From Ian:
Inciting Terrorism Is Not Free Speech
Our law has long recognized that words can be dangerous, even criminally so. That is why we have rules against crimes like solicitation, incitement, and conspiracy. To be sure, the line between protected speech and speech in furtherance of criminal behavior is fuzzy. But courts are perfectly willing to uphold convictions involving, for example, antitrust violations based on this distinction.
Despite these precedents, the court of appeals held that Al-Timimi’s convictions could not be squared with the First Amendment. Al-Timimi did not commit incitement, the court concluded, because his “exhortations were vague and general,” failing the “imminent lawless action” standard set out in 1969’s Brandenburg v. Ohio. Though he “encouraged unlawful acts generally,” he was not guilty of criminal solicitation because “the evidence did not demonstrate that he encouraged, with the requisite intent, a specific unlawful act.” This may seem like a loophole for bad actors, but the court reminds readers that “plenty of speech encouraging criminal activity is protected under the First Amendment.”
This is true, but plenty of speech is also not protected. The only standard the court employed to tell if Al-Timimi’s speech was protected was whether the criminal acts he encouraged were sufficiently specific. Since that standard can only be resolved by intuition, it’s probably best left to a jury—like the one that concluded Al-Timimi’s encouragement, advice, and instruction did meet that standard.
One wonders what is left of crimes like solicitation and conspiracy under the court’s reasoning. After all, prosecutors could have hardly hoped for better evidence in their favor. The men even testified at trial to Al-Timimi’s decisive role in helping them overcome their fears and join terrorist groups. If telling men you know are heavily armed to attack America is too vague and general to warrant prosecution, then any form of solicitation will be extremely hard to prove.
The Supreme Court will not likely review, much less overturn, this case. But it should be on the lookout for cases that allow it to re-establish the proper relationship between national-security concerns and the First Amendment.
The Court has already made clear that limitations on dangerous speech tailored to prevent terrorism are constitutional, even if applied liberally. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the Court held that simply explaining the law to terrorist organizations may be prosecuted as material support for terrorism consistent with the First Amendment. “Given the sensitive interests in national security and foreign affairs at stake,” the majority wrote, courts should defer to the political branches when they “have adequately substantiated their determination that . . . it was necessary to prohibit” acts, even speech-based acts, that further terrorism.
In spite of this, lower courts have consistently balked at the notion of enforcing laws designed to disrupt terrorist networks before they begin victimizing Americans. They have set the bar for conviction so artificially high that, as in Al-Timimi’s case, no prosecutor could possibly reach them.
The First Amendment does and should protect even abhorrent expression. What got Al-Timimi prosecuted, though, was not the abhorrence of his expression. It was that his speech played an important role in getting dangerous people to take up arms against the United States. Judges’ appeals to the “vitality” of “offensive” speech in letting him off the hook ring hollow.
Seth Mandel:
Josh Shapiro and the ‘No Free Shots’ Rule
Jewish leaders wasted no time in taking the Harris Committee on Un-American Activities to task for its embrace of the dual-loyalty canard. And Harris certainly deserves every ounce of criticism she and her team have received, and probably more. After all, if Shapiro can be disqualified for having as a teenager visited Israel and volunteering on a kibbutz, it could potentially have a chilling effect on young American Jews, who are already being pressured into hiding their involvement in Jewish communal activities. The attack on Shapiro is an attack on American Jewry.
Which is why Shapiro’s response is so noteworthy. We know about the obnoxious questioning not from an anonymous campaign leak or (don’t laugh) a high-status reporter digging into the undercurrent of anti-Semitism at the highest levels of progressive organizing. We know about it because Josh Shapiro wrote about it, put his name to it, and swung back at his party’s presidential nominee for good measure.
“I wondered,” he writes, “whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way.”
In any event, Shapiro concluded, the whole affair “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”
As to whether Shapiro would, as Harris requested, grovel and beg the forgiveness of people chasing Jews while cheering Hamas’s Nazi atrocities, he “flatly” said no.
What is unusual about this news cycle is not that an ambitious politician with national aspirations sought to put some distance between himself and his party’s failed past leaders, or that he would paint himself as having shown toughness and nerve in his own recollections of the incidents at hand.
Instead, what is striking is that he would do so on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism. Shapiro isn’t letting them take free shots at the Jews.
The Harris team’s behavior was atrocious, but they might have expected to get away with it on the assumption that no one wants to draw attention to accusations that they are a double agent or a Manchurian candidate. Shapiro, however, refused to play that game. His response was, essentially, OK let’s talk about it. Let’s play “Ask the Jew” in front of the whole country.
Josh Shapiro wasn’t supposed to be confrontational about it. He was supposed to take the hint and know his proper place as a Jew in national politics. He was not supposed to tell them to their faces how offensive their medievalist questioning was, and then to tell the world.
There is probably not one campaign operative in a thousand who would tell Shapiro to center his Jewish pride at a moment when so many progressive activists and organizers are out for Jewish blood. It contradicts the conventional wisdom.
But conventional wisdom didn’t prevent some anti-Semitic and anti-Israel lunatic from burning Shapiro’s house while his family was inside on Passover. Should he apologize to the man who tried to murder his family, too? Surely the Harris campaign would say yes.
Shapiro didn’t ask for this fight, but he’s not running from it. Hopefully it stays that way. The next generation of American Jewish activists and politicians are watching.
Tevi Troy:
Are Jews Still Welcome in the White House?
Yet this same dynamic of high visibility combined with inter-elite competition and grassroots hatred may bring about a period of unprecedented friction and danger for Jews, in which high-level Jewish political involvement proves irksome to antisemites and even to other inter-elite competitors—who, in turn, will have no shortage of Jewish rivals to scapegoat. This dynamic would likely be mirrored throughout the rest of society. Disaffected individuals or groups may also target prominent Jewish officials as a way of gaining sympathy for violent actions. We saw an element of this with the Passover firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s mansion by a disturbed anti-Israel activist.
Another, also unpalatable, possibility is that this fourth phase could couple rising elite and popular antisemitism with diminishing opportunities for Jews, as national politicians fear that prominent Jewish appointees might alienate key voting blocs, be they Muslims in Michigan, progressive Israel critics, or anti-globalists on the right. In the summer of 2024, for example, Gov. Shapiro’s Jewishness clearly seemed to count against him in the Democratic vice presidential selection process, as demonstrated by the offensive question from the Harris team of whether Shapiro was an Israeli agent. Bypassing Shapiro resulted instead in the choice of the less-talented Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the increasing mainstream acceptance of antisemitism in both major parties may already be causing the pipeline of future higher-level Jewish appointees to dry up. Baer, for one, suggested that the high-level Jews in the Biden administration could be a lagging indicator, reflecting high Jewish participation in the Clinton and Obama years rather than the current reality. According to Baer, some Jews faced challenges breaking into the lower levels of the Biden administration, which could affect Jewish participation in future Democratic administrations. This could stem from both discomfort with Jews from anti-Israel Democrats and reductions in qualified Jewish applicants being admitted to top schools—driven by that same discomfort. In the future, Baer feared that opportunities for Jewish staffers “might be hitting a brick wall depending on where the Democratic Party goes.”
Related to this are concerns about a broader decline of Jews in elite institutions. As Jacob Savage wrote in his widely read 2023 Tablet article “The Vanishing,” “Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing … In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.” If it continues, this scenario could be bad for Jews and bad for America, as countries that mistreat their Jews often struggle with other pathologies. Bernstein, however, is less worried, noting that the likely 2028 Democratic candidates have “plenty of Jewish senior people around.”
A third direction that the future may take is that the current surge in antisemitism will wane, and the fourth phase will be a better version of the third phase, with opportunities rising and antisemitism dwindling. This scenario is optimistic about both the Jews and America. As former Obama and Biden aide Chanan Weissman notes, “The Jewish story is the best story that America tells about itself.” He adds, “Societies that treat their [Jewish] communities well, benefit.” His scenario may not be one that many Jews see as likely at the moment, but it would be in keeping with the generally positive trajectory we have seen up until now. The problem with it is that straight-line extrapolations are often lacking in predictive power; in this case, they ignore the recent reemergence of antisemitism—which appears to be quite real.
The long history of the Jews and power in America is ultimately unique because of how little public controversy it has caused. Jews and Jewish ideas have been an essential part of this nation since its founding. While the current attacks on Jews from both the left and the right are by no means unique in the context of Jewish history, they are alien to American political culture—which is what makes this moment frightening. The attempt to mainstream antisemitism on both the left and the right should be properly understood as an attack by extremists in both parties on the existing political culture and on the principles of the American founding.
The American tradition is far more closely linked to the Jews and their many contributions to it than it is to the antisemites of the left or the right, whose hatred of the Jews reveals a rejection of that tradition—which they hope to reorder and replace with various European-born ideologies, from communism to fascism to theocracy, that have proven toxic to their political hosts. As Americans, Jews must lean in rather than retreat in the face of antisemitism, which in turn entails an embrace of this nation’s philosemitic and Enlightenment-based founding principles.
In America, Jews belong everywhere, from the White House on down. Any future White House that rejects Jews would be reflecting its own rejection of the American founding tradition.
Seth Mandel:
Matt Gaetz and the Jewish Firebugs
As Jews, we’re encouraged to be a light among the nations. But sometimes I think people get the wrong idea. Every so often, we are collectively accused of setting things alight among the nations.
That’s what happened in recent weeks as fires raged in Argentina. A conspiracy theory gained some traction online that held that Israelis were setting wildfires in Patagonia in order to cheapen the value of land and then buy that land. How were they setting the fires? With Israeli grenades.
By January 12, all of this had been thoroughly debunked, and an Argentine broadcaster at the center of it apologized. Naturally, the following day, Matt Gaetz—the scandal-soaked weirdo chased from Congress by ethics investigations into another career as a wannabe Candace Owens—did a whole segment repeating the conspiracy theory about Jewish firebugs and Zionist grenades.
The fact that Gaetz chose to run a segment on it after the country where it started denounced and debunked every falsehood is one reason Gaetz is viewed as a clown even among the crowd of maniacs he associates himself with.
Nevertheless, this clown was a congressman and was even nominated to be attorney general by President Trump. Tucker Carlson, currently the dean of the anti-American propaganda fetishists, has been making appearances at the White House. So we have to grapple with the question of how much damage we think the right-wing influencer ecosystem is capable of. After all, it wouldn’t be much consolation to say Matt Gaetz has the intellectual depth of a ceramic ash tray if he were the U.S. attorney general.
One type of damage is indicated by the fact that we’re talking about the firebug conspiracy theory, and that such a canard is worth talking about at all. On that front, history has a warning.
Included in the anti-Semitic slang that has managed to persist through time is the phrase “Jewish lightning.” It’s a relic, and it’s not all that common, but it refers to the reputation that American Jews got thanks to rumors that they were uniquely liable to carry out insurance fires in the 19th century. As a result, insurance companies began to deny Jews insurance coverage. Industry manuals warned of the risk of Jewish firebugs.
From Ian:
How António Guterres turned ‘international law’ into a weapon against Jews
Guterres has not merely presided over this corruption; he has normalized it, defended it, and amplified it. In doing so, he has used his position to advance an ideological agenda that singles out the Jewish state for delegitimization while shielding those who commit the most egregious human rights violations.
Anti-Zionist obsession at the United Nations has become indistinguishable from antisemitism in practice. When the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely targeted, denied the right of self-defense, and subjected to standards applied to no other nation, the conclusion is unavoidable.
Israel does not wage war against civilians. Hamas does.
Israel builds bomb shelters. Hamas builds tunnels under children’s bedrooms.
Israel warns civilians to evacuate. Hamas forces them to stay.
Any legal framework that erases these distinctions is not international law; it is propaganda.
International law was meant to restrain barbarism, not protect it; to defend human life, not terror infrastructure; to uphold truth, not political theater.
By weaponizing international law against Israel and tolerating terror in the name of false balance, Guterres has disgraced the office he holds and accelerated the United Nations’s descent into irrelevance.
The world deserves better.
The victims of terrorism deserve better.
And the Jewish people, who know all too well where institutionalized bias can lead, deserve better.
History will remember who stood for justice, and who turned law into a tool of moral inversion.
Alan Baker:
Buzzwords and false allegations are Western human rights inversion - opinion
With tragedies abounding, the Western brainwashing machinery is working overtime against Israel.
Thousands murdered and brutally subjugated in Iran. Thousands of non-Arab ethnic groups butchered in Sudan. Massive death tolls in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Myanmar violently represses its Rohingya and other minorities. Mass atrocities by Boko Haram and other extremist groups in Nigeria. Extrajudicial killings of civilians in Tanzania. Massacres of Christians in churches and hospitals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But Western media outlets, social-media platforms, UN and human rights committees, political leaders and parliamentarians, incited university students, and ignorant show-biz celebrities spout accusations against Israel of genocide, apartheid, starvation, and disproportionate military actions.
Such paragons of humanitarian virtue claim to defend human rights and advocate for Palestinians, but glaringly ignore everyone else and deny the rights to which Israel and its citizens are entitled. They ignore genocidal violence and terror by Palestinian and Islamist fanatics, which is incited by Palestinian leadership and supported, encouraged, and financed by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey.
No less glaring is the fact that the Western world chooses to forget the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023 – the rape, torture, burning, and butchery of thousands of Israelis and foreigners; the taking of hundreds of hostages; and the use of Hamas’s own civilians as human shields.
What should be a universal moral standard of human rights has become a cynical and transparent political weapon, directed against Israel.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Death and Legacy of Jerusalem’s Champion, Gabriel Barkay
Barkay, who was born Gabriel Breslauer in Budapest in 1944, is associated with two particularly famous projects. In 1979, Barkay discovered the Ketef Hinnom scrolls in Jerusalem. Once successfully unrolled and translated, it became clear they contained a passage from the Book of Numbers dated to the Iron Age, making them the earliest known biblical text in existence.
The other is the Temple Mount sifting project. In 1999 and 2000, the Muslim authorities at the Mount illegally undertook a massive construction project and removed 9,000 tons of earth, destroying artifacts in the process and dumping the rest of the dirt in the Kidron Valley. Their goal was to replace the history-rich earth with an unauthorized mosque. Barkay led a broad group of Israelis who protested the ongoing destruction and then helped get funding for a project of volunteers to sift through the dirt discarded from the Temple site. That work continues today.
Because the truth has what you might call a “pro-Israel bias,” reality is controversial. Hence the acknowledgements in Barkay’s obituaries that his work was sometimes characterized as “right-wing.” Here is how the New York Times obituary phrases it:
“In 2005, he and others founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, a crowdsourced program to examine the estimated 400 truckloads of dirt taken from the site. Since then, volunteers have identified about a half-million artifacts.
“The project was sometimes criticized as a tool of right-wing Israeli governments eager to establish historical claim to the Temple Mount.”
You’ll notice that it is considered “right-wing” because the facts of the case are politically unhelpful to the left wing. When it comes to Jews and Israel, the truth is considered provocative. It’s worth noting that this story was about the Arab authorities attempting to destroy hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts—a crime against humanity that is described here with the same neutrality one might employ to describe the decision to take the dog for a walk. It is the Israeli archaeologists’ response to that crime—to ask that the crime not be carried out—that is deemed political. People can be very touchy when reminded of the existence of Jews.
Barkay’s dismissal of such pettiness was on the mark: “Sneezing in Jerusalem is an intensive political activity,” he told The Times of Israel in 2019. “You could turn your head to the right, or the left.”
Indeed, one lesson of Barkay’s life is that the Jewish people should not treat their own rights and existence and history as a delicate subject. People offended by the truth only deserve to hear the truth more often. And if they face resistance, Jews should raise their voices. As Huckabee advised the audience in Jerusalem last month:
“The Jewish people have the greatest story in the world. So tell it. It’s a wonderful story to be told. And you have the receipts. You have the Bible. And for heaven’s sakes, I would say use it and tell it with courage and boldness. Never speak it with apology as if, well, I don’t want to bring this up, but just so you know, we kind of have a place here. No, I think you say: Do you realize that our history traces back 3,800 years and we can follow the linear progress of that history from then until now. And there are prophecies throughout the entire Old Testament that say things that we are watching before our eyes.”
US Holocaust museum board cites years-long absences in call to oust Sanders
Members of the governing board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to remove Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council amid reports that the senator has not attended a single meeting in 18 years.
Sanders was appointed to the council in 2007. The board, which meets twice a year to oversee the D.C. museum’s mission, programming and educational work, is composed of both presidential and congressional appointees. According to attendance records reviewed by board members and provided to the New York Post, Sanders “has missed every meeting of the board since his appointment.”
In a Jan. 13 letter to Schumer signed by a dozen council members, the board wrote that Sanders “has rarely, if ever, attended council meetings or participated meaningfully in the work of the council since his appointment.”
The council also raised concerns about some of Sanders’s public statements on “contemporary genocidal conflicts, including characterizations widely viewed as inconsistent with the principles of Holocaust remembrance and genocide prevention.”
Sanders has been an outspoken critic of Israeli policy, calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and describing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza “a genocide.” The letter stated that those stances bring into question Sanders’s “alignment with the mission of the museum and its governing body.”
“In the current context, with Jew-hatred and Holocaust distortion rising globally, it is imperative that Senate-appointed representatives on the council are fully engaged and steadfastly supportive of its mission,” the letter states.
'Moderate' Abigail Spanberger Appoints Two Qatari Lobbyists To Serve on George Mason University Board
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) has appointed two Qatari lobbyists to serve on George Mason University’s board of visitors, a Washington Free Beacon review has found.
Spanberger, who was sworn into office on Saturday, tapped former Reps. James Moran (D., Va.) and Tom Davis (R., Va.) to serve on George Mason’s 16-person board of visitors, which advises the school on "policy-making and oversight." After retiring from Congress in 2015, Moran launched Moran Global Strategies, which registered as a foreign agent of the Qatari embassy in April 2023. Davis, who resigned from Congress in 2008, is a lobbyist at Holland & Knight, which subcontracts with Moran’s firm on its Qatari lobbying contract.
Qatar, an oil-rich Gulf monarchy that harbors Hamas, has paid Moran’s firm $2.3 million through August 2025 to advance "bilateral relations" with the United States, according to foreign agent disclosures. Moran Global Strategies has, in turn, paid Holland & Knight $35,000 per month for its lobbying services. Davis is listed as Moran’s "principal point of contact" in the Qatari lobbying contract, records show.
The appointments are a sharp departure from the "moderate" image Spanberger presented to the public during the campaign.
Moran, who served 24 years in the House, has lobbied his former colleagues on behalf of Qatar on educational issues, according to lobbying disclosures. In July, he met with two members of the House Education and Workforce Committee prior to a hearing on "antisemitism in higher education," disclosures show. Moran was spotted in the audience at the hearing, seated behind Georgetown University president Robert Groves, Jewish Insider reported.
Last March, Moran contacted an aide to Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D.), whose wife previously served as interim president of George Mason, regarding "outreach on Qatar's higher education funding," according to disclosures. Holland & Knight and Davis have lobbied Republican lawmakers on education issues regarding Qatar. Davis met Rep. Kevin Kiley (R., Calif.) on June 25 for a "discussion" about the Committee on Education and Workforce, according to lobbying records.
Activist probed for anti-Israel posts no longer assistant attorney general of Michigan, state tells JNS
Zena Ozeir lists her current role on LinkedIn as assistant attorney general of the state of Michigan—a role that she has held since June 2023, per her profile.
The office of Dana Nessel, Michigan attorney general and a Democrat, told JNS exclusively that Ozeir does not currently hold that position.
“Zena Ozeir is no longer employed by the Michigan Department of Attorney General,” Kimberly Bush, Nessel’s director of public information and education, told JNS.
JNS sought comment from Nessel’s office about whether Ozeir was dismissed, and if so, whether it was as a result of a probe by the state office of her social media posts.
In June 2024, Nessel’s office told the Detroit News that it was investigating social-media posts in which Ozeir appeared to direct expletives at America and Israel.
Ozeir allegedly wrote on Instagram that “every accusation made by the Zionist entity is an admission. F**k them, f**k America, f**k genocide apologists. F**k anyone who peddles Zionist propaganda or gives any legitimacy to their criminal enterprise of a ‘country.’”
She made her handle private after the Detroit News sought comment from Nessel’s office, the paper said.
On Jan. 17, Ozeir was a panelist at an in-person event, which the group Palestine Solidarity Grand Rapids hosted in the city, per one of its social media posts. The event was hosted at the Fountain Street Church Sanctuary, per a flier, which identifies Ozeir as an “attorney, activist and USPCN member.” (The latter refers to the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, which “works closely with and unequivocally supports Students for Justice in Palestine,” per its site.)
The event flyer calls for the Holy Land 5—leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, who were convicted in 2008 of funnelling millions of dollars to Hamas—to be freed.
From Ian:
How Western Logic Brought Disaster upon Israel
Israel's intelligence was the most advanced in the world. But in the week before Oct. 7, 2023, it forgot to look at the Gaza bakery, which suddenly was asked to prepare hundreds of pita breads, or the barber shop in Jabalia that, on Oct. 4, was suddenly flooded with dozens of Nukhba operatives getting haircuts to look sharp before joining their 72 virgins.
"We struck them hard and they are deterred," former director of the Israel Security Agency, Nadav Argaman, declared in May 2021. "They want an economy, not a war," the political leadership told us. Then came the "Al-Aqsa Flood" on Oct. 7.
The catastrophic error that led to this disaster was Israel's excessively rational lens, rooted in Western logic - the belief that people act to maximize personal and family welfare. That is how Israel's value system works. The intelligence community and the political leadership refused to truly understand the jihadist fanaticism that had taken over Gaza.
Israel's intelligence instinctively searches for logic. But an enemy willing to sacrifice everything for a murderous ideology does not operate according to Western logic. Israel must adopt a permanent assumption: the enemy will always surprise you. He will always have a new trick - something you have not yet imagined.
True national resilience requires capability denial: Do not wait to understand how an enemy plans to use a capability - destroy it simply because it exists. Assume the possibility of blindness: The military and society must be prepared for the morning when the screens go dark.
National resilience must never rest on intelligence as its sole backbone. True resilience is the ability to absorb a blow you did not anticipate and respond with force - because you prepared for the worst-case scenario, not the "reasonable" one. National resilience is not the ability to predict the future. It is the ability to survive it even when you did not predict it.
Why Israel Is Seen Everywhere and Everything Else Is Forgotten
Israel occupies an outsized and morally charged place in the media's imagination, particularly in the West. There is a systemic, disproportionate fascination, bordering on obsession, with covering Israel as though it were the gravitational center of world affairs. With this saturation coverage, Israel becomes not just another country among many but a kind of moral index - a stage upon which the world's conscience is imagined to be tested and revealed.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies a peculiar and disproportionate place in the West's political imagination, unmatched by conflicts that are deadlier or more brutal. So it becomes over-seen, over-examined, intensely dissected, and uniquely moralized.
Israel's wars are routinely framed as the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict," as though the entire story were a localized struggle between two neighboring peoples, one strong and one weak, one powerful and one victimized. This framing is tidy, emotionally resonant, and yet profoundly misleading.
Most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians but against Egyptians and Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese, Iraqis and, increasingly, Iranians. The rockets fired at Israel during the war did not come only from Gaza. They came from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and from Iran itself. A vast and intricate regional struggle is reduced to Israelis vs. Palestinians. Israel is cast as the dominant actor, the controlling force, and ultimately the villain. The wider forces shaping the conflict vanish altogether.
This is how media distortion always works - by shrinking and enlarging the facts selectively. A small story is made to seem enormous. The result is a morality play in which a villainous country called Israel comes to embody the worst sins of the modern age. Israel ceases to be a state acting within a volatile region and becomes instead a metaphor for everything the imagination fears about power and injustice. If the coverage of Israel feels uniquely charged, moralized, and obsessive, it is because it is.
Israel Cannot Afford a Hamas ‘Victory Picture’ During Ramadan
The current conflict cannot be allowed to relapse into a wave of lone-wolf stabbings or car-rammings because the state was too timid to enforce its borders.
Hamas has already characterized these security measures as a “dangerous escalation” and an attack on religious freedom. This is a predictable script from an organization that has systematically converted religious and civilian spaces into military hubs .
The strategic imperative is clear: true peace follows the recognition of reality, and that reality requires the enemy to concede that their violent goals are impossible. If Hamas believes they can still achieve a “victory display” in Jerusalem, they will continue to resist disarmament and reconstruction efforts in Gaza. The road to a stable, post-Hamas reality begins with the total eclipse of their influence in Jerusalem.
The Israel Police and the IDF must remain steadfast. A ceasefire is not a surrender, and a pause is not a peace. The current era of regional conflict will only reach its conclusion when the citizens of Israel see that the flags of jihad have been permanently lowered.
By preventing a Hamas victory picture this Ramadan, Israel is doing more than just securing a holy month; it is asserting the permanence of the state and the finality of its security goals. First recognition of defeat, then a path to stability.
From Ian:
Simon Sebag Montefiore warns of ‘devalued’ anti-racist language and threats to Holocaust memory
The celebrated historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has issued a striking warning about the devaluation of anti-racist language in contemporary discourse, arguing that terms such as “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are now frequently manipulated to serve agendas running counter to their original intent.
Delivering the keynote speech at the Holocaust Education Trust’s event in Parliament, Montefiore observed:“Words are important—as we learned last week, the people behind the banning of a Jewish MP from his school because of his Jewishness were a cabal of teaching unions and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) coordinators who constantly repeat the language of anti-racism.
“We exist in a struggle where words have often come to mean their very opposite. In that case, and others, diversity came to mean discrimination, equity, injustice, inclusive, exclusion.
“And as it turns out, every bigot is a proud anti-racist to their bones. Every antisemite is against antisemitism, and naturally, everybody is against the Holocaust and genocide.”
At Monday evening’s event—held to mark this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations—the author warned that Holocaust memory is “in peril” and under attack from new forms of antisemitic distortion and ideological abuse.
Also among the speakers were Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Holocaust survivor Annick Lever, and several of the charity’s young ambassadors. HET’s chief executive, Karen Pollock, pointedly addressed recent concerns about the state of Holocaust education, stating: “Despite challenges, our experience at the Holocaust Educational Trust is that we’re working with hundreds more schools since October 7th,” following earlier newspaper reports suggesting Shoah education was being snubbed by many schools since the Hamas attacks.
In his main address, Montefiore recounted witnessing repeat protests outside the part Israeli-owned Miznon restaurant in Notting Hill, near his home.
“I hate to say it reminded me of Kristallnacht in Notting Hill Gate,” he said. “I came across a restaurant almost besieged by about 60 screaming activists who were referring specifically to the Holocaust, to the genocide, and applying this to an innocent restaurant, British owned, though with an Israeli connection, that they were specifically trying to drive out of Britain and trying to drive out of the neighborhood, trying to destroy a small business by terrorizing passers by, people going to the restaurant, and the owners of the restaurant.”
Oren Kessler:
The Bad History of ‘Palestine 36’ An Oscar short-listed film, funded by Qatar, Turkey, and the BBC, rewrites the past to serve a modern political fantasy
And yet the film’s gravest failing may be depriving the Jews of a voice. I don’t mean metaphorically; I mean there are precisely two words spoken by a Jew, in any language, in the entire film.
In fact, Jews appear on-screen only twice. Early in the film, a Jewish figure is briefly ushered to a microphone at the inauguration of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. Later, Jewish immigrants are seen in the distance, silently toiling behind a kibbutz wall.
And that’s it. For a film centered on an Arab revolt against Jews, it’s a glaring, flagrant omission.
It would have been easy for the screenwriters to have included two stock Jewish characters: The “bad” Jew who is arrogant, land-greedy, and patronizing toward Arabs, and the “good” one who respects their culture, learns their language, and is willing to limit Jewish immigration. I suspect that behind this choice lies the deep-rooted Palestinian and wider Arab taboo against “normalization” of Israelis—in this case, even before they were Israelis.
Nonetheless, wishing something away doesn’t make it so. Like it or not, the Jews were there, and their continued arrival was the key driver of the revolt. Portraying the rebellion as directed primarily against British imperialism (with the Jews as the silent beneficiary thereof) is historical malpractice.
The film’s last quarter is a crescendo of British brutality that bears only a patchy resemblance to the historical record. Soldiers detonate a home despite knowing an elderly couple is in their bed, embracing as they await the end. Wingate shoots a civilian in the head after gathering the townspeople to watch. In the climax, troops force civilians onto a bus and force it to drive over a landmine. Among the dead is a Christian priest whose young son then kills a British soldier in revenge. It’s essentially the film’s only moment in which blood is spilled by Arab hands.
The British have much to answer for in Palestine—a handful of well-documented atrocities, like that at al-Bassa, are amply described in my book. They indeed demolished homes during the revolt, just not with people inside. Wingate did inflict collective punishment on uncooperative villages. But there is no evidence of him ever ordering an execution, much less conducting one himself, nor of the British murdering a priest (or imam), nor of any Christian Arabs (let alone children) taking up arms against them.
Only in the final credits, and only in minuscule type, does Palestine 36 concede that the movie is a work of fiction, merely “inspired by actual events and characters.” Such a disclaimer should have appeared prominently at the outset, not buried where few viewers would notice, although that would erroneously suggest that the spirit if not the details of the Arab uprising of 1936–1939 had been captured. It has not.
As publicly funded British institutions, the BFI and BBC Film should have insisted on transparency. Their failure to do so places them uncomfortably close to the film’s other state-backed co-producers, in Turkey and Qatar, which reliably promote their governments’ harmful, extremist agendas in the region. The omission raises an obvious question: whether the lack of candor reflects more than oversight, and instead a shared comfort with reshaping the historical record to suit a contemporary agenda.
All the world’s a stage, a British dramatist once wrote, and nowhere more so than the Holy Land. But it is an affront to history that a portrait of a revolt against Jews should treat the latter as silent props or erase them altogether. However the filmmakers feel about Jewish immigration, land purchase, and nation-building in mid-’30s Palestine, these too are part of the history. These too are “actual events” performed by “actual characters” in the century-long drama still playing out between the river and the sea.
From Archetype to Libel: The Misinterpretation of Amalek in Genocide Accusations
Conclusion: From Archetype to Libel
The controversy surrounding the modern invocation of Amalek in Israeli discourse, especially after the October 7 massacre, highlights a fundamental conflict between internal Jewish cultural memory and external political misinterpretation. In Jewish legal and historical tradition, the term has long been regarded as a symbolic command rather than a literal one. Amalek is thus viewed as a metaphysical archetype of unprovoked, existential evil and baseless hatred, which appears throughout history in figures like Haman and the Nazis. When Prime Minister Netanyahu used the term, he engaged in a profound act of typological memory (Zakhor), placing the unprecedented trauma of October 7 within the ongoing struggle between cosmic good and evil. By imposing this literalist, hostile interpretation, detractors are engaging in defamation of the Jewish state.
Post-Script: The Anti-Zionist Echo Chamber
The rejection of the present article by Analyse & Kritik, which published the original article by Azzam, serves as a sobering case study in the circular nature of modern anti-Zionist scholarship. Rather than engaging with the provided evidence, the peer-review process revealed a systemic refusal to permit any narrative that challenges the “genocide” label, treating the accusation not as a hypothesis to be tested but as an absolute truth. Central to this failure was the reviewers’ total omission of the vast body of internal Jewish interpretive traditions—sources that explicitly reject or spiritualize the Amalek archetype. By failing to engage with these central points, the reviewers maintained a closed system that dismissed dissenting data as “denial,” thereby precluding genuine academic exchange.
The review process appeared driven by a palpable ideological bias that favored political positioning over substantive analysis. For instance, one reviewer asserted, without providing a shred of evidence, that for “any Israeli ear,” the mention of Amalek carries an immediate association with complete annihilation. This claim was made while simultaneously ignoring the centuries of rabbinic legal tradition cited in the article—such as the rulings of the Sages and Maimonides—that explicitly state that the literal commandment against Amalek is inapplicable today. Furthermore, the use of charged, ad hominem language—specifically labeling the arguments as those of “Netanyahu apologists”—reveals a hostile environment where scholarship is judged by its political utility rather than its factual merit.
Ultimately, this experience highlights the intellectual “incest” inherent in much of the anti-Zionist academic ecosystem. The editor’s response, which took it for granted that Israel has committed “horrible” crimes and demanded that any publication must include “commenting on the destruction of Gaza,” functions as a form of gatekeeping. By dismissing the concept of “self-defense” as a “conventional cliché” and refusing to engage with the primary and secondary sources presented, the reviewers merely confirmed that their objective is not the pursuit of truth. Instead, they serve to protect an echo chamber in which the same scholars quote each other ad nauseam, effectively weaponizing the peer-review process to perpetuate the very libel this article seeks to expose.
From Ian:
Fatah shares Hamas’s goal to destroy Israel
Consider that the 90-year-old Abbas has also long been given a free pass from the United Nations and others regarding the P.A.’s harboring and protecting of terrorists. The P.A. has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world (more than 60,000 men), largely armed and trained by the United States. Yet instead of using those forces to arrest and extradite terrorists—as the Oslo Accords require—Abbas and friends pay salaries to terrorists and their families, and shelter fugitive terrorists so Israel can’t capture them.
This is not a failure of capacity. It is a failure of will—and, more accurately, a reflection of intent. The P.A. does not arrest terrorists because it does not see them as criminals. It sees them as assets.
That truth became even clearer with the cosmetic rebranding of the notorious “pay-for-slay” system that has rewarded Palestinian Arab terrorism for decades. We were told this system had been reformed. We were told it is now humanitarian, not ideological. This, too, was a lie.
The only way to truly end “pay-for-slay” is for the P.A. to announce that anybody who has engaged in violence against Israel is disqualified from any P.A. payments. That would demonstrate that the entity sincerely rejects terrorism. Anything less is a sham, which is designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community.
Zaki said the quiet part out loud: Israel is “doomed to perish.” Hamas has been saying the same thing for years. The difference is no longer substantive, only stylistic.
It is long past time for the international community to stop rewarding duplicity. Diplomatic recognition of the P.A., financial aid without conditions and the pretense that Abbas represents a peaceful alternative have all failed. They have not moderated P.A. leadership; they have emboldened it.
If words still matter, then Zaki’s utterances must have consequences. Governments that genuinely oppose terrorism and support Israel’s right to exist should immediately suspend diplomatic recognition of the P.A.; cut off funding that enables terrorism; and demand real, verifiable rejection of violence, not empty promises.
The future cannot be built on fantasies. And it certainly cannot be built with partners who openly proclaim that Israel “is doomed to perish.”
Alberto Nisman’s Role in Holding the Islamic Republic Accountable for its Crimes: Reflections
Nisman’s granular investigation that exposed how the Islamic Republic recruits, radicalizes and executes terrorism continues to be a roadmap for counter-terrorism professionals around the globe. It no doubt played a role in President Milei designating the IRGC’s Quds Force as a terrorist entity yesterday. The designation makes members of the Quds Force and their allies subject to financial sanctions and operational restrictions.
Milei underscored that he maintains an “unbreakable commitment to recognizing terrorists for what they are.” Under his leadership, Argentina placed Hamas on its terrorism list on July 12, 2024.
The Quds Force designation takes place as the Islamic Republic has killed thousands of protestors from every province of Iran in recent weeks. The regime has cut off internet to hide these crimes but reports and images have leaked out.
In April 2024, Argentina’s highest criminal court officially designated the 1994 AMIA bombing a "crime against humanity" and explicitly held the government of Iran and Hezbollah responsible for its planning and execution.
The Venezuela connection to the AMIA bombing investigation may be noteworthy: it revolves around allegations that then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez served as a key intermediary in a covert deal between Iran and Argentina to cover up Iran's involvement in the 1994 attack. According to reports from three former Venezuelan government officials cited in Veja, Chávez met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on January 13, 2007, during which Ahmadinejad requested Chávez's help in persuading the Argentine government under Kirchner to provide nuclear technology to Iran and to cease cooperating with Interpol on arresting Iranian suspects linked to the AMIA bombing.
In exchange, Iran provided Kirchner's 2007 presidential campaign with millions of dollars funneled through Venezuelan channels, including a documented incident where a Venezuelan-American businessman was caught allegedly attempting to smuggle $800,000 into Argentina—funds purportedly originating from Iran and brokered by Chávez.
Iranian networks in Latin America, as detailed in Nisman's 2013 indictment, included terrorist infrastructure in Venezuela and neighboring countries, where Iran allegedly created sleeper cells and recruitment operations.
Kirchner is serving a six-year prison sentence under house arrest for her role in a separate corruption case. Several other cases against her are pending.
As Nisman’s family and victims of the AMIA bombing await justice, one can’t help but appreciate that his life’s work uncovering and exposing the Islamic Republic’s use of terrorism as a weapon of its governance and foreign policy have been fully vindicated. Governments around the world have taken important steps by sanctioning the Islamic Republic of Iran’s domestic institutions and individuals responsible for the regime’s malign activities at home and abroad. Many of its proxies have also been designated terrorist entities. While a lot more needs to be done, Alberto Nisman paved an important path to make this possible.
How radical Islamists and the far left united to ‘fight America everywhere and all the time’
Why are American progressives, who believe in gay rights and abortion, aligned with radical Islamists, who want a religious dictatorship? Because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” writes Peter Schweizer in his new book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.” In this exclusive excerpt, he explains that they are after the same thing: the destruction of Western society from within.
Ismail Selim Elbarasse, an accountant by training, seemed to be living a quiet life in Annandale, Virginia. But in 2004, when police officers noticed him driving with his wife across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and filming its critical structural elements, they decided to act, then detained him and notified federal agents.
He was already a suspect in a scheme to provide funding to Islamist terrorist groups, and now agents were searching through his home for further evidence of his possible involvement.
They discovered far more than a terrorism funding scheme.
Buried among the stacks of paperwork in his home was a document written in Arabic titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” written by a US-based Islamist leader from the Muslim Brotherhood.
The strategic goals memo specifically addressed the “Civilization-Jihadist Process” for using migration as a weapon of subversion.
Members “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated, and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
The Muslim Brotherhood specifically and Islamists in general have long viewed immigration as a weapon to deploy against the West.
From Ian:
Why Netanyahu Asked Trump to Wait on Attacking Iran
Israel has reportedly urged President Trump to postpone any immediate military action against Iran. Israeli decision-making is not rooted in diplomatic hesitation or lack of defense systems but in a sober intelligence assessment.
Israel's intelligence establishment has concluded that the current moment is strategically unfavorable for a strike and that such an action would be unlikely to achieve the collapse of the Iranian regime.
Regime change in Iran is not determined by popular dissatisfaction alone, but by the continued loyalty of the state's coercive institutions - most notably the regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The regime has demonstrated a willingness to use unprecedented and brutal force to suppress dissent. Israeli intelligence analysts assess that as long as the Iranian military and the IRGC remain cohesive and willing to shoot protesters, the likelihood of regime collapse remains low.
History has shown repeatedly that authoritarian governments fall not when protests erupt, but when security forces fracture, refuse orders, or shift allegiance. At present, there is no credible indication that such a split is imminent within Iran's power structure.
In short, Israeli intelligence concludes that the Iranian regime will not collapse as long as the army and the IRGC remain willing and able to fire on their own population. Until that reality changes, restraint is viewed not as weakness, but as strategic prudence.
Amb. Alan Baker:
Are Israelis Not Entitled to Human Rights?
On a daily basis, we are witnessing a mass-phenomenon of deliberately one-sided accusations being leveled solely against Israel, alleging human rights violations against Palestinians. Slanted social media platforms, once-reputable international media outlets, politically-biased UN bodies and human rights committees, and clearly ignorant show-biz celebrities all unthinkingly accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid, cruelty and disproportionate military actions.
Curiously, all these "paragons of international virtue" appear to be selectively blind as to the human rights of everyone else in the world. They flagrantly ignore the fact that Israel and its citizens are no less deserving of human rights. They ignore the fact that the public in Israel suffer from ongoing and daily acts of terror by Palestinian terror groups and Islamist fanatics. They have deliberately chosen to forget, or deny, the tragic massacre, rape, butchery, burning, and torture of many hundreds of Israelis and foreign citizens on Oct. 7, 2023.
All this is being orchestrated through a meticulous, well-oiled and well-financed system of brainwashing, emanating from the coffers of the likes of Qatar, Iran, and Turkey. Sadly, this is all being willingly and enthusiastically absorbed and cheered-on by an international choir in Europe and other Western countries, all too willing to absorb and propagate such propaganda and brain-washing and to direct it solely against Israel.
It is high time that the states and organizations within the international community, as well as international media outlets and the manipulated social media platforms, become aware of the absurdity and acute lack of any logical proportion in their anti-Israel fixation.
US considering asylum for British Jews
The Trump administration is discussing the possibility of offering asylum to Britain’s Jews, The Telegraph can reveal.
Robert Garson, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, said he had been in talks with the State Department about providing sanctuary for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in the UK.
Mr Garson, who was born in Manchester, told The Telegraph that the UK was “no longer a safe place for Jews”.
He said the Islamist attack on a Manchester synagogue and the widespread anti-Semitism evident in the wake of the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel had led him to conclude British Jews should be offered refuge in the US.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Garson said he could see “no future” for Jews in the UK and laid much of the blame on Sir Keir Starmer for allowing anti-Semitism to flourish.
Mr Garson said he had raised the idea of offering the US as a safe haven to British Jews with Mr Trump’s anti-Semitism tsar in his capacity as a board member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Mr Trump appointed Mr Garson to the council last May after firing board members appointed by Joe Biden.
From Ian:
An undercover reporter joined France’s anti-Israel movement. Here’s what she found
If antisemitism has long plagued France, dating back to the Middle Ages, it’s now metastasizing in new, alarming ways, according to a recently published book by French journalist Nora Bussigny.
Titled “Les Nouveaux Antisémites” (“The New Antisemites”), it exposes virulent Jew-hatred endemic to many far-left organizations in France, infiltrated by Bussigny as part of a lengthy undercover investigation. Using a false identity, Bussigny uncovered pervasive antisemitism and anti-Zionism, now a common denominator among diverse groups that often disagree on other matters.
“I saw with my own eyes to what degree Islamists, far-left so-called ‘progressive’ militants and feminist, LGBT and ecological activists are closely linked in their shared hatred of Jews and Israel,” Bussigny told The Times of Israel during a recent interview on Zoom.
“It’s ironic because historically, the extreme left was fragmented. Many radical groups never got along despite dreaming of a convergence of their struggles. Before October 7, [2023,] I was convinced they could only unify around a common hatred of the police and what it symbolizes for them. But I’ve now seen how their hate for Jews, or rather Zionists, to use their term, is more effective in bringing them together in common cause.”
The Hamas-led invasion on October 7, 2023, saw some 1,200 people in southern Israel slaughtered by thousands of marauding terrorists, and 251 abducted as hostages to the Gaza Strip. The massacre touched off the two-year war against Hamas in Gaza and an unprecedented spike in global antisemitism.
“Les Nouveaux Antisémites” — whose subtitle translates in English as “An Investigation by an Infiltrator within the Ranks of the Far Left” — opens with a dedication to Régine Skorka-Jacubert, a Holocaust survivor and member of the French Resistance.
Nora Bussigny at the podium of the French Senate as she receives the 2025 Prix Edgar Faure for best political book of the year. (Courtesy Nora Bussigny)
“While writing the book, I was invited to the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris,” said Bussigny, 30, speaking in French. “As part of its education program, they have a terminal which scans your face and attributes to you someone deported to a Nazi concentration camp. You’re then asked to commit yourself to help preserve the person’s memory and keep their story alive. I told myself I’d dedicate my book to Régine.”
In the book’s introduction, Busssigny explains her incognito endeavor, for which she risked her personal safety.
“During an entire year, I participated, with full discretion, in demonstrations, meetings, online discussions,” she writes. “I investigated university campuses. I applauded next to hysterical crowds glorifying terrorism. I took part in feminist protests and dialogued in municipal facilities with members of an organization [Samidoun] outlawed in many countries for its close, proven links to terrorism. I chanted against ‘genocide’ and for ‘Palestinian resistance’ — obviously armed ‘resistance’ — during demonstrations supposedly defending the rights of women and LGBT people, with no mention of homosexuals being tortured or murdered in the name of Sharia law in the Gaza Strip, governed by Hamas.”
Trump’s Fateful Choice in Iran
To be sure, there are valid strategic reasons for his reluctance. Most U.S. interventions to exact justice on foreign tyrants have ended poorly. No American silver bullet will cleanly depose Tehran’s Islamist leaders and peacefully transition the country to a stable, representative democracy. Since World War II, fewer than a quarter of authoritarian collapses have led to democracy, and those triggered by foreign intervention have been particularly unlikely to do so. Violent revolutions are coercive contests; they are won by those who can organize force, not mobilize hashtags.
That said, U.S. military action can still constructively shape events, even if it can’t control their ultimate outcome. Foreign intervention will not spawn an Iranian Denmark, in other words, but it could prevent the entrenchment of an Iranian North Korea.
In this context, Trump should be clear about his objectives, focusing on three fronts. He should seek to deter the violence against civilians by signaling that the cost of this slaughter will outweigh the benefits of suppression. He should insist on tearing down the digital iron curtain that has allowed the regime to massacre people in the dark (for the past week, connectivity in Iran has hovered at 1 percent). And he should make a goal of fracturing Iran’s security forces by degrading the regime’s command and control, thereby creating doubt within their ranks and emboldening the population.
On the last point, I consulted with three friends in the U.S. military and intelligence communities who have a century of collective experience dealing with Iran. Johnny Gannon, a Persian-speaking veteran of the CIA, advised that any U.S. action should serve to “demoralize, damage, and denigrate” the adversary. He paraphrased Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince about the risk of half measures: “One should either caress a man or crush him. If you injure him, you should do so in such a way that you need not fear his revenge.” If you aim for the supreme leader, you best not miss.
A retired senior U.S. military official who has studied Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for decades recommended striking the country’s missile capabilities and also aiming for command centers, such that the regime would be unable to coordinate internally and protesters could reemerge without fear. According to another former intelligence official, Trump’s action must convince the IRGC that it has just three options: change voluntarily, be changed by protesters, or be changed by Donald Trump.
The Islamic Republic may have prevailed in this latest battle, but it is destined to lose the war against its own society. The medium-term bet on who will prevail between an 86-year-old dictator and his young society is clear. Khamenei will soon be vanquished by time, and 47 years of the Islamic Republic’s hard power will eventually be defeated by the soft power of a 2,500-year-old nation that wants to reclaim its proud history.
Trump appears relaxed about the fate of Iran. Yet the machinery of war is already in motion: The USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier, is reportedly en route to the Middle East. Given their violent history with Trump, Iran’s leaders know they cannot rest easily.
The Silence of the Left on Iran
For the exiles I spoke with, the most disturbing—and telling—thing about the tepid response was the contrast with the impassioned reaction to Gaza. “Why is it that when Palestinians—armed or unarmed—fight for liberation, it is seen as a moral duty to support them, but when Iranians protest, they are labeled ‘armed terrorists’ or ‘agents of Mossad?’” Shams, the feminist scholar, said.
Janet Afary, a religious-studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, helped put this dissonance in context. She described for me a long history that would explain the left’s knee-jerk sympathy for the Islamic Republic, starting with the leftist elements that helped lead the 1979 revolution (alongside the clerics who ended up seizing full control). For those who want to see the end of Israel, the regime’s identity as a defender of Palestinian rights—and a funder of extremist anti-Israel groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah—has given it cachet.
Afary recalled confronting a colleague who was dismissive of the 2022 protests, which were largely driven by feminists; this person wondered why Iranian women can’t just wear hijab like other women in the Middle East. “Are you saying this because you don’t want the government of the Islamic Republic to be overthrown because it supports the Palestinian cause?” Afary asked her. She said yes. “To my face!” Afary said.
The ideological left doesn’t know what to do with violence that doesn’t involve a Western aggressor, according to Kamran Matin, another exile and an international-relations professor at the University of Sussex in England. Matin noted other groups that received only muted support from anti-imperialists, including the Yazidis, persecuted by ISIS, and Rohingya, victims of the Myanmar government—in which case the aggressors were not Western hegemons. If you jump to the barricades against these atrocities, “then the whole edifice of postcolonial anti-imperialism basically collapses. Because for them, it feels like they dilute their case against the West by accepting non-Western cases.”
From Ian:
Our duty to British Jews
We must be clear about this hatred’s source: a toxic alliance between the nihilistic ‘decolonial’ campus left that views Israel as the embodiment of everything that it despises, and Islamist influence in Muslim communities where anti-Semitic tropes too often go unchallenged. Britain cannot be a successful multifaith democracy if Islamist ideology is not exposed and challenged. Islamic organisations found to be peddling extremism must be shut down. Immigrants who espouse Islamist views must be deported.
Those in civic life, too, must be exposed and challenged when they fail to protect minorities. Bodies such as the National Education Union must be forced to confront open anti-Semitism within their ranks – a culture that normalises bigotry must be rejected with the full force of the law. The NHS is not so short of staff that it must keep employing those guilty of anti-Semitic behaviour. Many doctors found guilty of espousing violent hatred of Jews find themselves suspended, but far fewer are struck off, despite the obvious risk to Jewish patients.
The problem goes right to the top. Keir Starmer pledged to do ‘whatever it takes’ to tackle anti-Semitism following the Heaton Park synagogue attack. Yet he celebrated the release of an Egyptian activist who it later emerged had once said that ‘we need to kill more’ Zionists. Starmer had been un-aware of the comments; for British Jews, it all suggests their security is an afterthought.
Resisting anti-Semitism at home means fighting it abroad. Britain should be doing everything it can to assist Iran’s protestors. The Islamic Republic is the world’s leading sponsor of attacks on Jews – from its support for the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, to its funding of ‘anti-Zionist’ NGOs and television channels. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is believed to operate in Britain, surveilling dissidents, intimidating campaigners and even planning kidnappings. Yet No. 10 confirmed this week that it would not proscribe the organisation, which would make it illegal to support the IRGC.
What begins with Jews does not end with them. Countries that become unsafe for Jews – the Spain of the Inquisition, Germany in the 1930s, Russia in the past decade – are those where freedom eventually dies. Never Again is not a platitude, but a promise we must keep for all our sakes.
Lahav Harkov:
Fight Harder
Review of 'As a Jew' by Sarah Hurwitz
Hurwitz dedicates a significant portion of her book to defending Zionism and Israel, and she calls her avoidance of the topic in Here All Along a “cop-out.” She blames herself for having wanted to spare the controversy and avoid acknowledging the importance of Israel to today’s Jews and the justice of its existence. But she still makes sure to broadcast that she’s not one of those Zionists. She’s “appalled by Israel’s current right-wing government; sickened by the racism and extremism of its most senior government officials; horrified by radical settler violence…deeply troubled by Israel’s ongoing military occupation…anguished about the war in Gaza with its devastating casualties and destruction.”
This kind of virtue-signaling is not surprising from a former Obama staffer, even one who has immense Jewish pride and who has engaged in serious self-examination on the matter and hopes to encourage other Jews to do the same.
Hurwitz repeatedly refers to her political “side,” facetiously and in scare quotes, when distancing herself from the left because of its weaknesses on anti-Semitism. She admirably takes on some liberal Jewish shibboleths, as when she expresses “a feeling of loss” about how Reform Judaism chose to discard Jewish spirituality. She is correct to question whether those who pursue social justice as the true core of Judaism are implying that their “existence as a Jew is valid because it benefits people other than Jews.”
As a Jew is peppered with reminders, however, that Hurwitz is willing to distance herself from liberal axioms only up to a point. She writes that she doesn’t mean to dwell on Christian anti-Semitism—and one can grant her that it is, historically, very important—but she mentions the Soviet-inspired and Muslim-dominated anti-Semitism of our current discourse only glancingly.
Hurwitz is reminiscent of the talented British-American writer Hadley Freeman, who wrote the book House of Glass, about how her family survived the Holocaust. It could have been a classic, if only she hadn’t larded it with constant references to President Donald Trump being a fascist. In As a Jew, Hurwitz lays her incomplete self-examination bare by essentially blaming rising anti-Semitism in America on Trump.
Hurwitz says that she was first struck by the anti-Semitism of her side of the aisle during the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. But more than once she makes the argument that “this rhetoric from the far left came in the wake of a wave of alarming rhetoric and violence from the far right, particularly during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.” While the spike in online anti-Semitism in 2016 was undeniable, and while there has been an alarming increase in anti-Semitism, or at least a willingness to accept it, by influential right-wing figures in 2025, data unambiguously show that anti-Semitism in the U.S. started to rise sharply in 2014, when the first wave of Black Lives Matter riots began and when Hurwitz was still working for the Obama administration.
As a Jew is well written and thoroughly researched, and worth recommending to the people Bret Stephens called “October 8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and suddenly realized that a lot of people hate us. It’s really not a book for people who came to that realization long ago and have knowledge of Jewish history beyond a 101 class. Perhaps, in her third volume, Sarah Hurwitz will follow the logic of her own arguments, take account of her own experience at the Federation General Assembly, and go to battle openly with the enemies she refuses to engage with directly in the pages of As a Jew.
A Century of Rewarding Palestinian Terror
Palestinian Arabs have been fighting Jews violently in the Holy Land for more than a hundred years. The strategy has hardly brought them success, but they have retained it, in part because anti-Jewish mayhem brings them political rewards from important foreign actors.
Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities were innovative - the attackers livestreamed their actions with Go-Pro cameras - but they also fit an old pattern. Hamas said it was defending Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, and named its attack "al-Aqsa Flood." In the 1929 Hebron massacre in British Mandate Palestine, the Arab rioters, who killed nearly 70 Jews, likewise screamed that they were defending al-Aqsa. Linking the two episodes is the killers' sense that massacres of civilians are politically beneficial.
British officials condemned the rioters in 1929 for pitiless murder, and then tried to mollify them. They failed. The consequences of their appeasement effort remain with us today. In Britain, the 1929 riots energized anti-Zionist forces, who interpreted the inhumanity of the bloodletting as a sign of the vehemence of Arab grievances.
High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor, the British-appointed governor of Palestine, proved far more eager to accommodate than to punish those responsible. He favored radical policy changes to remedy Arab complaints against the Jews and pressed for these changes as necessary to prevent future riots. As a result, the threat of more riots became the mainspring of Palestinian Arab diplomacy and this intimidation campaign succeeded. Colonial Office experts proposed backing away from the Balfour Declaration.
The parallels to the current war in Gaza are obvious. People around the world did express horror at the murders, rapes, mutilations, and kidnappings of men, women, and children by Hamas on Oct. 7. Yet very little time passed before many of these same people argued that the key to preventing future terrorism of this kind is to placate the Zionists' enemies - by recognizing Palestine as a state, endorsing untrue reports of famine in Gaza, and accusing Israel falsely of "genocide."
As in the aftermath of the 1929 riots, rewards for savagery will increase, not decrease, the likelihood of future terrorist violence. This lays a foundation for another century of self-defeating Arab anti-Zionist belligerence. The rewards can be expected to empower the more hateful and oppressive elements in Palestinian Arab politics, making peace with Israel harder to achieve.
The Nazi War Criminal the Arab World Protected
Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia provided a stage for the lethal operations of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Jerusalem's Grand Mufti.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he had orchestrated anti-Jewish pogroms in the Land of Israel, and during World War II, he managed German propaganda to the Muslim world and developed strategies to mobilize Muslim minorities across the Soviet Union and the Balkans for the Third Reich.
In Yugoslavia he helped raise three Waffen-SS divisions composed entirely of local Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
These units perpetrated horrific war crimes - massacring Serbs and Jews, incinerating entire villages with their inhabitants still inside, carrying out systematic rape, torture, and pillage.
When the war concluded in 1945, Yugoslavia's liberated government moved to investigate the Mufti's role in Nazi atrocities, formally listing him as a war criminal and petitioning a UN special committee for his extradition.
Al-Husseini's allies throughout the Arab world unleashed tremendous pressure and threats that forced Yugoslav authorities to retreat from extradition demands.
From Ian:
JPost Editorial:
Israel cannot heal from war with Hamas while Ran Gvili remains in Gaza
Israel is approaching a new phase in the Gaza plan: a technocratic committee, tentative negotiations over disarmament, and renewed international focus on reconstruction.
Yet one unresolved wound keeps cutting through every communiqué and timetable: the fate of one young man whose absence sits at the center of the country’s conscience.
St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili, the last hostage held in Gaza, is a son, a soldier, and a human being with a family waiting for him. His return, even for burial, remains unfinished business for a nation built on a promise that those who serve will never be abandoned.
Phase II is being described in diplomatic language as the movement from fighting to governance. In The Jerusalem Post’s coverage of the new phase, US special envoy Steve Witkoff framed it as “moving from ceasefire to demilitarization.”
The words matter, because they signal intent. They also expose a hard truth: A plan that claims to turn a page still cannot close the most basic chapter, bringing home the last hostage.
As the Post’s Seth J. Frantzman has noted in analysis and reporting around the plan, Phase II proceeds while Gvili's remains are still in Gaza, still unrecovered.
Policy architecture matters. Ceasefire terms matter. Demilitarization frameworks matter. Committees and clauses still fail a society when they float above the human cost that created them. Israel’s public can hold complexity and trade-offs in its head. Israelis also understand something simpler: There is no “next stage” in national healing while the last hostage remains in limbo.
Gvili's family has said this plainly, and it deserves to be treated as national guidance, not private grief: “We cannot move to the next phase of the deal while even one hostage remains in Gaza.” That sentence carries more moral weight than a dozen briefings.
For Gvili's family in Meitar, the war’s human ledger will feel balanced only when he is home. His mother’s words captured a widely felt truth: “Without Gvili, our country can’t heal.” Grief does not respond to diplomatic phrasing. Communal cohesion does not form around progress reports. It forms around shared obligations kept.
Gvili's story is deeply Israeli. He was recovering at home, wounded and awaiting treatment, when the October 7 massacre unfolded. He put on his uniform and ran toward danger to protect people in kibbutzim who were not his own. He acted out of responsibility and out of a reflex Israelis know well: You move when others are in danger. His last known actions were in defense of life.
Longest-held Israeli hostages David and Ariel Cunio break their silence
Among the longest-held living Israeli hostages freed from Gaza, brothers David and Ariel Cunio, have begun speaking publicly for the first time since their release, describing their prolonged captivity marked by starvation, abuse and constant fear that escape would cost their loved ones their lives.
The Cunio brothers, kidnapped from their homes during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, are giving their first joint interviews as part of an international media tour coordinated by Fuente Latina, a nonprofit news organization that works to bring accurate reporting and firsthand testimonies about Israel, the Middle East and antisemitism to Spanish-language media worldwide.
Ahead of their media appearances, the brothers spoke exclusively with Fuente Latina, which provided their testimonies to JNS.
The Cunio brothers were released from Hamas captivity on Oct.13, 2025, as part of a hostage-release agreement under the Gaza ceasefire plan. After 738 days in captivity, Ariel Cunio said he believed for much of that time that he would never see his brother David again.
“In captivity, every day I planned an escape,” Ariel said. “But I knew that if I got out, I would be lynched in the street. And even if I survived and got home somehow, I feared discovering later that my brother or my girlfriend had been killed because I escaped.”
The brothers, both Argentine-Israeli citizens, were among eight members of the Cunio family abducted during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, making them the largest single family taken hostage that day.
Ariel described watching his brother Eitan’s home burn as Hamas terrorists attacked their kibbutz. In a family WhatsApp message sent shortly before he was taken, Ariel wrote, “Here begins the nightmare.”
Terrorists entered his safe room, killed his puppy, and abducted him and his girlfriend, Arbel, on a motorcycle. During the journey into Gaza, they fell multiple times, and their captors intervened to prevent a mob celebrating the attack from lynching them.
Ariel said he was held above ground in civilian buildings and observed weapons stored in UNRWA-marked bags and in areas designated as humanitarian zones.
“My captors tried to convince me to convert to Islam,” he said. “They told me it was a pity that I would die and go to hell as a Jew instead of going to paradise as a Muslim.”
White House confirms Gaza Board of Peace members including Turkish, Qatari representatives
The White House announced the members of the new Gaza Board of Peace (BoP) on Friday, which will be responsible for rebuilding the enclave and ensuring the disarmament of Hamas.
The announcement includes a list of members of the BoP, alongside the designation of the commander of the International Stabilization Force (ISF), and the Gaza Executive Board, which includes representatives from Turkey and Qatar.
The statement also detailed that Dr. Ali Sha’ath will be in charge of the technocratic National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), which will "oversee the restoration of core public services, the rebuilding of civil institutions, and the stabilization of daily life in Gaza, while laying the foundation for long-term, self-sustaining governance."
The BoP, with US President Donald Trump assuming the role of chairman, will be composed of seven executive founding members: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio; US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff; Jared Kushner; Sir Tony Blair; Marc Rowan; Ajay Banga; and Robert Gabriel.
The statement also confirmed that former UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov will have an executive role "on the ground" as the High Representative for Gaza and serve as a link between the BoP and the NCAG administration.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Do Jewish Organizations Have the Resources For This Battle?
Indeed that is the main lesson, and it has far-reaching implications. Within the progressive coalition, it seems the expectation is that each crop of candidates will be more vocally anti-Zionist than their predecessors.
Which is why the Jersey City case is so interesting. On the one hand, one is tempted to say that the stakes are low in Jersey City—it has a Jewish population of 6,000 compared to nearly a million in New York City. Nor does it set any sort of national cultural or media tone the way Gotham does.
But on the other hand, that is why it is worrying that the outgoing mayor feels the need to put up these guardrails. BDS’s primary purpose in the U.S. is to foment suspicion and exclusion of Jews. That the DSA and similar progressive organizers are trying to blanket the country’s city councils with anti-Zionist fanatics shows their level of dedication to the spread of anti-Semitism. Your local town’s decision to divest from Israel may have no tangible economic effect, but it isn’t intended to: The point is to spread the social and cultural effects of anti-Semitism.
This doesn’t really have much to do with Israel at all. Jews are the targets, and not just in major U.S. cities or in state governments but everywhere.
All of this has been clarifying. And it means American Jewish organizations must find the resources to join the fight on all fronts.
Stephan Daisley:
Is America still good for the Jews?
Just ten or twenty years ago, the U.S. was the most philosemitic nation on Earth with the exception of Israel.
The Constitution guaranteed religious pluralism and the culture was one in which Jews flourished in every conceivable profession and civic field.
Support for Israel was firmly bipartisan. By the dawn of the 21st century, antisemitism had been all but expelled from the mainstream.
A nation founded on liberalism and Protestant ethics is one primed to feel not just sympathy but solidarity with God's chosen people.
Jews found a home in America because it was their God who built the house. The Jews cannot be written out of America's story because their tradition is its co-author.
When Synagogues Burn
You cannot claim to care about antisemitic violence while elevating people who have celebrated those who preach it.
You cannot decry burning synagogues while honoring those who helped paint targets on them.
Because when public figures tell the world that Jewish institutions are “satanic”—or decline to challenge those who do—they are not engaging in provocative rhetoric. They are creating moral permission structures. They are telling unstable, angry, or radicalized people that Jews are evil—and that evil, in their minds, deserves to be destroyed.
That is how an idea becomes an accelerant.
Candace Owens did not light the fire in Jackson. Tamika Mallory did not. Louis Farrakhan did not. But they helped make it thinkable. They helped turn Jews from neighbors into metaphysical villains. And once that transformation occurs, a synagogue is no longer seen as a house of worship—it becomes, in the imagination of a radicalized mind, a legitimate target.
This is what antisemitism looks like in 2026. Not only swastikas and slurs, but influencer-driven demonology: Jews recast as cosmic enemies whose symbols, institutions, and very existence are portrayed as corrupt, satanic, and illegitimate.
So, the question for Mayor Mamdani is not whether he condemns arson after the fact. Almost anyone who is not steeped in antisemitism can do that. The real question is whether he is willing to confront the people who helped build the narrative that made it feel justified.
Because Jews do not need more empty – after the fact – statements of concern.
They need fewer people in positions of power who flirt with, excuse, or elevate those who traffic in the language that turns synagogues into kindling and Jews into targets.
From Ian:
Eugene Kontorovich:
Yes, Israel Can Apply Israeli Law to the West Bank
Israel’s sovereign rights over all of Judea and Samaria do not dictate the form of governance there. Indeed, since the Oslo process of the early ’90s, Israel has not governed the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, who are instead misruled by the Palestinian Authority. Israel neither taxes them nor conscripts them; it does not write their schoolbooks or make their welfare policies or clean their streets. Israel’s current interactions with the Palestinian population focus almost entirely on hard security issues. Given that all nations enjoy an inherent right to self-defense, this would be the case whether the Palestinian areas were technically an independent sovereign or not.
President Trump’s 2020 peace plan, recently reaffirmed in his 20-point plan for peace, contemplated Israel extending its civil law to roughly half of Judea and Samaria, where the Jewish population is concentrated, and leaving the other half for a potential Arab state. This helps explain his comments about “annexation of the West Bank.” However, while Trump does not support Israel applying its law to those areas under Palestinian Authority control, that is not inconsistent with the proposals being discussed in the Knesset.
The so-called annexation plans being discussed in Israel are thus not about the incorporation of foreign territory into Israel proper. Rather, they are about ending the anomalous military administration that has applied in this area since 1967. After the Six-Day War, Israel never fully applied its domestic laws to the territory because it always expected the Arab states to sue for peace, and it was always prepared to transfer to them at least some part of the territory. Until the late 1980s, many Israelis assumed that the party for such negotiations would be Jordan. With the Oslo process, Israel’s “peace partner” became the Palestine Liberation Organization. In both cases, there was no point in hurriedly applying Israeli law to territory that might not remain Israeli because of a negotiated peace settlement.
Israel’s system of military governance in Judea and Samaria was always intended to be temporary. In retaining that system through decades of negotiations with the Palestinians, all of which resulted in their rejection of internationally backed statehood offers, Israel seems to have both severely misjudged the preferences and intentions of its Arab neighbors while also injuring its own citizens, creating a new problem of its own making.
Today, roughly 700,000 Jewish Israelis live in Judea and Samaria—where they have every legal and historical right to live and buy property. Yet Israelis and Arabs alike continue to find themselves governed by an odd patchwork of military regulations that has deliberately never been normalized or transparent to anyone and, over time, has become increasingly unwieldy. Property law is based on obscure Ottoman statutes, permitting for infrastructure projects is difficult and burdensome, and environmental regulations don’t exist for either Jews or Arabs. Clearly, this ad hoc situation is being sustained by a combination of official Israeli delusion and sloth and by external actors whose goal is to make life in these areas as practically unpleasant as possible for everyone.
Five decades of Arab rejectionism interspersed with violent terrorist assaults has made it untenable to continue to hold the legal regulation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in limbo. And neither international law nor Western principles of democracy stand in the way of Israel finally applying its own civil law to its own citizens in those areas.
Seth Mandel:
The Promise and Peril of Phase 2 in Gaza
The decision to move to the second phase without a clear Hamas disarmament plan in place was not a mistake. As I argued last month, any extensive delay helps Hamas, which is gearing up for another round of fighting at some point. Also, the cease-fire deal pretty much locks any progress in place, since the IDF is in charge of security for any territory under reconstruction. Hamas can dig in, but it won’t advance.
The challenge that Hamas still presents, however, is significant. The scenario that Trump’s team expects to play out is the following: Life for Gazans improves exponentially in the half of the enclave stewarded by the Israelis and a supplemental international force, and pressure on Hamas increases while the humanitarian crisis abates.
But here’s another scenario: The moment shovels get put in the ground on the Israeli-controlled side, Hamas begins firing rockets and challenging the troops along the Yellow Line with skirmishes and attempted incursions. In this environment, the stabilization force never materializes and the technocrats wait for the skies to clear. With rebuilding frozen, Israel has no choice but to go into Hamas-controlled Gaza and disarm the terror group by force. But the renewed fighting takes a toll on the civilians left in Hamas’s half of the enclave, and scenes from the two years of war start replaying themselves.
Trump will obviously support the forced disarmament of Hamas even (or especially) if Israel is the one to do it. But will the Europeans fold? Will the stabilization force dissolve before it’s even on the ground?
There are only two reliable actors in this saga: the U.S. and Israel. Hamas is going to attempt to make it so that the U.S. and Israel are the only actors in the saga at all. As long as the U.S. and Israel are committed to victory, they’ll succeed. Because the enemy always gets a vote, and Hamas always votes for war.
John Ondrasik:
The "Free Palestine" Crowd Seems to Have Zero Interest in Freeing Iran
In recent days the tyrannical Iranian regime has conducted mass arrests and massacred thousands of protesters. Yet American college campuses, so recently the site of passionate encampments in support of the Palestinian people, are eerily quiet about what's happening in Iran. The congressional microcaucus known as the Squad are oddly mum about the suffering of women and children in Iran.
What's happening in Iran is a human rights nightmare. The UN Human Rights Council in recent years has been a merry-go-round of "genocide" accusations against Israel. Yet it has issued zero resolutions and held no inquiries about Iran. There is no global demand for humanitarian aid for the Iranian protesters, or even a ceasefire, from the people and institutions who don't hesitate to weigh in on Israel and Gaza.
Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, an attorney with the Institute for Justice in Washington who spent her childhood in Iran, says the millions risking their lives in Iran don't fit neatly into "the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white."
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
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