Monday, February 02, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
Monday, February 02, 2026Elder of ZiyonFor decades, Muslim-majority states have learned how to use the language of international law very effectively.
They did not try to overthrow the system. They learned how to work it.
International law was supposed to be procedural and neutral. In practice it has become highly political. Technical legal mechanisms are used to achieve outcomes that would be impossible diplomatically. Israel is treated as a permanent defendant while regimes with far worse records often escape sustained scrutiny.
The International Criminal Court provides one clear example. During negotiations over the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Arab states successfully inserted language that elevated voluntary civilian settlement activity into a specific war crime. That clause had only one real-world target. It converted a territorial dispute into a criminal offense and built a specifically anti-Israel law directly into what is supposed to be an impartial, universal statute.
The same pattern appears at the International Court of Justice. Friendly governments repeatedly request advisory opinions designed to shape doctrine against Israel. Each case helps construct new “international law” precedents while Israel is disproportionately cast as the accused. Meanwhile, mass slaughter in places like Syria or Yemen rarely generates comparable legal creativity. Procedure has become politics carried out in robes.
Muslim states followed a different strategy for human rights law, one meant to inoculate them from scrutiny. When accused of discrimination against women, restrictions on speech, or punishment for apostasy, they argued that Western standards did not reflect their values. Their response was the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1990.
The Cairo Declaration subordinates every right to Sharia. Speech, religion, family law, and gender roles all operate within Islamic legal limits. That structure allowed governments to say they were not violating human rights. They were applying a different, culturally authentic model. The declaration functioned as a shield against outside criticism.
For decades, that seemed to be the whole point. Iran is now proposing to turn that shield into a weapon.
A recent Persian-language paper published in Iran's Contemporary Political Studies, argues that what they call the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights should be transformed from a symbolic statement into a binding international instrument.
The authors do not simply want recognition. They want enforceability. They explicitly call for a convention or treaty with monitoring bodies, legal obligations, and coercive mechanisms. In other words, they want something that operates like existing UN human rights treaties or the ICC, where states can be investigated, judged, and penalized.
This is the critical step. They are proposing an alternative legal regime with teeth. and they admit that their target is Israel. But it would also enshrine Islamic violations of human rights allowed under Sharia law.
If that system becomes binding and enforceable at the international level, then Sharia-based governance becomes “human rights compliant” by definition. Arresting apostates, policing dress codes, jailing dissidents, and restricting speech would all fit comfortably inside the new standard. External criticism could be dismissed as illegitimate interference.
At the same time, the same system could be used aggressively. Israel could be accused of violating Islamic human rights norms, committing crimes against the Muslim community, or occupying sacred land. Legal proceedings, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure could be justified under a supposedly universal Islamic framework.
The result would be a structure that protects Islamic regimes at home while creating new legal tools to prosecute Israel abroad.
Only after you read the details do you see who is writing this.
The article comes from the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, a state-affiliated body. One of the authors, Sakineh Sadat Paad, served as an aide to President Ebrahim Raisi on “social rights and freedoms” and publicly defended the regime’s response to domestic protests. These are insiders connected to the machinery that justifies arrests, beatings, and executions.
This isn't independent scholarship by obscure academics. This is a policy concept backed by the Iranian regime.
The odds of Islamic law becoming formal international law anytime soon are close to zero, but that misses the point. Papers like this normalize the idea. Once a proposal enters academic journals and diplomatic language, it stops sounding radical. Then, in international forums, Western governments often prefer compromise to confrontation in order to avoid accusations of cultural intolerance or Islamophobia. A seemingly harmless sentence gets inserted about respecting local traditions. Later someone clarifies that those traditions include Sharia. Each small concession widens the opening.
This is how norms shift. The change comes incrementally, through language, committees, and resolutions.
The Islamists play the long game. The consequences are serious.
Iran is currently engaged in one of its harshest crackdowns in years. Protesters are imprisoned, women are punished for removing hijabs, and dissent is treated as a crime. Thousands have been detained or worse.
At the same time, regime-linked figures who have defended attacking protesters in the past are arguing that their interpretation of Sharia should become the basis for enforceable international human rights law.
A government that shoots demonstrators in the streets is proposing to police the world’s human rights compliance.
That tells you everything you need to know about how this “upgrade” would work in practice.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
|
Monday, February 02, 2026Elder of Ziyon
A new book titled Israel: Magic, Religion, and Blood by the Egyptian writer and analyst Mohamed Aboud — an expert on Israeli affairs and professor of Hebrew language and Israeli studies at Ain Shams University — has recently been published.The book uncovers secrets about Israeli society, which presents itself as a secular, democratic society, yet plunges into turbulent seas of the occult and religious conceptions that raise questions about the true nature of Israel.According to Aboud, every major historical event has a bizarre interpretation in Israel. While the causes of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser's death on September 28, 1970, remain shrouded in mystery, the strangest and most astonishing narratives come from Israeli religious circles themselves, accusing Jewish religious figures of being responsible for assassinating Abdel Nasser through supernatural forces, sorcery, and black magic!Dr. Aboud told RT that the head of the Supreme Talmudic Academy in occupied Jerusalem claims that three senior rabbis carried out the assassination of Abdel Nasser! All three belong to the Kabbalah movement, which is notorious for mastering black magic, charlatanism, and the creation of amulets and talismans.According to the Hebrew narrative, these rabbis slaughtered an animal and brought its liver, heart, and lungs into a carefully prepared sealed room for black magic rituals. They began invoking higher powers to carry out "Jewish retribution" against Abdel Nasser. The three rabbis used the divine Hebrew names of God mentioned in a rare religious manuscript, considered the primary reference for all Jewish sorcerers.Aboud explained that, in light of this story circulating in Israeli circles, the book Israel: Magic, Religion, and Blood aims to peel away the secular veneer surrounding the Israeli project to reach the heart of Israel. It wanders through its streets, exposes its institutions, and delves into its subconscious.
1️⃣ Kabbalistic Roots: How incantations and names are used in contemporary politics.2️⃣ Political Theology: Religious infiltration of state institutions and the military.3️⃣ The Element of Blood: How war transforms into a "sacred ritual" and soldiers into "killing machines" driven by biblical texts."True victory is not achieved by weapons alone, but first and foremost by knowledge."
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
|
Of the many examples of moral collapse that followed October 7, the debasement of genocide has been among the ugliest. Using the megaphone of social media, activists, hostile states, the media and non-governmental organisations have corrupted a precise legal term to smear troops who were issuing evacuation orders, facilitating aid handouts and fighting an enemy that used human shields. What begins with Jews never ends with Jews. If the meaning of genocide is lost, no Western army will be safe.Ben-Dror Yemini: Responsibility for Death Toll in Gaza Lies with Hamas
As Keir Starmer’s failed attempts to marshal international law against our own troops who fought in Iraq demonstrated, such instincts are strong amongst progressives. As in London and Strasbourg, so in the Hague. On Thursday, judges at the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, finished hearing a genocide case against Myanmar. Given the appalling atrocities against the Rohingya, few would dispute the verdict if the crime is confirmed. Scratch the surface, however, and trouble is brewing.
Genocide as a modern legal concept first emerged in print in Axis Rule In Occupied Europe, a 1944 book by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Crucially, it described mass violence with the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Lemkin was influenced by the 1915 Armenian massacres, but it was the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews – in which 49 members of his own family were murdered – that provided the catalyst for its inclusion on the statute books.
Since 1945, only five legally-confirmed genocides have been recognised by the British government: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and the liquidation of the Yazidis by Islamic State. Between the Srebrenica massacre – the last time the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a guilty verdict – and Myanmar, times have changed.
As part of the hearing this week, hostile Facebook posts were presented as evidence. Social media has become part of life since 2007, but there are fears that relying upon such contextual and emotive ephemera may eclipse the hard facts, especially as the ICJ’s next case is against Israel.
Aggressive posts and videos of soldiers chanting bloodthirsty slogans already form the backbone of the prosecution’s case against the Jewish state. Are these really evidence of genocidal intent in an army that warns civilians to flee before it attacks? The Myanmar precedent may lead judges – who are human, after all – to give such things undue weight.
Similarly, NGOs giving evidence against Myanmar included Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of which have a well-established bias against Israel. None of this necessarily invalidates the case. But it reveals the weakness of the court.
Recently, multiple media outlets reported that unnamed sources within the IDF were inclined to accept Hamas's casualty figures from Gaza.The silence of the graveyard: Why the West abandons Iran to the ayatollahs
But who exactly were these sources? I repeatedly contacted the IDF Spokesperson's Unit and was told: "That's not our position."
The IDF spokesperson to the foreign media, Nadav Shoshani, said: "The details published do not reflect the official data of the IDF."
An investigation reveals that, indeed, an IDF source did say something in a background briefing. But he wasn't an authorized spokesperson.
He didn't intend for his words to be understood the way they were. And his comments were twisted and distorted. But the damage? Enormous.
Hamas Health Ministry figures on the numbers of dead in Gaza identify no Hamas fighters, no deaths from natural causes, or those killed by rockets misfired by Gaza terror groups. They do show that the majority are men of combat age.
Hamas alone is to blame. It is Hamas that for years incited genocide against Jews. It is Hamas that launched a murderous rampage on Oct. 7.
In January 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out what may prove to be one of the largest episodes of state violence against its own population in modern history. Reports from within the Ministry of Health and independent monitors suggest that on the nights of January 8 and 9 alone, the death toll exceeded 30,000.
It was a methodical, ruthless slaughter of students, workers, and women whose only crime was a refusal to submit to theocratic cruelty. The regime plunged the country into digital darkness to shroud the carnage, yet the subsequent mass executions have been met in the Western public sphere with a curious, stifled silence.
Contrast this with the totalizing mobilization surrounding Gaza – a cause that has dominated Western activism, academia, and media ecosystems for over two decades. Rather than a mere shortage of facts, this staggering disparity represents an active ideological filter that renders certain atrocities invisible.
The Foucault ghost and the red-green alliance
The roots of this silence run deep into the bedrock of French Theory. When Michel Foucault traveled to Tehran in 1978, he famously romanticized the Islamic Revolution as a “political spirituality” that could challenge Western modernity. That intellectual legacy persists today.
Modern activists have inherited a neo-Marxist framework that has replaced the old class struggle with a rigid hierarchy of identity groups. In this moral cartography, social legitimacy is derived from one’s place in the “Oppression Olympics.” Because the Iranian regime frames itself as an opponent of the West – the source of all evil in the world – its crimes are “decoded” or contextualized away. To stand with the Iranian people would require activists to admit that an anti-Western regime can be a totalitarian engine of slaughter. For many, that admission is ideologically intolerable.
Sunday, February 01, 2026Elder of Ziyon
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
|
Sunday, February 01, 2026Elder of Ziyon
The Holocaust narratives, or the Jewish Holocaust, have become one of the founding myths of the Zionist movement as a means of blackmail under the banner of “anti-Semitism,” and anyone who criticizes Israel, its practices, and its crimes is labeled an “anti-Semite.”Global academic circles remain concerned with the bold question: How true and credible is this Holocaust that has been established as a blackmailing pretext by the Zionist movement and state?
The aforementioned UNESCO survey is considered an entry point for the return of objective research towards the truth, as the survey revealed the truth about those feelings, especially among school generations.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
|
It is striking just how much these arguments, on left and right, have in common, even though they are diametrically opposed in so many ways. Mishra, for instance, seems to suggest that Holocaust memory has been used to keep the doors of western power firmly closed to outsiders. Cooper, meanwhile, believes Holocaust commemoration has flung those doors wide open, enabling mass immigration and the dilution of white, western societies. Despite these profound differences, however, both appear to share the belief that, as the international order that has shaped our world since 1945 comes apart, the status of the Holocaust in our moral and cultural imagination is central to the question of what will follow.Gal Hirsch: 'Hamas planned to hold Israeli hostages for 10 years'
While establishment politicians and institutions continue to treat the Holocaust as the pivotal moral event of the 20th century, out in the discursive undergrowth ever-larger audiences increasingly seek alternative explanations for the world, and radical visions of how to remake it. In these circles, the sanctity of Holocaust commemoration is what makes it such an enticing target. “Are we closer”, Mishra writes, “to finding a replacement for the Shoah as a universal symbol of human and moral evil?”
Why this all matters ought to be obvious. The late Yehuda Bauer, one of the great scholars of antisemitism and the Holocaust, warned many years ago that “a reversion back to ’normalcy’ regarding Jews requires the destruction of the Holocaust-caused attitude of sympathy”. It is not difficult to find evidence that this reversion to an antisemitic “normalcy” is occurring. Last year, the massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach, following the killing of two Jews at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and the shooting of two Israeli embassy employees outside the Jewish Museum in Washington DC in May, were just the latest lethal incidents in a global surge of hatred that itself feels like the end of an era. Jews have been shot, stabbed, kidnapped and burnt, and synagogues and schools torched on multiple continents since the 7th October attack. Less visible is the daily grind of racist comments, slurs and exclusions that never make the news but lead Jews to shrink inwards and rethink their futures. Almost a third of all British Jews were directly targeted with antisemitic violence, harassment or abuse in 2024, according to polling from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
The rise of antisemitism, conspiracy-driven populism and authoritarian demagoguery makes Holocaust commemoration more essential than ever. But there is an urgent need to rethink how it is done. The long-held fear that it would become harder to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive once the last of the survivors are no longer with us might soon be surpassed by a greater danger: that people stop thinking the Holocaust matters, not because they don’t know what happened, but because they no longer care.
Perhaps “Never Again” was always a forlorn hope. It implies an optimistic assumption of progress, as if we can leave unwanted human behaviours and attitudes in the past, when history—and the current Jewish reality—suggests the opposite is true. Still, whether the existing international order survives this crisis or not, the memory and dignity of the six million who were murdered, and the vital lessons for humanity that we take from that darkest of times, must not be sacrificed in the process.
Hamas planned to keep Israeli hostages for as long as a decade, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch said in an in-depth interview, describing what he called the terror group’s long game of using captives, living and dead, as strategic leverage meant to grind down Israel over years.Gaza ‘doctor’ who slammed Israel in NY Times op-eds is Hamas colonel, seen in military uniform: watchdog, IDF
Hirsch, whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed on October 8, 2023, as coordinator for the captives and missing, said his own internal assessment early on pointed to a far shorter timeline than Hamas’s, yet still measured in years. “I thought it would take double,” he said. “At least four years.”
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, he also disclosed that Israel repeatedly prepared covert hostage rescue missions that never took place. Some were canceled because planners doubted they could succeed, he said, and others were shelved out of concern that rescuing one captive could endanger others held nearby. “If there was doubt about success,” Hirsch said, “take them out through negotiations, even if it takes time.”
The interview came days after Israeli forces recovered the remains of police officer Ran Gvili from Gaza, a development that, according to Israeli officials and multiple reports, closed the file on those abducted on October 7, 2023, whose whereabouts remained unresolved. Hirsch recalled calling Netanyahu with the update and telling him, in English, “Mission accomplished.”
A Gaza doctor who slammed Israel in a pair of New York Times op-eds is a colonel with terror group Hamas, according to an Israeli watchdog group and the Israeli Defense Forces.
Hussam Abu Safyia was photographed wearing a Hamas camo military uniform while at a gathering of Hamas elites to celebrate the completion of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in 2016, according to the Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor.
Safyia’s photo appeared on the Gaza Medical Services‘ Facebook page — a group overseen by the Hamas-run health ministry.
The ceremony was attended by ranking members of the brutal terror group, including Gen. Abu Obaida Al-Jarrah, Director of Military Medical Services Saeed Saoudi and National Security Forces commander Col. Naeem Al-Ghoul, according to the post.
Following Hamas’ massacre of over 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the war in Gaza, Safyia penned two screeds in the Times bashing Israel on Oct. 29, 2023, and Dec. 2, 2024.
“We are suffering and paying the price of the genocide that is happening to our people here in the northern Gaza Strip,” Safyia wrote in one op-ed.
Critics decried media giving the alleged Hamas member any ink.
“Those who platformed Abu Safyia must do some serious soul-searching, and figure out how they ended up promoting the propaganda of a literal Hamas terrorist,” NGO Monitor senior researcher Vincent Chebat said.
The Times referred to the colonel as a “pediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza” in each op-ed.
An IDF spokesman said Safyia was a ranking member of Hamas, and that the hospital was teeming with hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.
Neither NGO Monitor nor the IDF accused Safyia of participating in any specific terrorist acts.
No one in their right mind will ever again pay into that racket. It was, in a sense, an expression of organizational decadence, mixed with complacency. Anti-Semitism was at low tide, and instead of remembering that the tide always turns, Jewish groups believed they could afford to chip in and show solidarity with fellow “marginalized communities.”Andrew Fox: How academic propaganda is made
Regardless of the merits of this thinking before October 7, it is clear now that such a strategy cannot be employed again.
So where should the money go instead? A good place to look for answers remains Jack Wertheimer’s 2024 Mosaic essay on the American Jewish community’s post-October 7 philanthropy, since the overall trends remain the same even if the dollar figures have changed since then.
One area Jewish donors have turned to is groups that do nothing more than seek to combat anti-Semitism in the public square. One of Wertheimer’s sources in the philanthropy world told him: “The eyes of funders are now open in new ways; anti-Zionism is well-funded and pervasive in certain sectors. For the first time, funders realize how much those ideas have captured institutions.”
Indeed, this has only become more apparent since the essay’s publication. Anti-Zionism, it turned out, has been molded into a full-fledged ideology, more prevalent on the left than the right. That ideology has little or nothing to do with what Zionism actually is; instead, it’s a movement that sets itself in opposition to Zionists. That is, rather than participate in a debate over Zionism, anti-Zionism is a mercenary ideology that targets people who identify as Zionists—and, crucially, people the anti-Zionists accuse of harboring Zionism in their hearts.
What that means in practice is classic anti-Jewish discrimination in the professions, in academia, and the media. That’s because most Jews believe that Jews have a right to self-determination. So targeting self-identified “Zionists” is a way of targeting Jews.
Anti-Zionism is preposterously well-funded, because it has become a catchall progressive tag, and so some of the mountains of dark money set aside for progressive activism falls in the lap of any group that claims the anti-Zionist mantle. Which, at the current moment, is most of them.
So that’s one place Jewish communal resources must go toward: The battle against anti-Zionism must be joined in earnest. This also means that Jewish organizations should stop playing footsie with Jewish anti-Zionists. Even a big tent must draw the line at those who want to tear the tent down.
The intellectual lineage of this project is obvious: it is AirWars all over again. The same methodological sleight of hand. The same overconfidence and lack of access to genuine intelligence. The same collection of social media claims and hearsay, presented as forensic truth. AirWars gained a reputation by counting allegations as facts and treating propaganda as data, and this project repeats those errors nearly exactly. The only difference is that the flaws are now so well-documented that repeating them can only be a deliberate act.Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’
Then there is the plan to publish via AOAV, described as “respectable.” This is simply not true. AOAV’s leadership has openly campaigned against Israel for years, including promoting the genocide hoax in Gaza, and they specialise in the kind of partisan hit jobs that are the trademark of the far left. Whilst presented as a neutral research platform, in reality it is an activist ecosystem. Publishing there does not enhance credibility: it indicates that the author knows their work would not withstand rigorous peer review by neutral military, intelligence, or legal professionals. It is a safe ideological bubble where conclusions are celebrated rather than examined.
Remove the academic jargon, and this project is extremely simple. It starts with the assumption that Israel is intentionally killing civilians. It then develops a method guaranteed to “prove” that conclusion by excluding all evidence that might challenge it. Classified intelligence is disregarded because it is inaccessible. Operational context is ignored. Hamas-controlled information is given priority. Anything that is not visible in open sources is considered non-existent. The final product is presented as objective scholarship.
This is propaganda with footnotes, but it is rare for a researcher to be so pompous and confident in his echo chamber that he explains the sleight of hand before the magic show begins. The most charitable interpretation is that its author genuinely does not understand how wars are fought, how intelligence operates, or how the law is applied in combat situations. The less charitable interpretation is that he understands perfectly well – and is counting on his audience not to. Either way, no serious person should take this work seriously. We can only thank him for revealing his hand in advance.
Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one claim: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.'Nothing Less Than Holocaust Inversion': Prominent Holocaust Scholars Denounce Israel-Bashing Nonprofit Named After Holocaust Survivor
Not a week passes without another open letter from academics – often amassing hundreds or even thousands of signatures within days – denouncing Israel in the strongest terms. Across Europe, dozens of universities have now severed ties with Israeli institutions, citing alleged complicity in genocide – or at the very least, systematic war crimes.
In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution that appeared to settle the question: the Jewish state, it declared, was guilty of the “crime of crimes”.
In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.
A contrived consensus
And yet, there are clear indications that this supposed academic consensus was artificially contrived, a product of intense social pressure, ideological hectoring, and a “spiral of silence.” The IAGS resolution, for example, is not grounded in any original research and offers little substantive argumentation.
In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the US. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of American signatories, but only a handful in Europe – primarily in Germany and around a single London-based centre for antisemitism research.
In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on Gaza has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. The rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my view on Israel.
A spiral of silence
And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarised as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet – I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel has become so intense that many “dissidents” no longer dare to speak out.
This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent, as Steven Pinker notes in his book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.
I wanted to see if there was a way to break the cycle. What if people could speak honestly without risking their careers? I tested this by inviting primarily Dutch-speaking academics to share anonymous views on Israel and Gaza. What arrived was sobering – and chilling.
More than 100 prominent Holocaust and genocide scholars are sounding the alarm on an "extremist" Israel-bashing nonprofit named after a Holocaust survivor who coined the term "genocide," according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Exploiting the survivor's name while accusing the Jewish state of genocide, the letter's leader said, is "nothing less than Holocaust inversion."
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit named after Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, was established around 2021 without permission from its namesake's family. It has since used the late lawyer and activist's reputation to undermine Israel on the international stage, the scholars wrote ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The institute began accusing Israel of "genocide" just 10 days after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, later claiming Hamas did not commit sexual violence against Israeli civilians.
"As scholars who have written about the Holocaust or other genocides, we share your family's concern about extremists exploiting Raphael Lemkin's name to attack Israel," the experts, led by Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, wrote in a letter to the Lemkin family. "Israel's counter-terror campaign in Gaza is not genocidal, either in intentions or actions. The civilian deaths there are the result of Hamas embedding itself in residential areas and using the population as human shields."
Medoff told the Free Beacon that the institute's "false accusation of genocide in Gaza" amounts to "nothing less than Holocaust inversion," adding that "the fact that extremists are exploiting Lemkin's name to do so adds insult to injury."
The letter is meant to bolster the Lemkin family's months-long bid to pressure the institute to drop Lemkin's name, saying the institute's "policies, positions, activities, and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin's belief system." The family, with legal backing from the European Jewish Association, petitioned Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.) and the state's Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations to intervene on their behalf, though the governor and state have not taken yet any action. As Free Beacon senior writer Ira Stoll reported in late 2024, a Lemkin family member said he was "totally outraged" to see his relative's name used for anti-Israel activism.
That has been a key element of the price tag the Saudis put on their joining the accords. That sounded right to an American foreign-policy establishment that continued to believe that a two-state solution was the only way to end the conflict. Of course, as Palestinians have made clear, over and over again, they have no interest in the idea if it means they’ll have to commit themselves to living in peace with a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn.South Africa declares Israeli chargé d’affaires persona non grata
After the Second Intifada (2000-2005), and then Oct. 7, the once broad Israeli support for the concept has evaporated. Even most left-wing Israelis know that the Palestinians aren’t interested in peace. Acquiescing to demands for Palestinian statehood would have meant repeating the same catastrophic blunder made by the late Ariel Sharon when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, thus setting in motion the events that allowed Hamas to seize control of the coastal enclave and eventually to be able to commit the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Doing so in the far larger and more strategic areas of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) would have endangered the very existence of the state.
It’s equally true that the Saudis have no real desire to help create another failed Arab state that would, in all likelihood, be a perfect target to be taken over by Islamists—in this case, Hamas. Yet even before the Palestinians won general Arab and Muslim sympathy by launching a war on Oct. 7 with an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction, the Saudis were only using the statehood issue to help deflect pressure to join the Abraham Accords.
That should serve as a reminder to Israelis and Americans not to be too disappointed by the Saudis’ decision to attempt to reclaim their status as the leader of Islamist rejectionist forces in the region, a stance that, in recent years, they surrendered to Qatar.
Would it ever have been worthwhile for Israel to have made such a grave sacrifice of its security concerns in exchange for Saudi recognition?
For Israelis, having the Saudis embrace them fully and openly as partners would have signaled the end of the Muslim world’s refusal to accept the Jewish state’s permanent place in the region. But setting up a situation where the Palestinian Authority would likely have been toppled by Hamas would have been suicidal. The scenario in which Hamas assumes control of the territories is a guarantee of nothing but another and even more bloody round of war.
As much as it’s nice to dream of a world where the region could truly be transformed into a “new Middle East,” such as the one that the late Shimon Peres dreamed of when he agreed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, 33 years later, Israelis still don’t live in such a world.
That’s why it is far better to keep such fantasies out of efforts to ensure that the Saudis remain outside of coalitions bent on Israel’s destruction. The Riyadh regime may still hope to develop its economy and needs to modernize its society to achieve that; however, it is never going to be entirely divorced from the Wahabi extremism that put their family in control of the Arabian Peninsula in the first place.
Riyadh can’t change
And so, Americans and Israelis should stop chasing after the vain hope of getting the desert kingdom to behave as if it is anything other than the Islamist regime that it has always been and likely always will be. The Saudis will always act in their own best interests, and if that lines up with a more Israel-friendly policy, then they’ll do that. And being realists and still desirous of friendly relations with the United States, there will be limits on how far they will go in terms of open hostility to Israel. But they can neither be persuaded nor bribed to give up their basic character.
It’s long past time for Washington and Jerusalem to acknowledge this fact and stop trying to pretend that Saudi Arabia is anything other than what it is. It may not be at war with Israel and may even prefer for it to, along with the United States, continue to act to deter Islamist forces that are hostile to Riyadh, even if they are no longer worried about Iran. But it’s never going to be a real friend or ally of a Jewish state.
South Africa on Friday declared Israel’s chargé d’affaires and top diplomat, Ariel Seidman, persona non grata and ordered him to leave the country within 72 hours, according to an official government statement.Israel responds to South Africa, declares chargé d'affaires persona non grata
South Africa’s foreign ministry, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), said it had informed the Israeli government of its decision.
South African officials said the move was based on what they described as “violations of diplomatic norms,” including the alleged use of official Israeli platforms to criticize South African leadership and a failure to notify authorities about visits by senior Israeli officials.
“These violations include the repeated use of official Israeli social media platforms to launch insulting attacks against His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, and a deliberate failure to inform DIRCO of purported visits by senior Israeli officials,” said the statement.
In response, the Israeli Foreign Ministry designated South Africa’s top diplomat in the country, Shaun Edward Byneveldt, persona non grata, saying he must leave Israel within 72 hours, and that “additional steps will be considered in due course.”
Israel has declared South Africa's senior diplomatic representative, Chargé d'affaires Shaun Edward Byneveldt, persona non grata and has been given 72 hours to leave the country, as announced in a statement by the Israeli foreign affairs ministry on Friday.
The action comes in response to South Africa's earlier decision on Friday, in which it declared Israel's chargé d'affaires, Ariel Seidman, persona non grata, according to South Africa's foreign affairs ministry.
Seidman is required to depart from the country within 72 hours, the ministry said in a statement on its website.
It went on to accused Seidman of "unacceptable violations of diplomatic norms and practice which pose a direct challenge to South Africa's sovereignty."
"These violations include the repeated use of official Israeli social media platforms to launch insulting attacks against His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, and a deliberate failure to inform DIRCO (South Africa's foreign affairs ministry) of purported visits by senior Israeli officials," the ministry said.
Israel's diplomatic mission in Pretoria did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Israeli foreign affairs ministry statement referred to South Africa's action against the Israeli diplomat Seidman as "false attacks on Israel in the international arena."
Friday, January 30, 2026Elder of Ziyon
Attention to New Materialist theories transforms how we engage with the political-material effects of religion, including the intersections of white supremacy, fossil fascism, settler colonialism, and climate catastrophe. Climate change apocalypse is both a material and a spiritual concern, especially for those left on the margins. For Judaism, what lessons can we learn from diasporic Judaism rooted in a decolonial land-based politic that would challenge a Zionist ideology that has worked to strip Judaism of its ecological imperative to be in right relationship with the land? Can a Judaism beyond Zionism provide new ways to energize discourses of political liberation, Jewish ritual and practice, and ecological relation to the earth? Here is the potentiality of a kinship that conceives new spiritual and political entanglements that in turn generate energetic possibilities through a process of teshuva, or return. This chapter draws from Jewish and and decolonial studies, to examine the world that is engaged in a genocidal war amid the inescapability of climate change, as well as the world to come, and the world as it could be, in spiritual-material terms.
“You shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land... and destroy all their figured objects... You shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess.”This passage echoes the language and logic of settler colonialism and extraction.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
|
Friday, January 30, 2026Elder of Ziyon
Emotional politics of Jewish American Zionism: hegemonic feelings and the paralysis of facts
Claire Rosen Sultan - Independent researcherABSTRACTBy mapping the emotional politics in circulation today among Jewish American Zionists (JAZs) and the identity constructions and core beliefs therein, this essay explores how those emotions manifest in behaviours and their implications on the capacity for JAZs to engage with facts challenging their core beliefs. This essay traces myriad actors and processes that have led to the normalization of hegemonic JAZ emotional politics, for example, the hegemonic enmeshing of Jewish fears about annihilation with Israel’s fears about (meta)physical security. Engineered emotional politics permeate Jewish American identity formations to such an extent that they are furthering the Zionist mission to violently colonize Palestine. By manufacturing Jewish American repulsions from facts which criticize JAZ identity formations, and by engineering a normalized behaviour response (weaponizing antisemitism) to routinized elicitations of JAZ fear, Zionist narratives are systematically inhibiting engagement with facts revealing Israel as a Genocidal ethnic cleanser. For JAZs to understand Israel as the perpetrator of immense harm, the individual would first need to relinquish the core beliefs upon which their identity formation is constructed. The focus of this essay is the struggle for Jewish liberation from Zionism, which is separate – and inherently linked to – liberation and justice for Palestine.
The United Nations International Commission of Inquiry (UN COI) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) have adopted the capitalisation of Genocide as marker of the ongoing event's elevated status to a proper noun akin to a named historical event, signalling a direct accusation of the most serious international crime against the Palestinian people (United Nations General Assembly, 2024; International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2025)
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
|
You can tell if they are serious by looking at their anti-racism policies. Organisations cannot pretend to oppose antisemitism unless they define it. Without a definition they cannot discipline members for racist conduct.Seth Mandel: Can Elaine Luria Handle the Squad’s Heat?
If you cannot define it, you cannot oppose it.
Ominously, many want to shut down any attempt to limit Jew hate. They want a world without boundaries, where anything goes, and anti-Jewish racism can never be called by its real name.
Their first target is the widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been circulating in various forms since the early 2000s. The global left denounces it because it says that the definition has been used to “wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic”.
Within a day of becoming mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani showed his political priorities by withdrawing the city’s endorsement of the definition.
The precise form of words the IHRA drafters used is that it is antisemitic “to deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
You can argue about that. As I said above, people who want to abolish the world’s only Jewish state need to bend over backwards to prove that they don’t just hate Jews.
Good-hearted left-wing Jewish academics took the complaint seriously, and went out of their way to accommodate Palestinian and leftist concerns.
They produced the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism in 2021. It emphasised that it was not antisemitic “to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants between the river and the sea, whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state [or] federal state”.
All true opponents of racism need to do was oppose anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and race hatred.
A bare minimum you might say. But even this stripped down, permissive, definition of antisemitism is too much for many on the left to bear.
I hoped that the election of the Jewish Zack Polanski to the leadership of the Green Party would mark a break with the antisemitism that so disfigured the Corbyn movement,
Not if a faction among Green Party members has its way, it won’t.
A motion before the Green Party spring conference calls for the party “to reject the IHRA and JDA [Jerusalem Declaration] definitions which have been weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of the state of Israel”.
When the conference starts in March, we will see whether Polanski has the political courage to fight back, or whether he’s just another empty sloganeer.
Turn to the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, and it is the same story,
It too will not even accept the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism because it is “being used to reinforce the illegitimate policing of speech about Palestine and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”
You search its website in vain for examples of the Jerusalem Declaration silencing legitimate debate – and of course there are none. You search for any definition of antisemitism that would be acceptable to pro-Palestinian activists – and of course there isn’t one.
They have no formal means of condemning The Protocols of the Elders Zion, Mein Kampf or the Hamas Charter.
More pertinently from a modern left-wing point of view, they have no means of condemning Nick Fuentes and the antisemites flourishing in Donald Trump’s America.
The Maga movement is loathed by leftists. But at least some on the left would rather give the far right a free pass than accept the smallest restraint on the loathing of Jews.
Luria was once the kind of Democrat that party leaders wanted to recruit: liberal but poised, with a military career on the resume. (Luria spent 20 years in the Navy.)Iran's Options: Talking or Fighting
Military experience tended to go hand-in-hand with support for Israel, just as exposure to reality tends to increase support for Israel. Those with national security experience in the field would be much less vulnerable to the paranoid conspiracism of the Code Pink world and campus activists, the thinking went. An inherent toughness could make it less likely they’d bend or break in the face of progressive pressure.
And all of that was true—except that last part. One by one, “moderate” Democrats fell in line. Elissa Slotkin, now a senator from Michigan, entertained the idea that AIPAC should register as a foreign agent. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Marine, folded like a cheap suit in the face of anti-Israel primary pressure this cycle. Accommodating progressive anti-Semitism became the norm, with very few exceptions (Ritchie Torres, John Fetterman).
Luria says she wants to turn back that tide, or at least show it some resistance. The question is how far she is willing to go when locking horns with her party.
During Luria’s time in Congress, she was at the forefront of a group of Democrats criticizing Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, but she opposed removing Omar from her committee assignments, as Republicans had done with Steve King.
Luria’s willingness to call out some of the anti-Semitism from her own party has the potential to shift the debate if she gets back into office. But the extent of her impact will be decided by where Luria places the limits of her posture. Would she go beyond statements? That is, would she support actual consequences for Democrats who engage in rank anti-Semitism?
Most of the time, Luria seems willing to criticize Omar by name. Will she do the same for Rashida Tlaib, who has been headlining a conference tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? How about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thin-skinned Squad ringleader and blood libel specialist who may run for president in 2028?
As of now, the odds are in Luria’s favor. Virginia Democrats still nominate ostensibly moderate candidates, and the national mood certainly seems to have swung against Republican incumbents. (Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, who defeated Luria two years ago, holds the seat.)
Is Luria prepared to be a Slotkin/Moulton Democrat, living in fear of the Hamasniks in her party, or can she envision herself as a Torres/Fetterman Democrat, the much more rare breed with a spine strong enough to stand on principle? The fundamentals of the midterm elections mean we’ll probably soon find out.
President Trump's ultimatum to Iran calls for it to negotiate away its nuclear program or face a possible attack. Either path risks putting the already weakened regime in a more precarious position. Along with insisting that Iran halt domestic enrichment of nuclear fuel and hand over its stockpile of uranium, Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff has indicated Tehran must accept limits on its ballistic-missile arsenal and abandon its support for militias in the region.
A decision to halt enrichment of uranium would be a humiliating public retreat on a core national priority for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Rebuffing the demand is increasingly likely to prompt Trump to order strikes, further exposing the government's vulnerability.
"Their strategy right now is just buying time," said Alan Eyre, a former senior U.S. diplomat who specialized in Iran and is now at the Middle East Institute. "Their whole strategic outlook is when you're in a weak position you don't compromise, because that invites further aggression."
"The supreme leader is able to do compromises, but those compromises cannot touch the basic pillars of the regime, meaning he won't forgo a missile buildup, he won't forgo helping proxies and he won't forgo enrichment," said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
Citrinowicz said killing Khamenei or expecting the other members of the regime to turn against him under U.S. pressure is a faint hope, given Iran's unity at the top. Even if Khamenei was somehow removed, the regime would likely coalesce quickly around a new leader, he said. For all the setbacks the regime has suffered, there are few signs it is facing imminent collapse, such as splits within the leadership or defections.
"They still have cohesion. The regime is still functioning," Citrinowicz said. "If they feel this war is aimed at toppling this regime, it won't topple this regime, because to do it will take time, and Trump has no intention to invest that time."
"You could do airstrikes that significantly restrict this regime's ability to control its population and to project power abroad," Eyre said. "But to get from there to a better form of government in Iran? You can't get there from here."
Buy EoZ's books!
PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
Buy 
