The Definition of Antisemitism That Exonerates Henry Ford

Australia's Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion invited submissions, and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network — the peak body of the country's Palestinian solidarity movement — answered with a 259 page response. 

 A submission to an inquiry into antisemitism does not ordinarily require a slanted recap of the 1948 war, missives on settlements, the Gaza blockade, the genocide accusation, and the apartheid analogy, yet this one does. APAN treats the Commission less as a body to inform than as yet another vector to spread propaganda. Yet when you strip away the historical narrative and the included "expert" reports, the filing reduces to a single demand: anti-Zionists must not be called antisemitic, whatever they say about the Jewish state. To that end, APAN urges the Commission to reject the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.

How does APAN define the term?  "Hatred of or animus against Jewish people because they are Jews."

To defend that definition, APAN refers to three prominent Jewish anti-Zionist scholars.  All three of them happen to arrive at essentially the same definition of antisemitism — one that conveniently excludes themselves.

Shaul Magid, Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, complains in his report that the word has slipped its moorings — that "antisemitism" now stretches "from Christian anti-Judaism to racism, anti-colonialism, to anti-Zionism" — and insists on returning to what he calls the standard, which he says is "the unmitigated and unwarranted hatred of, or animus against, the Jew qua Jew." 

Ilan Pappe gives this definition: "being anti-Jewish is racist and antisemitic. This is the hatred of Jews because of who they are. Whereas being anti-Zionist means opposition to an ideology." 

Neve Gordon is quoted for a third variant, from a London Review of Books essay from January 2018, that antisemitism is "understood as hatred of Jews per se."

"The Jew qua Jew." "Because of who they are." "Hatred of Jews per se." Three anti-Zionist scholars essentially agree with each other that antisemitism is hate of Jews as Jews. The common denominator is that they are saying that real antisemitism has no reason - it is unwarranted, it is towards Jews per se, it is because of who they are. In other words, antisemitism has no reason, no excuse, it is pure bigotry divorced from logic. But these anti-Zionists have a good reason for their hate. That is the distinction that each of them is making. And that is the distinction they must make in order to separate themselves from the crude antisemitism of previous generations.

The only problem is that this definition includes lots of types of antisemitism that they claim they abhor.

The medieval mob did not hate Jews qua Jews. It hated them because they believed Jews poisoned the wells to spread the plague. They hated them because they believed Jews were murdering their Christian children for matzoh. This was, to their logic, self defense. Which means that according to these three scholars, it is not antisemitism because their hate was not unwarranted. 

The 19th century racial antisemite didn't hate Jews as Jews. He hated a biological contaminant, a bloodline he believed inferior and dangerous and parasitic. This wasn't illogical, it was science. Aryans who converted to Judaism were not hated, which means that their hate was not unmitigated, so therefore they were not antisemitic, according to this scholarly, consensus definition. 

Henry Ford published lots of reasons to hate Jews. Jews controlled the world press, cornered the money supply, debauched the motion pictures, corrupted baseball, ran the bootlegging trade, engineered Bolshevism, and started the First World War to profit from it. The chapter titles of The International Jew are a catalogue of warrants. Ford did not hate Jews for being Jews. He hated them, in his mind, for what they did - conspiring to control the world through Hollywood, banks and the media.  I see no way that these three anti-Zionist scholars can categorize Henry Ford as an antisemite under their own definition.

The Ku Klux Klansman who bombed a synagogue because Jews backed Black civil rights had a reason, too — Jewish support for integration.  A reason is a warrant, and a warrant means it is no longer antisemitic.

No doubt these scholars would object — their anti-Zionism is not illogical! It makes perfect sense! As if the accusation of apartheid and genocide against Jews in Israel is more logical or truthful than the blood libel or poisoning wells. Their beliefs have far more in common with traditional antisemitism than they have differences. The medieval antisemites would have defended their accusations just as vigorously as Jewish anti-Zionists do today.

Or they would say that antisemitic conspiracy theories, like Ford's, are really hatred of Jews as Jews. But is an unfalsifiable assertion that Israel has a secret plan to murder everyone in Gaza — one that would involve hundreds of thousands of soldiers, not one of whom leaks it — really different from that Ford's conspiracy theories?

Ilan Pappe adds a wrinkle - he says that they are not against Jews, but against an ideology, and opposition to an ideology cannot be antisemitic. In that case, Martin Luther wasn't an antisemite, either. Neither was Louis Farrakhan when he called Judaism a 'gutter religion' — he was attacking an ideology, just like Pappe.  

They might claim that they are targeting conduct, not identity. But so was Ford and so was the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They would insist that they hated what Jews do, not what Jews are.

In the end, their definition allows no daylight between their hate for the Jewish state and previous hatreds of Judaism, or Jews as a people, or Jews as any collective. Their distinctions are cosmetic - every single previous type of antisemitism can and often did point to similar distinctions between their hate and their cruder predecessors.

Gordon actually shows the problem in the same paragraph. Defining the "traditional" antisemitism he regards as genuine, he names it: "hatred of Jews per se, the idea that Jews are naturally inferior, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy or in the Jewish control of capitalism." The phrase per se and the examples that follow it contradict each other. Belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy is a reason; belief in Jewish control of capitalism is a reason, just as belief that Israel has a plan to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza is a reason. The conspiracist does not hate Jews per se — he hates them because of the plot he is convinced they run, the most elaborately warranted hatred in the entire canon. Gordon defines antisemitism as warrantless and then offers, as his paradigm cases of it, two of the most reasoned hatreds in history. The only way to hold both halves together is to apply the per se test selectively to exonerate his and condemn theirs, without being able to come up with a single cogent reason for the differences.  

A test applied selectively is not a definition. It is an alibi that has learned to dress as one.

Notice, finally, what the three of them share with the haters they would exempt. The religious antisemite tolerated Jewish apostates; the one that accused Jews of murdering children exempted the ones they were friends with. "Some of my best friends are Jewish" remains a joke for a reason. Being Jewish doesn't immunize anti-Zionists from being effectively antisemites; they are the shield wielded by the antisemites to avoid the charge. "See? She is a Holocaust survivor and she supports us!" Tokenism is real. The tradition of the tolerated Jew in an intolerant society is a very long one. 

These three scholars converged on a definition of antisemitism that covers almost no one. They had to, because every other definition shows that their beliefs are just the latest in the long list of variants of Jew hatred. They set out to define themselves out of antisemitism. They could only do it by defining almost all of antisemitism out with them.

(h/t Jill)

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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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06/04 Links Pt2: J Street Vindicates Its Critics Once Again; Thank You For Being Decent?; Berlin to rename section of street after Yad Vashem

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Don't Rush to Blame Israel's Leader for Attacks on Jews in the Diaspora

A sizeable number of British Jews are responding to the current tsunami of antisemitism by blame other Jews. To be precise, one specific Jew. They blame Benjamin Netanyahu. If only he wasn't prime minister, they say, the hatred would fade away. Seriously? You don't have to be a fan of Netanyahu to see how spectacularly and dangerously wrong-headed this is.

Security officials tell us that the Iranian regime is behind the attacks on British Jews, with Iranian cells in Britain posing an acute terrorist threat. Much incitement against Israel and Jews has been generated by the inflammatory hate marches since the atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 - marches organized by Iran, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams incite murderous hatred towards Jews in British mosques. Was any of that Netanyahu's fault?

His critics claim he prolonged the war in Gaza in his own interests. But his war aims - to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas and return all the hostages - were shared by the vast majority of Israelis. Are these critics really so ignorant of the terrible threat Iran posed to Israel through its proxy seven-front "ring of fire"? Are they really unaware of the genocidal hatred of Jews held by so many Palestinians?

To hold Netanyahu responsible for the onslaught on Israel and the Jewish people is not just warped and perverse. It's also cowardly and despicable. Blaming the victims like this is not only disgusting, it's also a weapon in the armory of those who want Israel and the Jews destroyed. For shame.

Seth Mandel: J Street Vindicates Its Critics Once Again

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter touched off a row within the Israel-focused Jewish political groups in America two weeks ago by describing the left-wing J Street lobby as a “cancer within the Jewish community.”

He was referring more broadly to a particular trend of American Jews going beyond self-criticism and into territory in which they seek to serve as human shields for anti-Zionists who delegitimize Israel. Nonetheless, it was inflammatory phrasing and Leiter soon toned down his rhetoric while expanding his critique of the progressive group.

Enabling an arms embargo against the Jewish state while at war, he said, isn’t “pro-Israel,” nor was the group’s amplification of Nick Kristof’s now-infamous dog-rape blood libel.

This spurred a brief debate over whether J Street is, as it claims to be, “pro-Israel.”

Meanwhile yesterday J Street announced it would oppose a section of the new U.S. defense bill that would increase military-to-military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel, which is being debated in Congress today.

And that perfectly sums up why it’s so absurd for anyone to claim J Street is pro-Israel. Not because of one position on one bill or one vote, but because it was an example of what J Street does. And an organization is what it does.

Seth Mandel: The Threat of Jean-Luc Melenchon

While there will no doubt be concern about the opportunity that would open for a nationalist right-wing president, Melenchon isn’t less extreme in his own politics. Here’s what he said about Israel and Lebanon this week on social media, flagged by the Algemeiner:

“Israel is invading and annexing all of southern Lebanon. Netanyahu has raised his flag over Beaufort Castle. This French name should remind us of the thousand-year history that binds us to Lebanon. We owe the Lebanese people aid, solidarity, and support in the face of genocidal forces.”

He added: “The aircraft carrier would serve as a more useful symbol in the Mediterranean than in the Strait of Hormuz, to remind Netanyahu that his interference in our elections and his invasions of our allies’ territories are viewed as threats by the French. The UN Security Council must condemn Israel and organize the withdrawal of its forces from the occupied territory.”

So Melenchon believes Lebanon is still a French colony, essentially—that Israel’s seizing of the castle is an act of war against France. Then he accuses Netanyahu of interfering in French elections, suggesting that too is an act of war.

But the last part may be the most deranged. Israel took South Lebanon from Hezbollah, not the Lebanese army. Hezbollah is an Iranian occupation force. Why isn’t Iran’s occupation of South Lebanon viewed as a threat to France? Because when he talks about “invasions of our allies’ territory,” the ally is apparently imperial Iran.

If it sounds crazy to think Melenchon sees Iran as an ally against Israel, it shouldn’t. The Western left has been marching for three years explicitly cheering Hezbollah and Iran. In fact, it’s been cheering loudest for Hamas, the Iranian satrapy that carried out the savage murder spree of October 7, 2023. Hamas recorded its exploits on that day, and admitted to some of the worst of the crimes not caught on camera. If Melenchon’s ideological base can celebrate the Iranian militia carrying out a massive campaign of sexual torture and child murder, why wouldn’t Melenchon also see Iran as the good guy in this fight?

This is something the West needs to grapple with before it gets completely out of hand. It is not that the European left, along with its acolytes in the U.S., want the end of war in the Middle East. It’s that they want a different war—one that pits Western militaries against Israel and fights alongside Iran.

That obviously won’t happen—now. But the desire to reorganize the alliance around Iran and its associated “resistance” movements is there. And it should be a five-alarm fire in any corner of Europe that has retained its sanity.

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06/04 Links Pt1: The UN is being used as a weapon against the West; Hamas Documents Reveal the Real October 7 Plan; Netanyahu: "I'd Rather Get a Bad Editorial in the Western Press than a Positive Obituary"

From Ian:

The UN is being used as a weapon against the West

The systemic rot extends far beyond the rapporteurs (and there are many more instances in the report). Let’s not forget that Iran was handed oversight of UN women’s rights, while China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia control the committee that decides which human-rights groups get access to the UN. And then there is UNRWA – the UN’s refugee agency, some of whose staff participated in the 7 October massacre.

The UN’s obsession with Israel seems to be getting more deranged by the day. Recently, it placed Israel on its blacklist of countries and parties that used sexual violence as a weapon of war. So Israel, a liberal democracy, now sits on the same list as Hamas – whose 7 October atrocities included systematic rape and sexual torture – and ISIS. The situation could hardly be any more absurd.

UN Watch calls for ‘major reform’. I understand the instinct, but you cannot reform a rotting corpse. The problem is that the UN continually hands influence to regimes that abuse human rights most egregiously, granting authoritarian propaganda a veneer of legitimacy. Every time Western governments treat UN reports as serious documents – or allow tyrants control of key councils without objection – they signal to the world that this system has credibility. It doesn’t.

The UN has become one of the most dangerous instruments in modern geopolitics. Authoritarian regimes are using the UN’s prestige to normalise their behavior, conceal their crimes and peddle anti-Western propaganda. It should terrify all of us that the world’s most trusted watchdog has been successfully leveraged as a PR firm for tyrants.

The time for decisive action is now. One way for democracies to reclaim control is by freezing funding, forcing audits, and purging compromised staff who are actively on the payroll of hostile regimes.

The UN was built to protect civilisation. It is now being used as a weapon against it. Going along with the charade only plays into the hands of our enemies.

Netanyahu: "I'd Rather Get a Bad Editorial in the Western Press than a Positive Obituary"

Asked about his relationship with President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday: "We agree on the main things. We want to get the nuclear program in Iran finished. We want to make sure that Iran doesn't pose a threat to Israel, to the Middle East, to America, that it doesn't develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, not only to Israel and to every capital in Europe, but to every city in the United States. That's our common goal. That's what we set out to do."

"Sometimes, as in the best of families, you have these tactical disagreements. We always find a way to work them out, and we do so as great friends. We can disagree in the morning, and by the afternoon we have common actions....He's been the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, and he respects me. I respect him. We always find a way to work out our differences."

"I think he understands that Lebanon has been taken hostage by Hizbullah....It's an Iranian proxy that...uses Lebanon as a platform to launch terror missiles into our cities, to launch killer drones against our civilians. So if we want to save Lebanon, if we want to get a Lebanese-Israeli peace, as I do, we have to disarm Hizbullah, and we have to demilitarize Lebanon....I know that this is a goal that the President and I share."

"The escalation is from Hizbullah. We had a ceasefire, they violated it. Look, the way European leaders cater to radical Islamic minorities in their own countries is shameful because they know the truth....They know we're protecting them as well, but they don't have the guts to stand up and line up with the right thing that will save our civilization against these barbarians."

"We're faced with an enemy that wants to destroy our country, that wants to destroy your country, that wants to destroy free democracies everywhere, and spread their terrorist ilk around the globe. So, when we fight Iran and its proxies, we're not only fighting our war, we're fighting your war and, frankly, Europe's war as well."

"[Do] I have to stop protecting my people because I'm going to get a bad editorial in the Western press? The answer is no. I'd rather get a bad editorial than a positive obituary. You know, our people have died long enough, and what has changed for us is that the kind of recriminations and the kind of lies that are leveled at the Jewish people over the centuries are now being leveled at the Jewish state. There's no difference. We deliberately kill children, we perform genocide, we're poisoning the wells."

"Since the birth of the State of Israel, we're still being vilified, but when they come to slaughter us, we say no more, never again. And we fight back, targeting the terrorists, targeting the aggressors, trying to save the people, trying to save those communities, and believe me, in the Middle East, contrary to what people think, many understand that."

Khaled Abu Toameh: What Happens When Jihadists Smell Weakness

The message emerging from Hamas -- and Iran -- is unambiguous: Hamas and Iran believe they are winning.

Iran has been dictating to Washington when and with whom it will negotiate. Washington apparently never insisted upon face-to-face negotiations with Iran. Why not? By discontinuing talks with the US, Iran also succeeded in maneuvering the Trump Administration into two huge victories for the current regime. First, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out in "Iran Gets Trump to Rescue Hezbollah," US President Donald J. Trump demanded that Israel stop defending itself against attacks from another proxy of Iran: Hezbollah in Lebanon. Second, Iran -- as a result of a much-publicized shouting match between Trump and Netanyahu – masterfully created "daylight" between its two main adversaries: Israel and the United States.

Even though Iran's weapons have been decimated, the current regime, run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has reportedly been using its leisurely, ever-extending ceasefire to rebuild them. The IRGC has been calling the shots and has stood up to the "Great Satan," the US. No wonder the regime thinks it is winning.

These are not the words of a defeated terror organization. These are the words of a group that believes time is on its side.

Abu Obeida's remarks are particularly alarming because they come after nearly three years of war, the elimination of many top Hamas leaders, and countless declarations by international mediators that Hamas would eventually be removed from power.

Instead, Hamas is still standing. Hamas, like Iran, appears increasingly confident.

The "Board of Peace" was supposedly created to bring stability to the Gaza Strip, end Hamas rule, and establish a new political reality after the war.

The truth is that the "Board of Peace" has failed in its central mission. Six months after Trump's ceasefire initiative and almost three years after the October 7 atrocities, Hamas remains in power. It continues to control large parts of the Gaza Strip, maintains its military infrastructure, and openly refuses to disarm

Recent reports that the Trump Administration pressured Israel to cancel a planned strike against Hezbollah targets in Beirut's Dahiya district sent a troubling message throughout the region.

For Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, any indication of friction between the US and Israel is good news. Terrorists thrive on the perception that their adversaries are divided.

Across the Middle East, terrorist organizations constantly search for signs of weakness among their enemies. Jihadists interpret "restraint" quite differently from the way Western policymakers do. What many Western leaders describe as diplomacy, patience, or de-escalation is frequently seen by Islamists as surrender, fear or exhaustion.

The October 7 massacre was partly the result of Hamas's belief that Israel had become weak, divided, and vulnerable. Today, Hamas appears once again to be reaching similar conclusions. This expectation should deeply concern policymakers in Washington.

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Regavim won a court case to demolish an EU funded West Bank building. So the EU sanctioned them as "extremists."

The European Union sanctioned four individuals and three organizations under its Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime, calling them "extremist Israeli settlers and organisations which support them" and declaring that they "are responsible for serious and systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank." I cannot vouch for every name on the list. I do know one of them well. Regavim is an Israeli legal-advocacy NGO that takes pains to operate within international and local law, and documents its research and litigation in the open. So I read the EU's statement of reasons to learn what serious and systematic human rights abuse Regavim had committed.

The EU says that Regavim "institutes legal proceedings and lobbies for the demolition of Palestinian property." It is "responsible for multiple court proceedings." It "lobbied for the demolition of a Palestinian primary school." The human rights abuse the EU condemns, in the EU's own words, is using Israel's court system and lobbying its government. The regulation then performs its sleight of hand, asserting that "through its activities" Regavim "plays an instrumental role in facilitating and encouraging coercive acts that aim to destroy Palestinian property." Regavim files petitions; a court decides; the state enforces. The "coercive acts" are court rulings and demolition orders issued by the State of Israel. The EU sanctions the petitioner for the verdict. If the EU is stating that Israel's respected High Court is really an extremist settler organization, it should sanction it. 

The "extremist" label deserves the same scrutiny as the charges, because I have watched Regavim work in a different context.  In 2013 the organization took me through the Negev, where it documents the same illegal-construction problem among Bedouin communities, and I filmed what they showed me. What I heard from them was not bigotry. Regavim acknowledged that the Bedouin had been treated badly by Israel in the decades after 1948, insisted that any solution had to give them a fair alternative, and argued that the state would have to spend serious money to provide it. Regavim's actual position is that the law should apply evenly and that the people affected by it deserve a just result. This is not how an extremist settler group would act. The EU is painting them as anti-Arab fanatics; the truth is quite the opposite. 

The regulation singles out  one case. Regavim petitioned over an EU-funded school at Jubbet adh-Dhib, near Bethlehem. An Israeli court found the structure had been built without a permit and posed a safety hazard to the children inside it, and COGAT imposed a deadline to vacate following the court's order. Regavim's role began and ended with the petition. The party that built without a permit was the European Union, and the party that ruled the construction unlawful was an Israeli court applying Israeli planning law. The EU has sanctioned the organization that brought the violation to the court's attention, while describing its own unpermitted construction as the injured party. Regavim's spokeswoman Naomi Linder Kahn put it precisely: the group's crime "involves petitioning to the courts against a dangerous, illegal, EU-funded school built on Israeli state land in a national historic site."

Strip out the rhetoric, and the only problem the EU has with Regavim is that it disagrees with its political opinions and legal advocacy. The EU has apparently forgotten its own Charter of Fundamental Rights, which guarantees everyone "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority." Sanctions are interference by public authority, and the EU has imposed them on an organization for its opinions and its lawful actions. If anyone is violating fundamental rights in this case, it is the EU, which has frozen a group's assets and barred its director from travel because it disagrees with the group's politics. The list of charges contains nothing illegal, because there is nothing illegal to charge. Regavim holds the position that Jews have a right to their ancestral land and that the law should be upheld to that end, and it has defended existing Israeli law in Israeli courts.

And guess where that law came from?

The entire international case against Israeli construction in Area C rests on a single foundation: that Israel is the belligerent occupier in the West Bank. Israel considers the territory disputed, but it agrees to adhere to the human rights portions of the laws of occupation in its administration of Area C. The law of occupation in the Hague Regulations Article 43 obligates the occupant to respect "the laws in force in the country" unless absolutely prevented. The occupier administers the territory under the legal order it inherited. In Area C, that order is the planning regime the EU's own allies describe in detail: under the 1966 Jordanian Planning Law, still in force in the West Bank, virtually any construction requires a permit issued in line with an approved scheme, and that scheme descends from Regional Outline Plans the British Mandate approved in the 1940s. When Israel took the territory in 1967, it took over the planning powers that the Jordanian law already conferred. Enforcing a permit requirement that predates the occupation by decades is the occupier doing exactly what Article 43 commands. This is international law.

The EU knows this regime applies to its own projects, because the UN says so plainly. Any Area C construction — and OCHA's enumeration names "a private home, an animal shelter or a donor-funded infrastructure project" — still requires approval from the Israeli Civil Administration, because the planning transfer to the Palestinian Authority that the Interim Agreement envisioned was never carried out. The EU builds anyway, without the permits the law in force requires, and then declares the result legal. A structure erected without a permit is unlawful under the precise legal order that occupation status keeps alive. The EU cannot invoke "this is occupied territory" to delegitimize one population's building and then fund the other population's building in open defiance of the planning law that occupation status itself preserves.

There is room for honest argument about how Israel applies the law, hardly ever approving Arab construction in Area C. But that is a problem with the application of the law, not the law itself.  The permit requirement itself is inherited law, not Israeli invention, and a building put up without a permit is illegal by the standard the EU insists governs the land. The EU's quarrel is not that Israel enforces a foreign legal order; it is that Israel enforces it against construction the EU paid for.

The low approval rate also reflects what Area C was built to be. Oslo II sorted the dense Palestinian population into Areas A and B, the urban and village zones where roughly 95 percent of West Bank Palestinians live, and left Area C as the strategic remainder: the settlements, the main roads, the Jordan Valley, the open land whose disposition the parties deferred to final-status talks. A zone defined in 1995 as the sparsely populated reserve, explicitly not the place where the Palestinian population was settled, will naturally generate a high rejection rate when permits are sought to build into it. Both sides understand the stakes. PASSIA states openly that Israel's aim in Area C is to push Palestinians toward A and B, and INSS records that Palestinians have run an organized legal campaign that has won authorization for 113 previously unauthorized villages — a build-first, litigate-later strategy rather than scattered individual need. Area C is contested strategic space whose population balance is being fought over before any negotiation, which is precisely the contest the EU funds on one side and sanctions on the other. The burden is not Palestinian alone: Jewish residents face their own thicket of permitting and legal review for construction and expansion, which is what one would expect of a planning regime applied across a disputed zone rather than one rigged in their favor.

The hypocrisy is stark. Regavim, Amana, and Nachala are accused, in the EU regulation's own language, of building or facilitating outposts "to create facts on the ground," of working to alter the territorial and demographic reality before any final-status agreement, of making it harder for the rival population to remain. This is exactly what the EU is doing on the other side! I took a tour with Regavim a decade ago and saw the EU's own program with my own eyes: clusters of structures thrown up across Area C without permits, flying the EU flag and bearing the words "Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection," positioned in deliberate lines across valleys to block Jewish communities from forming, like stones in a game of Go. Residents were brought in from Areas A and B to populate villages where none had stood. I saw hoses running off to steal water from neighboring Israeli towns. That was ten years ago, and the trajectory was already unmistakable; the structures have only multiplied since, because the program is continuous and the EU has never hidden it. Brussels funds the building, brands it, and describes its purpose in the same terms the regulation now treats as a human rights crime when the builders are Jewish.

The conduct the EU finances and the conduct the EU condemns are the same conduct: unpermitted construction in Area C, undertaken to win the territorial contest before negotiations, by moving a population in. The EU has drafted a definition of the offense that indicts its own program word for word. The only variable that decides whether Brussels calls it "humanitarian aid" or "serious human rights abuse" is which population holds the trowel. A standard that condemns one party while the accuser performs the identical act is not a legal standard; it is a pervasion of the entire concept of equal standing under the law.

The EU's fallback is that this construction qualifies as humanitarian assistance that an occupied population may receive regardless of domestic permit law. The argument fails on the EU's own evidence. Humanitarian assistance under international humanitarian law is relief for a population in need, not permanent construction engineered to alter territorial control. The EU's description of the Israeli mirror-conduct — facts on the ground, contiguity, frustrating the other side's claims — is an admission that the purpose of such building is political and territorial rather than humanitarian. Brussels has characterized the activity accurately when Jews do it and mislabeled the same activity when it does it.

Return now to the principle the EU claims to live by, because the contradiction is not abstract. The EU describes human rights defenders — and its own list of them names "members of human rights NGOs, academics, lawyers" — as "natural and indispensable allies," and its Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders commit EU missions worldwide to oppose exactly the tools the EU has now reached for: "administrative and judicial harassment," "smear campaigns, travel bans, criminalisation, stigmatisation." When a foreign government freezes the assets of a research-and-litigation NGO and bans its director from travel because it dislikes the NGO's cause, the EU calls that repression and sends a démarche. When the EU does it to an Israeli NGO, it calls it a human rights sanction. The behavior the EU condemns abroad is the behavior it has adopted here, against an organization whose work — researching land use, publishing findings, filing petitions in a democratic state's courts — is the textbook profile of the defenders the EU vows to protect everywhere else.

Underneath the legal packaging lies a claim with no source in law: that Area C is already Palestinian sovereign territory, so that Israel's permit regime is a foreign imposition and EU construction needs no one's permission. The status of Area C is the question the Oslo framework deferred to final-status negotiations, and no treaty, ruling, or resolution has settled it. There is no moment in history where control of Area C was legally (or otherwise) transferred to the Palestinian Authority. The EU has decided the question by assertion, and then by funding the facts and punishing the litigants who challenged them in court.  

A European Union that built its identity on the promise that lawful opinion is beyond the reach of state punishment has now demonstrated, in a binding legal act, the precise conditions under which it will break that promise: when the opinion is inconvenient and the person holding it is Israeli.

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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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06/03 Links Pt2: The Jew-hating Democratic party is a monster created by Barack Obama; Israel’s fairweather friends are fuelling anti-Semitism; The Barghouti Myth

From Ian:

Behind today’s radical, Jew-hating Democratic party is a monster created by Barack Obama

Two hundred and ten years ago this summer, a 19-year-old woman named Mary Shelley, bored one stormy afternoon, decided to write the scariest story ever told.

It was a tale of a brilliant and arrogant man who wanted to change the world but ended up creating a monster. She named him Barack Obama.

All right, she named him Dr. Frankenstein. But had the great author been around to witness Adam Hamawy win the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, she would’ve understood right away that she was looking at a familiar tale of hubris, malice and ghouls on the loose.

Like Shelley’s mad physician, Barack Obama, too, had an appetite for re-ordering the natural world. He took Bill Clinton’s party — one that allowed candidates in some parts of the country to be pro-gun and pro-life and still consider themselves Democrats in good standing — strapped it to the slab and shocked it with a lightning bolt of radicalism.

The creature that emerged from the experiment no longer talked about fiscal responsibility and government reform. It howled instead about opening our borders, legalizing gay marriage and redefining politics as the pursuit of identity by other means.

Antisemitic alliance
Under Obama, the Democrats became a gorgeous mosaic of victimized minorities, encouraged to seek retribution for wrongs real or perceived by grabbing a pitchfork and going out in search of a conservative to blame.

For a while, it all went swimmingly. Obama built a forever campaign that encouraged everyone to give to the party — not only their money but also their loyalty. Endless chatter about “the right side of history” was designed to make it clear that unless you wholeheartedly supported whatever the president and his aides told you was proper, good and desired, you’d be transgressing against history itself.

Tech companies, universities and other institutions soon fell in line, giving us execrable phenomena like cancel culture.

We all saw the might of Obama’s creation during Donald Trump’s disastrous first term in office: At the push of a button, a democratically elected president was made to appear to be the second coming of Mussolini.

And we saw it even more clearly during Obama’s third term, conducted via another Frankenstein-like creation, the brain-dead Joe Biden.

But as every reader of Mary Shelley’s knows, eventually the monster gets loose, grows mad and wreaks havoc. Welcome to the Democratic Party of 2026.

Israel’s fairweather friends are fuelling anti-Semitism

However, in the midst of a Democratic Party where support for Israel is now a political death wish, Emanuel has had a Damascene conversion. He recently advanced the unsubstantiated and largely debunked charge that laid blame on Israel for Palestinian starvation during the Gaza War. On American television, he recently said: ‘The days of taxpayers subsidising Israel militarily, that’s over. No more financial aid.’ And referencing the current war in Iran, he said: ‘The US should never spill any blood for the state of Israel’s security.’ At one time, an interpretation of events like that would have been unimaginable coming from Emanuel.

His counterpart in the UK is Zack Polanski, leader of the surging Green Party of England and Wales, a feature of which is barely concealed contempt for Israel and Jews. In a fawning interview in the Guardian (where else?) last year, Polanski said he grew up in ‘a very Zionist household, raised to really believe that Israel was the centre of everything and must be defended at all costs’. He unabashedly admits that this is ‘very different to my politics now’.

That is an understatement, to say the least. Polanski has excoriated Israel for its response to the 7 October massacre, including accusing it of genocide. Asked by a journalist in April over the escalating, and in some cases lethal, attacks on Jews in England, Polanski delivered an equivocating response: ‘There’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither is acceptable.’ While the public anticipates that conversation, the fortunes of the Green Party continue to rise.

The ostensible reason that Emanuel and Polanski give for their new pandering is that ‘Israel has changed’ since 1948. This is hardly a revelation on the order of the discovery of gravity or the introduction of quantum mechanics. Of course Israel has changed; what country has not changed over the past eight decades? The question neither of these political creatures has asked is why Israel has changed.

The military threat from Iran and its proxies is exponentially greater than ever before, and the insidious international propaganda campaign is even more intense – abetted by former supporters like the United Nations. Israel has been forced to respond in ways not always laudable, but rather than acknowledge this and the fact that Israel remains a beacon of moral leadership and a defender of the values the West was built on, Emanuel and Polanski have committed to cutting the cloth of their beliefs to the odious fashions of the day.

So who is worse, genuine anti-Semites, or these sycophantic poseurs looking to advance their political standing?

At least you know where you stand with real anti-Semites. Some may be cunning, some may be fools and many may just enjoy Nazi cosplaying, but the dangerous ones usually make their intentions known in word, if not in deed.

Political fakirs like Emanuel and Polanski come off as more acceptable, but do not doubt the lasting damage they can do by legitimising anti-Semitism in the larger polity. Emanuel will almost certainly never become president of the United States, but he lends credibility to the expanding anti-Semitic wing of the Democratic Party and to some extent the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party. Polanski has a similarly slim chance of becoming prime minister of the UK, but he gives a faint whiff of respectability to the Islamo-fascist wing of the Green Party.

The real anti-Semites deserve all the contempt the world can muster. But craven opportunists like Zack Polanski and Rahm Emanuel are also beneath contempt. History will not be kind to them for breathing life into this foul bigotry, however they might try to justify it.

From Anne Frank to anti-Jewish Sanctioning: The Netherlands' Betrayal of Israel

What was once known as the "Country of Anne Frank," a nation that had learned from its own role in the Holocaust... and quietly delivered critical military aid during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, now leads the charge at the EU in Brussels to punish the Jewish state for the apparent crime of Jewish survival....

The Jetten government coalition... has now also taken the lead in pushing sanctions against Israel....

The Dutch pro-Israel parties -- Geert Wilders' PVV, BBB, JA21, ChristenUnie, and the Christian-Zionist SGP -- were deliberately excluded from the governing coalition.

The Jetten minority government therefore governs on parliamentary life support from the very parties that despise Israel.

The Dutch betrayal mirrors a broader European sickness. Mass immigration from Muslim countries has imported a virulent strain of antisemitism that now crosses all political boundaries. Politicians realize only the electoral ramifications: Jewish populations are dwindling and Muslim populations are exploding. Post-Holocaust guilt, once a brake on Jew-hatred, has been inverted: many of the descendants of the perpetrators and bystanders now project their unresolved shame onto the surviving Jews and their state. The "oppressed" Palestinian has replaced the oppressed Jew as the object of European moral narcissism. The Europeans, who never forgave the Jews for Auschwitz, are finally free of guilt.

Europe, which cannot, or does not wish to, protect its own Jewish communities from daily harassment and assault, now presumes to dictate to Jews where they may and may not live in the Land of Israel.

The hypocrisy and moral rot are bottomless. It was Europeans who exiled the Jews from their heritage and cradle of civilization. It was Europeans who subjected "their" Jews to more than a millennium of discrimination, expulsions, mass deportations, and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. It was Europeans as well, who, at the Evian Conference of 1938, refused to open their doors to Jews fleeing Hitler. It was the British who issued the 1939 White Paper without a single protest from the other European democracies, and thereby slamming shut the gates of Palestine as a place of refuge as the extermination of the Jews began. It was Europeans (Polish, British, and Dutch) who devised the "Madagascar Plan" to deport Europe's Jews to a remote and uninhabitable island where they would surely perish.

Yet the Jews do not forget where they came from. Jews have lived in the Land of Israel continuously for millennia; and many of the descendants who had been forcibly dispersed, returned.

It is precisely this return that triggers such fury. Dutch authorities and many Dutch politicians now eagerly repeat the modern blood libel of "settler violence," -- all while ignoring the unrelenting terrorism committed by Arabs against the Jews of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel for more than a century until today.

Established and thriving Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods, and infrastructure exist in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Golan. These "facts on the ground" will most certainly remain in the future and likely grow into a home for hundreds of thousands of Jews now planning to leave a Europe that is collapsing as we speak. Israel will celebrate its restoration in the Land of Israel long after the Netherlands will have been destroyed by the Muslim and African invasions it invited in, and the remnants of what was once a great and moral country have returned to their natural state: a swamp.

Amsterdam Holocaust Museum cancels antisemitism conference

The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam has canceled a scheduled conference on antisemitism at universities, which was to be held at the museum.

The event, organized by a conservative Dutch politician and member of the European Parliament, was moved to another location last week and took place at a church instead.

“A Holocaust museum is the best place to speak about antisemitism, so I was surprised by the cancellation,” MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen of the Reformed Political Party (SGP) told JNS on Tuesday. “That’s the place to be.”

He said he was informed by the museum’s director that a demonstration was planned in front of the museum against the event and that the director did not want graffiti on the walls shortly before a visit by the Dutch King and the German president.

The staunchly pro-Israel lawmaker who initiated the conference said that about 100 participants ended up attending the advertised event, which the anti-Israel activists had condemned and sought to disrupt.

The Holocaust museum said Wednesday that the antisemitism conference was canceled at its premises because it had become politicized.

“We will not allow the National Holocaust Museum to become the focal point of a political dispute in the context of a rental event,” the Museum’s general director Emile Schrijver said in a written statement. “Protecting the integrity of the National Holocaust Museum should not be a political position; it is our core mandate and one we take seriously.”

The museum’s decision was strongly condemned by the European office of the Israel Allies Foundation, which spearheads faith-based diplomacy around the globe.

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06/03 Links Pt1: U.S. Military ‘Aid’ to Israel Is Over. Will Anyone Notice?; Trump delivered a military victory over Iran. Now he’s negotiating it away

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: U.S. Military ‘Aid’ to Israel Is Over. Will Anyone Notice?

In reality, Israel was buying the weapons and other supplies it needed, so this argument was always disingenuous. But it enabled some lawmakers to argue that they were not against Israel’s right to exist or to defend itself while also calling for a break in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This is in contrast to folks like outgoing Republican Rep. Tom Massie, who makes wild insinuations about Americans subsidizing Israeli abortions, and Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib and other members of the “Squad,” who simply yell about the Jewish state’s supposed bloodthirst. Meanwhile, the long-debunked “genocide” lie has gone mainstream in Democratic circles, furthering a trend that could make it virtually impossible for a future Democratic administration to rework the U.S.-Israel relationship in any remotely productive way.

Figures like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene continue to dishonestly frame the aid issue as a cudgel against Israel and against Trump. Eliminating this talking point without eliminating the aid, then, has given Trump reason to pursue a restructuring under his own watch.

Netanyahu has long felt similarly, but he also has supported restructuring the aid in a way that doesn’t hamstring Israeli leaders during wartime or stifle domestic Israeli production at a time when the state needs a larger degree of independence from the whims of Western politicians easily bullied by Hamasnik constituents armed with Iranian talking points. As Netanyahu told CBS last month, “let’s start now and do it over the next decade, over the next 10 years, but I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.”

And it starts now, with Stutzman’s resolution. The details will come later, but the general framework will put more emphasis on trade and mutual cooperation on various projects. That will also likely insulate much of it from sabotage by anti-Israel members of Congress at a time when Democrats are nominating the most extreme anti-Zionist crop of candidates in memory.

The question now becomes: Will this satisfy all those who claim that American subsidy is the problem with Israel aid? Or will they find other reasons to bash the plan and move the goalposts in their continuing quest to undo America’s alliances?

David Harsanyi: Trump delivered a military victory over Iran. Now he’s negotiating it away

For weeks now, we’ve been hearing that the United States and Iran are on the verge of a deal in which the clerics will agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire continuation that would allow for more negotiations over the fate of nuclear weapons.

We’ve now been negotiating over the parameters of more negotiations longer than the entire military operation lasted.

The question is, why is the U.S., after delivering an unprecedented military victory against the regime, allowing the mullahs to make demands as if they were on equal footing? And why does President Donald Trump keep giving in to those demands?

We don’t need a deal with Iran. We need the regime to surrender or collapse. If the president isn’t willing to accomplish that goal, walking away would be far preferable to striking another Barack Obama-esque deal, which seems to be where we’re headed. Not only would such a deal end up empowering clerics to restart their nuclear weapons program, retrench, and rearm, but it would restrain Israel and the Gulf States from acting.

The fact that Democrats and isolationists have successfully demoralized the American public doesn’t change the fact that U.S. and Israel decapitated leadership and institutional knowledge within the Islamic regime, set back its nuclear program, vastly degraded its ballistic missile capabilities, and stunted its ability to prop up proxy militias.

Iran will never be in a weaker position. We will never have more leverage. If clerics refuse to strike a suitable deal while their economy is being pounded by a U.S. blockade, what in the history of the regime makes anyone believe they’ll be more amenable when given an economic lifeline?

Though you never know what our mercurial president will do tomorrow, right now it feels like he’s being hoodwinked. The Iranian strategy for survival has always been clear. They’ve employed the same delaying tactics through four administrations.

In the long term, clerics believe they can eke out survival until a Democrat or “non-interventionist” Republican becomes president in 2028.

In the short term, they’re counting on the president not having the courage to resume widespread military engagement. Iran understands that American domestic patience is negatively correlated to high gas prices. They understand that Trump is under political pressure with the midterm elections coming.

This is the reason Iran keeps insisting that a narco-terrorist army in a third country be protected under any ceasefire agreement. Every time the sides are allegedly approaching an agreement, Iran instructs its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to launch missiles and drones at Israel. When Israel inevitably responds, as any nation would, the clerics break off negotiations temporarily to stretch the timeline even further.

Worse, on Monday, Trump announced that after a “very good” call with Hezbollah, a Justice Department-designated terrorist group that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, he’d convinced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off planned strikes in Beirut.

In other words, the president saved Hezbollah to placate the mullahs. So much for Netanyahu controlling the U.S. Indeed, Israel is the only country on the planet compelled by its friends to live with non-state terrorist armies on its borders.

Do the president and his advisers really believe this capitulation is going to be construed by the Revolutionary Guard as a good-faith effort? No, it will be seen as a sign of weakness and embolden it.

From Victory to Drift By Abe Greenwald

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The overarching mistake here is engaging diplomatically with Iran at all. This would be true even if the U.S. were speaking with the “right people.” Under the best circumstances, the regime sees diplomacy as an opportunity to con its interlocutors. Iran will always “talk.” Not because the regime is interested in coming to an understanding with America but because talks will, at the least, give Iran time to stave off potential U.S. action and, at best, rope American negotiators into a “deal” whose terms the regime will brazenly violate. Any announcement of “Iran talks”—ever—should be understood as “advantage, Iran.”

But, yes, it’s worse than that. Considering that the regime is aware of all the speculation about the U.S. running dangerously low on both defensive munitions and Arab support, such talks are even more perilous. Iranian leaders (wrongly or rightly) fear nothing in the way of American military strikes. They’ve decided that they can abandon even the pretense of compromise. They’re calling the shots and loving it.

I still think that Trump means it when he says that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. I just don’t know whether, going forward, he’s going to make the hard decisions necessary to win the war. I’m talking about the decision to endure the market spikes and ceaseless criticisms that would come with a long, serious, and unrelenting U.S. blockade on Iranian and Iran-related oil shipments in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. And I’m talking about what has become unthinkable in the mind of the American public: the deployment of U.S. ground troops. With each passing day, both seem less likely.

Do I still maintain that Trump did the civilized world a tremendous favor by leveling Iran’s nuclear program? Absolutely. But it must now be acknowledged that his dithering, if it continues, will introduce a whole new danger. If the only American president who’s been willing to confront Iran proves unable to finish the job, it’s party time not only for Iran but for bad actors in every corner of the globe.

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Mark Carney's awful speech might make antisemitism worse

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked into a Toronto synagogue with the worst antisemitism numbers in Canada's postwar history behind him, and he walked out having given a speech that manages the remarkable feat of making things worse.

He did say that more than two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada last year were aimed at a community that is one percent of the population. He did mention bullets fired at Jewish schools, firebombs at synagogues, Jewish patients harassed in hospitals, Jewish students chased out of campus common spaces, Holocaust memorials desecrated, parents weighing whether a Jewish day school is safe and observant Jews thinking twice about a kippah on the subway. This is to his credit.

Then he spent the rest of the speech making sure none of it would change.

Listen to the whole address and you will learn that Canada has an antisemitism problem without ever learning where it comes from. The hate, in Carney's telling, simply materialized. There is no October 7th in this speech. There is no anti-Zionism, no campus encampment, no "globalize the intifada," no marching mob outside a Jewish neighborhood, no name attached to a single one of the people firing the bullets and throwing the firebombs. The antisemites are like the weather — they arrive like a cold front, and the job of government is to hand out umbrellas. So that is what he offered: more money for guards and barriers, all of it already announced, plus a brand-new council whose marching orders are to study, research, collect data, and measure. 

The community has been living the data for two and a half years at its own front doors. It does not need a federal body to assess the scale of the problem. It needs the problem stopped, and on that subject Carney had nothing — no zero-tolerance standard for campuses, no commitment to prosecute, none of the 22 recommendations the Senate's own committee handed him this spring. The council that is supposed to fix this replaced the antisemitism envoy positions his government eliminated in February, contains exactly one Jewish member, and seats among its membership the lawyer who sued the University of Alberta for daring to clear an encampment. This is the body asked to defend Jews from antisemitism.

The part that should make every Zionist's stomach turn is the way he handled Israel, which is to say the way he refused to. No one can seriously deny that anti-Zionism is what fuels most of today's antisemitism. Yet Israel earned exactly one sentence in the prepared text — a note that the antisemitism guidelines still permit criticism of the Jewish state. Yay. Compare that to Justin Trudeau a year earlier, who at least said the words "no one in Canada should ever be afraid to call themselves a Zionist. I am a Zionist." Carney could not bring himself to defend Israel even once.

What he did instead is worse than silence. The civic principle at the heart of the speech is that "no Canadian going about their daily life should be held responsible for the actions of any government, wherever they may be."  To ask that Jews not be blamed for Israel's actions is to say that Israel's actions are blameworthy, and that the only mistake the mob is making is sending the bill to the wrong address. He did not defend the Jewish state against the libel. He accepted the libel and pleaded for Canadian Jews to be spared the consequences. 

The same surrender runs through his theory of where the hatred came from. Antisemitism, he suggested, is a foreign quarrel that immigrants must leave behind at the dock — "you leave behind your wars and your animosities" — and the covenant "requires that we do not transpose foreign conflicts onto each other." So the problem is not the ideology that teaches that the Jewish state is a colonial crime to be resisted by any means. The problem is that some people brought a faraway argument to Canada, and the solution is for everyone to calm down about a distant war. That diagnosis lands as squarely on the Jew who loves Israel as on the Arab who hates it. 

This is what it looks like when a leader seems to say every right word and means none of the consequences. Carney named the wounds and protected the people inflicting them by refusing to name them. He promised Jews safety and built it on the demand that they distance themselves from the one country on earth that exists to keep them safe. 

How, in the end, are Jews any safer? Outside of more security in some Jewish spaces, there was nothing said to fight antisemitism to begin with. 

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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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06/02 Links Pt2: Cities Without Jews; EU Sanctions Israel, Welcomes Taliban; SJP praised last year’s antisemitic firebombing

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Cities Without Jews

Once, while researching the development of Israel’s economy, I came across an incredible statistic. Between the late 1980s and 1996, during which somewhere around 800,000 Soviet and Russian Jews came to Israel, the Jewish state’s unemployment rate actually dropped. That is, Israel absorbed an immigration explosion that increased its population by about 15 percent so smoothly that unemployment actually went down.

How? Well, broad economic trends tend to be driven by multiple factors, but one of them surely was that Israel benefited greatly from Russia’s Jewish brain drain. (It turns out the real “Jewish Problem” is not having enough Jews.)

It is the intangible part of population shifts, as Americans—also citizens of a country blessed by immigration waves—well know.

This is what came to mind when I read the story in the Montreal Gazette about one of Canada’s leading doctors leaving the country for the U.S., largely over anti-Semitism, and decamping to Atlanta. Dr. Emmanuel Moss is the chief of cardiac surgery at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is also, according to the website of McGill University, where Moss directs the cardiac surgery residency training program, “one of the only surgeons in Canada routinely performing both robotic mitral valve and coronary bypass surgeries.” The president of Quebec’s association of cardiothoracic surgeons said that Moss is “ultra-specialized in robotic surgery” and “in the prime of his career.”

Canada’s loss, our gain.

There’s more to the significance of this than one man’s life-saving talent, of course. And to be fair, anti-Semitism isn’t the only reason Moss was reportedly unhappy. He has been warning of the hospital system’s staffing and equipment shortfalls. But, as noted in the piece, those aren’t new problems. Anti-Semitism, as one source put it, has reached a tipping point: “The problems with the health system have existed for years, and [Moss] could have left at any time before. So what it comes down to is the antisemitism and the feeling that this (city) has become an increasingly dangerous or unrecognizable place to live.”

We can zoom out several ways here. First, I’ve written here at length about Canada’s anti-Semitism problem and the lack of initiative being taken to stop it. So it isn’t all that surprising that a certain number of Jews would leave as long as the status quo remained or worsened. What’s worth adding here is that this is Canada, our neighbor to the north, and not some far-flung post-Soviet province.

The Joyless Art of Jew-Hatred By Abe Greenwald

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Regarding the “moral” satisfaction of Jew-hating, he writes: “The antisemite does not feel like a bully. His experience is one of courage. He is exposing hidden power. Defending society. Cruelty becomes public service.”

Here’s a disturbing recent social media clip that’s especially helpful on this point. It shows a musclebound white nationalist harassing a Jewish man in Nashville a few weeks ago. He says things such as “You’re so Jewish and disgusting looking. You’re so Jewish it’s hideous” and “You’re Jewish scum. You got Israel. Go to Israel…you cross eyed Jew…look at this dysgenic Jew.” He’s not exposing or defending anything. There is no sense of public service. What you see is bullying distilled down to its very essence, the high-school locker room in the public square. The unsalvable personal insecurity of the harasser is visceral. Like all bullies, he just wants to make someone else feel as worthless as he feels about himself. To his target’s credit, it didn’t work.

As for the “entertainment” factor, Pittinsky writes, “These pleasures—revelation, belonging, moral certainty—are not merely felt. They are performed. Antisemitism has always understood spectacle. During Crusader massacres along the Rhine, mobs formed through religious processions full of hymns, banners, and ecstatic collective emotion. Later centuries would perfect the form with burning Judas effigies, parades, costumes, cheering crowds. Antisemitism survives not merely as doctrine but as collective entertainment.”

I fear Pittinsky is mistaking frenzy for entertainment. Mobs of the like-minded—whether hateful or religious or merely delinquent—feed on group hysteria to give their pursuits a kind of cheap transcendence. The spectacle isn’t entertainment. It’s a frantic attempt at manufacturing enthusiasm.

Anti-Semites hate Jews not because it’s joyful to hate Jews. They hate Jews because their own lives are joyless. And this is important for Jews to remember because it accounts for the depths of the anti-Semite’s depravity. They’re not celebrating anything, and we shouldn’t view their obsession as a dark party theme. They’re taking out their assorted failures on us. As I’ve said before, anti-Semitism is chicken soup for losers. So long as we recognize that, anti-Semites will never win.

Gerald M. Steinberg: Doctors Without Borders: Promoting Hate Through Medicine

[L]ike other powerful groups in the NGO industry, MSF has become a major platform for political and ideological propaganda campaigns that often accompany wars and terror atrocities.

A major new report by the NGO Monitor research institute... documents how MSF has been transformed from a medical humanitarian organization into one of the most aggressive institutional promoters of anti-Israel messaging, most notably the canard that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

This is far from the only example of MSF's participation in demonization campaigns that are entirely inconsistent with the humanitarian agenda.

On October 7, while Hamas terrorists were still murdering and raping civilians in Israel, dragging hostages into Gaza, and live-streaming their "conquests," MSF officials were accusing Israel of war crimes.

Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, an MSF-affiliated anti-Israel activist, participated in a grotesque press conference organized by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, to promote the libel.

In a massive understatement, the text acknowledged that MSF lacked the legal expertise to determine genocidal intent – the central element of the crime under international law. But that disclaimer did not stop the organization from running with the libel. At least 272 times.

In parallel, MSF was deafeningly silent on Hamas' real war crimes: embedding of military (terrorist) infrastructure in hospitals (documented by NGO Monitor), schools, and civilian neighborhoods; the theft of humanitarian aid; and the continued holding of Israeli civilian hostages. Across MSF's international social media feeds, hostages were scarcely mentioned – appearing as the primary subject of only three posts out of hundreds.

By embracing false and defamatory accusations, Doctors Without Borders and all who are associated with this NGO have undermined fundamental moral and humanitarian values. They have traded white coats and medical missions for hate slogans and lies.

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06/02 Links Pt1: Israel is fighting for its survival in Lebanon; If It’s Genocide, Why Can It Wait Until 2029?; Iran targets Kuwait and Bahrain as US strikes island in Hormuz

From Ian:

Michael Doran: This Is How the Iran War Ends

In the optimistic scenario, both stages of the plan come to fruition. An extendable MOU is signed in the coming days, reopening the Strait of Hormuz under international monitoring, easing immediate military tensions and allowing oil to flow normally through the Gulf. Iran receives limited, reversible economic relief. Economic desperation proves decisive. The IRGC concludes that partial accommodation is preferable to prolonged isolation and the risk of renewed American strikes. Serious negotiations follow on the nuclear file. Iran makes meaningful concessions on removing the “nuclear dust.”

The odds of this happening are slim. All available information suggests that the men now running Iran are less flexible than even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was. But the odds are not zero. The senior administration official told me that the Iranian regime is “fractured and broken.” The current emergency footing allows the IRGC to avoid responsibility for the mess it has made. Some administration officials hope the MOU will bring the regime to “the point at which they have to govern this broken country,” intensifying domestic pressure over inflation, corruption, and stagnation.

At the same time, officials remain clear-eyed that the IRGC may continue to ride roughshod over the Iranian people and refuse to budge on the nuclear program. Under those conditions, regional alignment against Tehran would deepen further.

In the pessimistic scenario, the first-stage MOU moves forward and the Strait of Hormuz reopens, but the second-stage negotiations over the nuclear remnants quickly bog down. Delay, mistrust, and tactical maneuvering place the negotiations on a road to nowhere, consistent with the pattern of all previous U.S.-Iran nuclear talks.

Even in this outcome, the United States would still achieve a significant strategic gain. The more relevant historical comparison is the post-1991 containment of Saddam Hussein. A weakened, sanctioned regime remained in prolonged friction with a U.S.-led coalition that retained escalation dominance and overwhelming military superiority. The military campaign would give way to a prolonged contest of pressure, deterrence, and attrition. But Iran now is substantially poorer, more isolated, and further from a nuclear breakout than before the war began. The U.S. and Israel will maintain close monitoring of any remaining nuclear activity and ballistic missile production, ready to react to any alarming developments.

The pessimistic scenario is not the administration’s goal but remains, in my view, the more likely outcome. Republican hawks will have far more influence over this process if they work within the president’s framework rather than reflexively opposing it.

Trump has already demonstrated, through action rather than rhetoric, that he is not Barack Obama. He introduced into these negotiations the element most absent from the Obama years: a credible and demonstrated willingness to use overwhelming military force against the Iranian regime.

His allies, therefore, will strengthen their position by holding the administration to its own calibrated “no dust, no dollars” standard. Three demands immediately come to the fore.

First, significant sanctions relief or direct economic benefits for Tehran must come only in exchange for concrete, verifiable concessions, not merely for participating in a diplomatic process. The administration’s leverage derives from economic pressure backed by military dominance. Dealing away that leverage prematurely would indeed repeat a core error of the Obama approach.

Second, the administration must detach Hezbollah and Lebanon from the nuclear negotiations. Tehran will seek to transform every regional file into a bargaining chip in order to preserve and legitimize its network of proxies. Washington gains nothing by reinforcing the link between the Iranian nuclear file and Hezbollah’s position inside Lebanon.

Third, the military threat must remain visible and credible throughout the negotiations. Tehran entered these talks only after suffering severe military and economic blows. The regime’s negotiating position will harden immediately if it concludes that diplomacy has neutralized the possibility of renewed force. Escalation dominance, not goodwill, remains the foundation of American leverage.

In the coming phase of the conflict, time favors the side that maintains pressure. By emphasizing leverage, verification, and long-term containment rather than maximalist demands for unconditional victory, supporters of the administration can strengthen the president’s hand while preserving the strategic gains achieved by the war.

Iran Embraces a Forever War

One reason why Iran won't make real peace is that it has concluded that conflict is preferable to diplomacy. The war, after all, seems to be helping Tehran increase its international power. By striking Arab states that host American bases, Iran has succeeded in driving a wedge between U.S. officials and their Persian Gulf partners, who desperately want a lasting settlement. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, it has forced countries around the planet to acknowledge its power and negotiate over the fate of their ships.

The Islamic Republic's strategy, then, is not merely to survive and outlast the U.S. It is not even really trying to resolve its disputes with Washington. Instead, it wants to fundamentally alter how Tehran is dealt with by the U.S., its allies, and the wider world. It aspires to be a pole in a multipolar order, and it believes the war is helping it achieve that goal.

The Islamic Republic has quickly gained leverage. Arab countries, fearing economic calamity, have pushed the U.S. to seek peace. Asian countries, in desperate need of Persian Gulf oil and gas, have pleaded with Iran to offer their ships safe passage.

Even European leaders have struck a more accommodating tone. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz - who previously praised Israel for doing "our dirty work" against Iran - has stated that Tehran has "humiliated" Washington. Multiple European officials have opened channels with their Iranian counterparts. Norway's deputy foreign minister even visited Tehran.

The Islamic Republic also sees the war as helpful because, in its view, the conflict will force Washington to reconsider its assumption that Tehran is weak. Iran has concluded that neither Israel nor the U.S. can defeat it on the battlefield. Prolonging the war, then, is a way to prove that Washington's earlier assessment - that Iran's military was hollowed out and that the regime was on the brink - was wrong. In fact, they believe that compromise will only imperil Iran further.

The Islamic Republic's leadership is using negotiations as a tool for managing warfare. It engages in talks mostly to demonstrate to other states that it is serious about diplomacy, thereby lowering international pressure, and it does so to control the tempo of conflict. It refuses, however, to make offerings that would diminish its leverage or signal vulnerability. The regime believes that confrontation strengthens its hand. It is happy to withstand economic pain if it can control the Strait of Hormuz.

Hamas Fears a U.S.-Iran Agreement Could Leave Gaza Facing Israel Alone

Senior Hamas officials are increasingly concerned about Israel's new policy of gradually eroding the "yellow line" separating Israel and Hamas in Gaza and expanding its campaign of targeted killings of senior military operatives, allegedly with American backing.

They also express concern over the prospect that any future U.S.-Iran agreement will exclude Gaza entirely, leaving it vulnerable to Israeli actions. This could let Israel use its full military power in Gaza without fear of triggering broader escalation.

Senior Israeli security officials say Hamas's main concern is that a U.S.-Iran agreement would relieve Israel of many strategic pressures.

If tensions with Iran subside, Israel could devote substantially greater resources to the campaign in Gaza, intensifying military operations to try to achieve a more decisive outcome against Hamas.

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