observant, but historically Jewish communal leaders understood that Jewishness carried obligations beyond personal practice. They accommodated observant Jews even when they themselves were secular. They avoided scheduling conferences on Shabbat, or they made genuine efforts to make participation possible by arranging minyanim, securing a sefer Torah, and working with hotels to accommodate people who cannot use keycards or automatic doors. It is not simple, but it was once considered part of communal responsibility.

This conference makes no such effort. It defines Jewishness in a way that excludes anyone who takes Jewish observance seriously.

If “none of us are free unless all of us are free” is meant to affirm the dignity of every person, it necessarily implies respect for the deepest commitments of others, especially those within the community one claims to represent. Yet this conference marginalizes Jews for whom Shabbat is not a technical rule but a core expression of Jewish freedom and identity.

Seen this way, the contradiction is unavoidable. A slogan that claims universal dignity is paired with an institutional choice that disregards the dignity of Jewish tradition itself. A message that pretends to honor everyone begins by signaling that some forms of Jewish life are disposable. The first freedom it denies is internal.

Judaism has a very different understanding of freedom, and Shabbat sits at its center. Freedom is not the absence of obligation. It is the presence of meaningful limits. It is the refusal to let human worth be defined by urgency, usefulness, or ideological alignment. Shabbat is not a restriction imposed on freedom. It is freedom made concrete.

When a Jewish conference ignores that while wrapping itself in slogans about universal liberation, the problem is not ordinary hypocrisy. It is something deeper and more structural. Universalism that cannot respect its own roots becomes hollow. Moral language detached from lived obligation becomes performative. And a movement that cannot extend dignity inward has no serious claim to dispensing it outward.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

There is a brand new book, published January 2026, by Dafna Hirsch, called the The Israeli Career of Hummus: Colonial Appropriation, Authenticity, and Distinction. It is an entire book that argues that Israel culturally appropriated hummus from Palestinian Arabs.

An entire book.

The summary says "Hirsch shows how the Arab identity of hummus functions as a semiotic resource, which is sometimes suppressed and at other times leveraged to lend authenticity to hummus―and thus to its consumers."

This means that if Israelis downplay the Arab origins of hummus, that is proof of erasure, appropriation, cultural colonization. But if Israelis acknowledge and emphasize the Arab origins, that is proof of exploitation, orientalist authenticity-mining, symbolic domination.

No matter what Israelis do, it reaffirms their guilt.

The book is thick with the kind of pseudo-intellectual jargon that has become the hallmark of postcolonial academic orthodoxy. Terms like “Peircean qualisign,” “semiotic ideologies,” and “authenticity-conferring consumption” are deployed to mask what is, at its core, an ideologically rigid thesis: that everything Israelis touch—yes, even hummus—is evidence of settler-colonial theft.

But what’s missing is basic logic.

The entire book assumes as obvious that Israelis adopting hummus as Israeli is part of their settler-colonial nature.

But what are "American" foods? Hot dogs, hamburgers, apple pie - all of them originated in Germany! Was that cultural appropriation - or simply that Americans fell in love with those foods and adopted them as their own? Why, with Israel, is the starting point of the analysis that Israelis are evil, and all the following conclusions are based on that bigoted premise? Why is it not possible that Israelis just went crazy over falafel in pita and hummus, sabich and shawarma, Israeli couscous and shakshuka, not particularly caring if their origins are Arab or Mizrahi or Israeli? The only people who refer to foods as "masculine" or "feminine" are the academics who apply their own biases on their subjects, because normal people don't think of most foods as gendered.

Hirsch tells a story about how she grew up in Jaffa and was not aware of excellent Arab hummus stores near her house, and assumes that all Israelis are equally ignorant of their Arab neighbors. Maybe - or maybe she grew up as a left-wing, secular Ashkenazi who didn't know any Mizrahi Jews either - the types of people who would know the Arab shops (if they didn't keep kosher)?

This book isn’t about understanding; it’s about indicting.

The premise is fixed: Israel is guilty. Every chapter, every citation, every theoretical flourish exists to reinforce that assumption.

This is what much of academia has become today: Not a place for discovery, but for ideological confirmation.

And here’s the kicker:
This anti-Israel book was funded by the Israel Science Foundation—that is, by the Israeli taxpayer.

So if there’s any true “cultural crime” here, it’s not the hummus.

It’s the fact that Israelis are subsidizing the production of literature that pathologizes their existence.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/13 Links Pt2: Why the West Is Split Over Political Islam; Scott Wiener’s Dangerous Cowardice; Australian writers’ festival canceled after booting Pro-Hamas author

From Ian:

Pierre Rehov: Why the West Is Split Over Political Islam

Trump's executive order represents the most serious American effort in decades to confront Islamist political networks that, in Washington, had long been considered merely political differences rather than lethal security threats.

Across the Atlantic... in the European Union and many of its major capitals, political Islam — often embodied by Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations — remains part of an approach for a larger "dialogue with Islamists". Can you imagine a "dialogue with Bolsheviks" or a "dialogue with the Third Reich"?

[T]he European Union has taken a far more cautious, at times permissive, approach, apparently preferring to regard Islamic extremists as potential voters.

The West ends up assimilating into Islam, rather than the other way around.

Rather than confronting liberal democratic values, these "entryist" actors advocate for "reinterpretations" that often blur the lines between religious freedom and political Islam.

Many Muslims in the West, of course, just want an opportunity for a better life, but they are not the ones in the engine room, driving the extremist Muslim train. The agenda, according to Islam itself, consists of sharing Allah's precious gift of Islam (Dar Al Islam, the "Abode of Islam") with the rest of the world (the Dar al Harb, the "Abode of War," those who have yet to submit to Islam) -- either by infiltration or force. Finally – when everyone in the world has submitted to Islam, whether they wanted to or not -- then there will be "peace." That, evidently, is when the world will enjoy "the Religion of Peace."

The result is a West that now follows two opposite paths. On one path, the United States under the Trump administration is moving toward clarity and confrontation, willing to codify ideological enemies and remove them from the political landscape. On the other path, Europe continues its policy of engagement, accommodation and submission, risk-balancing between wished-for civic inclusion and ideological risk. This split only serves to impede counterterrorism and jeopardize the West.

Who radicalized the Mississippi synagogue arsonist?

Hate found its way to Mississippi’s largest Jewish house of worship, Congregation Beth Israel, when an arsonist intentionally set fire to the synagogue at about 3 a.m. Saturday, damaging the only synagogue in Jackson.

The alleged suspect’s name, Stephen Spencer Pittman, was released late Monday. According to the FBI, he faces charges of maliciously damaging or destroying a building by fire or an explosive.

Russ Latino, a native Mississippian and founder of the Jackson-based Magnolia Tribune Institute, said an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi alleges Pittman admitted to law enforcement that he set the fire at Beth Israel because of its “Jewish ties.” Latino added that Pittman referred to the synagogue as the “Synagogue of Satan” and detailed the steps he took leading up to the arson.

Latino noted that “Synagogue of Satan” is an antisemitic phrase that both Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens have used in recent years. “Nothing in his personal profile points out anything political. There is no Trump or Biden or Harris. There are just a lot of bible verses,” he said, adding, “But ‘Synagogue of Satan’ well, that is a pretty specific alliteration and the same phraseology used by Fuentes and Owens,” he said.

His social media presence on X shows a young man posting about his Christian faith and baseball, where he was a standout player in both high school and college.

Latino said the entire Jackson community has rallied around the Beth Israel congregants. “Many different faith organizations had reached out and offered their houses of worship for the Beth Israel members so they can practice their faith,” he said.

Pro-Palestine protesters plotted to spy on Maccabi players

Pro-Palestine protesters plotted to spy on Maccabi Tel Aviv players after West Midlands Police “ignored” the threat to the Israeli football team.

The Telegraph has seen a message in a group chat that discusses trying to “obstruct” the visiting players from taking part in a fixture against Aston Villa on Nov 6.

Members of the West Midlands Palestine Solidarity Campaign were asked to scour hotel lobbies in Birmingham for Maccabi players, in an attempt to stop the match from going ahead.

Craig Guildford, Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, is facing mounting pressure to resign for banning Maccabi fans last year.

Critics argue his decision was politically motivated rather than based on genuine safety concerns, and that Mr Guildford has misled Parliament with his version of events. The force has also been accused of ignoring threats to the Israeli players and their fans.

The Telegraph can reveal attempts by pro-Gaza activists to track down Maccabi players the night before the match.

An unidentified campaigner said the group could “still cancel this match if we obstruct team Maccabi from attending” and called for volunteers for “MISSION CRITICAL search actions”.

Activists were tasked with searching “hotel lobbies and dining areas” on the night before the game, looking for faces in a lineup of Maccabi players on the team’s website in an attempt to cancel the match.

They were also asked to work as “spotters” at the stadium, to be “watching the Villa Park entrances for the team coach”.

“We can then mount a quick response, to protest them, or the spotters can follow them back to their hotels to find out where their [sic] staying, and mobilise a protest at the hotel.”

The message suggests there was an organised attempt to target the Israeli players ahead of the match, despite West Midlands Police’s insistence that it was Maccabi fans who were likely to cause violence or intimidation.

01/13 Links Pt1: At least 12,000 killed in Iran crackdown as blackout deepens; Iranian Leaders' Claim to Legitimacy Shattered in the War with Israel; Syrian Druze leader: ‘Israel saved us from genocide’

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Iran’s Revolution

I tremble as I write these lines.

For Iran—brave and heroic Iran—trembles on the edge of a horrific bloodbath.

And I have no doubt that the fascist regime of the mullahs will take, if it can, a terrible revenge on the civilians who are defying it.

But the reality is clear.

What has been happening for the past eight days in the cities of ancient Persia is not a revolt. It is a revolution. The difference? Both tiny and immense. A revolt—Iranians have known at least five revolts in the past 15 years—demands reform, the mitigation of misery, negotiation. A revolution expects none of that and does not accommodate, at all, the hated order of things; it does not seek the adjustment of the regime, but its replacement.

Tocqueville: A revolution begins when people cease to imagine the future as an anamorphosis of the past.

Hannah Arendt: An insurrection challenges power; a revolution rejects its very principle and foundation.

This kind of event is rare in human history. But this is where the Iranians now stand. When they say, “Death to Khamenei,” they have crossed that threshold and entered this new era of both hope and tragedy.

Of course, the uprising may still be crushed. Of course, we are speaking of thousands of women and men executed in the secrecy of the electronic night that has fallen over the country. And, of course, we know of revolutions that ended drowned in blood.

But what has been has been. The Iranian women and men who have shouted at the top of their lungs that they want to live, but are ready to die for that, will not turn back. They will no longer accept the offers of negotiations made by cornered ayatollahs.

Those who fail to understand this are grotesque.

To those who still dare to reduce this conflagration to some so-called American Zionist plot—shame on them.

They are already and forever in the dustbins of History.

Trump Admin Designates Three Muslim Brotherhood Branches as Terrorist Organizations

The Trump administration on Tuesday designated three of the Muslim Brotherhood's largest branches in the Middle East as terrorist groups, unveiling long-awaited sanctions aimed at financially crippling the global Islamist organization responsible for fomenting violence against the United States and its allies.

The joint action from the State and Treasury Departments targets the Muslim Brotherhood's sects in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon in the first step "of an ongoing, sustained effort to thwart Muslim Brotherhood violence and destabilization wherever it occurs," according to the Treasury Department. The department noted in its release announcing the move that "additional terrorist designations" may occur as the Trump administration examines "all available tools to deprive these Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism."

"The Muslim Brotherhood has inspired, nurtured, and funded terrorist groups like Hamas that are direct threats to the safety and security of the American people and our allies," Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John K. Hurley said in a statement. "Despite their peaceful public façade, both the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim brotherhood branches have conspired to support Hamas’s terrorism and undermine the sovereignty of their own national governments."

Congressional Republicans have argued that the United States should designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization since at least 2015, but legislation doing so never reached the president's desk. After President Donald Trump took office for a second time and expressed an interest in targeting the Muslim Brotherhood through executive actions, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced a bill featuring a "new modernized strategy" to systematically sanction the groups' branches around the world rather than the brotherhood as a whole. The administration's announcement on Tuesday indicates that it is using Cruz's approach, going after individual Muslim Brotherhood sects across the Middle East.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control went after the Muslim Brotherhood's Jordanian and Egyptian branches, both of which provide material support for Hamas, while the State Department targeted the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood. The Lebanese branch, known as al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, received both the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist labels from Foggy Bottom, freezing its assets and preventing it from doing business with Western financial institutions.

‘Israel saved us from genocide’: Interview with Syrian Druze leader

‘We are paying a heavy price, but we struggle to remain steadfast and preserve our identity with dignity and pride,’ says Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze community.

According to him, the threat does not stem solely from the current rulers but from a continuous ideological current. ‘The previous regime also acted against us, but the current one is the most brutal. They do not want to eliminate only the Druze, but any minority that is not like them.’

Six months after one of the deadliest massacres the Druze community has suffered in generations, Sheikh al-Hijri speaks with rare openness about an open wound, a reality of siege and a clear aspiration to establish an independent Druze entity in Sweida province.

"The only crime for which we were murdered was being Druze", he says in a special interview with ynet. "This is an ISIS-style government, established as a direct continuation of al-Qaeda."

The massacre that took place last July, in which more than 2,000 Druze were killed, included executions, rape, abuse and the burning of people alive, women, children and infants, he says. "This was a decision by Syria’s dark regime and by all the terrorist groups operating from Damascus. It was genocide", he states.

‘The heavy price was not in vain’
Al-Hijri, 60, was born in Venezuela, where his father emigrated along with a large Druze community. Today, around 150,000 Druze live in Venezuela, making it the fourth-largest Druze population worldwide. He later returned to Syria and studied law at Damascus University.

In 2012, he replaced his brother as the spiritual leader of the Druze community following his brother’s death in a car accident that was never fully explained and was widely suspected to involve the Assad regime. Leadership of the community has remained with the al-Hijri family since the 19th century.

"The latest massacre proved that we cannot rely on anyone else to protect our community", he says. "The price was extremely heavy, but it will not be in vain. We are seeking a future in which the Druze are no longer victims."

"Since July 2025, we have been living in a state of full mobilization," he says. "Young and old alike are enlisted to defend our homes and our very existence. They wanted to annihilate us."

"German students march against the un-German spirit." Book burning in Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933.

Today's "anti-Zionist" academic environment increasingly resembles the anti-Jewish academic world in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. I am not saying this as rhetoric - I am saying that the parallels are essentially exact.

German academia’s descent into antisemitism began before the Nazis took power. In the early 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, Jewish professors were already being singled out as carriers of something alien and corrosive. Nationalist student groups disrupted lectures, boycotted Jewish faculty, and circulated petitions demanding limits on Jewish influence in universities. This was justified not in racial terms at first, but in intellectual ones. Jewish scholars were accused of promoting abstract, cosmopolitan, un-German modes of thought that allegedly undermined the nation.

In the 1920s, the concept of “Jewish science” emerged. It was not initially shouted by thugs. It was articulated by credentialed academics. Nobel laureates like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark argued that modern physics, especially Einstein’s relativity, was not merely wrong but Jewish in character - overly abstract, detached from reality, ideologically corrosive. The claim was not that Jews should be excluded because they were Jews, but that their ideas were incompatible with German values. Identity was converted into an epistemic defect.

By the late 1920s, this rhetoric had saturated campus culture. Jewish scholars were heckled, isolated, and treated as moral and intellectual threats. Lists of Jewish academics circulated. Entire disciplines were scrutinized for “Jewish influence.”

When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the intellectual case had already been made. When the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was enacted in April 1933, purging Jews from universities, it did not feel like a rupture. It felt like a logical next step. Expulsions overlapped with intensified rhetoric. Book burnings followed. By the late 1930s, Jewish intellectual life had been eradicated from German universities. The state merely finished what academia had already prepared.

This is not ancient history. It is happening now.

This month, the Journal of Emerging Sport Studies published a paper arguing that the considerable contributions of Muska Mosston to the field should be stigmatized because he fought in the 1948 War of Independence, years before he moved to the US and created his theories. From the abstract:

Decanonise the ‘forefather’
Situating Muska Mosston’s Contributions to Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy within the Context of Zionist Settler Colonization of Palestine
Muska Mosston, renowned as a forefather of pedagogical innovation in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy, is celebrated for his Spectrum of Teaching Styles, which has permeated the field for decades. However, an examination of his biography reveals problematic ties to Zionist settler colonialism, including active participation in the dispossession and erasure of Palestinian communities. Using a decolonial lens, this paper critically interrogates the legacy of Mosston, challenging the normalisation of settler-colonial ideologies within academic discourse. In exploring Mosston's legacy through a decolonial lens, we are also compelled to reflect: How do we engage with the work of scholars whose lives and ideologies are deeply intertwined with systems of oppression? Can we separate the value of their contributions from the oppressive systems they may have been a part of? Furthermore, we urge professional organizations and academic institutions to reflect on their complicity in idolatrizing and therefore normalizing such legacies; we suggest instead that they employ practices that uphold truth-telling, advance healing, embrace ethics and actively reduce violence. By foregrounding these self-and institutional-reflective questions, we seek to advance a more equitable, ethical and axiologically reflexive scholarly practice in physical education and the sport pedagogy community more broadly.

Mosston's teaching framework reshaped how physical education is taught worldwide, moving away from rigid command-based instruction toward more adaptive, student-centered models. His work became foundational in the field and was developed entirely after he left Israel (not that this matters.) It had no political content. It had nothing to do with nationalism, war, or ideology.

Yet the reader is told that his military service, and his Zionism, is disqualifying for his theories built in the decades afterwards. It wants to retroactively erase his legacy in the name of morals.

Orwell himself would be astonished at the idea that marginalizing an entire field of study because of a strained conception of guilt by association is "ethical."

There is no real information of what Mosston's role in the 1948 war was. But this is irrelevant to the modern antisemites who want to cancel him. He was a soldier - that is enough to tar him. Jews who fought to defend their land in an explicitly genocidal war started by their Arab neighbors are heroes, not evil colonists, but that fact is hidden behind several layers of lies that are accepted as gospel by a wide swath of today's academics:

1) Zionism is racist.
2) Zionism is settler colonialist, apartheid and genocidal.
3) Anyone who ever joined the Israeli army is a participant in ethnic cleansing and is therefore a war criminal.
4) Anything they have done since then is tainted by the fact they are war criminals.
5) They must be erased, canceled, and their contributions to society should be minimized or dismissed.

These are not even debatable in today's academic environment. They are assumed true as starting positions in going even further.

This is Nazi logic, not academic ethics. This is exactly how “Jewish science” was treated in Germany. No individual wrongdoing was required. No specific acts needed to be proven. Jewishness itself was enough to cast doubt on one’s intellectual legitimacy, just as Israeliness or Zionism is today.. Once that move was normalized, exclusion followed naturally.

We are already seeing the modern equivalent of the 1920s stage. Campus disruptions, boycotts, and protests targeting Jewish or Zionist professors mirror the tactics of nationalist student groups in Weimar Germany. Lectures are shouted down. Speakers are disinvited. Hiring and funding are contested based on ideological purity tests. The justification is always "moral." Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, as a stain that disqualifies participation in intellectual life.

But this article takes things to a new level. A seeming minor piece in a sports studies journal is literally encouraging the erasure of an entire field based on the identity - not beliefs, not history, but Israeli Jewish identity - of one of its founders.

The modern antisemites knowingly target peripheral academic fields as testing grounds to see how far they can push their ideologies in areas that are not sensitive to antisemitism. I've seen anti-Zionist articles in poetry journals, communications studies, gender studies, child studies, environmental studies: the list goes on.

But they have a model they are following, consciously or not: the precedent of antisemitic German students and academics between the world wars and during the rise of Hitler.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Only left-wing "anti-Zionist" graffiti on a synagogue site. Nothing to see here.

The New York Times reports:

Last wee, members of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center gathered to remember the devastating wildfire that burned down the synagogue’s campus and much of the surrounding community of Altadena one year ago.

On Sunday, they felt another kind of grief when a member of the congregation drove by the site and discovered anti-Zionist graffiti scrawled on an exterior wall, synagogue leaders said Monday.

In addition to denouncing Zionism, the graffiti said, “RIP Renee,” which Rabbi Ratner took as a reference to Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last week. Rabbi Ratner said that he had mentioned Ms. Good, whose death he described as a tragedy, in the congregation’s recent prayer for the dead.

Photos of the graffiti viewed by The New York Times showed that the message was written in large letters across several feet of a white exterior wall of the campus, which is otherwise surrounded by a chain-link fence covered with green hedges. Congregation members said that there is no signage identifying the site as a synagogue or other Jewish community center.

In an email to temple members, Rabbi Ratner described the graffiti as “hateful and antisemitic.” He said that the temple was working with law enforcement agencies and Jewish organizations to investigate the episode and ensure the community’s safety.

It is nice that the story was covered, but there are no photos of the graffiti so we can determine exactly what it said. Merely calling it "anti-Zionist" is a cop-out, especially when the rabbi calls it "hateful and antisemitic." Did it compare Israel to Nazis? Did it say "we disagree with the Likud"? This all makes a difference, but the NYT is almost certainly sanitizing what it actually said, because it probably mirrored sentiments that have been published in that newspaper over the past two years.

Based on the description in the article, it appears that the graffiti was scrawled on the low white wall at the former location of the synagogue.

The houses across the street appear untouched by the fire. Those residents would have seen the graffiti but it was only reported by a congregation member who drove by the location.

The far-Left are attacking synagogues as much as the far-Right are. Yet the outrage for the former is certainly more muted.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The "I was only joking!" defense of Jew hatred

On October 10, 2023, three days after the murderous Hamas pogrom, a transgender professor at University of California - David named Jemma DeCristo posted this:

Notice the knife, hatchet and blood drop emojis.

It sure sounds like a threat, doesn't it?

The university committee censured DeCristo but recommended against suspension; the chancellor went further and briefly suspended DeCristo without pay, which seems like the minimum that the university should do.

But what is fascinating is DeCristo's defense. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, DeCristo claimed that the post was satire and that they wouldn't apologize:

The panel felt she hadn’t intended to cause harm and had already experienced “terrible real-world consequences.”

In justifying a harsher punishment, which the university’s vice provost for academic affairs, Philip H. Kass, had initially suggested, May pointed out in his letter of discipline that both the investigators and the hearing panel found that DeCristo “failed to acknowledge the deep pain and significant disruption” she’d caused, which he said was “in direct conflict with” her “obligation to protect and preserve conditions hospitable to student learning.” He added that she had “failed to offer clarification or apology that could have mitigated the impacts” of her actions.

Asked by investigators whether she would consider issuing an apology or clarification, DeCristo said doing so would “just fuel the right-wing media that was harassing her.”

So this professor is unapologetic, and claims that it was all a joke. Hilarious!

This is interesting because this is the usual defense of neo-Nazis when they are called out for hate speech that crosses the line into incitement. They were only doing it for the lulz, they say. I had never seen a left-winger make that same claim.

But it is just another way that the antisemites on the Left and Right are learning from each other.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/12 Links Pt2: History is Not Whispering; Israel Won the Information War; Trump: No place for Jew-haters in GOP; Suspect admits to arson attack on synagogue in Mississippi due to its ‘Jewish ties’

From Ian:

History is Not Whispering

Anti-Semitism is never the end of the story. It is the warning flare.

It does not appear when societies are strongest, but when they are losing the ability to tolerate complexity, disagreement, and pluralism. Jews are the first test of that collapse—not because they are uniquely fragile, but because they have always stood at the center of pluralistic systems that extremism cannot tolerate.

This pattern is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. And it is not new.

When Jews are told their equality is conditional, that their safety depends on silence, that their collective existence is illegitimate, societies have already crossed a line. When violence against Jews is explained rather than condemned, escalation is no longer a question of if, but when. When elected officials refuse to name and shame anti-Semitism because doing so would alienate part of their base, the base has already been chosen.

The closing of the horseshoe is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis.

On the left, anti-Zionism reframes Jews as uniquely undeserving of national rights. On the right, post-liberal populism recycles the language of elites, global manipulators, and disloyal insiders. The vocabularies differ. But the structure is identical. Both reject liberal universalism. Both treat Jews as conditional citizens. Both abandon the same guardrails—and arrive at the same destination.

History does not forgive this convergence. It records it.

Those who imagine they can harness anti-Semitism without being consumed by it misunderstand how extremism works. The societies that tolerated it did not stabilize. They radicalized. Jews were never the last target—only the most reliable early prey.

We are not watching this unfold blindly. We have the documents. We have the precedents. We have the bodies.

This time, ignorance is not an excuse. Silence is not neutrality. Euphemism is not moderation.

We know exactly what is happening.

The only question left is whether we choose to stop it—or whether we allow history to resume its course, once again, at full speed.

Israel Won the Information War By Abe Greenwald

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Those who fret about the issue believe that Israel needed to continually explain the reasons for its military actions: It should have been more forceful in demonstrating that Hamas hides behind civilians and operates from civilian structures. It should have debunked Hamas casualty figures in real time, proved that there was no famine, explained the unparalleled effort the IDF makes to spare civilian lives, and so on.

But that’s not the story Israel needed to tell. There’s little point in the Jewish state trying to prove that it’s innocent of all the calumnious charges against it. Why? Because if Israel’s devoted critics could be persuaded that it’s a good and just country under continuous assault by barbaric fanatics, they would have been convinced by the decades of evidence—culminating in October 7—showing just that.

The vital information that Israel needed to disseminate, rather, was this: We will not perish. We are fiercer in battle than you could ever imagine, more accomplished in intelligence and operational execution than any nation in history, peerless in the art of war, and unapologetic in our commitment to survival. We don’t bend to public opinion; we stop at nothing to defend our existence.

And that message came across loud and clear.

Too many American Jews, on the other hand, spent two-plus years swallowing Hamas propaganda and publicly agonizing over Israel’s actions to varying degrees. Their story was: We’re just so sorry for all this ugliness.

And while they explained and apologized, they also bent over backwards to give the Jew-haters the benefit of the doubt. Some went so far as to kasher the mob.

We know exactly how that’s worked out. It’s long past time for Diaspora Jews to tell a different story of their own—one of bravery rooted in reverence for the Jewish tradition. But first they must believe it themselves. The Israelis do, and the world found that out.

No place for Jew-haters in GOP, Trump says

U.S. President Donald Trump said there is no room in the Republican Party for those with antisemitic views and that the GOP should condemn those espousing them.

“From my own personal standpoint, absolutely, because I condemn,” Trump told The New York Times in a two-hour interview last week that was published on Monday.

“I have a daughter who’s married to a Jewish person,” he told the newspaper. “My daughter happens to be Jewish, and the beautiful three grandchildren are Jewish. I’m very proud of them.”

The president also touted his support of Israel and his efforts to obtain a ceasefire in the war between Hamas and Israel.

“There has been no better president in the history of the world as we know it that has been stronger or better and less antisemitic, certainly, than Donald Trump,” he said in the interview. “I have been the best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel, and that’s, by the way, acknowledged by everybody, including the fact that we have peace in the Middle East, and that’s going to hold.”

Trump’s comments came as several prominent Republicans, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have faced criticism from several prominent party members for providing platforms to antisemites and Holocaust deniers, most notably Nick Fuentes. Carlson, a podcaster, was photographed in official images of a meeting that Trump held at the White House recently with oil executives.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual legislative conference in October, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and others went after Carlson for his friendly interview with Fuentes.

Speakers at the conference also aimed brickbats at the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and said the pro-Trump conservative research group was not in the business of “canceling our own people.”

The president earlier passed up opportunities to criticize Carlson, who had a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump told reporters in November.

But this time, he went after the antisemites in his own party.

“I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” he told the Times.

British Jewish veterans who fought for Churchill in WWII say the level of antisemitism in modern times feels like 'the whole world is against us'

They proudly fought for Britain to free the world from the clutches of Hitler's fascism.

But 80 years on, three Jewish veterans say they are increasingly alarmed by surging levels of antisemitism in the UK - and fear 'the whole world is against us now'.

Joe Slyper, 106, Don Breslaw, 102 and Solly Ohayon, 99, still remain largely positive about Britain, but believe anti-Jewish hatred today is at levels they themselves did not experience when they were younger.

Their views come in the wake of fellow veteran Alec Penstone, 100, who in November stunned the presenters of ITV's Good Morning Britain by declaring the sacrifice of the lost men of his generation 'wasn't worth' it.

He told Adil Ray and Kate Garraway: 'What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.'

While the trio are not so forceful in their opinion of today's Britain, they acknowledge the Second World War brought an end to Nazism - but not racially motivated hatred.

Don, who was just 19 when he was conscripted into the army, has come to sombrely conclude 'we've always been different - and when people are different, people tend to find cause to dislike us.'

The three spoke to Daily Mail as part of wide-ranging interviews on their wartime experience and how Britain compares today to before 1939.

01/12 Links Pt1: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made; The courage of Iran’s women puts woke Westerners to shame; Trump: 25% tariff on all countries doing business with Iran

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: What the late great Bernard Lewis knew about Khomeini

The late Bernard Lewis—renowned multilingual Orientalist—didn’t agree that Carter or anybody else had an excuse for ignoring Khomeini’s true identity and agenda. In a 2010 interview that I conducted with Lewis while researching my book, To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the “Arab Spring,” the professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University described his rebuffed attempt to set the record straight.

“In 1978, there was this figure being discussed, Khomeini, whom I knew nothing about,” he recounted. “So, I did what one normally does in my profession: I went to the university library and looked him up. I discovered that he was the author of Islamic Government [a collection of speeches he delivered in Najaf, Iraq in 1970]. And I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. It could give me some idea of what the man is about.’”

Lewis took the volume home and read it in one sitting. What it revealed was a philosophy of Islamic statehood, using the harshest possible rhetoric to denounce non-Muslims and calling for the spread of Sharia law across the world.

Deciding that something had to be done to expose the ayatollah and his intentions, Lewis contacted then-New York Times op-ed editor Charlotte Curtis and offered to pen a piece on what subsequently came to be known as “The Little Green Book.”

“No thanks,” she answered. “I don’t think our readers would be interested in the work of some Persian writer.”

Whether her response was due to ignorance of the significance of Khomeini’s waiting in the wings to take over Iran from the Shah, or to a lack of desire on the part of the Times to acknowledge that however authoritarian a ruler the shah might be, he was the epitome of benevolence compared to his proposed successor, wasn’t clear.

Nor did Curtis’s attitude surprise Lewis, whose view of the press was already—justifiably—dim. But it did cause him to recall an exchange he’d had in Pahlavi’s office not long before the revolution.

“Why do they keep attacking me?” the shah burst out, as soon as Lewis entered the room.

“Whom do you mean, Your Majesty?” Lewis asked.

“The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London and Le Monde—the four weird sisters dancing around the doom of the West,” Pahlavi said. “Don’t they understand that I am the best friend you have in this part of the world?”

“Your Majesty,” Lewis replied, “you must understand that the editorial policies of these papers are based on Marxist principles.”

“What do you mean?” Pahlavi shot back incredulously, since Communism wasn’t on his list of the West’s faults.

“I’m not referring to Karl, but to Groucho,” Lewis quipped.

When the Shah looked puzzled, Lewis asked him whether he was familiar with Groucho Marx.

“Yes, of course,” he responded, almost insulted by the suggestion that he, a buff of American movies, might not be up on Hollywood.

Lewis explained, “Remember when Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to become a member of a club that would have him? Well, our media’s posture—like our foreign policy—is to shun any government that wants our friendship, and to placate and pursue our enemies.”

Brendan O'Neill: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made

Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.

The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.

The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.

The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.

After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself

Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.

Melanie Phillips: Iranian protesters are showing courage in the face of tyranny — but Israel-obsessed liberals don’t seem to care

The reason is that the uprising is not just against the regime but against the repressive tyranny of Islam itself. This is intolerable to Western liberals, because it gets in the way of their fixed narrative that, when Islamists commit mass murder against the innocent, it’s justified resistance against Western-backed imperialism.

Such liberals simply cannot acknowledge the reality of Islamic terrorism and repression.

Their belief that the Israelis and Western imperialism are always the villains, and Muslims are always their victims, is essential to their self-image as morally virtuous people.

It may sound incredible, but Islam has become synonymous with conscience itself among Western progressives.

This is because the Palestinian cause has become their signature motif.

The Palestinians are viewed as the ultimate oppressed people, dispossessed of their rightful inheritance and victims of Israeli “genocide,” “apartheid” and war crimes in Gaza.

Every part of that is a lie. But among liberals, it’s an article of faith.

So they’ve failed to grasp how this cause has been leveraged by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood bent upon the conquest of the West. This is particularly true of Qatar, which has patiently spread its influence throughout Western universities and even bought up various Western media personalities.

The Palestinian cause has embedded into the Western mind the inversion of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and tyranny, which is a hallmark of the Islamic world and has found such fertile ground in the post-truth, post-moral Western intelligentsia.

So the keffiyeh-clad classes have been cementing Islamic control over Western streets and public space.

In Britain this is far advanced, with the Labour government under Keir Starmer refusing to outlaw genetically damaging Muslim cousin marriage and dragging its heels over dealing with the mainly Muslim rape and grooming gangs.

Western governments have increasingly moved to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, often classifying it as a terrorist or extremist organization. It is already banned in the UK, Germany, most Arab countries, Russia, China and others. Right now Australia is considering a ban on the group after a recent Sydney conference was publicized where the leaders said the West "sucks blood from humanity," advocated for a "Muslim army" under Sharia, and framed Islam as the only solution for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The justification for these bans usually begins with the group’s stated aims. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects liberal democracy and advocates replacing it with a global Islamic caliphate governed by sharia law. It presents Islam not merely as a religion but as a political system destined to supersede Western civilization. Its rhetoric is frequently antisemitic, dismissive of pluralism, and grounded in a vision of Muslim supremacy.

It is no stretch to say that the group's ideas are hostile to Jews, to women, to dissenters, and to the moral assumptions that underlie liberal societies. If Hizb ut-Tahrir ever held power, its worldview would translate into repression.

There is a problem, though. Hizb ut-Tahrir is explicitly non-violent. It does not carry out attacks. It does not issue operational instructions for terrorism in Western countries. Its leaders insist, consistently and publicly, that their method is ideological persuasion rather than armed struggle. Their ideas are corrosive, but they remain ideas.

It appears to have used socialist concepts to build itself this way specifically to take advantage of Western freedoms and inoculate it from being banned legally in the West.

This brings up the question of where free speech ends and where limiting speech is better.

That distinction matters more than many people are comfortable admitting. Once a society begins banning organizations solely for what they believe rather than what they do, it enters terrain that has rarely been stable and has often proved dangerous for minorities. Jews in particular do not have the luxury of treating this as an abstract concern. Measures justified as exceptional responses to one threatening ideology have tendency to be reused later against Jews, once the legal tools exist and the political mood changes. A framework that allows the state to suppress Hizb ut-Tahrir for advocating a religious supremacist worldview could, under different conditions, be turned against Zionism, against halachic norms, or against Jewish communal self-defense. This is not a slippery-slope fallacy: it is a recurring pattern.

At the same time, pretending that Hizb ut-Tahrir is merely another set of opinions that should be ignored is willfully naive. Its ideology does not sit in a vacuum. It is a sustained narrative that delegitimizes Western society, portrays Jews and non-Muslims as exploiters, and presents the destruction of the existing order as morally necessary. It may not tell followers to commit violence, but it devotes considerable energy to explaining why violence committed by others is understandable, justified, or admirable. Over time, that difference becomes less sharp than Western legal categories would like it to be.

The problem, as I see it, is that the West's concept of free speech is unnecessarily expansive and out definition of incitement is needlessly and extraordinarily narrow. We tend to locate responsibility almost entirely at the moment of explicit instruction, as though speech and action are cleanly separable until a specific verbal threshold is crossed. That approach forces societies to wait until violence is imminent before acting, while treating years of ideological conditioning as irrelevant. It assumes that moral preparation is harmless so long as it avoids certain words.

Hizb ut-Tahrir operates comfortably within that space. It questions the legitimacy of liberal democracy, depicts Western societies as morally bankrupt, frames Jews as agents of global injustice, and presents political Islam as the only path to dignity and justice. Violence elsewhere is praised without being ordered. Martyrdom is romanticized without being demanded. None of this satisfies the Western legal definition of incitement, yet it steadily lowers the moral barriers that make violence against civilians unthinkable. On the contrary, for many, the logical conclusion from being influenced by such ideologies is violence.

Jewish ethical reasoning has never been so constrained. The concept of lifnei iver recognizes responsibility at the point where one predictably enables wrongdoing, not only at the moment of execution. Moral culpability attaches when a person removes obstacles to harm, even indirectly, even without intent. Speech that repeatedly renders violence excusable or noble is not treated as morally neutral simply because it avoids direct commands.

Seen through that lens, the problem posed by Hizb ut-Tahrir is not that it holds extreme beliefs, but that it functions as a preparatory environment. It habituates listeners to a worldview in which violence by others becomes morally intelligible. That places it in a different category from ordinary dissent or even radical critique, and it justifies a different kind of response.

This does not require banning ideas. It requires acknowledging that speech operates within systems. A society can restrict organizational activity, funding, coordination, and amplification when those structures predictably serve as pathways toward violence, without criminalizing theology or private belief. That approach is narrower, more defensible, and far less likely to metastasize than ideological prohibition.

Free speech in the West has gradually ceased to be treated as an instrument and has come to resemble an article of faith. It is defended as absolute, detached from consequences, and insulated from moral evaluation. That was never its original purpose. Free speech was meant to facilitate truth-seeking, protect dissent, and prevent tyranny. It was not meant to obligate societies to host movements whose explicit goal is to dismantle the conditions that make free speech possible - or to dismantle the host societies themselves.

Free speech cannot function as a suicide pact, but neither should it be reduced to a reflex that substitutes for thinking. The harder task is to take ideas seriously enough to evaluate how they function over time, at scale, and in emotionally charged environments.

The question, then, is not whether Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned. It is whether Western societies are capable of developing a more mature understanding of incitement, one that accounts for moral enablement and foreseeable harm without granting the state a license to police belief. The system should be able to distinguish between reasonable ideas and "Globalize the Intifada!"

If that effort fails, the tools created to address groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir will not remain confined to them. History suggests they rarely do. And Jews are always going to be the first targets.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Since the 1970s, Neo-Nazis and far right extremists in Argentina have been claiming that Jews have been planning to buy up land in southern Argentina and Chile to create a Jewish state there. The conspiracy theory is called the Andinia Plan.

People still believe it. And every year, when there are forest fires, Israelis or Jews are blamed.

It is true that many Israelis go hiking in Patagonia and other regions, and some have accidentally started forest fires - one major one in 2011 that was started negligently by an Israeli backpacker. But now every fire is blamed on Jews, including new ones this year.

خلال التغطية الإعلامية لحرائق الأرجنتين، وفي لقاء صحفي مع امرأة أرجنتينية من المنطقة المتأثرة بالحرائق، حذرت المرأة وناشدت العالم للانتباه إلى حرائق الغابات المدمّرة والضخمة في الأرجنتين، مؤكدة أنها لم تكن طبيعية على الإطلاق .

تقول إن الحرائق دمّرت ما تصفه بجنتهم وتم إحراقه… pic.twitter.com/OPlVkQJD6V
— Tamer | تامر (@tamerqdh) January 11, 2026

The specific incident this year is that one man, Martín Morales, filmed tourists whom he identified as “Israehellis” making fires in Los Glaciares National Park, an area where fires are strictly prohibited. The video gives no indication or proof that the backpackers were actually Israeli. Even according to Morales, when he yelled at them they put out the fire. Yet that by itself was enough to restart incessant rumors yet again that the Jews want to burn down Patagonia to buy it cheaply from the government and make a new Jewish state.

El Diario 24 reports:

On Radio 10, journalist Marcela Feudale claimed that the fires in Patagonia had been started by two Israelis . These statements sparked outrage from figures such as Eduardo Feinmann, the president of the DAIA (Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations), Mauro Berenstein, and even President Javier Milei, who warned that this type of message, broadcast on major media outlets, promotes an anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic stance.

One of the first to criticize Marcela Feudale's comments was journalist Eduardo Feinmann, who called his colleague "irresponsible." "Yesterday I heard the irresponsible Marcela Feudale on Radio 10 saying she had good sources indicating that the fires in Chubut were started by two Israelis. That is completely false. It was a deceitful and anti-Israeli comment ," the journalist wrote on his official X account.

Along the same lines, Mauro Berenstein, head of the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations (DAIA), emphasized that pointing to two Israelis as the cause of the fires without evidence is completely irresponsible and dangerous. "It creates stigmas and reinforces an anti-Jewish and hateful narrative . The media bears an enormous responsibility: lies are not opinions, and DAIA will not allow it," he stated.

The words of the DAIA president were echoed by Javier Milei, who described this scenario as "the dark side of Argentina ." The head of state also shared the statement of Congresswoman Sabrina Ajmechet, who warned that Feudale's remarks, in a context of increasing antisemitism, are irresponsible and put the Jewish community in an uncomfortable position.

According to the Buenos Aires City legislator, the Radio 10 journalist's message was not innocent, but rather had a purpose. "I don't think it was a coincidence. They use Israel and Jews to attack the government, and it's completely gotten out of hand. Today in Argentina, many live in fear for practicing their religion. We must consider the consequences of the messages we use as communicators," Ajmechet stated.

Once the conspiracy theory gets spread, people are quick to use it to fit their biases. So this pattern repeat every year.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/11 Links: The courage of the Iranian people and the silence of the world; Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

From Ian:

Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism published in Fox News, Asra Q. Nomani documented how a network of self-described Marxist and communist organizations mobilized pro-Nicolás Maduro protests across more than 100 American cities within 12 hours of his capture on Jan. 3 by U.S. forces. The minute-by-minute reconstruction reveals the operational capability that I described in my congressional testimony in December 2024: a sophisticated, foreign-funded rapid-response infrastructure operating on American soil.

Nomani’s reporting raises a critical question: What is this network actually built to do? The answer matters profoundly for understanding both the campus antisemitism many Jewish students experienced after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the broader threat to American foreign-policy coherence.

This infrastructure exists to mobilize immediate domestic opposition to U.S. actions that threaten authoritarian regimes aligned with Chinese and Russian interests. Not all anti-Israel protests fall into this category. But specific campaigns, particularly the “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) movement that blocked airports, bridges, tunnels and critical infrastructure, were organized by groups with documented ties to Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech billionaire who sold his company for $785 million.

What The New York Times investigation revealed in August 2023 was a global operation. Singham has been co-opting left-wing movements worldwide—from political parties in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, systematically steering them toward pro-China Communist Party narratives. The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to groups that “mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.”

In South Africa, Singham’s network funded the Nkrumah School, which hosts boot camps attended by activists and politicians from across Africa. According to U.S. tax records, one of Singham’s nonprofits donated at least $450,000 for training at the school. But activists who attended these sessions began noticing something troubling. What was marketed as liberation politics increasingly took a pro-China tilt. New Frame, a South African news outlet funded by Singham, shut down in July 2022 after staff questioned why there was no coverage of Uyghur oppression or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This pattern of co-optation was repeated globally. In India, Singham funded NewsClick, which “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” In Brazil, funding went to Brasil de Fato, which interspersed articles about land rights with praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The operational model was consistent: Find genuine progressive movements, provide substantial funding and gradually shift their focus toward CCP strategic priorities.

Who The Left Stands With By Abe Greenwald

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The Western left’s silence and inaction in response to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Iran confirms what some of us have long known. Progressive activists are not pro-human-rights, pro-minority-rights, pro–women’s rights, pro-freedom, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, pro-peace or anti-war, and they are definitely not pro-democracy.

What they are is anti-American and anti-Semitic. That’s it. Which means the only things they are for are America’s enemies and the world’s Jew-haters.

Some have asked: Where are the American demonstrations showing support for the courageous Iranians trying to bring down the theocratic regime that’s oppressed them for generations? The answer: They don’t exist, or at least not in numbers significant enough to have come to anyone’s attention.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t protests happening in the U.S. right now. For example, last night, while Iranians were standing up to the mullahs, a crowd of keffiyeh-clad thugs swarmed a synagogue and Jewish school in Queens waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” Set aside—if you can—that they were there to intimidate Jews. They were also declaring themselves on the side of the Iranian regime. Hamas, as we all know, is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization. That’s where their sympathies lie.

And that’s been the case for more than two years. Anti-Israel protesters in the U.S. and Europe have regularly waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which was, up until recently, almost an Iranian statelet in Lebanon. And sometimes they’ve brandished the Iranian flag itself. So long as you hate Jews and the U.S., you’ve got friends on the Western left.

Courage of Iranian women stands in stark contrast to Britain's face-masked cosplay revolutionaries

He styles himself a revolutionary, fighting for progress.

Week in, week out, he and his comrades gather in cities across the UK, chanting their support for Palestine and demanding the destruction of Israel.

On occasion, he’ll turn his attention elsewhere and stand outside a feminist conference, screaming abuse at attendees who refuse to buy into the fantasy that trans women are actually women.

Whether devoting himself to making Jews feel unsafe or spending miserable afternoons threatening women who reject the presence of men in changing rooms and rape crisis centres, the contemporary British radical goes equipped with two essentials.

The first is a terrifying certainty. The second is a face-mask.

I’ve never had much time for these cosplayers, these weekend insurgents with their incoherent views and their violent rhetoric but, over recent days, my contempt for them has only deepened.

Since December 28, people across Iran have been on their streets, demanding the end of the Islamic regime that has terrorised them for decades. With international media denied access to the country, citizens have, through shaky live streams on their smartphones, showed the world what real revolutionary courage looks like.

How small the masked undergraduate waving a Hamas flag on a British street looks when compared with those Iranian women who – under threat of the most horrific punishment – have thrown off the hijabs they are compelled to wear.

While British ideologues align themselves, from the safety of the West, with the Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah, people across Iran are saying “no more” to the theocrats who, for years, have supported those terror groups.

And they are doing it with humbling bravery.

Watching shaky footage of a group of young women – their heads uncovered, their voices loud and clear – marching in protest while the sound of gunfire echoed around them, I found myself profoundly moved by their courage. Would I, I wondered, step up as they were now doing?

The most honest answer I could give myself was that I hoped so.

It has been depressing, if unsurprising, that those on the British left who scream so loudly about Palestine have had little to say about what’s happening in Iran. There have been no rallies of Keffiyah-clad protestors demanding support for the oppressed people of Iran.

But, then, how could they credibly have done so when Iran, under the leadership of Ali Khamenei, has been funding Islamist terror groups that share their unwavering hatred for Jews?