11/02 Links: Omer Neutra confirmed as one of three slain Gaza hostages returned to Israel on Sunday; The Arab World Rejects Hamas While New York City Glorifies It

From Ian:

When Truth Splits in Two: The Arab World Rejects Hamas While New York City Glorifies It

The Great Moral Reversal
In the Middle East, proximity to Hamas’s rule has produced clarity. People who live under or near Islamist militias know the cost of their fanaticism. They have seen the beheadings, the executions, the corruption, and the cruelty. They know that Hamas, like the Houthis or Hezbollah, does not liberate, it enslaves.

In the West, by contrast, ideological distance paired with obsession of the oppressor vs oppressed narrative breeds delusion. The further one stands from Hamas’s victims, the easier it is to romanticize its violence. Western activists, many of whom would never tolerate a prayer led by a homophobic priest or a law that could affect a woman's right to control her own medical decisions, suspend all judgment when those same forces wrap themselves in Palestinian flags.

It is an irony only modern politics could produce. Arab liberals call for Hamas’s elimination, while American progressives dance beneath its banners.

Why This Matters
The implications reach beyond moral outrage. When American cities normalize pro terror rhetoric, they erode the social immune system that protects against radicalization. When politicians legitimize extremists in the name of diversity, they invite violence and antisemitism into civic life.

One world is waking up. The other is descending into moral sleep. In Riyadh, Cairo, and Manama, journalists write that Hamas’s “role has ended.” In Brooklyn, protesters shout that “resistance is glorious.”

The former seeks peace. The latter seeks purpose. The former has seen war’s reality. The latter plays at revolution from the safety of American democracy.

The lesson is painfully clear: moral clarity still exists, but you will find more of it today in the Arab world than on the streets of New York City, a city now poised to dive even deeper into fanaticism and moral inversion.

The Qatar Problem

Knowledge Production and Narrative Control
Tensions between Saudis, Iranians, and Qataris had simmered for years, and I could still feel the heat at a security forum in Europe in late August 2023. After I led a teach-in on the Middle East, the Qatari ambassador to Canada, Dr Khalid bin Rashid Al Mansouri, approached me to ask if I needed funding for my initiatives. I declined. Mid-sentence, a Gazan social-media activist cut in: “Will you keep financially supporting our people in Gaza even now that Saudi is normalising with Israel?” The ambassador turned, took his hands, and answered, “We will never ever stop supporting our Palestinian brothers.”

That was not a humanitarian promise, it was policy. Qatar has bankrolled Hamas since 2007, when the group seized Gaza after a bloody rampage that overthrew the Palestinian Authority. In 2012, Qatar’s then-Emir made a red-carpet visit to Gaza and pledged US$400 million for projects, a watershed moment that signalled Doha’s unabashed embrace of Hamas’s rule. Patronage matured into a routinised cash flow, and by 2021, about US$30 million per month was entering Gaza, framed as “humanitarian” transfers that sustained Hamas-run salaries and government operations.

At the same time, Qatar was investing heavily in Western knowledge production and narrative control. Since 2001, US colleges and universities have reported an estimated US$6.25 billion in Qatari funding, making Qatar one of the five largest foreign donors in American higher education. Think tanks and policymakers were folded in, too. Qatar gave upward of US$9.1 million to US think tanks between 2019 and 2023. The Brookings Doha Center and related initiatives received US$14.8 million in a single three-year pledge, part of a broader, longer-running relationship that raised persistent questions and prompted FBI investigations about policy manipulation and censorship across the Beltway ecosystem.

Lobbying followed the same template. In a single recent year, Qatar retained 33 FARA-registered PR and lobbying firms, spending around US$18 million to create surge capacity for bookings, op-eds, and Hill and press engagement. To give you a picture of the scale of Qatari reach in DC, I spent several months after 7 October trying to publish a piece titled, “Qatar Is a Leading Saboteur of Regional Integration.” I sent it to everyone I know in media and policy, including Ambassador Dennis Ross who promised, when I begged him at a Washington Institute event in November 2023, to get it published. I had hit multiple walls, including at a think tank of which I am a member.

A friend at one of these publications told me: “I think they [the editorial team] have an issue with the fact that they have an upcoming partnership in December with Qatar. One of the directors flagged it as problematic and might put them in a delicate situation and prefer to go with another piece they had commissioned with a lighter touch on the subject. Sorry for that.” I asked if there was somewhere I could send it where there would not be a conflict of interest. “It is hard in DC,” my friend replied. “Everyone has interests with the Qataris.”

Even public grief was asked to stand down in deference to Doha’s leverage. After 7 October, several planned protests by hostage families in front of the Qatari embassy were quietly shut down. A source close to the Hostage Families Forum in DC told me they were explicitly warned not to “endanger” diplomatic talks with the only mediators deemed capable of securing releases. I do not fault the families for yielding, especially when even Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff continue to celebrate Qatar’s role as the indispensable mediator for peace.

WAPO: Palestinian Talks on Gaza's Future Could See Hamas Help Shape Its Rule

Palestinian political factions are holding closed-door discussions that could see Hamas play a role in shaping a postwar administration in Gaza.

The eight Palestinian factions and armed groups involved - including Fatah, which leads the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank, and Hamas - are working to reach a consensus over key elements of an interim administration.

To avoid a protracted postwar insurgency, Hamas must be included in any political settlement, say Palestinian political factions and mediators from Arab countries.

A pivotal question is whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu or President Trump would object to a Gazan government born out of talks between Hamas and Fatah.

For Israel, nearly every aspect of the inter-Palestinian talks is unpalatable.

"The fear for Israel is that Hamas will open the gates of Gaza and say to the PA, 'You're the boss here. Just bring money to Gaza and you can declare yourself the minister of agriculture or education. Just don't touch weapons, and we'll be the dominant player,'" said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence analyst.

Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said, "There is a risk that the end state that emerges will be what we wanted to avoid....Hamas is battered and bruised but hanging on to power, preparing for the next round."

WSJ: Hizbullah Is Rearming, Putting Ceasefire at Risk

Hizbullah in Lebanon is rebuilding its armaments and battered ranks, defying the terms of a ceasefire agreement, and raising the prospect of renewed conflict with Israel, according to Israeli and Arab intelligence.

The intelligence shows Iranian-backed Hizbullah is restocking rockets, antitank missiles and artillery. Some weapons are coming in via seaports and still functional smuggling routes through Syria. Hizbullah is also manufacturing new weapons itself.

Under the agreement that ended a two-month Israeli campaign against the group a year ago, Lebanon is required to start disarming Hizbullah in parts of Lebanon, before continuing to the entire country as per a previous agreement.

Israel is losing patience after new intelligence findings highlighted Hizbullah's rearmament. "Should Beirut continue to hesitate, Israel may act unilaterally - and the consequences would be grave," Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a key American envoy for Lebanon and Syria, said in October.

The standoff highlights the difficulty of quashing an established militia with a base of support among the population even when it has been badly beaten. The difficulties are also evident in Gaza, where Hamas is resisting demands that it disarm and relinquish power.

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11/01 Links: The illusion of Palestinian peace; Hamas again hands over remains that don’t belong to hostages; CENTCOM posts footage of Hamas terrorists looting aid truck

From Ian:

The Balfour Declaration is a monument to humanity in this dark age of anti-Semitism

The revival of anti-Semitism has shown in a way no Zionist arguments ever could, the need for a state with a Jewish majority where Jews can live without fear.

The Balfour Declaration contained an important proviso – “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. It did not mention the national rights of Arabs, since at that time many believed that such rights were reserved for those of European origin.

All the same, “the civil and religious rights” of Arabs are better protected in Israel than in the murderous regimes and failed states which constitute much of the rest of today’s Middle East.

The early Zionists hoped for Arab acceptance. But a brief period of amity soon gave rise, inevitably no doubt, to a persistent and often violent conflict between two national claims, each backed by religion.

Balfour would not have been surprised. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s, he had been accused of being unjust to Irish nationalists. “Justice” he mused, “there is not enough to go round”. And indeed in the Middle East there isn’t.

Nevertheless, Israel has become an insurance mechanism for Jews against anti-Semitism; and sadly no one can predict when or where that mechanism will be needed.

And that is why, as the diplomatic historian, Tom Otte, has argued, the Balfour Declaration stands as “one of the few monuments to humanity in the 20th century”.

The illusion of Palestinian peace

The “ecstasy” of jihad was visible on Oct. 7, in videos of young men calling their parents to boast about killing Jews with their own hands, and in the mobs cheering as kidnapped Israeli girls were paraded through Gaza’s streets.

Even academics in the West, such as Cornell’s Russell Rickford, revealed the same moral sickness when he called the massacre “exhilarating.”

Arab–Palestinian wars have always followed this script: an initial eruption of homicidal and suicidal ecstasy, followed by crushing defeat—the War of Independence (1948), the Six Day War (1967), the Intifadas, and now the war of Oct. 7. Yet from each failure, what remains in memory is the thrill of violence, not the price of it.

This mindset—rooted in the dream of expanding Dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) by erasing Dar al-Harb (the land of war)—turns every peace proposal into betrayal, and every act of terror into redemption.

Meanwhile, international institutions like the United Nations invert morality by cloaking this death cult in the language of “human rights.” The result is what the Arab intellectual Fouad Ajami called “a palace of dreams” turned into a trap of death.

The much-discussed “deradicalization” needed for a peace process is nowhere in sight. As this survey makes clear, the obstacle is not Israel’s settlements or borders—it is the culture of hatred itself.

Until that changes, peace will remain a Western illusion.

Hamas again hands over remains that don’t belong to hostages

Hamas transferred to Israel the remains of three individuals that do not belong to any of the 11 slain hostages still held by terrorist in Gaza, Israel’s broadcaster Channel 13 reported on Saturday.

The remains, which Red Cross intermediaries handed over to Israel overnight Friday, were examined by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv’s Abu Kabir neighborhood.

The Israel Defense Forces says that at least two bodies of deceased captives can be recovered immediately by the terrorist organization, while Hamas may truly not know the whereabouts of three to five others.

“We ruled out the possibility that the remains returned last night are linked to any Israeli hostage,” an Israeli official told Ynet on Saturday.

“Specifically, this incident does not constitute a violation, since from the outset we assessed with low probability that the remains belonged to hostages. We prefer that Hamas hand over findings so we can verify them. That said, Hamas continues its fundamental violation—the failure to return the bodies of the fallen,” the official added.

According to the ceasefire terms, in cases of uncertainty, remains should be transferred to Israel for verification.

However, Jerusalem believes that Hamas is deliberately slow-walking the return of the deceased hostages to avoid its disarmament, which is set to take place in the second phase of the ceasefire deal with a deployment of an international force in the Gaza Strip.

Instead, the Islamist group is buying time to reassert its control over territory from which the IDF has withdrawn, so it will have greater bargaining power in future talks regarding Gaza’s reconstruction.

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10/31 Links Pt2: A season of bipartisan betrayal on antisemitism; When Conservative Leaders Lose Their Way; The Question JD Vance Needs to Answer

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: A season of bipartisan betrayal on antisemitism

Heritage embraces Tucker
He reached a new low this week when he welcomed neo-Nazi Holocaust denier and vicious Jew-hater Nick Fuentes onto his podcast. That raised the question as to whether Carlson was going to be able to mainstream antisemitism on the political right in much the same way that woke progressives have done to the left.

We didn’t have long to find out the answer to that question. And it came from a surprising source—the Heritage Foundation Washington think tank that has been one of the intellectual hubs of conservative thought and activism. In a video posted on X, Kevin Roberts, a historian and president of Heritage, made it clear that not only was he refusing to distance himself and his organization from Carlson, but that he was doubling down on this stand.

In a brief speech, Roberts denounced those who have criticized Carlson’s platforming of antisemitism and his vicious attacks on Israel and Christian Zionists, whom the podcaster described as heretics who had a “brain virus.” Roberts said Heritage didn’t believe in “canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians” and depicted those appalled by Carlson as a “venomous coalition” who engage in “slander” that “serves someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts said Heritage supported cooperation with Israel when it served U.S. interests—something no one disputes. But the Heritage president seemed to echo some of the dark rhetoric of the far left and far right when he spoke of those who “reflexively support” the Jewish state as “loud” sinister, globalist” forces who are somehow harming America, and that must be resisted.

He made clear that he would stick with Carlson, no matter what he did, and his only interest was in attacking the left. He said that he “disagreed with and even abhorred things that Fuentes had said,” but wouldn’t cancel him either. He treated his hatred of Jews as merely an idea that should be debated.

He did some damage control on that aspect of his statement a day later by detailing on X his profound disagreement with Fuentes’s vile bigotry. Still, he stopped short of drawing the obvious conclusion that those who normalize and seek to mainstream neo-Nazi beliefs need to be held responsible for doing that.

The point being, it doesn’t matter if you are appalled by Fuentes if you treat those who promote him and treat him as legitimate as allies, and smear those who oppose such abhorrent behavior as somehow unpatriotic or guilty of dual loyalty.

This is a startling turnabout for an organization with not only an honorable record of support for Israel but whose “Esther Project” to combat antisemitism has served as a blueprint for the Trump administration’s efforts to root out left-wing ideologies that are enabling Jew-hatred on college campuses. Roberts’ seeming neutrality about his friend’s prejudiced behavior directly contradicts what his organization has been trying to do in academia.

It’s especially discouraging since the real “globalist” forces in the international community are the ones whose arguments are echoed by Carlson and Fuentes, in which they promote blood libels against Israel, and seek to isolate and destroy it. Supporters of the Jewish state are Heritage’s natural allies and are to be found among its staff and donors because they support the same vision of national conservatism—both in the United States and Israel— that Roberts has championed.

JD Vance mimics Kamala Harris
Roberts’s profession of loyalty to Carlson came in the same week as a troubling response of Vice President JD Vance to questions from an Israel-hating student at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. When given an opportunity to slap down anti-Israel conspiracy theories, he let them go unanswered. He responded with what could only be described as an equivocal statement about the U.S.-Israel relationship in which he boasted of pressuring Jerusalem during the recent ceasefire negotiations and professed his Christian faith.

While Trump and Vance have strong pro-Israel records, Vance’s answer was little different from the way Harris responded to smears of Israel from left-wing activists when campaigning last year, when she was primarily interested in signaling her sympathy for them. Like her, Vance seemed to be signaling that he, too, was more concerned with demonstrating his solidarity with extremists on his end of the spectrum than in distancing himself from them. When you consider that Vance is the likely frontrunner to succeed Trump, it calls into question whether Trump’s historic pro-Israel policies will be maintained if he wins in 2028.

Both battles must be fought
Taken together, all these events present an ugly picture of the current state of political debate in the United States.

There is no doubt that most of those who are supporting the U.S.-Israel alliance and fighting antisemitism can be found among Republicans and on the political right, while all the energy and most of the young stars in the Democratic Party are to be found among its anti-Israel and antisemitic left-wing. And unlike the crickets to be heard among most prominent Democrats about Mamdani, the pushback against Heritage and Carlson from prominent Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is a sign that the conservative base of the GOP is still firmly pro-Israel and ready to fight Jew-hatred wherever it is to be found.

But what we heard from the Heritage Foundation and Vance this week indicates that the antisemites have not only gotten a foothold within the conservative mainstream. Some of the most important players in it would prefer to embrace them rather than to drive them back to the fever swamps where they belong.

This is a sobering revelation for those who have long taken comfort from the way that the two major American political parties had more or less exchanged identities in the last half-century when it came to Israel and opposition to antisemitism. This shouldn’t diminish the effort to call the political left to account for its role in normalizing hatred for Israel. But it is a discouraging reminder that the same battle must now also be fought on the political right.

When Conservative Leaders Lose Their Way

The Stakes for Conservatism
Roberts is free to debate Israel policy, question foreign aid, or advocate for a more transactional foreign policy. These are legitimate positions worthy of serious discussion. But when he uses his platform as Heritage’s president to defend the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis, he damages not just his own reputation but the credibility of the entire conservative movement.

He gives the left ammunition to paint all conservatives as tolerant of fascism. He alienates Jewish conservatives who have been vital to building our movement. He signals to young conservatives that Holocaust denial is just another viewpoint in the marketplace of ideas.

This is particularly tragic because Heritage has so many brilliant scholars doing crucial work on everything from regulatory reform to national security. They deserve leadership that can distinguish between legitimate policy disagreements and the mainstreaming of genocidal hatred.

A Call for Moral Clarity
The Heritage Foundation is bigger than any one president. Its legacy of principled conservatism stretches back to Edwin Feulner, who built it into a powerhouse, and forward to the scholars who continue producing vital research today. The institution itself remains essential to the conservative movement.

But Kevin Roberts has failed a basic test of leadership. By defending the platforming of Nick Fuentes, he’s chosen online populism over moral principle. He’s decided that maintaining Tucker Carlson’s friendship matters more than maintaining the standards that separate conservatism from its worst fringes.

Roberts owes the conservative movement—and The Heritage Foundation itself—a clear retraction and apology. Not for his views on Israel or foreign policy, which are legitimate subjects for debate, but for defending those who mainstream Holocaust denial and white nationalism.

Until he provides that clarity, he’s damaged not just his own credibility but cast a shadow over an institution that deserves better leadership. Heritage’s board, scholars, and supporters should demand better. The conservative movement certainly does.

There are many hills worth dying on in politics. Defending the mainstreaming of Holocaust deniers isn’t one of them. Kevin Roberts should know the difference. The fact that he doesn’t is a tragedy for him and a challenge for an institution that has given so much to the conservative cause.

Seth Mandel: The Question JD Vance Needs to Answer

Last night, Vice President JD Vance made remarks at a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi and then took questions from the crowd. It was inevitable that one of those questions would be a provocative statement about nefarious Jewish influence masked as an innocent question about American foreign policy.

“I’m just confused,” the stammering MAGA-hatted student repeated a couple of times. What was this poor chap confused about? “I’m a Christian man, and I’m just, uh, confused why—that there’s this notion that we, uh, might have or, uh, owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred billion dollar, um, foreign aid package to Israel…. I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

Now, there are a few possible ways to answer this type of “question.” Vance could have been combative and rejected the premise forcefully, deterring any other clowns from trying to hijack the vice president’s event. That would have been a show of strength. He also could have ignored the sniping about Judaism to appear diplomatic while trying to show that he won’t take such bait. In that case, he could’ve just answered the policy part of the question by correcting the kid’s warped description.

The third option would be the weakest: accept the premise of both parts of the question and try to convince the young man that the White House knows what it’s doing.

As you can probably guess, the vice president chose the third option:
“First of all, when the president of the United States says America First that means that he pursues the interests of Americans first. That is our entire foreign policy. And that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time…. In this example, the most recent Gaza peace plan that all of us have been working on very hard for the past few weeks, the president of the United States could only get that peace deal done by actually being willing to apply leverage to the State of Israel. So when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this president of the United States.”

A good follow-up question might have asked Vance which specific presidents he had in mind when he suggested that other presidents have been controlled by Israel.

Vance then treated the other part of the question as equally legitimate:

“Now you ask about, you know, sort of Jews disagreeing with Christians on certain religious ideas. Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the realities is that Jews do not believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah. Obviously, Christians do believe that. There are some significant theological disagreements between Christians and Jews. My attitude is: Let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them. But if there are shared areas of interest, we ought to be willing to do that, too.”

Vance said he was fine with, for example, working with Israel to maintain open access to Christian holy sites. Then he concluded: “What I’m not OK with is any country coming before the interests of American citizens.”

Vance was plainly unprepared for this question, even though he should have known it was coming. In the end, he came off as a guy who really wants the vote of a college-age groyper who came to troll him that night.

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10/31 Links Pt1: IDF to recieve three slain hostages to return tonight; Paddystine’s new president; FBI Thwarts Jihadist Terrorist Attack in Dearborn, Michigan

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: The Numbers Game

Here is my one regret from the last two years of commentary on the 7th October War: we let ourselves get sucked into arguing the running death toll coming out of Hamas’s Health Ministry in Gaza.

In some ways, it was inevitable. Global outlets put those figures in every headline and chyron, so someone had to meet them on the field. Nevertheless, it was still a strategic mistake. We allowed Hamas’s daily ticker to become the global yardstick for morality in this conflict.

Start with a simple truth about war reporting: immediate casualty numbers after explosions are guaranteed to be wrong. These are not fog-of-war errors from Hamas; they are straight-up lies. The Al‑Ahli explosion is a case study. Within minutes, the “500 dead” claim circled the world. Subsequent assessments from Western intelligence agencies put the likely death toll in the low hundreds, yet the first number did its work; it framed the narrative for days. We have seen this ruse time and again, and we fall for it each time it happens.

I am not saying the numbers do not matter at all; every innocent death matters infinitely to the people who loved them. But the “numbers game”, the breathless, running tally, turns a legal and moral analysis into a horse race graphic. It incentivises speed over verification, from a single unverified source with a clear propaganda motive, and it collapses complex questions into a single, unreliable metric. Even organisations and reporters who regard Gaza Health Ministry figures as broadly useful acknowledge the limits of instant counts and the likelihood of later revisions when conditions improve or bodies are recovered from rubble.

Here is the broader point. If the tally is 40,000, 68,000, or 100,000, the fundamental question remains unchanged. In no other conflict do we treat a running counter as the dispositive test of conduct. Afghanistan’s war killed roughly 176,000 people through direct violence by 2021: civilians, Afghan forces, insurgents, and others, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Iraq’s direct-war deaths from 2003 to 2021 total 275,000–306,000, including 185,000–209,000 civilians. Those wars are debated on strategy, aims, and legality, not by a daily, decontextualised ticker. Nobody alleges those wars were genocides.

Look around the world right now. Amidst the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Sudan, famine has been formally identified, with the UN-backed IPC system projecting expansion absent major relief. In the worst-case scenario, up to one million people could die in Sudan through war, famine, and pestilence. There are no mass marches in Western capitals keyed to that potential number and no live tickers on cable news.

FBI Thwarts Jihadist Terrorist Attack in Dearborn, Michigan, Planned for Halloween Weekend

The FBI on Friday foiled a jihadist terrorist plot in Dearborn, Mich., arresting multiple suspects for plotting an ISIS-inspired attack over Halloween weekend.

Authorities "thwarted a Jihadist terror plot stemming from Dearborn earlier this morning—reportedly timed to coincide with children trick-or-treating later tonight," journalist Eitan Fischberger wrote in an X post. FBI director Kash Patel confirmed in a statement on X that officials "thwarted a potential terrorist attack and arrested multiple subjects in Michigan who were allegedly plotting a violent attack over Halloween weekend."

"The plot was inspired by ISIS," CNN reported, citing two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.

The suspects discussed the plot in online chatrooms where an undercover FBI agent was present, the officials told CNN. Authorities have arrested two of the participants and are questioning three others.

This is far from the only ISIS-linked terrorist plot on U.S. soil this year. In June, an Afghan national who had pledged allegiance to ISIS pleaded guilty to two terrorism-related offenses. In January, U.S. citizen Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 15 people and injured dozens more when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans. Jabbar, who died in a shootout with police, had an ISIS flag in his vehicle and pledged allegiance to the group in Facebook videos posted just hours before the attack.

Paddystine’s new president

Describing Hamas as “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” she is not averse to issuing her own “Paddystinian” statements. “I come from Ireland, which has a history of colonization,” she told the BBC earlier this year. “I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country.”

One of the core doctrines of Palestinianism is that “Palestine” is the only issue that matters and that other international crises—from Ukraine to Kurdistan to Sudan—are either politically suspect or simply irrelevant. As Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinians, expressed it at an Oct. 30 briefing organized by the U.N.’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, “Palestine today is the stage to prove whether or not we will live in a truly decolonized world.” The message sent to the residents of the city of El-Fasher in Sudan, who last week were driven from their homes amid bestial atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as well as to the thousands of Ukrainian children illegally abducted by the Russian invaders, is that they don’t count.

In fact, Russian imperialism is not just exempted. In Connolly’s case, it receives a full-throated endorsement. An uncompromising backer of Irish neutrality that was famously on display during World War II, she opposes greater Irish contributions to the defense of Europe. She has additionally criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, accusing the alliance of playing “a despicable role in moving forward to the border and engaging in war-mongering,” believing that the greatest threat posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the “militarization” of Europe.

As Rachelle Moiselle, a keen observer of the Irish scene, has observed, Connolly also has a nasty habit of referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” as if the country is a geographical feature rather than an independent state allied with the West. So much, then, for not telling “a sovereign people how to run their country,” unless you believe, as Connolly clearly does, that Ukraine is a province of a Greater Russia.

Perhaps Connolly’s greatest offense was her homage to the now-deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2018. Standing in the rubble of Aleppo, relentlessly bombed by the Russian forces supporting Assad during the civil war, she offered her solidarity to this exemplar of Arab dictators, despite Assad reducing the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus from—as one Palestinian witness memorably put it—“a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die.”

Connolly is unlikely to stick to the traditional role of the Irish president as a figurehead, opting instead for the activist profile adopted by Higgins and first pioneered during the 1990s by Mary Robinson. While the current crop of Western leaders is unlikely to heed her warnings and complaints, she is set to be a major component of the global movement to isolate and weaken the State of Israel.

She will not be alone. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, sits in her camp, as will—assuming he wins New York City’s mayoral election—the Hamas shill Zohran Mamdani, to name just two of her erstwhile comrades.

As Israel’s main ally on the world stage, the United States needs to tighten political and economic pressure on Ireland, which, in the estimation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, “runs a trade surplus at our expense.” As for the American Jewish community, they should steer clear of vacations in Ireland and refrain from buying Irish products. For one thing, it’s not safe to be a Jew there. For another, with Ireland pushing a boycott of Israel, we should have no qualms about urging a boycott of Ireland in response.

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10/30 Links Pt2: Tokenism and Anti-Zionism After October 7; Why I’m going to stop using the term ‘antisemitism’; New York holds its breath

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Tokenism and Anti-Zionism After October 7

She certainly might be right about what lies ahead. But she is stacking the odds against it. How does one celebrate Jewish holidays without mentioning the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel? Where do you tell your kids the Israelites were going when they escaped Pharaoh’s clutches, Portland? Where were the temple sacrifices made, Katz’s Deli? Jewish history happened where it happened, and there isn’t much you can do about that.

As her mother says to her in that interview: “But how do you square that with the ancient history that I’ve been taught—that Jews were from Israel, that all those years we wandered in the desert and then finally came back to Israel. Is all of that false?”

To which her daughter responds: “That was many, many years ago!”

Yeah, that’s kind of the point. Full commitment to Diasporist anti-Zionism requires the jettisoning of everything that happened before this moment.

But the larger obstacle to the future envisioned here is that this young lady will no doubt be spending her time with peer groups hostile to Jewish tradition and practice and history. Forget the Muslim Student Union; the Times story discusses her conversations with canvassers from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a progressive political group designed to reinforce her priors.

This is the problem that Rabbi Blumofe appears to put his finger on. It’s not that liberal Jews can’t or don’t exist. It’s that the structure of American politics is such that if one aligns with anti-Zionism, one is unlikely to encounter anything else. Indeed, the progressive gate-keeping has become so intense that anti-Zionism is now a litmus test for activists on any issue. It’s why climate prophetess of doom Greta Thunberg spends her time on boats challenging the Israeli navy.

The Diasporism advocated in these groups is a closed circle. As Vladimir Jabotinsky said when confronted with the argument that Jews ought to be a light unto the nations from within those nations but without a nation of their own: “England… has enriched the world with a valuable social idea: self-rule of free citizens, that is, the parliamentary government. However, how did the English nation teach other peoples to understand and run such a government? Certainly not by being scattered among the nations and convincing them; just the opposite.”

The same goes for being in groups whose entire reason for being is to critique the Jews. Embracing tokenism is a form of extreme self-exile and self-negation. The proliferation of political spaces that use anti-Zionism as their litmus test is one of the great challenges facing American Jewry. And the first step to overcoming that challenge is to acknowledge it.

David Harsanyi: Why I’m going to stop using the term ‘antisemitism’

There was no longer a need to invent blood libels tied to the Jewish faith, though doing so would never really go completely out of style. Indeed, Marr and other socialists like Eugen Dühring would blame Jews for the rise of unfettered capitalism, and national socialists and other xenophobic factions blamed them for spreading worldwide communism. But no matter how secularized or German or patriotic or apolitical a Jew might become, they still could never escape their “race.”

Later, some of the Nazis, devotees of the racialist outlook, objected to the use of “antisemitism” because they sought “Semitic” allies like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who would join them in egging on the murder of Jews in Bosnia and elsewhere. Not all “Semites” were the same.

And the “Semitic” designation is ridiculous. Coined by German historians in the late 1700s, it bunches together wildly divergent groups of ancient people by similarities in language. An “anti-Semite,” then, technically speaking, is a person who is hostile to Hebrew or Aramaic or Phoenician. Over the years, Jewish organizations have prodded people to remove the hyphen to create a more generic term for a prejudice against Jews. Now, I’m sure “Semitic” is useful for linguists or historians trying to make sense of the movements and relationships in the ancient world, but in contemporary usage, it’s about as valuable as calling Hungarian or Finn haters “anti-Uralics.”

“Antisemitism” is reminiscent of another vaguely scientific-sounding word meant to mislead, “Islamophobia.” Defining Jews as “Semites” strips them of religious, cultural, or intellectual traditions and reimagines them as a race. “Islamophobia” treats criticism of the cultural and intellectual traditions of Islam as if it were tantamount to irrational racism. Islam isn’t a race; it’s a theology with numerous strands. Jews aren’t a race, either. They are, because of their ancient origins, an ethnicity and a faith.

Orwell warned that language decays when our thoughts become foolish — and that corrupted language, in turn, makes foolish thinking easier. Words have meaning, and using them precisely matters. A person who despises others for unchangeable traits such as skin color is a racist. One who rejects Catholic beliefs with hostility is anti-Catholic. Someone who instinctively dislikes all Dutch people is a bigot. Hatred of women is sexism. An irrational fear or hatred of men is androphobia. When we distort or dilute such words, we don’t make the world kinder — we simply make our thinking less clear.

If you believe Jews control space lasers for Israel and are behind every nefarious plot you’ve conjured up in your fetid imagination, “anti-Semite” doesn’t really do you justice. You’re probably just a “Jew-hater.” There’s really no reason for anyone to soften the blow by adopting Wilhelm Marr’s preposterous verbiage.

Melanie Phillips: New York holds its breath

The fear that the wider community might turn against Jews has meant that—even now that it has indeed done so at an unprecedented level—these cowed Jews don’t blame the haters, but instead blame Israel for allegedly turning the community against them. As Levin states, even some Jews genuinely concerned with Israel’s well-being are thus sickeningly blaming Jewish victimization on other Jews.

For similar reasons, there’s a fixed belief among Jewish leaders that the principal threat to diaspora Jews comes from the extreme right, despite the fact that most of this threat emanates from the progressive radicals of race, gender and climate politics.

This helps explain why there has been no concerted opposition to Mamdani from America’s Jewish community leadership. Many of these leaders believe not that people like Mamdani have incited the current explosion of antisemitism but that Israel has tarred their own standing in society, particularly among the intelligentsia, media and other cultural icons with whom they identify.

Levin calls out a range of U.S. communal bodies and leaders, including the Anti-Defamation League, the New Israel Fund, J Street and Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the leader of Reform Judaism, for effectively siding with the mortal enemies of Israel and the Jewish people or failing to do enough to counter them.

Rather than call out the demagogic black community leader Al Sharpton, who has spewed anti-Jewish invective and has been involved in anti-Jewish violence that goes back to the Crown Heights riots in 1991 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Levin notes that Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, effectively embraced him as an ally against the right.

Along with the campus-based Hillel organization, says Levin, the ADL has also failed to take adequate action to counter the threats to Jewish students on campus, and no other legacy Jewish organization has stepped up to fill this void.

And none of them has called out the rampant antisemitism that is standard fare throughout the Muslim world. Instead, these organizations parrot the leftist denunciation of anyone critical of Muslims as a bigot.

There’s another reason that Jewish community leaders don’t call out these enemies within. The Jewish world tells itself that the greatest threat it faces is disunity, which has brought disaster upon the Jewish people in the past because it has fatally weakened its defense against its enemies.

While it is undeniable that disunity is disastrous, an even greater catastrophe is surely threatened by Jews turning against their own. This provides both lethal weaponry and a protective shield for the mortal enemies of the Jewish people.

These anti-Jewish Jews have, in effect, joined forces with those who are intent upon the extermination of the Jewish state. They sanitize and incentivize these enemies while gaslighting Jews who support Israel and whom they demonize as nationalist bigots.

The damage that’s been done by Jews who have a pathological impulse to damage their own people, and who hurl against Israel and Zionism the same malevolent lies deployed by those who want Israel and the Jews removed from the world, is unconscionable.

The willful refusal by the Jewish community leadership to address this amounts to a betrayal of a Jewish community that’s under siege. If Mamdani is elected, they will have much more to answer for.

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10/30 Links Pt1: Amiram Cooper, Sahar Baruch identified as slain hostages returned to Israel; The War that Rewrote the Middle East; Italy blasts Francesca Albanese: “Entirely devoid of credibility and impartiality”

From Ian:

The War that Rewrote the Middle East

Over 24 months of sustained combat, Israel demonstrated an unexpected capacity for prolonged warfare - politically, economically, and psychologically. Moreover, the notion that Israel cannot wage war in more than two or three domains simultaneously was shown to be outdated, as it operated across seven domains: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and the West Bank, without losing strategic coherence. Israel ceased to behave like a besieged enclave and emerged as a regional power with expansive capabilities.

The war also destroyed the myth of sanctuary. From Tehran to Yemen and even Doha, Israel struck its enemies with ease and precision. The era of "safe havens" for planners and financiers of anti-Israel operations has ended.

In addition, the legend of underground invincibility collapsed. Iran, Hizbullah, and Hamas poured vast resources into subterranean networks they believed impregnable. Yet the killing of Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah in a fortified bunker last year put an end to this myth. The Israeli-American strikes on Iranian facilities also underscored that even the deepest tunnels and bunkers may no longer guarantee safety.

Under U.S. CENTCOM, several Arab militaries quietly joined missile-defense efforts against Iranian strikes, an event unthinkable prior to this war. The U.S., too, shifted from a passive supporter to an operational partner, with the alliance maturing into a working, action-based partnership reminiscent of U.S. relations with NATO members.

Israel Did What the U.S. Would Have Done Had a Genocidal Enemy Launched an Attack on Us

After two years of intense conflict, Israel is substantially better off than it was on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel confounded its mortal enemies by inflicting defeat after defeat on the revolutionary, virulently antisemitic Iranian regime and its primary surrogates - Hizbullah and Hamas.

Israel persevered heroically in defiance of the Biden administration's relentless pressure to restrain its response. The IDF waged a series of brilliant campaigns - decapitating, with surgical precision, Hizbullah's leadership; degrading its thousands of missiles; and devastating Iran's air defenses, thereby facilitating U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear sites that significantly set back its nuclear weapons program.

Israel also secured the return of the remaining hostages without sacrificing its prerogative to crush the unreconciled remnants of Hamas should they resume violence. The shock and awe of the IDF's military victory has incentivized more moderate Arab regimes to cooperate with Israel and abandon Hamas. Israel's resounding victories against Iranian proxies contributed mightily to the weakening of Assad's bloody tyranny in Syria.

The U.S. and its democratic allies are also substantially better off now that Israel has won its existential war against its genocidal adversaries. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz expressed his gratitude for Israel's attacks on Iran: "This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us....This regime has brought death and destruction to the world."

Thus, Israel did what I hope and pray the U.S. would have done had a genocidal enemy launched a proportionally equivalent attack on us - murdering 40,000 Americans; raping, torturing, and beheading victims; casting babies into ovens - without a shred of remorse. Surely we would and should have vanquished such a perpetrator, settling for nothing less than complete and utter destruction of the regime that perpetrated the attack - just as Churchill and FDR rightly did with Nazi Germany and Japan.

It is rank hypocrisy to begrudge the right of Israel to do what we and any other morally sane nation would have done in response to a comparable attack.

The great scholar of war Geoffrey Blainey instructs us in The Causes of War that the longest and most durable periods of peace occur when the results of war are most decisive, eliminating the root cause of the conflict. We ignore these lessons at our peril.

The Age of Amnesia By Abe Greenwald

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Should JNIM capture Mali, add it to the list—along with Russia’s war on Ukraine, unprecedented aggression by Iranian proxies, and jihad throughout other West African countries—of nightmares made possible, in part, by Joe Biden’s catastrophic decision to surrender in Afghanistan.

But I’m beginning to think that Biden’s withdrawal was only a symptom of something much larger. Many dispiriting circumstances here and abroad—including this latest development in Mali—are pointing to an unavoidable realization. It’s beginning to seem as if the West (with the heroic exception of Israel) has forgotten everything about 9/11 and the nature of jihadists. And we’ve forgotten everything about the necessity of fighting terrorism except for one detail—it’s hard and unpleasant work.

You see it in the pro-jihad mobs that flooded through the United States over the past two years. You see it in the dilapidated polities of Europe, where Islamist thugs tyrannize by terrorist veto. You see it in Donald Trump’s encouragement of a new Syrian regime ruled by a former al-Qaeda fighter (this, too, was an inspiration to JNIM). And you can look back and see it in Trump’s first-term decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia.

And, yes, this must be said: I can’t help seeing it right now in New York City. The city that was once devastated and traumatized by Islamist terrorists is about to elect as mayor a man with a long and loud record of support and sympathy for Islamist terrorism.

Twenty-four years after 9/11, the Taliban is in power, al-Qaeda is on the verge of state governance, terrorists are on the march, and their fans are everywhere—including, all too soon, in Gracie Mansion.

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10/29 Links Pt2: The Cinema of October 7th; Media Complicity: Hamas Breaks the Ceasefire, Israel Gets the Blame; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder making his own ‘Palestine flavour’

From Ian:

Mini-Series "Red Alert" Chronicles the Hamas Oct. 7 Attack from the View of Four Families

Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender, 68, from a Jewish family in the Bronx, has produced a taut, gut-wrenching four-part drama series, "Red Alert," which chronicles the Hamas terror attack from the perspective of four families caught up in the horror.

"We just wanted people to see what it's like to be an ordinary, everyday person and be woken up by a terrorist in your house," says Bender.

We meet a family taking refuge in their safe room in Kibbutz Nir Oz; an Arab man driving near Gaza with his family; a husband and wife from the security forces separated in the chaos; and a mother evacuating the wounded as she searches for her son.

"They're basically all family stories," says Bender, who was nominated for an Oscar three times. "We wanted to show real heroes."

The purpose of "Red Alert," says Bender, is to expand the audience that is aware of the events of the day, rather than relay them blow for blow. "It's just too triggering. It's too much."

He felt a drama would be the most appropriate vehicle to convey a message instead of a documentary.

"I thought, the people who would not normally go see a documentary might see this. You know, it's called 'Red Alert.' In a sense, it's a thriller. But when you watch it, it actually becomes very emotional, and you realize it's the truth."

The Cinema of October 7th

It is no surprise that the first artistic response to the events of the Seventh of October, put in cinematic context and sufficiently sublimated, was a film by Nadav Lapid. Yes!, Lapid’s fifth feature film, and in some ways his most sophisticated and radical to date, is a macabre, grotesque morality tale about a young couple with a baby, trying to survive in a monstrosity of a country, a near-future or current Israel. Lapid’s alternative Israel is an oligarchy of sorts, in which the young are ruled by the elderly who consume them for sexual pleasure and entertainment. The young must sell themselves to servitude or else be doomed to bankruptcy.

It is also no surprise that Lapid was able to accommodate this colossal event, a catastrophe, in his unique brand of cinema. That’s because Lapid’s films, politically, were there long before any of this happened. His first film, Policeman (2011), starts as a group portrait of a small team in an anti-terrorist police unit. Most of the time, the officers are seen hanging out in barbecues, tackling extreme sport challenges, or at home going about their respective romantic lives. Though the premise is that of an action film, Lapid’s camera seems more intent on examining their rituals and rites, watching how they bond and how they deceive one another.

Most of the time, we see them faking it, though the feeling of the film is not that of a satire or a parody. Instead, there is a kind of overriding strained ambivalence, wherein it is hard to judge what might be the right attitude on the part of the viewer toward the subject matter and characters. The perverse is ever present in Lapid’s filmmaking, which makes it harder on the audience to tell right from wrong. The director also has a way of cutting shots together that is more reminiscent of French Nouvelle Vague than Hollywood’s version of realism, which further complicates the relation between space and time.

‘Yes!’ is an explosive, taboo-crushing novelty of a film that explores how we drag on with our lives in the wake of catastrophe.

At times, the film lends itself to some extreme oddities; the commander of the anti-terrorist crew is trying to hone his skill at vaginal massage on his pregnant wife. Maybe the best scene in the entire film takes place in one of those get-togethers, wherein the main character, the team commander, “snatches” a baby from one of the sleeping wives of his buddies, to check out in front of the mirror how to hold the baby right so as to best accentuate his muscle tone.

We are bound to ask, what could that baby-holding-in-front-of-the-mirror scene mean, strange as it is, both to the movie and to our better senses? Obviously, Israeli machismo is being ridiculed, exposed as narcissistic and false. The scene has an eerie feel to it, like something that should have been cut out of the movie and never seen. Yet it is these very insertions that make his films interesting, both as political critique and as a form of grotesque art. These moments undermine the plot, which is probably what Lapid was aiming at in the first place: to foil our self-indulgences, to wipe out our heroes.

Seth Mandel: Tarek Bazrouk and American Domestic Extremism

In 2024, he was arrested for attacking pro-Israel protesters and in fact assaulted another one as he was being arrested. This lovely ball of hate was at it again later in the year, ambushing a Jew near a Columbia protest. Then in January of this year, he got his hat trick.

All of the episodes were uncontrovertibly violent; not only was Bazrouk not protesting peacefully, but in all cases he physically assaulted peaceful protesters. Nevertheless, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the hate group at the center of other high-profile pro-Hamas incidents, posted that Bazrouk “has been locked up for over five months for speaking out against genocide,” and they claimed it an example of “political repression.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement unsurprisingly filed a petition for leniency, announcing it “stands in solidarity with Tarek.” Students for Justice in Palestine, probably the most extreme collection of Hamas boosters, “demands his immediate liberation.” (Note the word choice: liberation being the euphemism du jour for spilling Jewish blood.)

SJP says Bazrouk “has been targeted by the United States government for his activism.” Which in a way is true: Pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S. is indeed marked by its violence and incitement.

It’s no surprise, then, to see at the courthouse 200 supporters of a man who admitted to a string of assaults. And it is important for us all to acknowledge this support. These “pro-Palestinian” groups conflate violence with speech, and have been fooling free-speech groups for years with the ruse.

Now, however, they are using Bazrouk’s case to make plain what everybody should have seen all along: They do not support free expression but rather respond to free expression with violence, just as their heroes in Gaza do. The movement has one main organizing goal: attacking Jews’ freedom of speech, expression, and association.

Additionally, they reject their naïve defenders’ claims of nonviolence. The Palestinian advocacy groups in the U.S., and the wider progressive movement in which they are now fully embedded and integrated, do not believe they are being targeted for mere speech. They simply believe that speech and violence are equally legitimate forms of expression. And, considering their welcome reception in American political culture, why wouldn’t they?

Seth Mandel: Why Some Academics Are Told Not To Acknowledge Jewish Holidays

A lot of effort goes into finding creative ways to discriminate against Jews on college campuses, but this is a new one. The Telegraph has interviewed several Jewish professors in Britain, and one of them tells the paper that her school’s diversity team sends out greetings on Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh holidays, but not Jewish ones. When she asked them to include Jewish holidays as well, she got a pretty incredible response:

“I was told that Jews could only be mentioned when marking a religious festival that makes no reference to the land of Israel—which possibly leaves one, a minor festival called Purim.”

The article chronicles several other recent incidents, most notably the ongoing harassment of Michael Ben-Gad, an economics professor at a University of London-affiliated school, including activists storming his class and threatening to behead him for the crime of being Israeli.

Ben-Gad is standing his ground quite well and keeping his sense of humor throughout this ordeal. But it is an illustration of a counterintuitive new reality: The pro-Hamas demonstrations have been much reduced (though not eliminated entirely) but the bigotry itself has accelerated.

Take for example what happened recently at Pomona College in California. Pro-Hamas protesters stormed an event commemorating the October 7 attacks featuring a survivor of those attacks, Yoni Viloga. A group calling itself Claremont Undercurrents then took credit for the attack with an open letter that, the Algemeiner reports, appears to threaten Viloga with murder.

Unsurprisingly, the letter accuses Viloga of being “a settler on stolen land” and says his “fictitious ‘state’ destroyed 92% of Gaza.”

Viloga, of course, lives in Israel. To the pro-Hamasniks in the West, it remains a crime to be a Jew living in the Holy Land.

This is no mere land dispute. It’s an argument over whether the educational institutions of the West will persist within established reality—Israel exists, the Jewish holidays mention Israel because the people of Israel are indigenous to that land—or within a bubble of genocidal science fiction.

One can’t help but notice just how much the truth of history bothers these zombies. Their concerns have nothing to do with the lives and the rights of anyone living there now; they simply can’t handle that the people of Israel are living in the Land of Israel, as they have for thousands of years.

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10/29 Links Pt1: Phase II of the Gaza Agreement: The American Vision and Israel's Security Considerations; UNICEF data show there was no famine in Gaza

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: A "Two Gaza Solution"

The war in Gaza has not ended; it has changed shape. The American vision that has emerged is vast in ambition and uncertain in outcome. President Trump's envoys have constructed a regional framework that joins the recovery of Gaza to a broader project linking Arab capital, American protection, and Israeli restraint. For the moment, it works. Hostages have been released, the guns are quieter, and the promise of a new Gaza is being drawn on every conference table.

Yet on the ground, two Gazas now exist. To the west, the remnant of Hamas authority. To the east, the zone under Israeli control. Eastern Gaza will be demilitarized and reconstructed under international sponsorship. Western Gaza is left to Hamas's residual power and the patronage of its regional allies.

Dr. Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, insists that Hamas, as an Islamic jihadist movement, "will not lay down its arms voluntarily because that would be tantamount to erasing its identity" and argues that the only realistic agent of disarmament in the short term is the IDF. What remains now for Israel is to secure the gains, shape the reconstruction, and prevent the return of illusions.

Jake Wallis Simons: Hamas and the luxury of freedom

Imagine the horror of discovering that you have been rubbing shoulders with terrorists. No, I’m not talking about those gullible souls who join the Gaza marches in London, but about the British airline crew who had an unfortunate brush with Hamas at a five-star Marriott hotel in Cairo. Full marks to the Daily Mail, whose veteran photographer Mark Large snapped several of the 154 jihadis freed by Israel as they lived it up at the inexplicably named Renaissance Cairo Mirage City.

What’s a terrorist to do? You recruit suicide bombers, oversee a bus bombing or murder a police officer, get banged up, luck out with early release as part of an exchange for innocent Israeli hostages who had been kept in Hamas catacombs for two years, you’re just enjoying the first luxury buffet you’ve had in years – then the British press turns up! Frankly, it made me miss my time as a reporter on the road. The Marriott, we are told, boasts of being the ‘preferred air crew hub hotel in Cairo’, hosting six airlines regularly due to its proximity to the airport. Or perhaps that should now be ‘boasted’, as one imagines that its time catering to air crew has rather passed.

Cabin staff at the hotel, where rooms start at £200 per night, told the Mail that they were contemplating piling furniture in front of their bedroom doors just in case 7 October came knocking. And who can blame them?

Among the terrorists enjoying the Marriott’s facilities were Mahmoud Issa, who founded Special Unit 101 of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, a Hamas kidnap unit, and had been in prison since 1993; Islamic State hijacker Izz a-Din al-Hamamrah; bus bomb mastermind Samir Abu Nima; kidnapper Ismail Hamdan; and Yousuf Dawud, who murdered a border police officer. These monsters have now apparently been sent packing, leaving Marriott to (presumably) call in the crisis management bods as their customers desert them in droves. Chief foreign correspondent Andrew Jehring, Middle East correspondent Natalie Lisbona, snapper Mark Large: sterling job.

Aside from the sheer journalistic accomplishment, however, there is much to be said about this darkest of stories. Think about it from the point of view of the victims, or the families that survive them.

Why Aren't Human Rights Groups Denouncing Hamas Atrocities Against Gazans?

Following the ceasefire in Gaza, numerous corroborated testimonies - some supported by filmed evidence - have emerged of Hamas's executions of political opponents, particularly brutal torture of civilians in broad daylight and killings or beatings of civilians who merely expressed gratitude toward the U.S. or criticized Hamas.

Given these facts, I was astonished to look at the X accounts of two of the world's largest human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and find that there has been not a single reference to these atrocities. Every day more atrocities occur, and silence confers a degree of legitimacy upon them.

Initial statements about atrocities have in the past been issued far more rapidly by human rights organizations. Yet two weeks after the ceasefire there was still no comment, not even a demand that Hamas comply with international humanitarian law.

As human rights activists, our message should be clear: We will not ignore any atrocity; we will not abandon Gazans now that Hamas is attacking them; we will not hesitate in voicing strong condemnation. I call on the human rights community to urgently denounce Hamas's atrocities against Gazans.

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10/28 Links Pt2: Islamo-socialist alliances don’t last, just ask the Iranians; The ADL’s Medicine Is Causing the Disease; The Jewish academics living in fear of anti-Semitic hate mobs

From Ian:

Islamo-socialist alliances don’t last, just ask the Iranians

Instead of the Ukip demonstration, large masked groups of young men took to the streets chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they vowed to “defend our community”.

Among the protestors were pockets of Left-wing activists, one of whom, witnessing the tension, attempted to appeal to some sense of shared solidarity.

“There’s no need for that, bruv,” he was filmed pleading with his megaphone. “We’re on the same side”. The reply from a balaclava-wearing demonstrator was swift and unambiguous: “No, we’re not.”

That short exchange captured the heart of the problem. The Left in Britain believes it has found allies in political Islam – fellow “oppressed” fighting a common enemy in the so-called “far-Right”. But many Muslims, including those increasingly taking an active role in politics, do not see it that way. Their vision for society is diametrically opposed to the progressive ideals the Left claims to champion: free speech, gender equality, secularism, and LGBT rights.

What we are witnessing is the same fatal miscalculation that took place in Iran.

And another reverberation from 1979 is the weakness and incompetence of the political establishment. In the final year of the Shah’s rule, the regime tried desperately to appease its enemies. It jailed its own supporters and released violent radical prisoners in a futile attempt to calm the streets. In its fear of seeming repressive and its eagerness to appease the radical Islamists, it caused its own downfall.

Does that all sound familiar? Today in Britain, our own leaders are doing something similar.

The police, terrified of being accused of “Islamophobia”, have become hesitant to enforce the law evenly. Peaceful demonstrators carrying “Hamas are terrorists” signs are arrested, a Star of David is treated as a provocation, while those who issue threats and incite violence are indulged and appeased. The Government, concerned about losing votes from its Muslim constituents, neglects the threat of extremist networks openly recruiting in mosques, prisons, schools and online. It does this while lecturing ordinary law-abiding Britons about “extremism” and labelling them “far-Right”.

Just like Tehran in 1979, Left-wing elites are too weak to confront the forces that seek to overthrow their own values, and too naïve to recognise that those forces are not partners in progress but architects of regression.

The Left in Iran learned the hard way that when you go to bed with Islam, you do not wake up in a democracy. You wake up in a theocracy. Britain’s Left should take heed.

The Soviet role in turning anti-Zionism into a popular cause

According to Ion Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc officer ever to defect to the West, this campaign was deliberate and crafted by the KGB. Its chief, Andropov, realized that Islamic societies were particularly receptive to anti-Western rhetoric. He channeled this natural hostility against Jews and Israel, deliberately reframing the conflict not as a religious jihad but as a nationalist struggle for human rights and self-determination. This new language appealed to Western intellectuals, activists and politicians as well.

The campaign deployed thousands of Soviet bloc agents across the Middle East to spread propaganda in Arabic, including editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated and vile document, while providing funding and ideological guidance to local Arab movements.

At the center of the project was the Palestine Liberation Organization. Founded in 1964 under Soviet patronage, the PLO became the perfect vehicle for constructing a new national identity. Pacepa later revealed that the 1964 Palestinian National Charter, the PLO’s ideological foundation, was written in Moscow.

Strikingly, the charter did not call for sovereignty over the West Bank or Gaza, which it explicitly recognized as Jordanian and Egyptian, respectively. Instead, it focused entirely on the destruction of Israel. It was in this Soviet-written document that the modern political term “Palestinian nation” first appeared.

Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian engineer mentored by Soviet intelligence, became the face of the newly created identity. He admitted that Palestinian nationality was being formed “through the conflict with Israel.” His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, later revealed as a KGB agent, defended a dissertation in Moscow downplaying the Holocaust and portraying Zionism as a collaborator of Nazism, directly adopting Soviet propaganda themes. Both men presented themselves in the West as pragmatic politicians, while at home they supported terror and rejected genuine peace with Israel. Zuhair Muhsin, a PLO executive committee member, candidly admitted the artificiality of the Palestinian identity in 1977: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. The existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new weapon in the ongoing battle against Israel.”

Through its propaganda, Moscow created one of the greatest political myths of the 20th century. The Palestinian movement is historically unprecedented: The only “national” project whose aim is not to build its own state, but to destroy another.

The Soviet anti-Zionist campaign spread through leftist networks, NGOs and Islamist movements. It used Communist-front organizations that organized conferences linking the Palestinian cause with other “anti-imperialist” struggles, from Vietnam to South Africa to Cuba. Delegates from Third World countries and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as Western radicals, adopted these narratives and brought them back home, pushing them in political, academic and activist circles.

Soviet-Palestinian propaganda ranks among the most successful in modern history, having fused ideology, history, and moral symbolism into enduring narratives. It presented anti-Zionism as morally noble, connected it to anti-imperialism, and cloaked it in the language of “global peace.” Propagandists skillfully exploited Western guilt over colonialism. The continuity is visible today: Russian disinformation campaigns on Ukraine employ the same tactics of denial, inversion of reality and moral manipulation. The KGB may be gone, but its most successful operations live on.

Soviet propaganda not only undermined Israel’s legitimacy on an international basis but also corrupted the very language of human rights. It turned the Jewish national movement into a supposed symbol of oppression, a stark reminder of propaganda’s destructive power when left unchallenged. The persistence of these narratives lies in the fact that the networks and structures that spread them never disappeared. Today’s leftist anti-Zionism is less a response to events in Gaza than a continuation of recycled Soviet ideological nonsense, passed from one generation of intellectuals and activists to the next. The liberal West, victorious in the Cold War, largely failed to confront this legacy.

Moscow turned Zionism into a slur, and from this lie emerged the modern face of antisemitism. Zionism is exactly what the Soviet narratives denied: a national liberation movement of the Jewish people, grounded in the universal right to self-determination, a right that is unquestioningly granted to every other nation.

The Anti-Semite in Plain Sight By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. It's the definition of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: All of life’s discontents can be traced back to their Jewish source, no matter how imaginary. The IDF’s connection to alleged NYPD brutality is as real as Mamdani’s traumatized aunt. And the only thing original about his iteration of the charge is the faux-poetic imagery of Israeli bootlace—if he didn’t pick that up from someone else.

But there are some NYC voters who don’t watch such trends as closely as others and, perhaps, haven’t yet realized that Mamdani thrives at the cross section of the radical left and radical Islam. And maybe some of them haven’t voted yet. But we’re not talking about a critical mass.

It also came out today that Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, sits on the advisory council of an organization called the Gaza Tribunal alongside key Hamas operative Ramy Abdu and other assorted Jew-haters tied to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and various terrorist groups. Mahmood Mamdani’s position with the Gaza Tribunal isn’t news; that was reported back in July. But no one bothered to look more thoroughly into the group’s makeup.

Why?

The answer gets to the deeper frustration of all this. What’s more maddening than these late-breaking stories is that I’m not so sure they would have made much of an impact had they dropped months ago. It’s not as if there wasn’t already a virtual anthology of Mamdani’s collected works of Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism readily available to anyone with the slightest interest. Is his blaming alleged NYPD tyranny on Israel worse than when he confessed his “love” for the Holy Land Five, who were convicted of funneling millions of dollars to terrorists? Is his father’s association with a Hamas figure worse than Mamdani’s own chumming around with the confidantes of the 9/11 planners? These things, and much else, have been known for the entirety of the mayoral race. None of it mattered.

If you’ve known who Zohran Mamdani was all along, this moment actually feels more punishing than validating. Being proved right when it’s too late to do anything about it is a special kind of torment. And it’s sickening to think that the truth might never have made a difference anyway.

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10/28 Links Pt1: Make Believe 'Global Justice'; Hamas’s Latest Barbaric Stunt; In truce violation, Hamas returns further remains of hostage recovered in 2023

From Ian:

Make Believe 'Global Justice'

The events of October 7, 2023, one recalls, began on a quiet, peaceful holiday morning. Innocent Israelis near the Gaza Strip were either still asleep in their homes, had just started going about their day, or were enjoying the Supernova music festival. All at once, thousands of rockets launched from Gaza came raining down, terrorists flew in on motorized paragliders, and bulldozers crashed through the Gaza border fence, followed by pickup trucks and motorcycles pouring over the border carrying murderous hordes intent on slaughtering them. As a result, Israelis of all ages, babies included, were cut down, raped, burned alive, and beheaded – for no reason other than living in Israel.

Israel retaliated, as any normal nation would have done. Nonetheless, it was viciously blamed, starting the next day, for defending its people and homeland, and pursuing the perpetrators of atrocities.

The use of the term "global justice" for charges against Israel is therefore an artifice -- a slogan designed to deceive the public into believing an invented people is a "just cause," as the late senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official, Zuheir Mohsen, admitted in 1977:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

Israel's war against terror, if one regards it as a fight between a civilization with laws vs. seventh-century terrorism with machetes, is the quintessence of a just war. Unfortunately, for its critics, it happens to be a righteous, justifiable, act of self-defense...

If Israel is committing genocide, they're really, really bad at it. They could have had genocide on October the eighth.... It's absurd. If they were trying to commit genocide, it would not have taken them 22 months." — US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, CBS News, August 8, 2025.

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters." — Antonio Gramsci, Italian politician, 1924.

Many of Europe's leaders, in pandering to terrorists for votes, can be considered complicit in the rise of Jew-hatred and are therefore culpable for the consequences – which, ironically, look as if they will be worse for their countries than for Israel, the country they have been trying to undermine.

The "Gaza Tribunal" Brings Together Western Academics, Journalists, and UN Officials With Convicted Terrorists

While the Gaza Tribunal is filled with speakers and organizers linked to terrorism, it also counts a number of former UN officials and prominent academics among its ranks. The Istanbul conference featured Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories, Craig Mokhiber, ex-Director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ New York office, and scholars such as David Whyte, Ussama Makdisi, and Wadie Said.

The tribunal’s leadership includes figures with UN experience like Hilal Elver, former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Michael Lynk, former Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine. Its advisory council is populated by seasoned UN veterans, including Mouin Rabbani, Christine Chinkin, Georges Abi-Saab, Aslı Bali, and Karim Makdisi. Their participation provides institutional credibility to an event otherwise dominated by individuals with direct or familial ties to terrorist organizations. UN Special Rapporteur Micheal Lynk – Sadaka, The Ireland Palestine Alliance

Shedding light to the rott at the UN, a WHO doctor just went public, revealing that UN officials had decided since December 2023 to fabricate a narrative of famine in Gaza. This raises serious questions about whether elements of the UN, at its highest levels, are implicated in the same alleged coordination described in the Baroud lawsuit.

The lawsuit currently facing Ramzy Baroud alleges a broad network of coordination between media, academia, NGOs, and Hamas — an operation the Gaza Tribunal exemplifies. Last year’s Gaza Tribunal included UN Francesca Albanese, who also co-founder of a legal network whose board includes Baroud and several others with known links to terrorist organizations.

Taken together, the Gaza Tribunal, its participants, and the involvement of international organizations illustrate the lawsuit’s claim: that a coordinated network of media, academia, and terror-linked figures is working systematically to amplify Hamas propaganda under the guise of scholarship and humanitarian advocacy.

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10/27 Links Pt2: The origins of today’s anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric; Radiohead and the Gaza Thought Police; Asia-Pacific envoys honor foreign workers killed in Oct 7 attacks

From Ian:

The origins of today’s anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric

In The Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (Routledge Taylor and Francis Group for the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.2025) Jeffrey Herf, professor emeritus of History at the University of Maryland, summarizes his excellent academic books about the various kinds of antisemitism sponsored by governments and by political movements. He shows that much of the current anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric is recycled Nazi, Soviet bloc and extreme Islamist propaganda deliberately generated for purely ideological and political reasons.

So, the Jews are both Communists and capitalist-imperialists, the fomenters of revolutions and the oppressors, exploiters and colonizers of others. They control the media and act in secret. There is hardly an anti-Jewish lie from the Twentieth century, whether from the Nazis, the Communists or the Islamists themselves missing from this package of hate-soaked rubbish.

Herf also shows that ‘Radical, theologically based hatred of Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel is part of the core ideological beliefs of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ The world view of the Iranian leadership is so delusional and divorced from reality that if that nation were to acquire a nuclear weapon Iran would not act like a rational state ‘according to the customary norms of what constitutes reasonable behavior in international affairs.’ It cannot be assumed that Iran will value its own survival above eliminating the hated Jewish enemy.

Westerners frequently assume that radical Islamist Jew-hatred is just another form of prejudice and therefore can be worked around. But the irrational, paranoid conspiracy theory that proposes that the evil Jew is part of a satanic design to weaken the solidarity of Islamic people everywhere is a central guiding and operating principle of the Iranian leadership. Even more, according to mainstream Iranian thought, the Jews are enemies of humanity as a whole and not just Islam.

Iran is the first national government since Hitler’s Germany to make hatred of Jews a central ideological principle.

Although many of these essays were written before October 7, 2023 one of the necessary conclusions of reading Three Faces of Antisemitism: Left, Right and Islamist is that almost all the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric one hears today is the product of deliberate political and ideological decisions made by Jew-haters over the last one hundred years or so.

Today’s Jew-haters are parroting the rhetoric of the Nazis, the Soviets and the Islamists. Just as they often don’t know anything about the history of Israel and the Jewish people, so also today’s Jew-haters do not know that they are the heirs of the Nazis, the Communists and the Islamists whose rhetoric has now been all rolled up into one big, ugly, toxic homicidal ball.

Hear Him Roar

In the closing acknowledgments of his new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America, Ben Shapiro declares, “Some books are suffused with a cold objectivity. Others are written at white heat. This book was written passionately, because we live in shockingly turbulent times, and because the truth has never been more urgently necessary.”

He is stating, in other words, that his book is a polemic. Some polemics are tendentious, slapdash, indifferently sourced rants. Others are essential—the rhetorical equivalents of a ship’s lookout sounding the alarm at the sudden appearance of an enormous iceberg. Shapiro’s book fits into the latter category, although the peril that faces our civilization is not an iceberg but a swarm of pirates.

Does this sound a bit melodramatic? So be it. The pirates, or “Scavengers,” in Shapiro’s terminology, are those individuals and institutions in Western cultures, increasingly ascendant, who valorize terrorism and political violence, worship at the altar of Marx, favor the takers rather than the makers, and believe that wealth and success are, by definition, evidence of evil-doing.

As many have noted, the dominant notion in modern intellectual discourse, incubated in our universities and cultural institutions, is that the powerful are automatically evil and the powerless are inherently good. It’s an incredibly simple, and simplistic, notion, despite all the post hoc intellectual appurtenances attached to it by radical thinkers ranging from Edward Said and Frantz Fanon to modern-day leftist fashionistas such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

The effectiveness and pervasiveness of this worldview is illustrated every day in our news media, where the sins of the powerful are quite rightly excoriated while the sins of the supposedly powerless are either excused away or, more often, utterly ignored.

The very simplicity of the message “Western civilization bad” is the reason for its success and uncritical acceptance on our college campuses and, increasingly, among Western leaders. It’s a message that appeals to primal human emotions such as envy and guilt (though wealthy radicals believe they can easily expiate their guilt by declaring a “land acknowledgment” and bellowing “Free Palestine!”) and takes advantage of these leaders’ wish to be, or at least to appear, decent, fair-minded, and “empathetic.”

Shapiro, editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of the podcast The Ben Shapiro Show, has set out to flip the script on the radicals. Too often, defenders of capitalism and Western freedoms have gotten bogged down in patient explanations and defenses (not that these aren’t necessary) rather than creating a simple and comprehensible framework for understanding why postcolonial Western civilization, despite its manifest shortcomings, is superior to its alternatives. This is doubly true for the defenders of Israel, who find themselves constantly engaged in running skirmishes and dead-end debates with naive or bad-faith actors about non-existent “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” instead of engaging in a full-throated and confident defense of the only free democracy in the region.

Shapiro’s effervescent intelligence, adherence to traditional values, and his boyish, earnest, debate team persona combine to make him seem both deeply sincere and utterly uncool. The latter, I suspect, is something Shapiro doesn’t care about, and that is decidedly to his credit. He is a moderate thinker who writes with immoderate passion.

Stop Being Jew-ish and Start Being Jewish

In his foreword to the catalogue of a recent exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, museum director James S. Snyder seeks to evoke his institution’s tradition of exploring the works of Western artists, like Rembrandt, who specialize in Hebrew biblical subjects and of world cultures that engage with Jewish ideas. These are topics on which any reasonable person would expect a Jewish museum to focus, especially the one located in the American city with the largest and most culturally engaged Jewish population.

So it is profoundly telling that the three exhibitions Snyder cites as examples of the museum’s specialization in these themes—The Jews in the Age of Rembrandt; Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy; and Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain—were all presented more than three decades ago, in 1982, 1989, and 1992 respectively. That one has to go back to the year Bill Clinton was elected president to cite an exhibition demonstrating the Jewish Museum’s serious engagement with the intersection of Jewish and world culture is a sad testament to how dramatically impoverished the Jewish Museum had become in the 21st century.

This impoverishment—which is to say, a deliberate and shocking dearth of Jewish content—fell to astonishing lows during the tenure of Claudia Gould. She led the museum between 2011 and 2023, and during that time, one was hard-pressed to find anything resonantly Jewish in the museum’s special exhibitions. This was a conscious choice. Founded in 1904, the Jewish Museum (known in institutional circles as the JM) has vacillated for more than a century between being a Jewish museum and being a Jew-ish museum. In its mode as a Jew-ish museum, it has tried to echo the lofty, non-culturally specific artistic standards of its famous neighbors, the Guggenheim and The Met, and denied its founding purpose. Gould wanted to run a Fifth Avenue museum, not a museum dedicated to the rich cultural, artistic, and historical legacies of the Jewish people.

And so it was, and is, something to celebrate that the JM conceived and mounted an exhibition from March to August this year that placed at its core a distinctly Jewish text, which carries through to the wonderful catalogue that will immortalize it. The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt does nothing less than bring to life—through visual, theatrical, political, ceremonial, and domestic culture—the central and monumental role this text had in the life and consciousness of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities of 17th-century Holland. This story is read aloud every year in synagogues across the world on the joyous Jewish holiday of Purim and is very specific to the Jewish experience. The exhibition documents the surprising emergence of Esther as a cultural superstar in the 17th-century Netherlands, Holland’s economic and artistic Golden Age.

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