UNICEF's one-sided, anti-Israel view

UNICEF used to be a respected organization advocating for children worldwide. But when it comes to Israel, especially since October 7, it has been willing to lie or misrepresent facts in many ways, large and small.

Here is the first paragraph of a press release from last month:

ROME/NEW YORK, 23 July 2026 – New analysis released today shows improvements in food security and child nutrition across the Gaza Strip. However, the United Nations cautioned that the progress, driven largely by expanded access to humanitarian food, nutrition, agricultural and health assistance, remains fragile. While access into Gaza has improved, only one crossing – Kerem Shalom/ Abu Salem – in the south of Gaza remains open, limiting the flow of essential goods that can assist with recovery and leaving the majority of the population dependent on humanitarian aid. The people of Gaza are still struggling to recover their livelihoods, local food systems and essential services.

Guess how many crossings were open to Gaza before the war?

Exactly one, Kerem Shalom. It managed to supply all of Gaza's needs by itself. I've visited there; it is huge. The UN cannot stop itself from blaming Israel for things that are not Israel's fault. Plenty of food is entering Gaza, more than enough for everyone; the only problem is distribution after the fact and Israel has little to do with that. UN agencies have plenty to do with it.

But another small detail shows how anti-Israel the UN is: calling the crossing "Kerem Shalom/ Abu Salem."

First of all, the Arab name is incorrect: it is Karm Abu Salem. 

Secondly, there was never any Arab village or ruin or single tent there with that name. The kibbutz Kerem Shalom was opened in 1967; the Arabic name was created afterwards. Why? Because the idea of a Hebrew name for a Jewish area is so hateful to Arabs that they have to make up their own name.

And even the name they made up has a layer of lies. Kerem Shalom means "vineyard of peace." The Arabic equivalent would be Karm al-Salam. Karm Abu Salem means "the vineyard of Abu Salem," as if that is the name of an indigenous Arab who lived in the area. Of course, there is no such person, but it makes the Arabic name sound like it was there before Jews lived there. 

If the Arabs want to make up their own names, no one can stop them. But when the UN officially adopts a made up arabic name that was created for no other reason but to claim it as theirs - a Jewish neighborhood inside the Green Line - that indicates that the UN is biased against Israel at every level, from the seemingly trivial nomenclature to the idea that even Israeli areas within the Green line are really Palestinian. 

(h/t Irene)

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

 

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08/04 Links Pt2: The Weaponization of Human Rights; Ireland’s €53m government jet ‘can’t land in fog’ after Israeli tech boycott; The War on Dialogue; The Demonization of Israel Ignores the Success of Israeli Arabs

From Ian:

The Weaponization of Human Rights

When It Becomes Jew-Hate
In July 2021, antisemitic incidents surged across Britain during that summer’s fighting in Gaza. Jews were harassed in the street. A convoy was filmed driving through London screaming threats of rape against Jewish women. And Kenneth Roth offered his unwanted analysis. “Antisemitism is always wrong,” he wrote, “and it long preceded the creation of Israel, but the surge in UK antisemitic incidents during the recent Gaza conflict gives the lie to those who pretend that the Israeli government’s conduct doesn’t affect antisemitism.”

In the very sentence in which he condemned antisemitism, he placed its cause not with the antisemites but with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. He told Jews being attacked on the streets of London that the real reason lay in the conduct of a foreign government. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League called it “plainly false and offensive,” and he was right. Blaming Israel for violence against Jews, rather than the people committing that violence, is not human rights advocacy. It is the oldest move there is, wearing new clothes: whatever happens to the Jews, the Jews brought it on themselves.

This was not a slip. Under Roth, HRW branded Israel an “apartheid” state, reaching for the single most incendiary word available and fixing it to a country whose Arab citizens vote and sit as judges on its own supreme court. The word was not chosen because it was accurate. It was chosen because it was powerful. Like so much of what Roth did, it was a political act wearing the costume of a legal finding.

Which brings us back to Ceuta.
Roth left Human Rights Watch in 2022. He no longer has its budget or its name behind him. And that is precisely why the Ceuta tweet matters so much. For thirty years, his defenders insisted that HRW’s fixation on Israel was simply where the evidence led, that the volume of criticism reflected the volume of abuse, nothing more. The Ceuta tweet destroys that defense from the inside.

Here was a man, stripped of every institutional restraint, handed a story that had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, and he manufactured an Israeli villain out of thin air, on a map he had not even read correctly. The conclusion came first. The evidence was to be invented afterward. That is not what following the evidence looks like. It is what an obsession looks like. And now we can see that the obsession was never really the organization’s. It was his.

This is one of the oldest features of Jew-hate, and I have spent years writing about it. It does not always arrive in a brown shirt. It adapts. It takes the language a society holds sacred and turns that language against us. Once it borrowed the language of the Church, and Jews were the killers of God. Today it has learned to borrow the language of human rights, and Jews are the killers of children and the enemies of justice. The costume changes. The accusation does not. And Kenneth Roth has been one of its most fluent translators.

Nor does it stay contained. Roth’s theory did not stay in his replies. Analysts documented how the Ceuta crisis was spun into a global antisemitic conspiracy within seventy-two hours, and Roth handed that conspiracy the credibility of a name that Princeton and Yale still invite to lecture on human rights. This is how it works. This is how Jew-hate is laundered: not by thugs in the street, but by respectable men with blue checkmarks and university affiliations, men who would be genuinely offended to be called antisemites even as they write the antisemites’ script for them.

What it Costs
The language of human rights is important. Real people in real dictatorships depend on it: the dissidents and the prisoners, the people in exactly the closed societies Robert Bernstein built his organization to defend. When words like “apartheid” and “genocide” are picked up and swung as weapons in a political fight, they are drained of their meaning, and the world’s genuine tyrants are handed a gift: the ability to wave away every accusation as just more politics. A movement that cries wolf at a democracy while the wolves run free everywhere else does not protect human rights. It discredits them.

And there is a cost closer to home. Every time a figure of Roth’s stature dresses up an old hatred in the language of justice, that hatred is given fresh permission. It is made respectable. Ordinary Jews, in London and Paris and on American campuses, are the ones who then live with the consequences, because the man with the human rights credentials has told the world that when Jews are targeted, Jews are somehow the authors of their own misfortune. That is not the protection of a vulnerable people. It is a license for their persecution.

Ultimately, that is Kenneth Roth’s legacy. Not one tweet about a Spanish enclave, but thirty years of proof that the most powerful institution in human rights could be turned into a weapon: for politics, for money, and above all for a fixation with the Jewish state that has outlived his own career. His defenders will call the Ceuta tweet an aberration. It is not. It is the clearest thing he has ever written. It is who he has always been, said plainly at last, and published while the dead were still being counted on a beach that had nothing to do with the Jews.

The Guardian is in the grip of an antisemitic ideology

The authors go on to argue that Truman, like his predecessors, caved to the powerful Israel lobby and betrayed the U.S. ‘national interest’—an ideal that Israel lobby conspiracists like Clifton and Lustik fancy themselves uniquely equipped to define, while framing Jews and other supporters of Israel as intrinsically ill-equipped to delineate.

Also true to character, the authors frame the lobby as the biggest obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, erasing decades of Palestinian terrorism and peace rejectionism. It’s also supremely dishonest for two ideologues both hostile to the right of Israel to continue existing as a Jewish state – within any borders – to feign passion for a negotiated solution to the conflict.

Indeed, a review of Clifton’s X timeline during the first few days after the Oct. 7 attacks clearly suggests not only that he had little if any sympathy for murdered, raped and tortured Jews, but that he sympathised with Hamas.

Elsewhere in the Guardian excerpt, the co-authors make use of their faux nationalist authority to take thinly veiled swipes at American Jews, questioning their loyalty and suggesting dual loyalty.

For instance, former US Mid-East peace negotiator Dennis Ross (who’s Jewish) is dismissed in the book as a peace obstructionist due to his record as a “a lobby insider.” This false accusation was first peddled in the widely ridiculed 2006 book on the Israel lobby by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter of whom later blurbed a book by Gilad Atzmon which was described by CST as one of the most antisemitic books in years.

Indeed, the only characters in the Israeli-Palestinian debate whose motivations and actions are questioned or examined are Jews and others involved in pro-Israel lobbying groups.

True to form, Clifton and Lustik are breezily unconcerned with the decisions, ideologies and loyalties of the diplomatic elite (aka, the peace processors) whose assumptions about the root cause of the conflict has continually been proven false, pro-Palestinian groups, and Arab and Muslim Americans – the latter of whom show a distressing level of support for Hamas.

Indeed, the Guardian’s effective endorsement of the authors’ mono-casual Jewish and Israel-focused explanation for the continuing Mid-East conflict, which has been echoed by the outlet’s own anti-AIPAC reporter Chris McGreal year after year, is a microcosm of their broader coverage of the region, which denies agency to the latter – no matter how destructive, malevolent and inimical to peace their decisions – while assigning all of the blame to the former.

Finally, there’s the authors’ decision to ignore the single most consequential event for anyone purportedly writing about Israeli-Palestinian peace today: Hamas’ barbaric massacre in southern Israel.

As the renowned historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, a supporter of the two-state solution whose new book, titled “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East,” comes out in September, recently observed, the terror group’s decision to launch that attack “prevented any creation of a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future,” a timeframe he clarified as meaning “decades.”

Indeed, evidence abounds that Hamas’ only guiding passion is the annihilation of Israel, regardless of the cost to the two plus million Palestinians in Gaza.

The Palestinian-American peace activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib documented that Hamas itself acknowledged that, as far back as 2014, Gaza was offered billions of dollars (US) in development, which included an airport, a seaport, new industries, major cash infusions and self-rule. The condition for this path forward for Palestinians was Gaza’s disarmament and demilitarisation, a deal which would have given Hamas an off‑ramp: integrating its employees and former fighters into the civilian police, and shifting toward nation‑building instead of terrorism.

As Alkahatib, one of the Palestinian architects of the Gaza development plan, said, Hamas rejected the plan and, instead, “turned the territory into a fortress of violence, tunnels, rockets, smuggling, and radicalization,” which culminated in Oct. 7, “Gaza’s vast devastation, tens of thousands killed, and billions wasted,” a wanton act of destruction that Jewish lobbyists in Washington had absolutely nothing to do with.

The path forward for Gaza, Alkhatib concludes, requires introspection, accountability, responsibility, and an insistence on Palestinian agency – ideas for peace that the territory’s leadership, Western pro-Palestinian activists, anti-Israel media outlets and antisemitic lobbyologists are loath to consider.

The Demonization of Israel Ignores the Success of Israeli Arabs

Whatever the extremists of Hamas intended to achieve through their attack on Israel, their actions appear to have strengthened the country's core and brought out a collective national spirit that was tangible to me as I traveled through the country.

After attending a conference in Haifa, I was struck by the changing nature of Israeli Arab employment and the growing involvement of Arab citizens in key sectors of the Israeli economy. At the University of Haifa, I was particularly struck by the number of young Israeli Arab women studying on campus. I could hear Arabic being spoken all around me.

Consider Israel's healthcare system. One in four doctors in Israel is Arab. Just over one in four dentists is Arab, as is just over one in four nurses. Almost one in every two pharmacists in Israel is Arab. These are highly specialized professions requiring years of education, training and accreditation. Moreover, Israel has suffered thousands of casualties since the Oct. 7 attack and many of those injured were treated by Arab doctors and nurses.

The blanket term of "apartheid" in Israel against its Arab population simply does not stack up when compared to what happened in South Africa. There are social disparities - but Israeli Arabs are part and parcel of Israel's future. That is patently obvious to any social observer.

Israel's critics overlook the countless interactions that take place between Arab and Jewish citizens every day. They remind us that reality is far more complicated than the slogans through which Israel is so often discussed in Britain.

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08/04 Links Pt1: Iran’s Most Powerful Weapon Is Time—Here’s How To Turn It Against Them; The Not-So-Special Relationship; Piers Morgan to Hamas spokesman: Why kidnap a baby?

From Ian:

Gen. David Deptula: Iran’s Most Powerful Weapon Is Time—Here’s How To Turn It Against Them

Destruction Is Not the Same as Leverage
American airpower can inflict devastating damage on Iran’s military establishment, but that does not constitute a strategy. To be productive, military effects must be connected to a defined political purpose.

If Iran believes it only needs to survive until the American political environment changes, then retaliatory strikes alone can be waited out. To be effective, the U.S. must convince Tehran that waiting will make its position progressively worse—not better.

This requires persistent military pressure against the regime’s ability to attack and regenerate. The United States should continue attacking the production, storage, command-and-control, and launch architecture supporting Iran’s missile, drone, and maritime operations. Electrical-power infrastructure that directly and effectively supports those military capabilities constitute a lawful military objective when targeted in accordance with the principles of distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions, and provide a highly leveraged means of neutralizing them consistent with the law of armed conflict. Maritime restrictions should be sustained and enforced consistently, with clearly defined humanitarian provisions and consequences for violations.

Most importantly, military pressure must be integrated with a sustained economic campaign directed at the revenue streams that finance the regime and its military reconstruction.

Iran’s petroleum trade remains its central economic lifeline. Tehran depends on front companies, financial intermediaries, foreign refineries, ship-to-ship transfers, and a shadow fleet to disguise the origin and destination of its exports.

The Treasury and State Departments have already taken significant action against these networks. Recent Treasury measures target vessels, companies, financial intermediaries, and procurement networks supporting Iranian petroleum sales, missile production, and unmanned aircraft programs. Those actions provide a strong foundation for a campaign that connects economic pressure directly to military and diplomatic objectives.

Washington should continue systematically inhibiting the banks, insurers, port operators, brokers, refiners, and shipping networks that enable Iranian revenue. This forces foreign companies and governments to choose: access to the American financial system or assist in Iran’s sanctions-evasion economy. It must be clear you cannot do both.

Enforcement matters more than announcements. A sanctioned tanker that continues delivering oil represents unrealized leverage. Closing the gap between designation and enforcement is essential to maximizing pressure and strategic effect.

The Long Game Is the Path to a Durable Win
President Trump has long emphasized speed, deadlines, and measurable results. That approach can create valuable urgency and prevent bureaucratic drift. Iran, however, is attempting to turn that preference for rapid results to its advantage by arguing an agreement must be reached within a narrow political window.

The administration should resist and decouple the midterm election calendar from Iranian negotiations.

A 100-day benchmark can be a useful management and communications milestone, but it is insufficient for compelling a revolutionary regime to turn its back on decades spent absorbing sanctions, suppressing domestic opposition, and waging war through proxies and asymmetric means.

For President Trump to secure a durable victory, the United States must be prepared to play the long game. This does not mean accepting an endless war. It means establishing conditions under which Iran’s choices are steadily reduced while America’s are preserved.

The administration can reinforce its position by making clear that economic and military pressure will continue beyond the midterm elections. It should expand interceptor and counter-drone production on an emergency basis, build regional stockpiles, strengthen partner defenses, and shift the cost-exchange ratio in America’s favor. It should continue degrading Iran’s capacity to manufacture and employ offensive weapons while tightening enforcement against the regime’s oil, shipping, and financial networks.

The objective should not be destruction for its own sake or an agreement that trades substantial economic relief for temporary or unverifiable promises.

The objective should be to change Iran’s strategic calculation.

Iran must come to believe that each additional month of resistance will carry increasing cost, resulting in less revenue, fewer military options, greater isolation, diminished military capability, and a weaker negotiating position. At the same time, the United States should make clear that a verifiable agreement remains available if Iran abandons the behavior that created the crisis.

This combination—relentless pressure and a credible diplomatic solution—offers the best prospect for achieving the administration’s objectives.

The decisive question is not whether the Pentagon has a secret technological breakthrough waiting in the wings. It is whether the United States has the strategic patience, economic discipline, and political determination to ensure that Iran cannot simply outlast it.

If Washington demonstrates that determination, time will cease to be Iran’s most powerful weapon and become America’s. (h/t MtTB)

The Not-So-Special Relationship

Benjamin Netanyahu placed two bets on Israel’s alliance with the United States.
One bet was on Donald Trump. The two leaders’ past feuds and the American’s erratic temperament looked like minor points compared to Trump’s record as the president who recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and ordered the airstrike that killed Iran’s terror chief, Qassem Soleimani.

From his first term, Trump broke with many of the dysfunctional norms that had governed U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment had approached the region’s conflicts as a management problem. Their goal was to lower the intensity of conflict by engineering a rough equilibrium that would prevent any party, including Israel, from getting too strong. Attempts to balance the interests of existential foes were supposed to produce stability. Instead, they ensured the periodic reeruption of war between actors like Israel and Hamas who proved unwilling to adopt the norms of Western bureaucrats.

Trump initially rejected this path by enforcing clearer lines between friends and enemies. His approach was to pick winners and take tributes, rather than to work through State Department offices and NGOs to build complex subdivisions of imperial administration.

Siding with Trump promised Israel not only greater external support, but a freer hand to pursue its own war aims after Oct. 7. In return, Netanyahu offered something that he believed Trump wanted: a powerful ally to project power in the Middle East on behalf of U.S. interests. If Netanyahu’s first bet paid off, Israel stood to be promoted from first among American client states to U.S.-backed regional hegemon in the Middle East.

The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests.

At the same time as he was drawing closer to Trump, Bibi placed a second bet to make Israel less dependent on Washington. In January, he vowed to wean Israel off U.S. military aid over the next decade (the aid Israel receives comes in the form of credits that it’s required to spend on U.S. weapons companies). Last December, Netanyahu told a graduating class of the Air Force Academy that he had approved an investment equal to $108 billion over the next decade to build up Israel’s domestic munitions industry. “I don’t know if a country can be completely independent but we will strive to ensure our arms are produced as much as possible in Israel,” he told the new pilots. His goal was “to build an independent arms industry for the State of Israel and reduce the dependency on any party, including allies.” When U.S. officials tried to dictate Israel’s war plans, for instance by demanding that the Israeli army not enter the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, Netanyahu proved that he was willing to defy Washington.

When Israel and the U.S. launched their joint war against Iran in February, it looked initially like both wagers were paying off. Israel was demonstrating its independent capabilities while acting in concert with the global superpower to defeat a common enemy. The American and Israeli militaries operated with an unprecedented level of cooperation. Pilots from the two countries flew side by side to strike precoordinated target packages. Intelligence-sharing, planning, and rehearsals took place in joint command centers.

But we know how this story ends. After enduring the devastation of their top leadership and military infrastructure, the Iranians brought the war to a halt by shutting down maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Fearing the costs of a prolonged closure and unwilling to risk the escalation necessary to reopen the strait by force, Trump offered the Iranians a deal. Effectively, the U.S. would pay Iran a ransom. In return Trump would extricate America from a broadly unpopular war before the midterm elections. By the terms of the deal, hundreds of billions of dollars would be released to Iran. The U.S. made other promises to restore Iran’s military capacity and deterrence, including a pledge to force Israel to call off its operations against Iran’s Lebanese terror proxy, Hezbollah. In return the Iranians would reopen the strait. At a later date, American and Iranian officials would reconvene to negotiate terms of a broader agreement.

Instead of neutralizing the Iranian threat and crowning Israel the dominant power in the Middle East, the first of Netanyahu’s gambles went bust. With Iran on the ropes, Trump’s deal revived the regime’s fortunes. The agreement was loose enough that its terms could easily be nullified or rewritten, but its immediate impact was a win for Tehran. For the Arab leaders who pay careful attention to even subtle power shifts in the region and had endured Iranian missile barrages during the war, the message was clear. American security guarantees were provisional at best. The Iranian regime, whose survival had been in question, was reestablishing its claim to be the region’s dominant actor.

Yet this outcome is less surprising than the furious allegations about Trump’s betrayal suggest. Trump, who once decried the weakness of bribing terror states, calculated that it was now in his interest to do so and simply reversed course, albeit with the implicit understanding that he might abruptly reverse again at some future date. There was a clear precedent for both his personal inconsistency and the substance of his policy. He was reverting to the standard U.S. approach to the region, which aims to manage conflicts within a concert of powers.

The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests—namely the freedom to aggressively deter Hezbollah.

The point was made clearly when Trump told a reporter at the Financial Times that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” and would be forced to accept whatever deal Trump made because “I call all the shots.” In other comments, Trump accused the Israeli leader of nearly sinking the deal by carrying out counterattacks inside Lebanon. Bibi, whom Trump had once praised, was now attacked as a bloodthirsty warmonger; an obstacle to peace just as Democrats had always accused him of being.

Simply put: Bibi’s two wagers proved incompatible. Taken as far as it could go—to joint operations aimed at toppling the regime in Iran—the bet on Trump stopped short of Israel’s strategic goals. Moreover, it did so in its final act by threatening Israel’s freedom to act as a sovereign power in defense of vital interests on its own borders.

That leaves the bet on independence as Israel’s path moving forward.

Washington Post Claims Support for Israel Is Dangerous to America

On August 1, 2026, the Washington Post reported that Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, had warned the Pentagon that he lacked enough naval forces to keep defending Israel against ballistic missiles.

He said that without another Aegis-equipped destroyer, he might eventually have to choose between defending Israel and defending the American "homeland."

This followed a May Post report titled "U.S. Bears Brunt of Israel's Missile Defense, Pentagon Assessments Show."

It said the U.S. had consumed a substantial share of its most advanced interceptors while defending Israel from Iran - more, he said, than Israel itself had expended.

Omitted from the report was that American missile-defense systems in and around Israel were not protecting only Israeli civilians and military installations.

They were also protecting American aircraft, crews, fuel, munitions, communications nodes, and support personnel operating from or through Israeli bases during the campaign against Iran.

The dozens of KC-46 and KC-135 refueling tankers at Ben-Gurion airport and Uvda and Ramon airbases, together with their crews and fuel infrastructure, enabled American combat aircraft to reach Iranian targets and return.

Any Iranian ballistic-missile attack on the Israeli airfields supporting those operations threatened American combat power directly. The U.S. was defending a joint military operation, including exposed U.S. assets.

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Mamdani's New York, illustrated

JNS reports:

 Jews, who make up about 10% of New Yorkers, were the targets of nearly 70% of all hate crimes in the Big Apple last month, according to newly released city data, and anti-Jewish hate crimes, which the city said it confirmed, were up 53.3% compared to the same period last year.

The New York City Police Department said that it recorded 33 “confirmed” hate crimes in the city last month, of which 23 targeted Jews (69.6%). In July 2025, there were 15 anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city, it said.

It is one thing to read numbers in a story. It is another to see them graphically.

Here is July in New York City:

 Anti-Jewish crime didn't just outnumber all other types of hate crime combined - it was more than double all the other hate crimes combined.

The full picture for 2026 so far is hardly better, showing how hate works in Mandani's New York:

Up until this year, the standard response from antizionists was that the police were including anti-Zionist crime and it was all exaggerated. But that isn't true, so they pivoted: now they admit that antisemitic crime is up, and they blame - Israel! Apparently, they say that because of Israeli policies, antisemitic hate crime goes up. But isn't that admitting that the people attacking Jews because of Israel are conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which they claim cannot happen?

Logic was never their strong suit. 

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

 

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08/03 Links Pt2: Ceuta and the dangerous insanity of anti-Zionism; Simon & Schuster Gives Book Deal to Palestinian Writer Who Calls Jews ‘Demons’; Motherland Blues; Engineering Hate

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Ceuta and the dangerous insanity of anti-Zionism

From the left, the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said the rushing of Ceuta was ‘completely engineered’ by Israel and its allies. Their dastardly aim? To ‘re-educate’ Spain and force it to ‘fall back in line with Western imperial objectives’. Rich-boy keffiyeh clown Hasan Piker echoed this drivel, titillating his Ivy League followers by saying Israel and America ‘got the Moroccan government to send, like, 40,000 people into Spanish administered territory’. It was ‘classic Israel’, he said: a ‘shameless’ effort to destabilise a critical nation.

That there is no proof whatsoever that someone in the Jewish State phoned up Morocco and said ‘Unleash the migrants’ matters not one jot to the Israel haters. Indeed, conspiracy theorists are positively allergic to facts. Badger them for proof that the Jews engineered the Ceuta crisis, or coolly explain to them how Building 7 fell on 9/11, and they’ll say you’ve been ‘got at’. Evidence itself is suspect in the loony bin of anti-West conspiracism. They just scream ‘Israel launched an Islamic invasion of Spain!’ – as Alex Jones did – and hope that the loudness of their claims will drown out the insanity of them.

In Spain itself, lefty influencer Ana Alcalde – also known as ‘Gaza Barbie’ after she sailed to Gaza on one of those dumb flotillas – said Ceuta was part of a ‘plan’ to ‘take down’ the government of Pedro Sánchez. Even a Spanish official – transport minister Óscar Puente Santiago – hinted that the long fingers of the Jewish State were wrapping round the neck of Spain. ‘Well, things are starting to get pretty clear’, he said in response to an Israeli official’s tweet about Spain’s ‘colonial enclaves’ in North Africa. His tweet was interpreted by many as support for ‘the growing conspiracy theory’ that Israel ‘helped orchestrate the large-scale migrant incursion’.

This Jew-blaming that spread through the digital highways faster than the Moroccan men barged into Ceuta captures how unhinged and lethal anti-Zionism has become. It confirmed that it is the undisputed heir to classical Jew hatred. Jews were once accused of inflicting plague, poison and social mayhem on Europe. Now the Jewish nation is accused of inflicting ‘swarms’ of migrants on Europe. These conspiracy theories might be separated by centuries, but they share two striking things in common. First, a glaring lack of proof, the wilful sacrifice of reasoned thought at the altar of a neo-religious conviction that despicable ‘foreign’ elements are masterminding our moral downfall. And secondly, the Jews. It’s them again. The Jewish people brought plague to Europe, now the Jewish nation is bringing ‘plagues’ of foreigners. Different millennium, same vile racism.

The Ceuta conspiracy theory also shines a light on the double bigotry of the woke ideology. In the woke universe, a demented animus for the world’s only Jewish state sits comfortably alongside a cloying, patrician pity for Muslims. The Jews are seen as the sinister authors of every earthly wrong, and Muslims as the hapless victims of those wrongs. So in the Ceuta theory, we see the Jewish nation re-imagined as demonically powerful and we see the wholesale stripping of Moroccan Muslims of any agency whatsoever. They become mere tools, instructed on how to act by the wily Jewish State. The neo-racialists of the credentialled classes see the world as being inhabited by devils and children, the former requiring their performative fury, the latter their aristocratic sympathy. Muslims are dehumanised too under the rule of the hyper-racialists.

Anti-Zionism has become the suffocating religion of the cultural establishment. Every social ill – from war to broken borders to the rise of the far right – is giddily traced back to Israel. Not only does this hang yet more target signs around the necks of Jews, it also obscures the truth about Europe’s social problems. It is our own governments’ suicidal abandonment of the ideal of national sovereignty that has caused the migrant crisis, not the hand-rubbing plotting of the Jews of the Holy Land. Like their forebears in the pitchfork Middle Ages, anti-Zionists prefer to live in a house of lies than to confront the truth of their world, and themselves.

Motherland Blues

Yet the Ukraine war was already eroding the logic behind that restraint. By the summer of 2022, after failing to achieve a rapid victory and expending large quantities of precision-guided weaponry, Moscow had turned to Tehran for attack drones. Russian officials visited an Iranian airfield twice to inspect weapons-capable systems; deliveries followed, and Iranian-designed Shaheds soon became a central component of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Iran, one of the powers Russia had previously attempted to balance in Syria, was becoming an increasingly important supplier to the Russian war effort.

At roughly the same time, Moscow began withdrawing or repositioning some personnel and equipment from Syria to meet the demands of the Ukraine front. In August 2022, satellite imagery indicated that Russia had removed an S-300 air-defense battery from Syria and shipped it toward the Black Sea, apparently to reinforce defenses closer to the Ukrainian theater. Russia did not abandon its principal Syrian bases, but reports of withdrawals and repositioning suggested that Iran and Hezbollah were seeking to fill some of the resulting gaps. The contradiction was becoming difficult to ignore: Israel was preserving its accommodation with Moscow partly because Russia could restrain Iran in Syria, even as Russia’s battlefield failures made it more dependent on Iranian weapons and less capable of performing that restraining role.

The community most exposed by this ambiguity was not in Jerusalem. When the invasion began, Russia’s core Jewish community still numbered roughly 155,000 people, along with a much larger population estimated at around 600,000 eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Three days after the invasion, Boruch Gorin, a senior spokesman for Russia’s Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities, wrote bluntly on Facebook, “Stop the war!” On March 2, Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar—nicknamed “Putin’s Rabbi,” given their close relationship—issued his own carefully worded appeal to “stop this madness to prevent future deaths.” Their statements were striking because Putin had spent two decades cultivating a tacit compact with Chabad: After 70 years in which the Soviet state had repressed religious life and sharply constrained Jewish practice, the Kremlin supported the rebuilding of Jewish institutions, while Chabad’s leaders generally avoided confronting the government.

By the summer of 2022, Moscow was pressuring the institutions connecting Russian Jews to Israel. Russia’s Justice Ministry asked a Moscow court to dissolve the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization responsible for facilitating aliyah. The case was formally framed around alleged violations of Russian privacy law, but it unfolded amid deteriorating relations with Israel and a growing exodus of Russian citizens. By July, nearly 20,000 immigrants had arrived in Israel from Russia since the invasion began, with similar numbers arriving from Ukraine. Then Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid initially warned that closing the agency would be “a grave event” with consequences for bilateral relations, then softened his language, emphasizing Israel’s readiness for dialogue while “maintaining the important relations between the countries.”

The same community Putin had long presented as evidence of his tolerance could now serve as leverage against Israel. In October, Alexei Pavlov, an assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council, described Chabad as a supremacist cult in the state-owned newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev subsequently apologized, saying the remarks were erroneous, and stressed that they did not represent the council’s official position. Even so, the episode alarmed Russian Jewish leaders: Former Moscow chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt urged Jews who were able to leave Russia to do so, while Boruch Gorin warned that official antisemitism would mean “the end of a Jewish presence in Russia.”

Putin’s own rhetoric was shifting as well. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2023, he defended Russia’s absurd claim that it was fighting to “denazify” Ukraine by turning directly to Zelenskyy’s Jewish identity. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin said. “They say that Zelenskyy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” Putin, who had spent two decades presenting himself as a protector of Russian Jews and a guardian of Holocaust memory, was now claiming the authority to distinguish authentic Jews from shameful ones and conscripting Jewish suffering into the ideological justification for his war.

After Oct. 7, the deterioration became even harder to disguise. Moscow blamed the conflict’s eruption largely on the failure of American policy and intensified its criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the bombardment violated international law and risked producing a catastrophe lasting decades. Less than three weeks after the massacre, Russia hosted a Hamas delegation led by senior official Moussa Abu Marzouk in Moscow, prompting an angry Israeli protest that the Kremlin was sending “a message legitimizing terrorism against Israelis.”

Days later, an antisemitic mob stormed the airport in Russia’s Makhachkala, Dagestan, searching for rumored Jewish and Israeli passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. Hundreds of men overran the terminal and runway, inspecting vehicles and demanding to see passengers’ documents. Putin condemned the violence only indirectly, blaming Ukrainian agents acting on behalf of Western intelligence services, without presenting evidence, rather than confronting the antisemitism animating the riot. The Kremlin did not organize the mob, and Russian authorities later prosecuted participants; by July 2025, Russian courts had sentenced 135 people in connection with the riot. But the episode exposed how quickly official anti-Western and anti-Israeli narratives could merge with older hatreds inside Russia itself.

By then, well over 40,000 Russian citizens eligible under the Law of Return had immigrated to Israel. Those who remained belonged to a community Moscow and Jerusalem had spent two decades treating as a strategic asset: evidence of Putin’s professed tolerance, and an electoral and demographic constituency in Israel.

However, the rupture did not happen. Israel preserved its access to Russia, while Moscow stopped short of severing relations with Jerusalem. But beneath that continuity, the arrangement was decaying. Russia was becoming more dependent on Iran, less capable of regulating Syria, more willing to pressure Jewish institutions, and increasingly prepared to align itself diplomatically and rhetorically against Israel. The relationship survived Ukraine and Oct. 7. The strategic logic that had sustained it did not.

Engineering Hate

REVIEW: 'Unsafe At MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews' by Yossi Sheffi

Yossi Sheffi is the author of this intensely disturbing book about the experience of American and Israeli Jews on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. Sheffi holds an endowed chair in engineering systems at MIT and is a member of the faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and the Operations Research Center. He is a leading expert in supply chain management and the author of nine books in his areas of professional expertise. He has been a member of the MIT faculty for almost 50 years.

Sheffi's 10th book is also the first of its kind. Sheffi commissioned an unnamed journalist to interview dozens of American and Israeli Jewish undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty about their experience on campus following October 7. Based on those interviews, the text of the book consists largely of a chronological narrative of the 2023-24 school year recounting their experience.

As the introduction puts it, "This is the story of what it felt like to those whose lives and studies were turned upside down." Like Ken Kesey's fictional One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Unsafe at MIT takes us inside the asylum at MIT.

Sheffi's narrative demonstrates that the anti-Israel and antisemitic inmates ran the asylum. By contrast with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's Nurse Ratched, MIT president Sally Kornbluth proved herself to be a spineless weasel. Kornbluth's betrayal of the applicable rules governing student protest on campus is one of the book's most powerful motifs. Unlike her counterparts at Columbia and Harvard, Kornbluth nevertheless kept her job.

Sheffi himself is an Israeli immigrant to the United States. He was born in Mandatory Palestine. He emigrated to the United States from Jerusalem in 1975 to pursue his graduate studies at MIT. Many of the students and postdocs interviewed are Israelis with a background of service in the Israel Defense Forces. Sheffi does not make a point of it, but MIT appears to be unusual in this respect. The pain of these students permeates the book.

MIT is a magnet for those seeking the development of technical expertise that has made Israel a multidimensional powerhouse. October 7 hit these students hard. MIT provides a window onto the wave of hatred of Jews and the Jewish state that manifested itself on elite campuses following the massacre. It should be noted that the students whose experience forms the core of this story are mostly identified only by first names or pseudonymous first names.

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08/03 Links Pt1: How a UN study shatters the Gaza starvation narrative; The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War; B'Tselem report ‘demonizes Israel by rebranding terrorists as minors’

From Ian:

Does Israel want peace?

While Israel never lost the hope of peace, it understood that it would not come about merely through slogans, chants, campfires, or peace symbols.

Among Israel’s neighbours, rallies all too often called for the murder of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. Survivors of Nazism, jihadism, and communism knew such words could become reality. They had seen it before.

Israelis, therefore, had no appetite for the catastrophic illusions that led Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, to declare after Munich in 1938: “I believe it is peace for our time…” Genuine peace partners

Nor were Israelis ready to risk being sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical expediency, otherwise known as appeasement, as happened so shamefully to Czechoslovakia.

Israelis needed no sanctimonious lectures from afar about the virtues of peace. They understood those virtues better than most. What they needed were genuine peace partners.

Anwar Sadat had once been a bitter foe of Israel and had sympathies for Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Yet he came to understand that Egypt’s future prosperity depended on making peace rather than pursuing Israel’s destruction.

It worked. Paired with Menachem Begin, Israel’s first Right-of-centre prime minister, and with the help of the United States, they achieved the seemingly impossible in 1979 – peace.

To get there, Begin agreed to a full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, three times the size of Israel itself, and from the strategic depth it represented.

It worked again in 1994, this time with Jordan, while Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s leader. As with Sadat, King Hussein convinced Israel he was sincere about peace, understood Israel’s security concerns in a country the size of Wales, and grieved for the loss of innocent lives – Arab and Israeli alike. Another peace treaty, more Israeli concessions, and no Israeli second thoughts.

A third breakthrough came in 2020, when Israel had to choose between partial annexation of disputed West Bank territory and a normalisation agreement with the United Arab Emirates. The Right-of-centre Israeli government chose the latter.

The decision has paid dividends ever since. In addition, there was the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which could have led to peaceful coexistence, but instead was seized by Hamas to create a new launching pad for its war to the death with the Jewish state.

Anyone visiting Israel and speaking with people going about their daily lives would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli who welcomes decades of army reserve duty, rejoices as their children enter life-and-death military service, looks forward to 3am dashes to bomb shelters while carrying toddlers or helping elderly relatives, or relaxes on a bus while wondering whether a nearby package contains groceries or nail bombs.

Of course, the big question is whether peace with the Palestinians is possible. Hopefully, one day it will be. It requires, though, not just a territorial negotiation, but something bigger.

Can the Palestinians convincingly accept that Israel, whatever its final borders, is there to stay, that Jews are indigenous to the region, and that living alongside Israel, not replacing it, must be the outcome?

Neither the late Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas, by their actions, has shown the courage and sincerity of Anwar Sadat or King Hussein. Will the next Palestinian leader? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to pray fervently for peace, while never forgetting that it lives in a part of the world where, as Shimon Peres, the late Israeli president and Nobel laureate, liked to remind visitors: “In the Middle East, either you’re at the dinner table or you’re on the dinner menu.”

Nadav Eyal: Exclusive: The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War

An in-depth look at Roaring Lion — the war aim Israel never made public, the intelligence assessment that failure could push Iran toward the bomb, and what the Mossad told the Kurds

It is impossible to think about Israel’s plan to bring down the Islamic Republic without first thinking about its sheer presumption. Grinding a regime down over years — sanctions, influence operations, the slow seeding of fear and confusion — is one thing. Recruiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president and Holocaust denier, as an asset and installing him in power is another. So is launching a full-scale Kurdish invasion. This is the kind of project superpowers fail at. Israel tried it, and poured an enormous effort into the attempt.

Over the past weeks, The New York Times and Haaretz have published a great deal about that effort. What follows adds to the record on the most ambitious regional objective Israel has ever pursued: regime change in a country of roughly 100 million people, a regional power — attempted in wartime, and in coordination with the only superpower, the United States.

In the presentation the Mossad gave the Israeli cabinet on the eve of the operation, regime change was projected to take “one to three years.” That was a reasonable hedge; the Islamic Revolution did not happen in a day either. The ministers heard a different tune. “We understood,” one of them told me, “that we were going for regime change in a fast, sweeping move — killing the current leader, a Kurdish invasion, Ahmadinejad as our agent, protesters in the streets.”

Begin with a distinction
Again and again this has been described as “a Mossad operation.” The Mossad — Israel’s foreign intelligence service — was without question the animating force, the planner, the one pushing. But this was an operation of the State of Israel, ordered by its cabinet. It grew out of a conviction that had taken root at the political level and was then imposed on the security establishment: there would be no solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, and no end to the friction with Iran, without a change of regime in Tehran. The 12-day war of June 2025 had created an opening, and Donald Trump was in the White House. Israel had to try, because the window might close. The cost of inaction, even weighed against the risk of failure, was higher than the cost of action.

Those words were said explicitly by Benjamin Netanyahu to the American president. The doctrine is his.

None of this is interpretation. The war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published. After conversations with a double-digit number of sources, military and political, the central objective can be reconstructed:
To deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel by creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. Those may not be the exact words. But “creating the conditions for regime change” was the bottom line.

The phrasing was a compromise, negotiated in part with the IDF. From the first moment, the army said it did not know how to produce regime change on its own. For the General Staff, the main effort was strategic damage to Iran — the erosion of capability over time. Support for the Mossad was, as the army understood it, a secondary effort.

Why “creating the conditions” rather than “toppling the regime”? One defense official offered me a guess: the IDF knew this was a complicated objective, possibly an impossible one. It did not want to be dragged into a war with an aim so absolute that it could run forever — far past the number of interceptors in Israel’s magazines.

And yet the cabinet voted for an objective that was, in practice, an attempt at regime change. An objective that large — Megalomanic, some would say — dictates the allocation of resources and carries severe regional consequences. Put another way: the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles mattered, but they were not the holy grail, and they were not the message of the new war that followed. Where Rising Lion, the June 2025 campaign, prioritized the nuclear project — and did in fact halt enrichment — Roaring Lion was meant to be the war that ended all wars. With Iran, at least.

Andrew Fox: Hamas’s ‘disarmament’ deal is not what it seems

Western powers continue to misunderstand Hamas. They treat it as a stack of rifles with a political office attached. But it’s far more than an armed force. It ruled Gaza for almost two decades and infested its civil machinery. It shaped schooling through the education bureaucracy. The health sector operated under its government, while Hamas-run courts enforced its authority. Municipal employees and emergency committees kept its presence visible when formal ministries broke down. Collecting the weapons of Hamas and other factions removes an immediate threat of armed force, but it leaves Hamas’s human infrastructure in place.

The proposed handover to the National Committee exposes the danger. Hamas has sought to carry over 40,000 civil servants and security personnel into the new technocratic order. Roughly 10,000 belong to the Hamas-run police. A new nameplate on a ministry changes little if the same officials control salaries and local permits, with loyal policemen on the streets. Hamas can surrender the administrative title while retaining its governance networks.

Hamas’s behaviour during the ‘ceasefire’ does not bode well for the Board of Peace plan. Hamas gunmen reappeared as Israeli forces withdrew last year, crushing local rivals. The movement then resumed enforcing order with extreme brutality. Its remaining bureaucracy collected revenue and paid loyalists. Israel now says Hamas continues to recruit and rebuild. Every month of quiet exposes the superficial appearance of calm, even as renewed Hamas coercion demands another violent confrontation.

Verification of Hamas’s surrendering of weapons is going to be nigh-on impossible. No audited inventory exists for an arsenal dispersed across ruins and private buildings. Inspectors must prove the absence of hidden rifles and explosives across a dense urban landscape designed to frustrate surveillance. Hamas can hand over expendable weapons and reveal tunnels Israel already knows about, while continuing to conceal those Israel is unaware of. The commanders who remember how to rebuild can remain underground or melt into civilian employment. A weapons store controlled by a fragile administration remains a future armoury.

Hamas’s leaders are unusually candid about their objectives. Political bureau member Bassem Naim said the agreement preserved ‘our strategic project’. He praised the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, Hamas’s codename for the 7 October pogrom, and called for other arenas to advance the ‘liberation’ project.

The Board of Peace’s roadmap therefore offers Hamas an opportunity. Surrender enough metal to secure Israeli withdrawal, then protect the organisation embedded within Gaza’s new administration. Rearmament can wait until scrutiny fades. The weapons left inside Gaza will be waiting, too.

Lee Smith: The President of PEACE

So, if Trump can’t win the war, or won’t, he can win a peace by pocketing Hamas’ nonconcessions to pad his résumé as a dealmaker—indeed, a “PRESIDENT OF PEACE,” as U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz described the commander in chief now determined, like the loser presidents who preceded him, to waste American time, prestige, and money on “a credible political path that achieves self-determination and Statehood” for a Palestinian terror enclave.

The Hamas deal, like the administration’s arrangement with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and Trump’s repeated and unrealized threats against Iran, is evidence that the president is in danger of losing the plot, if he hasn’t already.

The White House includes the cease-fires between Israel and Hamas and between Israel and Iran as two of the eight peace deals Trump has arranged since taking office. Some of those deals are holding up, like the one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and some aren’t, like the agreement struck between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But none of that really matters to most Americans, nor should it. We go to the polls every four years to vote not for the candidate most likely to win cease-fires for foreigners, but rather for the one who will advance our prosperity by imposing our peace.

Rome imposed its peace on rivals, and on those who might someday cause trouble, to bring wealth and glory to Rome. Caesar Augustus turned Rome from brick to marble, but the architecture of the Pax Romana was made of steel and blood. They make a desert and call it peace, said one victim of Rome’s devastations to serve Roman interests. Our version of peace has been much gentler, but the purpose of the 80-year Pax Americana is the same: to make things better for Americans, regardless of what that might mean for foreigners.

Trump seemed to grasp this most fundamental concept of statesmanship more clearly than his most recent predecessors, from Bill Clinton through Joe Biden. He seemed to understand what peace, outside of the clichés promoted at beauty pageants, really means. “Peace through strength” is how he formulated the true nature of peace, or the only kind of peace that can matter to Americans: America’s peace.

One of the pillars of the postwar order is the Strait of Hormuz, through which the free flow of oil stabilizes international energy markets. Of late, administration validators have argued that the strait is becoming less strategically important with the construction of Saudi and UAE pipelines that bypass the strait and reach the Red Sea directly. But as those who can read a map or even a newspaper understand, the Red Sea is also vulnerable to Iran via its Red Sea proxy, the Houthis.

The strait is still crucial to America and its allies. And losing it to Iran would mean a strategic defeat for the United States, one significantly more consequential than losing in Iraq and Afghanistan. But White House messaging tells adversaries and allies alike that the Pax Americana is a broken reed. Sure, the Americans once protected the strait against a nuclear superpower—for decades—but under Trump, America’s patrimony is up for grabs.

Leaks from Trump officials that plans to take the Strait by force are complicated by the lack of interceptors tell American adversaries little about our stockpiles they haven’t already counted. Rather, they indicate that, since a massively funded military has many other ways to ensure victory against an obscurantist third-world regime like Iran’s, the president is looking for excuses to fail to win. When the administration publicly frets over the possible targeting of desalination plants in the Arab Gulf states, it is indicating that it doesn’t truly understand the stakes and sacrifices involved in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And when Trump reasons, as he did in a Truth Social post Saturday, that he is once again walking back his plans to strike Iran for “the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran,” he is saying that America’s peace, now and for future generations, is not his priority.

Trump can’t say how these ghoulish puppet shows with Iran and its proxies augment America’s wealth and glory because they don’t. Rather, they make America complicit with monsters. They put us in the same room as Hamas, whose cruelty, Trump said less than a year ago, “struck to the core of humanity itself.” He vowed then that America stands with Israel under the motto “Never again,” but now he’s leaning on a wartime ally to play along with phony deals he’s struck with Hamas and Hezbollah that deter Israel while shielding the terrorists on its borders. These aren’t the acts of a president of peace, never mind a commander in chief who understands the nature of America’s peace and the character of our adversaries who want to break it.

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The International Union of Muslim Scholars wants more scholarship on Jews and Israel — as long as it is antisemitic

Ahmed Raissouni, a former president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, just published an essay complaining that pro-Palestinian scholarship is too thin. He wants Muslim academics to build a real, long-term body of work on Jewish history, Zionism, and Hebrew and Torah scholarship, comparable to what Western universities produce.

In the Orwellian world of the IUMS,  "scholarship" means "cherry picking or fabricating facts to reach antisemitic conclusions."

Raissouni, who effusively praised October 7, names the models of the researchers he wants to see more of. 

The first is Roger Garaudy, the French philosopher whom Raissouni credits with "the study and refutation of the founding religious myths and legends of Zionist theories." He calls on scholars to continue "along the path Garaudy began." Garaudy was convicted in France in 1998 for Holocaust denial, for a book arguing that the Holocaust death toll and the gas chambers were largely invented to serve Israeli political interests. This is the ideal researcher to the Muslim scholars represented by IUMS.

The second model is Abdelwahab Elmessiri, praised for having "disturbed Israel and Zionism more than the Arab armies surrounding it." Elmessiri's life's work was an eight-volume Encyclopedia of the Jews, Judaism, and Zionism arguing that Jewish peoplehood itself is a fiction rather than a genuine identity — treating the existence of the Jews as a phenomenon to be explained away rather than a people to be studied.

Raissouni then turns to Morocco. He writes that Moroccan academic history has spent decades "falsifying" the record to inflate the role Jews played in the country's development, and that the professors doing this work are funded by "poisoned Zionist grants," some of them acting as brokers who bring in the money themselves. The Jews being studied, he says, are not really contributors to Moroccan history at all — "in reality they consider themselves an infiltrated Israeli mission serving the Kingdom of Solomon." Yes, the Jews are so crafty that they sent their people to Morocco in Roman times, before Islam, just so they can pretend to be part of Morocco's history. It takes a special kind of scholarship to come up with this conclusion, and that is exactly what Raissouni and IUMS want to see more of.

Raissouni also wants to tackle scholarship on antisemitism, which he calls "a sword hanging over politicians, thinkers, historians, human rights advocates, and judges." Obviously antisemitism doesn't really exist. Just as obviously, this article isn't Exhibit A.

He also asserts, without a single source, that "perhaps a third of Americans, a third of Europeans, and certainly tens of millions" of people are driven by fabricated Torah and Talmudic myths. Well, duh.

The thing is, as I read this, that the concept of perverting research to reach a predetermined conclusion is not a Muslim innovation. What he demands in the Muslim world is happening, today, among thousands of Western academics in captured fields like Middle East history, social justice, gender studies, art history and dozens of other fields; openly advocating a political position and twisting facts to reach the end goal. Muslims don't need more people who understand Hebrew; they can just read the papers being published constantly by Western universities. 

The only innovation Raissouni brings is that he is unusually candid about naming his goal and his heroes in advance. 

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

 

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08/02 Links: Gaza Illusions; The Children Hamas Chose to Weaponize; Deal said in the works to revive US-Iran MOU; Time for Israel to Go on a Narrative Offensive

From Ian:

Gaza Illusions

Hamas identifies more advantages than disadvantages in the Board of Peace agreement for Gaza and therefore welcomes it. The organization survived after three years of bitter war and remains the dominant force in Gaza. It does not assess that the arrangement threatens its status or its assets. In its understanding, it will be able to continue preserving its military and civilian power under the cosmetic cover of the technocratic government - adopting the Hizbullah model, meaning existing alongside a weak formal government.

Hamas emphasizes that the demand for disarmament relates only to heavy weapons, of which it has barely any left. The arrangement appears to be creating a trap for Israel, enabling Hamas to preserve its power, despite the promise that nothing would be advanced in the area unless Hamas was first disarmed.

Under the circumstances that have been created, vital interests in Gaza must be defined in the spirit of "prevention," first and foremost: preserving freedom of action against emerging threats in the area; designating a large area near the border where activity of any kind will be prohibited, all the more so the establishment of an enemy presence; preserving the right to veto foreign actors entering Gaza; and above all ensuring that the Philadelphi Corridor is not under Hamas control.

Did the PA's "Pay-for-Slay" Policy Facilitate the October 7 Massacre?

The Palestinian Authority established a comprehensive statutory framework governing financial benefits for terrorist prisoners and released terrorists. Over time, the remuneration system expanded beyond monthly salaries to include release grants, guaranteed employment within the PA apparatus, and continuing financial support where employment was unavailable. The legal framework progressively increased both the level of financial benefits and the institutional obligations imposed upon the PA toward terrorist prisoners and released terrorists.

The PA/PLO's remuneration policy was not merely a humanitarian welfare program or a series of isolated financial payments. Rather, it evolved into a comprehensive statutory and administrative framework that systematically rewarded terrorist imprisonment, guaranteed continuing financial support following release, and, in many cases, facilitated the reintegration of released terrorists into publicly-funded employment.

The policy substantially reduced the personal and economic consequences associated with terrorist activity and materially assisted a significant number of experienced terrorists who later resumed terrorist activity. Several ultimately rose to senior positions within Hamas or directly participated in planning, financing, directing, or executing the October 7 massacre.

Time for Israel to Go on a Narrative Offensive

Rewiring the narrative
Historically, the relative success in the turnabout on Israel and Zionism has been a long process. Even if we ignore Jewish anti-Zionism thinking, amongst Jews as well as non-Jews, or take into consideration general anti-Jewish sentiment whether racist or religiously-motivated, surely we are in a very different place as regards control of the narrative.

In a recent piece posted in the +972 Magazine, we learn that France’s Rima Hassan, European Parliament member representing the La France Insoumise party, wants to break four taboos in the French public debate on Palestine.

They are: recognizing Zionism as a colonial ideology; defending the right of return; discussing the legitimacy of armed struggle; and moving beyond the two-state paradigm.

That is not a simple alteration of a narrative but, as the chant that has been increasingly sounded at anti-Israel rallies is formulated, Zionism must be eliminated. We are back in the 1950s and 1960s with the “Throw them into the sea!” sloganeering.

Yet, because of the internal squabbling in Israel over policies, the fundamental truths of the Zionist narrative have been misplaced in our public diplomacy material, as well as the fierce willingness to engage in confronting the waves of lies and fabrications assertively. It appears the “in” thing is to appear at the Oxford Union in evening dress.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, however, provides another problem. Appalled by Hasan Piker’s claim of how much better Hamas is than Israel, he writes in the LA Jewish Journal on July 16 that Piker’s political voice promotes a “toxic narrative … untethered from reality.”

Piker, he continued, is an example of how “Palestinians’ allies have led [the Palestinians] to the dark side of their national aspirations – destroying Israel rather than building their own potential state.”

Greenberg does not address that toxicity’s success. He does not ask if that negativity should be a cause to punish those exploiting such a message or if, and he is a rabbi, an ethical conclusion could be drawn that should advance the idea that an Arab Palestine state would be immoral.

There exists a major underestimation of the damage and danger the Palestine narrative dominance represents. And now that the pro-Palestine camp has reduced the rhetoric to a zero-sum situation, demanding our elimination and that our existence as a Jewish state must be denied, the hasbara (public diplomacy) approach of defense and explaining Israel’s actions needs to be refashioned.

Money is available. According to reports, since October 2023, upwards of $100 million has been allotted to hasbara efforts, most on social media platforms. I probably haven’t seen all the output, but I am confident little of it was framed in an attack mode.

We need to be past that stage of weak, explanatory public diplomacy. Attention must be shifted. The burden of proof and defense must be placed on the pro-Palestine side. Should a Palestinian national identity of less than 100 years be preferred over a 3,000-year Jewish national identity?

Were not the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the real colonization process in the Middle East?

Who is truly engaged in an “ethnic cleansing” if not Palestinianism? Who initiated genocidal violence, beginning in 1920? Should not the side that violates agreements be punished? Should a constant rejection of diplomacy and willingness to compromise be tolerated?

It is time to make major changes in attitude and approach and to reassert Zionism’s narrative.

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In the UK, spending more on those who want to kill Jews than on protecting Jews

From The Daily Express:

Labour will spend 50% more taxpayer cash on aid for Palestine than it will on protecting British Jews despite rising antisemitic attacks. The revelation came as the result of ministerial questions which revealed £381 million would be sent to Palestine in the next three years. That's 50% more than the £250 million pledged by the Labour Government to protect Britain's Jewish communities.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel, told the Daily Express: "Labour’s priorities are all wrong. This extraordinary funding, some of which will likely end up in the hands of the undemocratic and unaccountable Palestinian Authority, exceeds funding recently pledged for protecting British Jews from antisemitic violence and hatred.

The usual defense by the Left in the US to prioritize demonizing Israel is that tax dollars are going there, which would be better used locally. But they never talk about tax dollars to other foreign recipients, including Palestinians, Jordan, Egypt and others. 

Here we see the argument turned on its head against a progressive British government: spending more on those who support attacking Jews than on protecting local Jews from attack. 

The people who pretend that all tax dollars should be spent domestically when the argument is about Israel somehow change their position when the recipient is the Palestinian Authority which has proven time and time again that it celebrates terror attacks against Jews. 

The only people in the region who support genocide are the Palestinians. They just disagree on the specific methods of getting rid of all the Jews in the Levant. 

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

 

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08/01 Links: Hamas disarmament cannot wait for the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza; Trump cancels Iran attack, calls for immediate deal; Herzog accuses Mamdani of spreading 'blasphemy,' antisemitism

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Hamas disarmament cannot wait for the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza

The latest Gaza proposal is better than the empty language that has surrounded much of the postwar discussion. It addresses Hamas’s weapons, the tunnels, the command structure, the future administration of Gaza, and the link between demilitarization and Israeli withdrawal.

That is important, but it is not enough. Israel cannot agree to a process in which withdrawal, reconstruction, or political recognition move forward on the assumption that Hamas will disarm later.

The issue is not whether disarmament appears in the document - it does - the issue is whether Hamas is required to carry it out before Israel gives up the leverage needed to make it happen.

Hamas has spent the period since October 7 using every negotiation to gain time, preserve control, and push the most difficult questions into the next phase. Deals have produced real achievements - above all the return of hostages - and that matters. But Hamas’s military power has remained largely untouched by diplomacy.

The negotiations show the same risk, with Hamas already presenting its obligations as conditional on Israeli steps that would come first in practice. It has repeatedly rejected disarmament, qualified it, or offered formulations that leave its weapons under a different name or authority.

The latest proposal may be more serious, but it still depends on sequencing. If Hamas is allowed to remain armed while a new Palestinian committee enters Gaza, while international bodies begin work, and while Israeli forces pull back, the result may be a civilian structure operating under the same threat that has shaped Gaza for years. Israeli withdrawal can not happen based on Hamas promises

The United States should be careful not to mistake a framework for implementation. Titles, ceremonies, international boards, and public declarations may help move negotiations forward, but they do not remove a single rocket, destroy a single tunnel, or prevent Hamas from rebuilding. Israel cannot base a withdrawal on what Hamas says it intends to do.

The standard must be physical and verifiable. Weapons need to be collected and placed beyond use, while production sites and tunnels need to be located and destroyed. Smuggling routes, command networks, and financing systems need to be dismantled. Inspectors must be able to enter sites without warning, and violations must stop the next stage automatically.

Food, medicine, water, shelter, and basic services should reach civilians regardless of Hamas’s conduct, and they should do so without strengthening Hamas’s control where possible.

Large-scale reconstruction is different. It brings money, building materials, jobs, contracts, and influence. If it begins while Hamas remains armed, it risks rebuilding the system that allowed the organization to embed itself in every part of life in Gaza. Reconstruction should expand first in areas that have been independently verified as demilitarized and where a civilian authority can operate without armed intimidation.

Orna and Ronen Neutra: Israel’s future is in jeopardy if it becomes a single-party cause

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham entered our lives during the darkest chapter our family had ever known. This week, as we traveled to Washington for his funeral, we came not only to honor one of Israel’s most steadfast friends, but to remember a leader who stood beside our family — and whose example offers an urgent lesson for Israel and its relationship with the United States.

We first met Graham shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, when we believed our American Israeli son, Capt. Omer Neutra, had been taken hostage by Hamas. We later learned that Omer had been murdered during the attack and that his body had been taken into Gaza.

From the earliest days of the war, Graham was among the strongest and most consistent voices in the Senate calling for the hostages to be brought home and standing firmly with Israel. He spoke with clarity about Iran’s central role in supporting Hamas and understood that Hamas could not remain in power if the region was ever to achieve lasting stability.

Within weeks of the attacks, he led a bipartisan Senate delegation to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt. He believed Hamas must not be allowed to destroy the historic possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. He also recognized that building a regional coalition against Iran and its proxies was essential to creating a safer and more stable Middle East.

But the lesson Graham leaves behind is not only about foreign policy. It is about how meaningful change is achieved in a democracy.

When he believed in a cause, he fully embraced the democratic process required to advance it. He worked across party lines, sought consensus whenever possible, and used his voice, relationships, and influence to bring others with him.

That was how he approached the effort to bring the hostages home.

He never told us what we wanted to hear simply to make us feel better. He told us what he believed. He never offered false hope, but he always made time for us, listened carefully, and treated our concerns with honesty and respect.

During one meeting with hostage families, he said something we have never forgotten: “I wish you were all my constituents.”

As our family’s journey unfolded, from fighting to bring Omer home, to learning the devastating truth of his murder, to finally bringing him home for burial, we tried to follow the same principle.

From the beginning, we made a conscious decision that the hostage crisis could never belong to only one political party.

On Oct. 15, 2023, Donald Trump called us as a former president and private citizen. We thanked him for reaching out, but we also shared what would become one of the guiding principles of our advocacy: The hostages had to remain a humanitarian cause, not a partisan one, especially during a presidential election. He immediately agreed, and we appreciated that he honored that principle throughout the months that followed.

We carried that commitment through every stage of our advocacy. We worked closely with the Biden administration and later with the Trump administration. We met with Republican and Democratic senators, members of Congress, governors, administration officials, and leaders from across the political spectrum.

We participated in the Republican National Convention while proudly supporting fellow hostage-family advocates Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin when they addressed the Democratic National Convention.

Our message was the same in every room: bringing the hostages home was not a Republican cause or a Democratic cause. It was a human cause.

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