07/20 Links Pt2: Ireland’s hypocritical anti-Israel law is a win for Hamas — and a challenge to Trump; Rare burnt First Temple-era beams unearthed in Jerusalem after 2,600 years

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Ireland’s hypocritical anti-Israel law is a win for Hamas — and a challenge to Trump

In 1977, Congress prohibited US companies from participating in boycotts of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.

Decades later the Trade Promotion Authority law, passed during the Obama administration, specifically condemned “state-sponsored unsanctioned foreign boycotts of Israel.”

That’s exactly what Ireland’s law is.

US laws ban American companies from complying in any way with an impermissibly discriminatory boycott like Ireland’s.

That puts American companies operating there in a legal bind.

Moreover, the law requires the Treasury Department to maintain a “current list of countries which require or may require participation in or cooperation with an international boycott.”

American companies doing business in countries listed as boycotters face tax and other penalties if they abide by their requirements.

Until now, Treasury’s list was made up solely of Arab states like Syria and Iraq — and it’s gotten steadily shorter, as more Arab countries have made peace with Israel and started normal trading relationships.

Now Treasury must promptly add Ireland to its official list of boycotting countries: If Dublin wants to act like Damascus, it must be treated as such.

Irish legislators seek to pressure Israel to completely withdraw from Judea and Samaria, and to dismantle all Jewish communities there.

But Israel did exactly that with Gaza in the 2005 Disengagement — and Hamas turned it into a terror base.

Ireland claims its move upholds international law, but its hypocrisy is glaring.

It has imposed no similar rules on goods from other disputed territories — or on China, despite Beijing’s massive and ongoing human rights abuses.

Ireland isn’t about to shutter its movie theaters showing “The Odyssey,” even though parts of it were filmed in Western Sahara, which the United Nations regards as occupied territory.

Its ban applies only to Jewish towns.

President Donald Trump’s first administration clearly stated its opposition to Ireland’s law — heck, even the Biden administration warned Dublin of “consequences” if it moved forward.

But animosity to Israel runs so deep in Ireland — the only criticism the law got from opponents was that it doesn’t go far enough — that its legislators decided passing a symbolic Israel-bashing bill is more important than good relations with Washington.

Perhaps they think America is bluffing?

Regardless, imposing trade restrictions on a US ally as it fights alongside us in a hot war is deeply disrespectful.

But Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly considering a similar measure — so Trump must nip this trend in the bud.

The United States must make it crystal clear that no matter which countries choose to impose sanctions on an ally, they will face the consequences of US law.

Ireland's Antizionism

In the sports world, opposition to Israel has grown significantly in the past few weeks and months. Nowhere has this been truer than in the ongoing campaign to cancel the upcoming Ireland-Israel football match scheduled for October. Left-wing politicians and the establishment media took the lead in advocating for a complete cancellation of the game, even if it would hurt Irish football in the long run. The media ran with the story every day, all with the same ideological bent.

When the game was moved from Dublin to a yet to be determined neutral venue, the very same people who complained about Israeli football players and fans visiting Ireland’s largest city argued that moving the game deprived them of the right to protest the Israeli team in person. The country’s largest trade union has even called on the national broadcaster not to air the game. This demonstrates that these activist groups were not interested so much in the outcome as in the process, for it allowed them to keep the issue alive in public discourse, with the establishment media eagerly amplifying the most extreme antizionist voices.

This gets to the heart of antizionism, for it doesn’t purport to offer constructive solutions to deeply entrenched problems, so much as to provide an ongoing justification for a constant campaign of vilification directed against Israel and the majority of the world’s Jews who support its right to exist in peace and security. Quite a few of those who agitated against the game being played in Dublin, who have been silent on the Islamic Republic’s massacre of their own people, couched their opposition as being borne of out of a commitment to being “anti-genocide.”

This implies that Israel’s war against Hamas was a deliberate act of genocide rather than the result of having to fight a war in a densely populated area, in which the enemy deliberately used civilian infrastructure to wage battle. This is a key component of antizionist discourse, which has employed “genocide” as a rhetorical weapon and as a libel. Nothing exemplifies the degree to which antizionism has taken over the Irish public sphere quite like the degree to which sundry politicians and journalists have used this term as a factual representation of what has occurred in Gaza over the last three years, with little regard to international jurisprudence. Those Irish antizionists who employ the term “genocide” do so not to highlight civilian suffering in Gaza — which is indeed very real — but to whip up hatred against Israel’s very existence and to downplay the Holocaust’s place in western collective memory. This is especially alarming, considering the lack of historical knowledge about the Holocaust among many in Ireland, particularly young people.

Antizionism, once institutionalized, limits the spaces in which Jews, if they identify with Israel in any manner, can freely operate. One recent incident which showcases the depth to which antizionist thinking has taken root in Ireland is the cancellation of a Dublin fundraiser for Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. The Dublin National Concert Hall, which was meant to host the event, which was to include the performance of a play about October 7, decided to cancel the event following an antizionist campaign by local activists who accused MDA of being “complicit in genocide.” Significantly, no other venue has stepped up to offer to host the event.

While it is certainly true that antizionism has infiltrated the public sphere in numerous western democracies, there simply is no equivalent to the degree to which it has taken root in Ireland and in the Irish media, which focuses disproportionately on Israel in its news coverage. This is not meant to be a slight on everyday Irish people, many of whom have expressed alarm at the speed at which antizionism has become normalized in myriad aspects of Irish society. Rather, it should be seen as a warning sign for all those interested in promoting pluralism and tolerance and the viability of a peaceful, long-term settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of all, it is a reminder that antizionism remains a distinct manifestation of Jew hatred, one that continues to threaten both the viability of Diaspora Jewish communities and the classical liberal underpinnings of western democracy.

David Collier: How an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Became a Community Note on X

The risk of long-term reputational damage needed to be addressed. I went back to the site where the graffiti had been drawn. Several days had passed, and I had no idea what I would find. The graffiti itself had gone, but two freshly painted patches on the pavement were immediately visible. Someone had covered it over. It was a relief. I may have been fighting a nonsensical conspiracy claim, but the approved Community Note had given the allegation the appearance of official endorsement.

I posted footage of the covered-up graffiti on X and requested a review of the Community Note. Thankfully, that was enough for the note to lose its approved status. It wasn’t, however, enough to stop the abuse or silence the conspiracy theorists.

There was one more thing I could do to close this case completely.

The FOI Request That Closes the Case
If park staff had painted over the graffiti, there should be a record of it. Because Trent Park is managed by Enfield Council, that record would be obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act.

On Saturday 27 June, attaching the photographs in my possession, I submitted the request.

I have now received the response.

As the brilliant fictional detective Adrian Monk would say at this point in the investigation: “Here’s what happened.”

On 24 June at 19:08, just over two hours before members of my family walked through the park, a concerned citizen sent an email to Councillor Alessandro Georgiou, the Conservative councillor of Cockfosters ward and leader of Enfield Council. The email is explicit in its detail, mentioning both the swastika and the Star of David.

To his credit, at 22:42 that night, Cllr Georgiou sent a response, thanking the sender, and copying in an official council account, asking for the graffiti to be cleared “ASAP.”

At 10:35 on 25 June, Lisa Smart, Head of Urban Green Spaces at Enfield Council, responded that the council aims to remove offensive graffiti within 24 hours and that she would instruct officers to deal with it.

I was also provided with timestamped images, showing that the council workers had arrived to deal with the graffiti within that 24-hour window, at just after 8:00 on the morning of 26 June.

The timestamps show the graffiti thirty-five hours after my photograph had been taken. Both the swastika and the crossed-out Star of David remain clearly visible, along with the stain in the centre of the pavement. So much for the claim that the markings had simply been drawn in water. According to the council’s account, the combination of the heat and the way the graffiti had embedded itself into the surface meant officers eventually had to paint over it, as the photographs show:

By 11:44 on 26 June, the graffiti had been covered over.

The following day, I returned to the site and filmed the footage I posted on X.

Case closed.

The Bigger Lesson
The disturbing aspect of this story is that a system intended to combat misinformation elevated a conspiracy theory into an apparently authoritative statement with real-world consequences.

The burden was then reversed. Those making the accusation produced no evidence. The Jewish target had to spend weeks obtaining official records simply to restore the presumption of innocence.

This time, documentary evidence happened to exist. Had the graffiti been removed some other way, the Community Note would likely still be there today, giving permanent credibility to a baseless accusation.

Systems that determine “truth” are vulnerable to organised falsehoods, popular prejudice and institutional bias. When the subject is Jews or Israel – where hostile narratives already circulate widely – that vulnerability becomes especially dangerous.

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07/20 Links Pt1: Benny Morris: Omer Bartov - What Went Wrong?; Deborah Lipstadt: UN ‘failing Jewish people greatly’; Iran FM says he has never met new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?

A review of Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov; 243 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 2026)
Late in the book Bartov describes a post-7 October visit to Israel and a meeting with Israeli students. He says he came away shocked. “They had not only internalised a particular view that had become commonplace in Israel—namely that the razing of Gaza … was a legitimate response … but had also developed a way of thinking that I observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview, and self-perception of German army soldiers in WWII [again, the comparison to the Nazis!] … Hamas as human animals—and of the wider [Gaza] population as less than human … Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault … If Hamas carries out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop two-thousand-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding under or close to these shelters … The way people’s eyes glazed over whenever I mentioned the suffering of Palestinian civilians … was deeply unsettling.” (I wonder whether Bartov’s eyes “glazed over” when he was told of the suffering of Hamas’s victims, many of them tortured and raped. But, of course, he has a point about the progressive Israeli dehumanisation of the Palestinians—but he ignores the coin’s other face, the parallel dehumanisation of the Israelis by the Palestinians).

Bartov’s descriptions of various episodes in the conflict are speckled with distortions and marred by tendentiousness; this is not a book scholars will excavate for facts. For instance, Bartov repeatedly states that the Zionist forces “expelled” the Palestinian population from the territory that became the State of Israel—when, in fact, most simply fled from the actual or potential battlefields (and some were ordered or advised to leave—as in Haifa on 22 April 1948—by their own leaders). The most that can be said is that the Israeli government refused to allow the refugees to return to their homes and lands after the war, not exactly the same thing.

The decades of British rule were characterised, Bartov tells us, by the “familiar processes of a settler colonial takeover of land and resources from the indigenous Palestinian population.” The American, South African, and Australian “settler-colonial” paradigms, to which he is alluding, featured brutal armed conquest and confiscation of indigenous lands. In Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, the Jews acquired lands from very willing Arab sellers—nothing before 1948 was conquered. And the country had, and has, no “resources” to speak of.

But the sad truth is that Israeli internal demographic and political trends and the constant Islamist violence and genocidal threats have derailed the Zionist project, transforming it from a positive, moral enterprise to something teetering on the edge of an abyss. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as in Bartov’s peroration, that Israel today is “bloody-minded … [and] paranoid” and is now “heading down the path of theocracy and apocalypse.” I would advise waiting a bit before making a definitive judgment. Let’s see what sort of government the Israeli general elections, scheduled for 27 October, wash up and whether they will alter the current downward spiral.

But one thing is already clear: Bartov’s book, and his journalistic “Israelis are genocidaires” campaign that preceded it, have, objectively speaking, assisted the Islamist terrorists in their effort to destroy the Jewish state. This is something he will have to live with.

Friedman: A Palestinian state will destroy Abraham Accords

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman said in Congressional testimony released on Monday that efforts to create a Palestinian state would fatally undermine U.S.-led negotiations to achieve normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries.

In a written statement submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, Friedman said that attempts to link the two issues were “destined for failure” after Oct. 7.

“Israel already has done the two-state experiment and that folly almost destroyed the Jewish state,” Friedman wrote. “Talk of a Palestinian state in the halls of Congress or the palaces of Europe is just wildly out of touch with the realities on the ground.”

The former envoy to Jerusalem argued that countries like Saudi Arabia that might seek to join the 2020 Abraham Accords agreement that normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco “understand those realities well.”

“A Palestinian state will not advance the Abraham Accords; it will destroy them,” he said. “It will consume the region with even more conflict and violence.”

“The fact that the Abraham Accords did not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a feature, not a bug, of the deal,” he wrote. “The accords sent a clear message to the Palestinians that the days in which they held the Middle East hostage had ended.”

Khaled Abu Toameh: Iran's War on the Arabs: Time for the Gulf to Stand with Israel

Over the past week, the Iranian regime has demonstrated once again that its ambitions extend far beyond destroying Israel.

It is a war against the entire Middle East and, ultimately, against the United States and the West.

Tehran then launched missiles and drones not only against US assets but also against infrastructure in Arab countries across the Gulf, in addition to Jordan, presumably so they would pressure US President Donald J. Trump to call off US firepower and return instead to waste-of-time negotiations for a waste-of-time "deal" that Iran would not honor in the first place.

In reality, the negotiations have been worse than a waste of time... The negotiations actually caused harm. They gave the regime time to retrieve missiles it had hidden and to resume firing, with targeting assistance from China and Russia, on US forces and allies in the Gulf.

Iranian regime ideology rejects peaceful coexistence and normalization between Arabs and Israelis -- as does the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, currently embodied by Qatar and Turkey.

Taken together, these terrorist organizations form what Tehran proudly calls the "Axis of Resistance." It is, in reality, an axis of terrorism. Its purpose is not just to destroy Israel. Its objective is to spread Iran's revolutionary Shiite Islamist ideology, undermine moderate Arab governments, expel American influence from the Middle East, and ultimately wage jihad (holy war) against the West.

The Arab states therefore have every reason to openly align themselves with the United States and Israel in confronting the Iranian threat.

This is not about choosing sides in someone else's conflict. It is about defending their own sovereignty, their own interests, their own citizens, and their own future.

The lesson of the past week: So long as the regime in Tehran remains committed to exporting its "Islamic Revolution" and maintaining its network of terrorist proxies, there can be no genuine security or stability in the Middle East.

Until the Iranian regime abandons its expansionist ambitions or loses the capacity to pursue them, the Middle East will remain trapped in recurring cycles of violence. Until then, the Arab states would be wise to recognize that this is their fight as much as Israel's.

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07/19 Links: Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews; US claims PA’s prisoner payments reform a con; Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

From Ian:

Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews

REVIEW: 'The Jews and the Left' by Batya Ungar-Sargon

This book gathers momentum and goes into high gear in its final sections leading up to and including the October 7 "wake-up call" to Jews and through them to the rest of America. Concentrating on the universities, the media, and sectors of the American public that she knows best, Ungar-Sargon shows how the Left's worldview, once based on right versus wrong, was replaced by the ideology of oppressor and oppressed. "That is the source of twenty-first century leftist anti-Semitism." The many strands of anticapitalist, anticolonialist, Orientalist, and other critiques of America come together in common opposition to Jews, now mostly in Israel. As she exposes the ideologies and promoters of the anti-Jewish alliance, the author punctuates her rebuttal with frustrated cries of "totally false" and "They are simply wrong." Having shown why American Jews became Democrats in the first place, and how they were then betrayed by former allies, she invites her fellow Jews to speak out as she has done, "not as Republicans" but as proud Americans.

It is heartening to read this rally against "a uniquely left-wing form of anti-Jewish hate and violence that has all but replaced right-wing antisemitism in America," but Ungar-Sargon's history is flawed and her awakening is late. Here is Commentary critic Robert Warshow writing in 1947 on America in the 1930s, "when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist party. If you were not somewhere within the party's wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition." The Communist Party was by then already in full anti-Zionist mode, Stalin having supported the Mufti's jihad in Mandatory Palestine as the start of the Arab revolution.

Warshow was writing not about the small percentage of Jews in the party but about his entire intellectual cohort. Some of the Jewish Left felt free to support Roosevelt in the late 1930s only because the Soviets had authorized the formation of the Popular Front that encouraged the cooperation with liberals it had previously prohibited. The communist "ideal" penetrated this country much deeper than fascism and for long after the threat of fascism fell away as its excuse for condoning its repressions and failures.

By the late 1960s and early '70s, some of Warshow's liberals were ready to mock their former subservience. In the American Scholar, Lionel Abel, another of the New York intellectuals, described their voluntary submission to Leftist thought control:
One must in no case do anything that might be harmful to the Left. What if the projected action seems a good one? Then one must be all the more careful. One must consider every possible consequence, even the most remote. Many actions that at first might seem beneficent when looked at more closely turned out to involve a possible damage to the Left. What Left? Which Left? Never mind. And do not ask. Indeed there is need not to ask, for the very fact that we don't know what the Left is today means that whatever it be, its situation is precarious.

When Irving Kristol, speaking for that generation, defined the neo-conservative as a liberal who was mugged by reality, that "reality" took the form of the anti-Zionist Left.

This is just to say that there have been earlier important wake-up calls in the American history of Jews and the Left, and the excommunication of "the Right" was used to keep them in line. That Jews among other Americans do not know this history makes it so much sweeter to keep pulling that football out from under them.

Ungar-Sargon's warning comes after the red diaper babies of the 1960s had metastasized into legions of progressives and merged with Islamists, fueled by more overseas funders, hackers, and influencers than the old communists ever dreamed of. Her explanation for the relation of Jews and the Left is partial at best, but her warning may still be timely. She insists that Jews under assault have to lead the way in speaking the truth: "To hate Jews is to hate America. We are an inextricable part of this nation." This is a fight that all Americans must win.

Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

I can only imagine how bizarre it must be for the people of North Herefordshire, who thought they were electing a Green MP to talk about nature reserves and pollution, to hear Ellie Chowns mention Israel and Gaza a combined 50 times and North Herefordshire just 37 times. Astonishingly, she has mentioned Israeli settlements in the West Bank more times than the pollution of the River Wye – a key local issue that she promised to make her top priority if elected.

The frequency with which these MPs have used their platforms in the Commons to pontificate Israel has been dizzying – and their use of parliamentary procedure has been shameless. In just the past few weeks, there has been a backbench business debate on trade with Israeli settlements and a Westminster Hall debate about Israeli influence on British politics.

In the Westminster Hall debate, we had the extraordinary sight of multiple MPs who have been on Qatari-funded trips to Qatar complain about other MPs going on trips to Israel, even though these were funded by British donors to British organisations, such as through Conservative Friends of Israel or Labour Friends of Israel.

To be clear, it is entirely justifiable for parliamentarians to go on state-funded trips, provided they are declared and the MPs go with open eyes. But as John Lamont noted in his brave and powerful contribution to that debate, those MPs were not calling for a review of lobbying regulations or foreign-sponsored trips. They were singling out one country. I will happily leave it to the reader to guess why they were so eager to single out this particular country.

Fortunately, there are many brave MPs who have stood up to all this in parliament. But the fight is extraordinarily one-sided. For even the most ardently pro-Israel MPs, this issue will just be one of many they care about. For some, their motivation for speaking out may be more driven by their principled belief that some balance is needed, rather than from a deeply held, organic desire to talk about Israel. Contrast this with the multiple MPs on the other side, for whom this is what they got into politics for and what gets them out of bed every morning. It’s the same on Britain’s streets. While many view the anti-Israel hate marches with contempt and horror, a small, angry and laser-focussed minority have been able to dominate public discourse.

Needless to say, none of this actually contributes to improving the situation for ordinary Palestinians, or for anyone else in the Middle East. As Hamish Falconer, the Middle East minister, admitted, ‘An inevitable consequence of the actions announced from this despatch box is that the warmth of my relationship with my counterparts in Israel has indeed suffered’. Combined with the UK’s unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, we have thrown away any leverage we had with the Israeli government and much of the influence we had over the Palestinian Authority. And we have done this merely to indulge a mob who do little more than make this a nastier, unfriendlier country for our small Jewish community – and indeed the rest of us.

Report: Israel suspects foul play after third Israir plane damaged at Luton Airport in under a year

Israeli aviation officials suspect foul play in an incident at London Luton Airport last week, when an Israir plane was damaged by the aircraft tug while it was being towed ahead of takeoff, Channel 12 reports.

According to the report, Israel suspects the damage was caused maliciously, with “nationalistic” intent, and is in contact with the relevant authorities in England to determine whether that is indeed the case.

Israir previously said it was the third instance of its planes being damaged at the London airport within less than a year, further increasing suspicion that it was not accidental.

The incident on Thursday evening left approximately 300 people waiting aboard the Israir plane as it sat on the tarmac for several hours.

The passengers had no air conditioning for part of the time, leading to “some medical incidents,” a passenger recounted after.

Israir blamed Luton for the three instances of damage, saying that “to our knowledge, no orderly investigation has been carried out by the airport’s management into these incidents.”

'Favorite Jewish uncle' and the limits of learning from Nazism

Few US Senate primaries this year carry greater implications for the Democratic Party's future than Michigan's August 4 contest. One of the race's leading candidates is Abdul El-Sayed, whose positions and endorsements place him squarely within the antizionist movement.

To many Americans, the fact that El-Sayed has affectionately referred to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as his "favorite Jewish uncle" would seem to settle any suggestion that his antizionism reflects anti-Jewish bigotry. El-Sayed plainly does not dislike Jews categorically. He admires one of the country's most prominent Jewish politicians and embraces him in explicitly Jewish terms.

That apparent exoneration reveals something important about how modern Western societies learned to recognize the villainization of Jews.

Since World War II, Nazism – which targeted all Jews for elimination – has been the West's definitive prototype of anti-Jewish bigotry. Measured against that prototype, an ideology that welcomes and even elevates Jews who share its own views appears disqualified from being anti-Jewish. Sanders's place in El-Sayed's political and personal imagination, therefore, appears to vindicate El-Sayed against any charge of villainizing Jews.

The prototype underlying that conclusion, however, was built on a fundamental mistake: treating anti-Jewish bigotry as inherently premodern.

The West traced a symbolic archive of images and accusations against "the Jew" back to centuries of religious hostility. Yet those origins tell us where the archive developed, not what the phenomenon essentially is.

Religion supplied the historical setting in which that archive accumulated around the Jew as the figure rejecting a supposed redemptive truth, but the Jew's role was portable. Once religious power gave way to modern secular forces, those forces inherited the archive, stripped it of God, and reconstructed it in the languages of race, psychology, and metaphysics.

But the West came to interpret anti-Jewish bigotry differently – as an ancient pathology that modernity had not yet eliminated. It therefore viewed Nazism as that pathology's definitive culmination, rather than as one modern form of anti-Jewish bigotry among others. Instead of remaining vigilant for other distinctly modern forms, the West built its postwar moral architecture around preventing Nazism's return.

After Auschwitz, Western societies rightly became extraordinarily sensitive to fascism, racial hierarchy, and explicit Jew-hatred. But the postwar order did not stop at recognizing Nazism's characteristics as dangerous. It went further and conferred moral authority on their perceived opposites. Anti-racism. Universalism. Internationalism. Nazism's traits became the map of evil, and the inverse of that map became the territory of good.

That framework overlooked a fundamental feature of anti-Jewish bigotry: it has never belonged to a single political ideology. Jews can be blamed for capitalism by one movement and communism by another, for racial inferiority in one context and racial supremacy in another, for refusing assimilation and for dissolving the nation, sometimes by the same accuser in the same decade.

Postwar Western culture trained itself to recognize the villainization of Jews primarily through Nazism's particular characteristics rather than through the role assigned to the Jew. In doing so, it sensitized itself to ideological form rather than symbolic function.

The consequence was that another modern anti-Jewish ideology could assume the shape of anti-Nazism – thereby not only avoiding being identified as anti-Jewish bigotry, but also acquiring moral authority within the postwar order.

That is exactly what antizionism did. Propagated by the Soviet Union and its Arab nationalist allies, antizionism reconstructed Zionism and Israel as enemies of humanity through a set of distinctly modern libels. Drawing on Nazi imagery and Holocaust inversion, it recast Jews as the new Nazis, perpetrators of the very evils – racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide – around whose rejection the postwar moral order was being built.

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07/18 Links: Is Israel Actually More Isolated Than Ever?; How Trump Can Avoid the Vietnam Trap; What Ro Khanna, Tucker Carlson, and Rahm Emanuel have in common

From Ian:

Richard Goldberg: Is Israel Actually More Isolated Than Ever?

Why do conservatives break against Emanuel’s claim of Israel being isolated?

Many of these conservative leaders have a lived experience under pro-Islamist, Marxist rule, which informs a world outlook that embraces a technologically innovative, culturally vibrant, and terrorist-fighting democracy like Israel. These leaders see Israel for what it is: a strategic asset. And when they come to power, strengthening bilateral relations with Israel is a Day 1 action item.

Here in the United States, support for Israel is an investment in helping secure another American century – one defined by winning the AI arms race, unlocking quantum computing, controlling the periodic table and mastering advanced energy solutions.

That Israel is a democracy with shared Judeo-Christian values whose fight against terrorism and unmatched intelligence service saves countless American lives remains true – but that is only the foundation of the relationship. The future primes more. Israel is a technological juggernaut that can help us preserve another American century is tomorrow’s promise. It is why, as America’s National Defense Strategy notes, Israel is a model ally.

It’s also why Israel’s position within non-traditional multilateral frameworks continues to strengthen. The Abraham Accords have expanded to include Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority country. Turkey’s rise alongside U.S.-brokered peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is bringing Yerevan and Baku closer to Israel. Greece and Cyprus are doubling down on their Eastern Mediterranean strategic partnership with Israel, too.

It might be a surprise for people to learn that Venezuela – just a few months ago the headquarters for Iran in the Western Hemisphere with no relations with Israel for a generation – welcomed Israeli aid into Caracas after last month’s devastating earthquake.

So, when Rahm Emanuel declares Israel more isolated than ever, why is it that we instinctively nod our heads and think it’s true? There are indeed alternate universes where it certainly feels true: the dystopian United Nations; the cadre of click-bait podcasters feeding a Marxist-Islamist-Nazi medley of talking points to young people with no living attachment to World War II and no memory of September 11; and the media coverage of Emanuel’s own party, which now openly embraces communists, terrorist sympathizers, and people with Nazi tattoos.

The socialist ascendancy within the Democratic Party is a very real phenomenon that threatens American support for Israel. An Islamist ascendancy in Western Europe is very real, too, with negative effects on relations with a Jewish state.

But from the Western Hemisphere to Europe to the Middle East to India, Israel is not as isolated as you think.

How Trump Can Avoid the Vietnam Trap

So far, this stage of the conflict with Iran has not gone as Trump had hoped. As he told Fox News, at the beginning of the year he thought regime change was possible. Much of the senior Iranian leadership died in the early stages of the air campaign, but the regime survived their passing. The blockade and continued bombardment inflicted significant damage to the Iranian economy and military, but Iran's closure of the Strait roiled global oil markets. Trump eventually settled for a lopsided MOU.

Thankfully, the setback with Iran is nowhere near as costly as in Vietnam. Fifty-thousand Americans lost their lives in Southeast Asia due to hostile action, whereas the number of American casualties in this conflict is far lower. This stage of the conflict with Iran has only gone on months, rather than years of ground fighting in Vietnam, and the effects of the war on the public have been much less grave.

But another defeat would nonetheless damage the country and Trump's presidency. Americans do not like to give important concessions to a weaker foe, especially one that is obviously bent on our destruction.

The Iranians appear to have determined that they have more to gain by reigniting the war than by continuing to negotiate. They are trying to block the Strait again and relaunching attacks on the Gulf Arabs and U.S. bases in the region. The Houthis in Yemen are also threatening to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, the other route Saudi oil can take to reach Asia.

Trump has decided "the only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength." He described a series of increasingly painful strikes on Iranian infrastructure that will occur "unless they get to the table and negotiate." Those strikes are now underway, and the U.S. military is once again blockading Iran.

The Trump coalition will be demoralized if this new round of fighting keeps the price of oil high enough to hurt Republicans in the midterms and results in even worse terms than the MOU. But Iran can only take so much damage before its economy collapses and the mullahs face severe internal threats to their rule.

Trump can accelerate that process. Rather than bombing the Iranians into accepting American concessions, he should bomb them into offering new ones of their own.

Lee Smith: JD Vance’s Big Crashout

Blaming Jews for his failure is also evidence of a more organic problem with Vance: namely, his character. It’s a bad sign when elected officials evade responsibility for their own mistakes when the point of the job is to take on responsibility for the well-being of others—in his case, 350 million others.

NFL coaches and players typically spend Mondays reviewing footage of the weekend’s game to ensure they don’t make the same mistakes next Sunday. The VP should watch the game reel: What did you, JD, get wrong about the MOU? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have laid into all the Trump supporters who criticized my Iran deal, and probably I should have kept my validators from threatening American Jews by saying that if they didn’t like my moderate stance on Israel, wait till they got a dose of “real antisemitism.”

Then there’s my choice of outside mediators, like Asim Munir, the Pakistani field marshal. I talk a lot about how our interests diverge from Israel’s, but the same military Munir leads hid Osama bin Laden for five years. Maybe Pakistan’s interests don’t always sync with America’s? Was I wrong to take policy guidance from Trita Parsi, the Iranian-born think-tank expert whose work, said a U.S. district court judge, was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime”? Maybe the whole idea of trying to make a deal with Iran was wrongheaded. After all, the people who most vocally supported my efforts had worked for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and those guys have been trying to put the boss in jail for a decade.

Vance blames others for his blunders because that’s the emotional content of his 2028 presidential campaign: grievance and self-pity. He has to keep performing it for the young middle-class white men he hopes to attract, based on the theory that America has been waiting for a political movement for white kids who believe the country betrayed them because they had to settle for their safety school. In truth, it’s going to be hard to convince enough of the young white men at, for instance, Ole Miss—where Vance famously boasted that “this president isn’t controlled by Israel”—that they have it worse off than their fathers and grandfathers when they’re at a famous school with an SEC football team and a 97% acceptance rate where three-quarters of the student body is white and most of them are girls, which gives the boys a big and eager dating pool.

Shouldn’t someone tell Vance that privileged grievance is a losing message and that to win the imaginations of young white guys, he should draw from his biography? Hey, fellas, time to bear down, as I did. Go to school, work hard, there are lots of fantastic opportunities out there for smart, ambitious guys, especially now with the rise of artificial intelligence. It truly is a brave, new world! Don’t be a resentful loser. Respect women, meet a nice girl, start a family. And don’t smoke dope. My first book is about what substance abuse does to families. That’s why I won’t go on Rogan anymore—he’s a good guy, but a pothead. I don’t want any of you guys thinking he’s a role model, so I’m not going back on that show until he dumps his bong.

In the end, of course, all this is on the president. He can sideline Vance, who has been undermining him from day one on Iran and other matters, but he hasn’t. The fact is that it’s not just Trump’s problem but also a problem for 77 million other Americans who went out to the polls for him, and now time is running out. If he can’t get the job done, which includes disciplining his number two, odds are ever increasing that in two and a half years, millions of illegal aliens will be gathered at our southern border, waiting for the next far-left Democrat to be sworn in.

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07/17 Links Pt2: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation; The DSA Is a Trojan Horse the Democratic Party Must Drive Out; Debating Peter Beinart on the Right of Return and Other Matters

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Scapegoating the Jews

The ugly reality of a Democratic Party that’s now dancing to an anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Islamist tune was on display this week with another visitor to Israel, the possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna of California.

In an outrageous PR stunt cooked up with radical Israeli anti-government activists, Khanna made an unauthorized visit to a sensitive area of the “West Bank,” where he claimed to have been detained, harassed and even threatened by Israeli security forces who sided with violent settlers.

As video footage subsequently revealed, there was no violence and no harassment. It was a stunt designed to further the agenda of turning Israel into a pariah state—a situation that Emanuel blames on Netanyahu but which has actually been created by a poisonous narrative of lies to which both Emanuel and Vance have contributed.

This unconscionable onslaught is now the driver of politics on the Wwestern left and in parts of the American right.

In Britain, Andy Burnham, who next week will become prime minister after a bloodless coup in the governing Labour Party, made a point of threatening further punishment of Israel over Gaza as his first statement on foreign affairs.

This week, he went one stage further. Having refused to spell out to the British public his intentions for government, Burnham gave an interview to podcaster and former sports broadcaster Gary Lineker, who left the BBC after sharing a post about Zionism that depicted a rat—a Nazi image for Jews. When Lineker referred to the “genocide” in Gaza, Burnham conspicuously failed to challenge him.

For Britain’s incoming prime minister to use such an anti-Jewish dog-whistle—and as a priority—is an ominous signal indeed.

The surreal prominence of the Israel issue in domestic politics is due to a poisonous cocktail of factors, including Islamist influence, the dominance of the intersectional left and the West’s loss of its own cultural bearings, including the notion of objective truth.

What’s becoming ever more apparent, however, is that political leaders are scapegoating Israel because things are going wrong for them, both at home and abroad, and they cannot understand why. Refusing to acknowledge what they’re up against, they blame the Jews.

Israel, America’s indispensable ally, is now making plans to develop its own independent weapons supplies and nurture other alliances against the danger of a possibly hostile future U.S. administration.

Emanuel came to Israel to lecture it that it was in danger of losing America. In fact, with the iron having entered the soul of the Jewish state as a result of Oct. 7, America is in danger of losing Israel.

Brendan O'Neill: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation

The whole report is crazy. It analyses 3,733 Speccie articles about Islam and related issues. It found that 57.4 per cent of them were ‘biased’ or ‘very biased’. Bear in mind that this includes me calling Hamas cunts. It mauls Spectator writers for ‘delegitimising the idea of Islamophobia’ (guilty as charged), for using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, and for obsessing over ‘so-called “grooming gangs”’. Keep up – they’re called rape gangs now, given the reams of evidence we have that these gangs of mostly Pakistani men raped hundreds of white working-class girls. Seems it’s not only ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ to be outraged by the mobbing of an Israeli woman but also by the subjugation of English women.

The report wangs on about me, Douglas Murray, Julie Burchill, Gavin Mortimer, Rod Liddle – fine company! Burchill – who’s also a spiked columnist – rattles the pious pricks because she ‘defends the right to make jokes about Islam’. Call the ayatollah! ‘We’re always told that making jokes about Islam is “punching down”’, she wrote in March 2023. ‘But tell a migrant worker-slave in Qatar or a gay man in Dubai or a spirited woman in Iran that the world’s wealthiest and fastest growing religion is powerless.’ The CfMM’s fun-sponge scribes accuse her of ‘invoking human-rights abuses’ in ‘three separate state contexts’ and ‘attribut[ing] them collectively to Islam as a unified religious force’, which has the effect of reinforcing a moral ‘asymmetry’ that is… oh, I can’t go on. The humourlessness is asphyxiating. Guys, someone disagrees with you. It’s fine. You’re going to give yourselves a hernia.

It’s so telling which articles of mine get on their wick. I’m criticised for saying there has been an ‘orgy of anti-Semitism’ in the West since 7 October. I’m slammed for saying the keffiyeh classes are motored less by ‘concern for Muslim life’ than by ‘contempt for Israel’. I’m accused of using the word ‘Islamist’ in a ‘broad, undefined’ way. O’Neill is too vague in his piece on ‘what he calls the “Jew hunt of Amsterdam in 2024”’, the report says. Erm, it wasn’t me who called it a ‘Jew hunt’ – it was the anti-Semitic mob itself, which expressly hit the streets in order to ‘hunt’ the ‘cancer Jews’ who had travelled to watch Maccabi Tel Aviv.

And of course I’m told off for my pieces on the rape gangs. Especially a 2017 piece in which I commented on the ‘palpable reluctance’ of the state and polite society to ‘confront the particular problem of some Muslim men’s disdain for white working-class girls’. Apparently that’s Islamophobic. It isn’t. I stand by every word. The safety of working-class girls matters to me infinitely more than your feelings.

There’s a side-splitting irony in this bonkers report. It quotes a phrase of mine from a Spectator piece I wrote 11 years ago. It quotes it three times, including in the foreword, which is written by Peter Oborne. That phrase is ‘dainty sensibilities’ – I was criticising the cloying offence-taking of the professional misery guts who stink up our activist classes. How dare you say we are exhibiting ‘dainty sensibilities’, asks this 146-page report about the mean media and its mean words. You couldn’t make it up. But the CfMM is right about one thing: I am making a ‘civilisational judgement’. I judge that Hamas is morally inferior to Israel, that Islamism is morally inferior to secularism, and that shitting your pants when you read something you don’t like is morally inferior to just laughing it off. And everyone is welcome on my civilisational side: Christians, Jews, Muslims, ex-Muslims, non-believers, everyone. Because we don’t discriminate against people, only against ideas.

The DSA Is a Trojan Horse the Democratic Party Must Drive Out

Nowhere is the DSA’s radicalism more dangerous than in its commitment to anti-Zionism. For the DSA, opposition to Israel’s existence is not a secondary foreign-policy debate; it is a litmus test anchored in its governing text.

Analysts note that the DSA functions as a strict ideological enforcement mechanism: any candidate or member who deviates from its anti-Zionist platform or affirms Israel’s right to exist faces swift expulsion or denial of endorsement. Its platform explicitly names Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, hardcoding anti-Zionism as a fundamental tenet.

This hostility is a proxy for animus toward Western civilization and American global leadership. By aligning with hostile anti-Western regimes under the banner of “anti-imperialism,” DSA drags mainstream politics into a dark arena.

This dynamic is bigger than any one candidate. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani built an agenda that strips antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to Israel, while Kiros pledged to end all military assistance.

For the Jewish community, the danger is immediate: the DSA’s rise is tied to an effort to strip antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to the Jewish state.

The Trojan Horse and the “Dirty Break
The DSA’s core deception is presenting itself as part of the Democratic Party while advancing ideas at odds with the party’s values. It does not see itself as a wing of the party; it sees the party as a host organism to be drained and discarded. As documented by political journals like City & State New York, today’s DSA organizers are explicitly executing what they call the “dirty break.” They use the Democratic Party’s ballot access, volunteers, and credibility as tools of convenience while building an independent Marxist-aligned infrastructure designed to break away and destroy the party from within.

The organization’s youth wing formalized this as an official strategy in a 2022 convention resolution. Even former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison put it bluntly to DSA candidates: if you don’t support the party, don’t use its ballot line, volunteers, or resources to get elected.

Political reporting confirms this “party surrogate” or “party-within-a-party” model. Through structures like the “Socialists in Office” committee, elected DSA officials are bound to caucus weekly, coordinate legislative action, and vote as a unified socialist bloc answering to an external organization rather than the Democratic Party or their broader constituency.

Time to Purge the Poison
For years, the Democratic establishment has responded to this insurgency with quiet accommodation, fearful of alienating a vocal activist base. Every act of appeasement has only legitimized a group working toward the party’s dissolution. The victories in New York and Colorado prove that the time for polite disagreement has passed.

I have spent years arguing that antisemitism is never only about Jews – it is a leading indicator of a society’s broader institutional and moral health. The DSA’s rise fits that pattern. Hatred of Jews has historically been the ideology radical movements borrow when they need a common enemy to attack the liberal establishment.

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07/17 Links Pt1: Sa’ar: Radical left, terror groups form ‘operational alliance’; Ro Khanna uses Jewish lives as fodder for presidential ambitions; IDF kills Oct. 7 infiltrator, Hamas platoon commander in Gaza

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Vance is the variable in the partisan divide on Israel

America’s two major political parties were given an opportunity this week to show where they stood on the alliance with Israel and gave the nation a clear answer to the question. In a vote on a proposal put forward by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to cut all military aid to the Jewish state, the partisan split was stark.

Massie, who was defeated in a GOP primary earlier this year, was the sole Republican to back the idea of ending support for Israel, with every other one of the 215 members of the caucus opposing it. A majority of House Democrats joined him in voting for the proposal. In all, 103 Democrats voted in favor of it, with 98 opposing and 10 others voting “present.”

A stark partisan divide
The vote made it clear that national polls revealing the decline in backing for Israel—largely driven by partisanship—are reflected in Congress. At a time when antisemitic blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza or being an “apartheid” state have been mainstreamed by liberal publications like The New York Times and routinely endorsed by many Democrats, the overwhelming majority of Republicans reject these lies and still support Israel. There are now votes on record in both the House and the Senate that show the majority of Democrats support ending the alliance with the Jewish state, while, other than outliers like Massie, all Republicans oppose the idea. It means there is no avoiding the conclusion that the Democrats are on their way to becoming the anti-Israel party, if that hasn’t happened already.

Due to retirements and primary results, the number of anti-Israel Democrats will be far larger in the next Congress. That leaves the GOP, which will be rid of Massie next January, in a position to claim that anyone who cares about Israel ought to be looking at them as their only viable political home.

Yet there is one reason for holding off on describing the debate about Israel and antisemitism as one in which partisanship is the key indicator. And his name is Vice President JD Vance.

While House Republicans were holding the line against the tide of anti-Israel sentiment sweeping the country, Vance went on the most-listened-to podcast this week and made it clear that he is not to be counted among those who share that position.

In a three-hour interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” that spent as much time discussing the July Fourth White House UFC extravaganza and the fact that one of the fighters there called former first lady Michelle Obama a “man” as it did policy questions, the vice president nevertheless demonstrated that he was not among those who value the alliance with Israel. To the contrary, he was eager to blame Israel, its government and its American friends for the fact that his excursion into foreign policy with a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran has become a fiasco.

Vance nods to the ‘groypers’
Given a chance to demonstrate his mettle as a negotiator in what appeared to be a new version of President Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” reality show, Vance’s performance bore comparisons to his predecessors in the Obama and Biden administrations. He not only stubbornly defended the ludicrous notion that the Islamist terrorists running Iran could be enticed to rejoin the civilized world by means of Western bribery and diplomacy, but scapegoated the Israelis and the pro-Israel community for his failure.

In a clear pitch to what might be considered the “groyper” antisemitic wing of the American political right, he said: “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to, like, actually shift us away from [negotiations] because they want to continue the military campaign.”

He acknowledged the downward trend in support for Israel in the United States. But then, as veteran conservative commentator Rod Dreher noted in The Free Press, Vance’s position “sounds like scapegoating; a contemporary version of the ‘stab in the back legend’ (Dolchstosslegende) that German generals conceived and spread in 1918 to blame Jews and socialists for Germany’s World War I defeat and their own leadership failures.”

Vance rightly rejected the ridiculous charge that it was Israel’s fault that Trump chose to pursue a longtime U.S. foreign-policy goal by attacking Iran to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons and spreading terror. And yet he still cited stories about efforts by Israelis and supporters of Israel to influence public opinion in the United States as evidence that this is undermining the administration. He considers criticism of his Obama-like appeasement of Iran to be somehow wrong, while not acknowledging that frenemy nations like Qatar spend exponentially more to spread support for Islamist ideas and hate for Israel in America than Israel’s backers.

It was a dismal performance by the vice president, whose record when it comes to standing against the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism has been, at best, equivocal. While he is on record for opposing Jew-hatred, his public statements have shown him as unwilling to confront or oppose antisemites as Democratic leaders such as former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Tom Barrack promotes Middle East trade alignment cutting out Israel

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack on Friday promoted a new regional trade and security alignment in the Middle East centered around Iraq, Turkey and neighboring Arab states, appearing to sideline a similar regional project including Israel.

Speaking at the U.S.-Iraq Business Summit, Barrack told attendees that Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who visited with President Donald Trump at the White House this week, is considering a transformative agreement “that will make the Strait of Hormuz” — which has been effectively shut down due to the Iran war and continued hostilities — an “afterthought in two years” by shifting trade that usually passes through the waterway to overland routes.

“What this young leader [al-Zaidi] has in mind — aligned with Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt — is a program that will make the Strait of Hormuz an afterthought in two years,” Barrack said. “We’re going from just-in-time delivery on boats through these minor straits to just-in-case delivery going the other way.”

The proposal appears to serve as an alternative framework to the stalled India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which has faced roadblocks following regional turmoil and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. While the original IMEC agreement included Israel as a vital transit point connecting India to Europe via the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the newly envisioned corridor relies instead on a coalition featuring Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

The State Department also released a statement on Friday welcoming the announcement of cooperation between Iraq and Syria on the “rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Iraq-Syria crude oil pipeline as a priority infrastructure project of bilateral and regional strategic significance.”

“We feel the chaos on one side, but actually, what’s happened is a brilliant realignment of security and strategic alliances in the region,” Barrack said in his remarks, with “Iraq being at the forefront of a new strategic security alliance.”

Bruce Pearl: Ro Khanna uses Jewish lives as fodder for presidential ambitions

California Congressman Ro Khanna announced last weekend that “Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine. When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.”

Khanna was trying to turn 90 minutes on an Israeli road into political capital, asking supporters to imagine what Palestinians endure every day if even a member of Congress could be treated this way.

Powerful politics. But an incomplete story.

Khanna’s office says his trip to Israel was financed with campaign funds. Before it began, his staff reportedly told the Israeli Embassy it would be a private visit, with no official meetings.

According to a source involved in the planning, Israel nevertheless offered meetings with survivors of the Oct. 7 terror attack and others affected by the conflict.

Those offers, the source said, were declined.

Apparently, Khanna’s delegation was more interested in reinforcing a conclusion about the Jewish state than testing one.

I’ve assisted in taking members of Congress through Judea and Samaria (West Bank) with the US-Israel Education Association. Serious congressional delegations coordinate these visits carefully.

When we visit predominantly Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, we travel with Jewish guides and buses marked with Hebrew lettering. When the itinerary includes lands with mostly Palestinian Arab populations, we switch to Arab guides and buses clearly marked in Arabic.

For Khanna’s delegation to move through an Israeli-populated area relying on a single Palestinian Arab activist as a guide was an invitation to exactly the kind of confrontation that followed.

Not because of “Israeli apartheid.” Because of Israeli funerals.

During the Second Intifada, Palestinian suicide bombers turned Israeli buses, cafés and family restaurants into terrorist targets. Israel’s security architecture was built in response to that harrowing reality.

To debate the checkpoints without recalling what produced them is to explain the lock while forgetting the burglar.

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07/16 Links Pt2: Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return; How Amnesty International lost its way; Jew hatred is back in the pulpit at the Church of England

From Ian:

Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return,' Jewish leader tells 'Post' after emigrating

Australian antisemitism “has passed the point of no return,” former president of the Australian Jewish Association, Dr. David Adler, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Adler recently relocated to Israel, citing the surge in antisemitism in Australia.

While the family only arrived on July 9, Adler told the Post that aliyah has been in “preparation for a long, long period of time.”

“We’ve seen a general deterioration in Australia for a long time,” he told the Post. “Australia has essentially outsourced its manufacturing. Its defense capacity is down. National identity is being lost. Education standards are down. There is a crazy socialist activism, left-wing activism. Those things have been building gradually. But no doubt October 7 unleashed a level of antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism that I didn’t think could occur in Australia.”

“On October 8, there were some leaders of the Muslim community and some Muslim groups in Australia celebrating on the streets. On October 9, we had the riots in front of the Opera House.”

What Adler found the most shocking was that the authorities “failed to act” after these incidents.

Australia passed point of no return, 'all downhill'
“There was not a single arrest from the riots at the Opera House, despite a number of laws being broken. And that area, I know from security experts, is covered by high-definition CCTV. However, the authorities chose not to act and instead warned the Jewish community not to go there,” he explained.

Since then, Adler said it’s “been all downhill.” He said he has lost track of the number of threats made against him, including death threats.

This led him to arrive at the viewpoint that the trends in Australia “have passed the point of no return.”

“The tipping point has been reached and passed. And even though there’s a Royal Commission running at the moment, and it’s doing a good job in exposing some of the accounts and evidence of antisemitism, I do not have confidence in efficient action being taken to deal with it.”

Adler told the Post that anti-Jewish violence is predominantly coming from Islamic extremism, but that “Australia has taken nowhere near enough action” to combat this. “It should do things like expel the hate preachers, deport the hate preachers, close down mosques that are teaching extremist and radical views, and in fact has done some things in the opposite.”

“The whole antisemitic, anti-Israel extremism is on a level that no one forecast.”

Nicole Lampert: How Amnesty International lost its way

There was a lot of internal discussion about how to retain and attract progressive donors, many of whom were critics of Israel, Malekar adds. “I clearly recall that sections in Western Europe and the USA saying we were losing ground and membership because we were behind others in progressive circles who were criticising Israel.”

“Until then, Amnesty had held to its core values of judging things on international and humanitarian laws, but slowly I saw how the line was being blurred as the work became more politicised and standards went down.

“The organisation became more and more led by political ideologies such as theories around colonialism and seeing everything through the lens of the victim vs the oppressor. Younger people were joining from universities who were imbued with these political theories in which Israel is only ever viewed as an oppressor.”

In 2021, Amnesty became a champion of the politically charged Black Lives Matter campaign, a source of further controversy. Tim Gudgion, a former Amnesty member, says he resigned his membership at this point, regarding its involvement as “very, inappropriately, political”.

Then, the following year, an Amnesty report claimed there was apartheid across Israel and the occupied territories. It caused huge anger in Israel.

“Even if you agree the occupied territories are using a form of apartheid, none of us would accept that it is the same in the state of Israel,” says Malekar, who is one of a number of whistleblowers featured in a report by the campaign group, EiGHT, on alleged double standards by human rights organisations in their approach to Jews and Israel. “And we tried to argue that in making these two territories one land, they were actually joining hands with the most Right-wing Israeli politicians who want to annex the occupied territories.”

The head office in London didn’t appreciate the Israeli branch’s pushback, she says. “These are people who are very committed, and it surprises them if someone would dare to question them.”

And what happens when the perceived oppressor becomes the victim, as it did on October 7, 2023?

Malekar recalls an exchange of emails between head office and other department heads as she hid in bomb shelters not knowing how bad the war was going to get. “One of the things I remember from that horrible night was communicating with London as they considered how to phrase their condemnation. They could never just say, ‘this is wrong’. Not even for one minute. There were discussions over how to frame the narrative.”

Must Durham’s miners be forced to celebrate Palestine?

The Durham Miners’ Gala – ‘the big meeting’, as locals still call it – took place last week. Once, every coalfield had its gala. Now Durham’s is the last great survivor. But survival is not the same as relevance.

In recent years, the question hanging over the ‘big meeting’ has become harder to avoid: what is it for, and who does it now belong to? That question became sharper still after County Durham, long impregnable Labour country, turned into something much closer to a Reform UK stronghold in last year’s local elections.

The gala itself remains organised around a politics that belongs to another century. It is caught between three worlds: the culture of the old industrial working class, the socialist politics of the 20th century and the activist liberalism of the contemporary left. Add to that the visible support for Reform among the families and descendants of Durham colliers, and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. The big meeting can no longer pretend that these tensions are merely background noise.

Over the past few years, the Gala has become less a living expression of working-class politics and more a stage for the narrow concerns of the Corbynista activist class. A clip from this year’s event made the point brutally. The ‘Palestine Bloc’ – around 30 (mostly white) activists carrying Palestine flags and wearing the keffiyeh uniform of the modern protester – moved through Durham behind a few dancers in traditional Palestinian dress. They shouted ‘free, free Palestine’. Some in the crowd clapped. Others booed. John Cleese posted a video of it on X, with the observation that it would not be out of place in a Monty Python sketch. He’s right.

This wasn’t the first time the gala has embarrassed itself. The flashpoint last year was the invitation to Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK. It seems that every year the gala is dragged into another controversy because the activist left insists on making it speak the language of identity politics and middle-class luxury beliefs. As a result, the working class has been turned into a costume, a backdrop, a set of banners and brass bands to lend moral weight to causes that often have little to do with the people whose history is being borrowed.

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07/16 Links Pt1: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet?; The PA's Army Threatens Millions of Israelis; Karim Khan’s sex abuse accuser goes public; Vance’s Bridge to Nowhere

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: The warning signs for Israel in Washington can no longer be ignored

Vance, who is seen as a prime contender to be the Republican nominee for president in 2028, also waded into the conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender. Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” he said, reiterating a claim that has been refuted and discredited.

The embrace by such a senior Trump administration official of conspiracy theories about Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence, which have proliferated in the years since his death and often have veered into antisemitism, is part and parcel with Vance’s increasing alignment with the far Right base populated by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens.

Taken separately, the vote in the House of Representatives and the Vance interview are worrisome signs that the “special” relationship between Israel and the US is on life support at best. Taken together, they should be an alarming wake-up call that the days of the “kishkes” identification test with Israel – as exemplified diversely by the late Lindsey Graham and former president Joe Biden – are long gone.

Although it’s easy to place the blame elsewhere – and there are a plethora of strong arguments to be made in retort to both Democratic and Republican detractors of Israel – we must also look inward and see what can be done to reverse the tide of sentiment against us.

We can surely criticize the headline-provoking gambit by US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) last week, who chose to only hear and see the Palestinian side of life in the West Bank. But we can also acknowledge that vigilante Jewish groups are patrolling the area in a heavy-handed and lawless fashion that creates potentially lethal friction points and does irreparable damage to Israel’s image.

We can criticize Rahm Emmanuel for haughtily coming to Israel and warning us about what needs to be done to repair the US-Israel relationship, while acknowledging that some of his points were spot-on and unfolding before our very eyes in the House vote and Vance interview.

Jerusalem can no longer ignore or downplay the growing trends in the US of having to endorse the “Israel is genocide” trope to become a candidate, or of blaming Israel for getting the US entangled in Iran. The unsettling news this week demonstrates that with stark clarity.

Lee Smith: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet?

Trump is angry the Iranians violated Vance’s MOU to open the strait. But virtually no one believed it had any chance of success, except Vance and the influencers he courted to write articles and social media posts that he could take to his boss to show that the base could be fooled into thinking it wasn’t like Obama’s deal.

And those who said the deal was as bad as Obama’s were excoriated by the brash youths who populate Vance’s comms apparatus. “Cool, Ted,” White House validator Alex Bruesewitz tweeted at MOU skeptic Sen. Ted Cruz. “No one asked you, bro. Stop trying to undermine the President and his administration.” Bruesewitz gave more of the same to another Trump ally, journalist Mark Levin: “Sit back and stop trying to undermine the President and his team.”

Vance saved for himself the privilege of screaming at Israeli officials who doubted the prospects of his deal’s success. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said last month, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Vance’s name is now attached to a loss because Trump’s return to war is proof that everyone Vance and his communications team hectored was right and Vance was wrong. Accordingly, Vance’s associates are messaging that the vice president never really had that much invested in the MOU’s success. As one ally of the vice president recently told reporters, “All that really mattered was him being seen as attempting to bring the war to an end.”

In the new version, Vance’s talks with the Iranians, the rapport he boasted of building with Iranian Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, were more like diplomacy theater: If the MOU didn’t work out and made the White House look foolish when the Iranians inevitably violated it, that was still pretty good material for JD’s 2028 campaign. At least he proved to isolationists—i.e., pro-Iran think tankers and journalists whispering in Vance’s ear and pro-Russia podcasters whining into their microphones—his opposition to the neocons’ latest war for Israel.

The issue is that whatever version of Vance’s efforts is correct—he believed he could secure a deal or he didn’t have much confidence he could secure a deal—the result is the same. The Trump team spent down prestige by negotiating with a side determined to humiliate it, while it stiff-armed domestic allies on whom it depends for political support. And that support could come in especially handy now as the administration returns to a war that is likely to become increasingly unpopular as long as the president fails to devise a strategy to win it.

Perhaps even more consequentially, the vice president, ever keen to highlight how U.S. interests diverge from Israel’s, beat up on a partner it is likely to need if it decides to win the war. Otherwise, the administration is likely on course for another long conflict in the Middle East, what Trump refers to as a “forever war.”

A journalist asked Vance in the press briefing last week if that wasn’t essentially the condition the administration had created with its phony cease-fires, fruitless negotiations, and tit-for-tat exchanges of fire. “So far the Iranians are not showing any signs of wanting to give what you want them to give,” said the journalist. “The plan right now is basically when they misbehave to keep bombing.” Vance disagreed. “It’s not a forever war if the Iranians violate the terms of the agreement and shoot commercial shipping, and we respond to it,” said the vice president, seemingly without understanding he was just rephrasing the question.

But that’s precisely the stuff America’s forever wars have been made of: the continuation of hostilities without defining victory and making decisive moves to obtain it. The reason America doesn’t win wars is not that it wants to turn tribal confederations into liberal democracies or teach surrealism to veiled schoolgirls or sow corruption abroad and reap the profits. Those are all effects of the fundamental problem, which is deciding, for whatever reasons, not to win.

For Trump, the choices are stark: either preside over another American war without resolve and go down in history as the American president who forfeited America’s postwar birthright and lost the strait, or decide to win.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Iran-Backed 'Decisive Campaign' To Destroy Israel and the West

The documents, recovered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Gaza Strip and published by the Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute, reveal that Hamas had meticulously planned the October 7 massacre more than a year before it was carried out. They also expose Sinwar's unwavering commitment to Hamas's founding objective: the destruction of Israel through mass murder and conquest.

The operational planning was astonishingly detailed. Sinwar envisioned breaching the border simultaneously at 25 locations using approximately 2,500 terrorists in the opening assault.

Sinwar estimated that approximately 10,000 "well-trained fighters" would eventually be required to carry out the operation successfully. Each Israeli community was assigned specific assault teams. Military bases were designated for destruction. Strategic road junctions were mapped and allocated to specialized units. Every aspect of the operation had been carefully calculated.

These were not defensive plans. They were invasion plans.

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation concerns Sinwar's own understanding of the consequences of his actions. He fully anticipated that Israel would respond with overwhelming force. "The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal," he wrote. "It may even use a nuclear bomb."

Despite this extraordinary assessment, Sinwar concluded that the invasion should proceed because "this campaign is a battle of life or death."

He deliberately chose to launch the attack because advancing Hamas's ideological objective – the destruction of Israel – was more important to him than the lives of the Palestinians under his rule.

This is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that Hamas has never been a national liberation movement primarily concerned with improving the lives of Palestinians. Rather, it is an Islamist terrorist organization prepared to sacrifice its own people in the pursuit of its ideological war against Israel.

The lesson from these documents is that Hamas remains committed to the same objectives that guided its founders nearly four decades ago: eliminating Israel through violence and replacing it with an Islamist state.

Hamas is but one component of a broader Iranian strategy aimed at undermining American influence and destabilizing pro-Western Arab governments throughout the region, apparently to drive US forces out of the region, thereby leaving the run of the Middle East, unimpeded, to the ruthless Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now ruling Iran.

The October 7 massacre was not an aberration. It was the realization of a strategy, reportedly conceived seven years in advance. Preventing another October 7 requires more than temporary ceasefires or diplomatic initiatives. It requires ensuring that Hamas can never again function as either a military force or a political authority.

Anything less invites more catastrophes, as we have seen for 47 years, from Iran's attacks on Israel, Arab neighbors, brutalized citizens, the United States, and the West.

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07/15 Links Pt2: The dark truth about the pro-Palestine marches; Boris Johnson: pro-Palestine marches support ‘nihilistic Islamist ideology’

From Ian:

Just the headlines today, I have a water damaged ceiling issue.

The dark truth about the pro-Palestine marches

Shai Davidai: Antisemitism Is an Ideology. We Must Fight It Like One.

British Jews moving to Israel should do so out of love, not fear

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07/15 Links Pt1: Trump warns Iran: negotiate or face energy strikes; Vance alleges Israel ‘manipulating’ American opinion on Iran war; Massie amendment to cut Israel funding fails 104-314;

From Ian:

Just the headlines today, I have a water damaged ceiling issue.

John Spencer: What Options Does the United States Have Left in Iran? Actually, Many.

Mother whose son’s body was taken to Gaza by Unrwa worker says extra £23m UK funds for agency is ‘disappointing’

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07/14 Links Pt2: The Road to Forty-Four Percent; Melanie Phillips: Why liberalism cannot defend Britain; The unfathomable darkness of the Church of England

From Ian:

The Road to Forty-Four Percent By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
To move beyond terrorism, he had to reframe the terrorist threat as a minor nuisance or a thing of the past. He did both. Obama insisted that ISIS was just the jihadist “jayvee team” and could be dispatched with a few drones. Never mind all the talk about radical Shiites—it was time to offer Iran our “open hand.” As for the multiple terrorist threats that Israel faced, they were best dealt with by creating a little “daylight” between the U.S. and the Jewish state.

And that was that. It was as if the War on Terror was a bad dream. And so we would spend more than a decade wiping from our minds all concern about Islamist ideology and jihad.

Toward the end of this period, Donald Trump entered politics and commandeered the national consciousness. To the extent that anyone thought about terrorism anymore, it was to point out that the real terrorist threat came from white racists in Trumpland.

By the time Hamas massacred 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, the attacks of 9/11 were multiple epochs beyond us. Those long-ago media students of Islam and terrorism were now students of Trump and Covid. And those are the ones who hadn’t been replaced by a generation that wasn’t even alive during the War on Terror.

In the West, that younger generation had been shaped by a grab-bag of leftist ideology to despise America and Israel and support the enemies of both. After October 7, all consideration of Islamic radicalism would be refracted through the prism of Israel. The millenarian bloodlust of jihadists was excised entirely and replaced with a story about genocidal Zionists.

Protests made up of mostly non-Muslim Westerners would go on to march and chant in support of Islamic terrorists. And in doing so, they would normalize Jew-hatred and justify jihad and make the West safe for Muslims to declare their affection for Hamas.

For those punks and fools of the West, the path to virtue wasn’t found in distinguishing between Islam and Islamism. Their virtuous mantras sought to collapse that distinction. And far from feeling good about their country, they urged the Muslim minority—and everyone else—to share in their hatred of it.

Democrats split ahead of vote whether to cut $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel

The Congressional Progressive Caucus broke with House Democratic leadership on Tuesday in the latest example of support for Israel dividing the Democratic Party.

Hours after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to colleagues saying that he would oppose an amendment to end $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Progressive Caucus, sent a competing letter urging House Democrats to reject the aid to Israel.

“The Democratic Party needs a new approach to Israel and Palestine,” Casar wrote. “The American people are crying out for an end to U.S. tax dollars subsidizing Israel’s military.”

“After the Israeli government has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza and helped lead the United States into a destabilizing, deadly war with Iran, we are called to act,” he stated.

The House is expected to vote later this week on an amendment from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to strip funding for Israel from the 2027 national security and State Department appropriations bill.

Massie lost his primary in May, in an election that focused in large part on his opposition to U.S. aid to Israel. He has used much of his remaining time in the House to pursue anti-Israel measures, including calling to re-investigate the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty and amendments to strip out Israel-related provisions from annual appropriations bills.

The Jewish state receives about $3.8 billion annually in U.S. aid, including $3.3 billion in foreign military funding to purchase arms and $500 million for cooperative missile defense programs.

Massie’s proposal to end most of that aid, which also includes some spending on humanitarian programs, has further divided a Democratic caucus in which support for Israel has become a major fault line and cost several incumbents their seats in primary challenges from the anti-Israel left.

In his letter on Tuesday morning opposing the Massie amendment, Jeffries acknowledged the difficult political calculus that many Democrats face and called for a “major reset” of U.S.-Israel relations.

“There are good faith reasons that will result in members voting in a variety of different ways with respect to the amendment,” Jeffries wrote. “Moving forward, it is my strongly held view that for the good of Israel and the Palestinian people, American policy in the Middle East must change.”

EXCLUSIVE: Two New Law Firms Threaten New York Times With Shareholder Suit Over Gaza ‘Rape’ Story and Softball ‘Investigation’ of Platner, Accuse Times of ‘Pushing False Narratives’

A growing coalition of law firms representing a New York Times Company shareholder is demanding the publisher turn over its "books and records" for an investigation "into whether the company's board has abdicated its basic oversight duties" following a string of controversial Times reports that sought to discredit Israel or support anti-Israel Democratic politicians such as Graham Platner, according to a demand letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

If the Times does not produce the materials by July 21, a lawsuit will be filed in the New York County Supreme Court, according to a letter sent Tuesday by a coalition of lawyers representing the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a nonpartisan think-tank and beneficial Times shareholder. It is the second time that lawyers from the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC)—and now several other firms who recently joined the effort—have demanded access to the news organization's internal data and communications, accusing it of rampant anti-Israel bias and advocacy on behalf of prominent anti-Israel Democratic politicians like Platner—who withdrew in disgrace last week from Maine's Senate race—as well as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The stockholders, the letter says, aim "to investigate whether the [Times] Board is engaging in any form of oversight to ensure that the New York Times remains a news reporting agency worth anything to its stockholders, rather than becoming viewed by the public as a simple propaganda arm that selects its articles and reporting in a way that ignores truth in favor of pushing false narratives."

The prospective lawsuit could provide a new avenue for accountability at the Times, which has been largely dismissive of a rash of criticism over recent reporting on Israel and how it handled its investigation of Platner's alleged sexual misconduct. The paper has offered competing and often contradictory defenses for these articles, leading the shareholders to question if the Times board is flatly "ignoring company quality and compliance policies" that are meant to produce neutral, fact-based journalism. The inclusion of two new prominent law firms—Grant & Eisenhofer and Schall, Brown & Schwartz—on NJAC's campaign suggests that the Times may face difficulty dismissing their fresh concerns, which extend past mere anti-Israel bias to now encompass velvet-gloved reporting on two high-profile, anti-Israel Democrats.

"A Board doing its job does not watch its company get caught, publicly and repeatedly, publishing material that violates the company's own written standards, and say nothing," the letter states. "The violations themselves are for the newsroom to answer; the Board's attention to those violations, or its ignorance of them, is what NCPPR seeks to inspect." To do so, lawyers are demanding the Times hand over scores of internal records related to its reporting on Israel and Platner, including any private discussions the Times board may have engaged in about the coverage.

NJAC's initial May 29 letter came on the heels of a lurid and outlandish report, now widely discredited, from Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that accused Israel of raping two Palestinian "journalists" in separate incidents with a carrot and a dog. The NJAC raised concerns about the quality of the board's oversight prior to the publication of the column, which relied heavily on a Hamas-linked organization for the dog rape allegation, according to multiple reports, including in the Free Beacon.

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