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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Mandel: J Street Vindicates Its Critics Once Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Mandel: The Threat of Jean-Luc Melenchon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

The UN is being used as a weapon against the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khaled Abu Toameh: What Happens When Jihadists Smell Weakness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel’s fairweather friends are fuelling anti-Semitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amsterdam Holocaust Museum cancels antisemitism conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Victory to Drift By Abe Greenwald

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Cities Without Jews

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

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

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

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

Canada’s loss, our gain.

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

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

The Joyless Art of Jew-Hatred By Abe Greenwald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Michael Doran: This Is How the Iran War Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran Embraces a Forever War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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06/01 Links Pt2: The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed; Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul; How Palestinianism wages war on Zionism and Jewish history

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed

It’s not that I don’t understand what is happening. Having watched a similar process take place within the GOP, the entire political world knows exactly what it’s seeing: The base sees every character flaw in a candidate as a feature not a bug; defeating the other party becomes a matter of life and death and therefore justifies any behavior; the party’s institutions get in line.

All of it is inexcusable but uncomplicated to decode.

And so progressives have made Platner the hero of the hour, a living idol and a human litmus test. Je suis Platner, they seem desperate to cry out. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ floor leader in the upper chamber, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jointly announced they’ll ensure Platner has all necessary resources to bring his Totenkopf to the halls of the Senate. And professional ex-Republicans fall all over themselves to prove their loyalty to their new party by saturating the punditry with anti-anti-Platnerism whose irony is apparently lost on them.

But the truly wild part of all of this is that rejecting Platner was supposed to be the absolute least that was expected of them. Platner wasn’t supposed to be the “country over party” test because it was too easy to mean anything. You weren’t supposed to deserve credit for rejecting Nazi iconography.

This weekend’s latest additions to Platner’s long list of scandals is that he was sexting up to a dozen women while married and had an active account on a singles’ site with a reported reputation for lax age-limit gatekeeping.

To add this to what we already know—the Nazi tattoo, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the racist postings, the cheering of the killing of U.S. soldiers, the fascination with violence, and all of the dishonesty about it—is to realize just how insane the conversation has become. Ideally, a person who criticizes Platner would prove nothing except that they are still human. Yet somehow we got to a point at which Platner’s denunciators truly do deserve praise because Democrats seek the political destruction of these dissenters. When Rep. Jake Auchincloss had the temerity to say the Nazi stuff was disqualifying, it was Auchincloss who was put on the defensive and made to explain himself.

Democrats have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Republican abuse of power, but it turns out they are far more afraid of what the progressive left is capable of once in power. That, at least, is the clear message they are broadcasting.

And so we are left begging for crumbs of decency. Yes, we say, it is brave to denounce Platner. And it is—because his party has made it so.

Nothing Is Disqualifying By Abe Greenwald

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If a Democrat has a shot at winning, he can do no wrong. Adam Hamawy volunteered with an al-Qaeda front group in Bosnia and was an associate of “the Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Today, Hamawy is in the lead for a New Jersey congressional seat and has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the newest neo-Squadnik, Ro Khanna.

Abdul El-Sayed is a strong contender in a Michigan Democratic primary battle despite his voicing sympathy for the mourners of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragging about smashing a bottle in a liquor store, struggling with Israel’s right to exist, and various disconcerting escapades.

Of course, the exemplar here is Zohran Mamdani. In his successful run for mayor of New York City, he showed that support for terrorist causes, involvement in anti-American activism, and staunch socialist zeal were more than acceptable in Democratic politics.

Platner represents something different from all these. His deficiencies aren’t foremost ideological or political. They’re deeply intrinsic to his character. He’s a messy amalgam of glowing red flags that, in everyday life, would signal, well, human garbage.

Like Nick Fuentes, Platner is at once a Nazi admirer and Communist sympathizer. He’s on record mocking a wounded U.S. soldier as a “Dumb motherf-----” who “didn't deserve to live.” Platner has said that women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f***ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” And he was most recently exposed for sexting with women on a hook-up app while married to his current wife.

With a guy like this, it’s a safe bet that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

It wasn’t long ago that a large majority of Democrats would simply recognize Platner as unfit to serve in the janitorial staff of the U.S. Senate, let alone as a senator.

Brendan O'Neill: Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul

That flag is so omnipresent that it feels like Ireland has been colonised again – not by the Brits this time but by that Euro-fervour of anti-Zionism. All of the most Guardian-approved, Shoreditch-thrilling Irish artists – Sally Rooney, Kneecap, the Mary Wallopers – bow obsequiously at the altar of Israelophobia.

It stinks up the political class, too. Indeed, just last week, Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, returned from one of those thwarted flotilla jollies to Gaza that the hyper-smug love to engage in. She said Israel behaves like a ‘Nazi state’. She described her brief detention in Israel as being akin to a ‘concentration camp’. She said she and her fellow seafaring narcissists ‘got a feeling of what the Jews felt like during the Second World War’. Comparing the two-day detainment of posh, well-fed mugs with the incarceration and burning to death of millions of Jews? There’s repugnant, then there’s that. Stay classy, Israel-haters.

Defamations against Israel fall from the mouth of every influencer here. Even a sports presenter, following the game with Qatar, could casually say on air that Israel is waging a ‘genocidal campaign’ in Gaza. Nothing to say about Qatar? The team we just played? Which funded the army of anti-Semites that killed more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis? Of course not. Israel is the all-consuming devil that stalks the fever dreams of Ireland’s pious. It is a substitute Satan in a post-Catholic land. You can’t even watch the footie here without being subjected to self-righteous homilies about the uniquely wicked nature of this far-off nation. It is relentless. It is exhausting.

And get this – the Irish men’s cricket team is due to play Afghanistan in Belfast in August. Do the sanctimonious of Dublin 4 long to stop that game too, in protest against the Afghan government’s violent gutting of women’s rights, its theft from women not only of the right to play sport but also of the right to show their faces in public, speak in public and attend schools and universities? Nope. There have been a few expressions of ‘moral discomfort’ about hosting the Afghanis but nothing like the orgy of moral inebriation that greeted the news that the Irish football team would play Israel. As I say, moral circuit boards fried, all over this isle.

Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul. The Irish establishment’s frothing animus for the Jewish state is an embarrassment to us Irish who refuse to convert to the cult of Israel-hate. It is disproportionate, hysterical, and so obviously driven by bigotry, meaning these people will go mental over a sports fixture against the Jewish nation but say nada about a sports fixture against an Islamist nation ruled by violent men who treat women like cattle. Let Ireland be a lesson – when you drink too heartily from the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, you lose your reason and decency. You become so consumed by hatred for a tiny foreign state that you let your own state go to moral rack and ruin.

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06/01 Links Pt1: Gazology: How Gaza Became The West's Moral Obsession; IDF doctor killed, 7 hurt by Hezbollah drone attack; Israel commemorates victims of 1941 Baghdad Farhud pogrom

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Iran Is Really Asking of Trump

So Trump’s strategy is to keep talking and use the embargo as leverage to get a better deal. Iran’s strategy isn’t a secret either. It’s to allow Trump to think he’s close to a deal in order to for him to force Israel to stop beating up Iranian forces in Lebanon.

Each side thinks it’s playing the other, while the soldiers still dying are mostly Israelis.

Of course, the antiwar crowd has an answer at the ready: Israel can stop its pursuit of Hezbollah in Lebanon! Except, the reason Israel is in Lebanon is because Israel not being in Lebanon doesn’t prevent Israelis from being killed by Hezbollah.

On a simpler level, here’s what just happened: Iran announced that a specific part of the war—namely, Hezbollah in Lebanon—was of utmost importance to it. In response, Trump conceded that part of the war as a down payment on renewed negotiations, without getting anything in return.

Why would Iran think it’s doing anything other than winning at the moment?

There is another aspect to this refreshing bit of honesty from the Iranians. They have admitted that Hezbollah is Iran and Iran is Hezbollah. Of course, we knew this. But it’s better to have Iran openly admit it in a way that makes it impossible for its numerous American supporters to pretend otherwise.

Thus, we have three powers in Lebanon: Israel, Lebanon, and Iran. Only two of those are arguing for a permanent right to control the country: Lebanon and Iran. So which of those two has a stronger case to control Lebanon?

It’s not a trick question. Iran is confirming, yet again, that the Western narrative of this conflict is the correct one. Iran is an occupying power in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the deaths in Lebanon are indeed Iran’s responsibility.

It is also confirming something else. Any belief that Iran can be merely contained while leaving its threats intact is shortsighted in the extreme. The entire region was blown open by October 7, which was the work of one of Iran’s militias, Hamas. The fact that Iran is asking to preserve the ability to have its proxies repeat the conflagration is proof that the choice before Trump is war now, in which the U.S. has a distinct advantage, or war later, when the enemy has rearmed. The president should choose wisely.

JPost Editorial: Forcing the IDF to leave Lebanon is a betrayal of Israel's citizens

Trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet
Accepting another extension under these conditions would mean trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet, which is not truly quiet at all.

The collapse of the ceasefire extension was inevitable. Israel cannot maintain a truce with an organization whose purpose remains its destruction. The IDF’s recent maneuvers, including the capture of strategic high ground such as Beaufort Castle, reflect a clear military need to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in a lasting way.

Those hard-won gains must not be bargained away for another fragile agreement that Hezbollah will violate as soon as it suits its interests.

The airstrikes in Dahiyeh must be relentless and unrestricted. That is where decisions are made, where precision weapons are stored, and where Hezbollah’s Iranian-backed leadership feels most secure.

Israel does not need an extension of a failed policy. It needs the restoration of real deterrence. That deterrence will not come through gradual de-escalation, American-brokered road maps, or futile negotiations with Iran. It can only come through the systematic destruction of Hezbollah’s will and capacity to fight.

The time for begging for permission to defend Israel is over. The government must resist international pressure to preserve the ghost of a ceasefire and give the IDF the mandate to finish the job. Anything less would be a betrayal of the citizens still huddled in shelters, waiting for a government that values their lives more than its standing in Washington.

The ceasefire is dead. Israel should stop pretending otherwise before more Israelis pay the price for this diplomatic fiction.

France bans Israel from defense exhibition, limits Israeli companies to showing defensive weapons

The French government barred Israel's official participation in the June EUROSATORY defense exhibition, according to a Monday statement by the Israeli Defense Ministry, with its French counterpart saying that Israel was limited to defensive platforms.

The Israeli government and the ministry will be unable to participate in the exhibition or establish a national pavilion. Israeli defense firms would be prevented from displaying offensive weapon systems.

The French Defense Ministry said that exhibits would be limited to air defense and anti-missile defense equipment, and that Israeli exhibitors would be able to display their wares if they complied with that framework.

"The French decision encompasses: a ban on government representatives attending the exhibition; a ban on opening an Israeli national pavilion; and a restriction limiting Israeli defense industries to displaying air defense products only, with offensive systems explicitly excluded," said a statement by the Israel Ministry of Defense.

"This policy is applied selectively and discriminatorily relative to other participating nations - in direct violation of the established norms governing international defense exhibition," it added.

Participating companies confirm their attendance months in advance and despite the ban on the Israeli government and offensive weapons, many Israeli companies are expected to have their own smaller private desks to present their systems. Defense & Tech by The Jerusalem Post understands that among the Israeli companies still planning to attend with their original lineups including Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Dozens of Israeli companies acquired by the American defense conglomerate Ondas will also participate at the expo.

According to the French ministry, EuroSatory organizers have been informed of the decision and are expected to enforce the restrictions.

The Israeli Defense Ministry decried the restrictions at one of the world’s largest defense industry exhibitions as a selectively applied and discriminatory policy, “in direct violation of the established norms governing international defense exhibition,' said the ministry.”

"This is a disgraceful decision, one that reeks of political and commercial calculation, and regrettably, it comes as no surprise. It fits a deeply troubling pattern in French conduct in recent years - a pattern that has consistently placed France on the wrong side of history,” said the ministry. “France, which prides itself on the values of liberty and democracy, is acting in direct contradiction to the principles it claims to uphold. It is hiding behind a pretense of political justification to exclude Israeli offensive defense systems from an international forum - systems that have proven far superior to their French counterparts, and that have demonstrated exceptional precision and effectiveness against terrorist organizations and regimes threatening not only Israel, but regional and global stability at large.”

Paris' desire to undermine Jerusalem as a competitor
Eurosatory, one of the world’s largest defense exhibitions, takes place on the outskirts of Paris every two years.

During the last Eurosatory in 2024, France prevented the attendance of dozens of Israeli defense companies. At the time, the French Defense Ministry said that “the conditions are no longer right to host Israeli companies at the Paris show, given that the French president is calling for the cessation of IDF operations in Rafah.” The move was overturned by the Paris Commercial Court, which found that the order would lead to discrimination, but many Israeli companies decided not to attend the show.

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05/31 Links: Rachel's Life in Pieces; Einat Wilf: What the Arab World Knew All Along & How Israel Lost the Information War; Netanyahu hails capture of Lebanon’s Beaufort Castle

From Ian:

Rachel's Life in Pieces

REVIEW: 'When We See You Again' by Rachel Goldberg-Polin
"Once upon a time, I was meandering down the road of life with my husband, Jon. It was a regular and beige life, and it worked. It was a warm beige. We felt, and were, blessed and lucky. Normal.

"Suddenly, one day, while walking along our way, a metaphorical 18-wheeler semitruck hit us from behind and broke every bone in our bodies. All 412 of our combined bones were fractured, our spirits were mangled, and our hearts were stolen. Our life was stolen.

"That day was October 7th, 2023."

So begins the soul-searing memoir by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the Chicago-born American-Israeli whose globe-trotting efforts to free her son Hersh from Hamas captivity ended when he was murdered in a tunnel in Gaza 330 days after his kidnapping.

When We See You Again is a book no parent should ever have to write but every American should read. That every Israeli will read it I take as given, considering the prominence of Hersh in the country's national consciousness and the fact that posters pleading for his release still cling stubbornly to street signs across the world's only Jewish state.

The book is an attempt by a bereaved mother, beloved by the millions of people across the globe who read and watched her and her husband's efforts on behalf of their only son, to capture Hersh's personality beyond the headlines and psychologically work through her unimaginable grief. "Since my heart is shattered into tiny pieces," she writes, "it is easier to share than when it was one mighty, solid, and strong heart. So please take a shard. Be careful, they are sharp." Its brilliance lies in the author's weaving of unending loss and boundless frustration alongside attempts to find measures of comfort through Jewish teachings (by profession, she is an educator). Additionally wise is her avoidance of distracting the reader with partisan politics. No political figure in America or Israel is mentioned by name and she does not take a side on the debate that roiled the global Jewish community as to whether imprisoned terrorists should be freed in exchange for civilian hostages.

The reader is reminded of Hamas's brutality, often absent from daily headlines about Middle East negotiations and by those who would seek a Palestinian state. Describing how Israeli authorities found the bodies of Hersh and his fellow murdered captives, she unsparingly and clinically notes, "They were all skeletal, filthy (the coroner estimated they had not bathed in months), bearing scars of torture, and riddled with close-range bullet wounds. Hersh had six. And his hair was covered in gunpowder." She details how Chaim Peri, an 80-year-old peace activist, was kidnapped and murdered after 100 days of captivity. While Goldberg-Polin doesn't dwell on every horrific detail, it's worth reminding readers that on the 7th, Hamas also killed Holocaust survivors, burned Jews alive in their homes, sexually abused both living and dead victims, and livestreamed the murder of grandmothers on Facebook. Forty-six Americans had their lives snuffed out that day.

Jake Wallis Simons: The anti-Zionism mob is showing its true insidious colours

On the surface, the anti-Zionist cover story is quite convincing. They simply long for the evil state of Israel to be replaced by a single, democratic country with equal rights for all. The Zionist project was a historic mistake and should be humanely dismantled. Pretty reasonable, no?

Not so fast. For one thing, if you’re going to start dismantling every country with a history of injustice, best of luck to America, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Pakistan and India, all the Latin American states founded through Spanish and Portuguese conquest, all the European states built through centuries of feudal warfare and empire, and much of Africa and the Middle East.

Secondly, any practical thoughts on that single state for Jews and Palestinian Arabs? Here’s a clue: think October 7 and multiply it. So what’s the solution? Send the Jews back to the countries from which they most recently fled, like Poland, Russia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Libya? What about the racists in those countries who persist in their demands that the Jews go “back to Israel”?

They must know all this, just as they must know that “Death to the IDF” would mean a second Holocaust. Regardless, celebrities like Gary Lineker and Juliet Stevenson craft the anti-Israel narrative, while progressive Jews like Miriam Margolyes and Zack Polanski provide the alibi. “Respect” is awarded. Then the shock troops go in.

Here’s another flavour of the idiocy of the scene. Molly Crabapple, an anti-Zionist writer, recently published a book about Bundism. This was an Eastern European Jewish socialist movement of the 20th century which opposed the Zionist dream of returning to the land of Israel. Instead, Bundism promoted “doikayt”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”, insisting that Jews should fight for dignity where they already lived. According to The Economist, this could inspire modern Jews who “want to celebrate their heritage without tying themselves to Israel”.

Thanks for that. Here’s the problem: the Bundists were slaughtered in the Holocaust. This, then, is a vignette with a warning. To prevent the rhyming of history, we need immunity to spin. Insidious ideas must be given their true names, regardless of the nomenclature shrilly demanded by their proponents.

British Museum evacuated after ‘suspicious device’ found days after Jewish event postponed

The British Museum was evacuated on Saturday after staff discovered a suspicious device in a visitor toilet and received what it described as “malicious communications”, just days after the institution faced criticism for postponing a Jewish Culture Month lecture on ancient Israel over security concerns.

Police were called to the museum at around 2.50pm and between 12,000 and 16,000 visitors were evacuated as a precaution.

The Metropolitan Police later confirmed that the package was found to be non-suspicious and that there was no ongoing threat. The museum reopened shortly before 4pm.

In a statement, the museum said: “Earlier today, the British Museum was evacuated as a precaution after a suspicious device was discovered in a visitor toilet. At the same time, the museum received malicious communications, which were treated seriously and reported to the relevant authorities.

“As this remains a police matter, we will not be providing further comment on the nature of the communications received.”

The incident comes less than a week after the museum postponed a lecture on the kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah, which had been scheduled as part of Jewish Culture Month.

The lecture, due to be delivered by Paul Collins, Keeper of the Department of the Middle East, was postponed after concerns that activists planned to disrupt the event. Museum officials said intelligence suggested a significant proportion of those registered to attend intended to prevent the lecture from proceeding.

The decision sparked widespread criticism, with politicians, historians and public figures accusing the museum of capitulating to threats of disruption.

David Collier: Antisemitism and Ignorance on Display at Cambridge Market Square

Last week someone showed me a photograph of a pro-Palestine stall in Cambridge Market Square. What I saw was not angry students or hardened activists, but four elderly women – probably in their seventies – who had chosen to spend their day urging strangers to boycott Israel.

The image stayed with me – and I decided that I wanted a closer look at what was actually taking place. So yesterday I went up to Cambridge to listen to what they were saying. Selling a Fictional Palestine

When I arrived, the stall was slightly larger than the one I had seen in the photograph, with perhaps six people gathered around it. The women from the original image were there, now accompanied by a couple of younger men. For a while I simply stood nearby, looked through the maps and leaflets laid out on the table, and listened to the conversations taking place with members of the public who had stopped to engage.

At one point, one of the Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists was speaking to three young people, probably in their early twenties. The discussion turned to the word “Palestine” – and it quickly became clear that none of those involved had any real grounding in the history they were attempting to discuss.

For much of the last two millennia, “Palestine” was primarily a geographic term used by successive imperial and colonial powers in reference to the Holy Land. It was not part of the traditional identity of the local Arab population. Yet the subject has become so politically charged that many pro-Palestinian campaigners now tie themselves in ahistorical knots trying to pretend otherwise.

Which was exactly what I encountered.

After the group moved on, and noticing my interest in the stall, one of the women approached me. I deliberately chose not to challenge her or present myself as informed. I wanted to test the depth of her knowledge, so rather than appearing as an adversary, I presented myself as someone open to being educated.

We spoke for around twenty minutes, and almost everything she told me was either misleading, historically confused, or simply false.

Here are a few examples:
Invading armies
I was told that while the Arab armies did invade in 1948, they only entered the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state and did not enter the Jewish enclave. This is simply false. Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese armies all entered areas allocated to the Jewish state. Jordanian forces also captured the Jewish areas within the international zone around Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed them of their Jewish population. At one stage, the Egyptian army was just twenty miles from Tel Aviv.

The woman was not merely mistaken. She was dramatically rewriting the nature, ambition and scope of the invasion.

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05/30 Links: Mamdani just offered NY's Jews a 234-year-old bargain; Ireland Can't Stop Thinking About Israel; Hezbollah targets Israeli home front with series of rocket, drone attacks

From Ian:

Hen Mazzig: Giant

I went into Giant braced for a hit job, and I was wrong about that. Mark Rosenblatt does not put Roald Dahl in the dock and read out the charges against him. He gives him wit, a beautiful house in the country, a fiancée who adores him, and a new children’s book about to ship... And then he lets Dahl talk. John Lithgow plays him as charming, the kind of man you would want at your table. By the end you understand that the charm and prestige were doing the work the whole time. It was how the cruelty traveled.

Liccy, his fiancée, catches the contradiction before anyone else in the room. You keep telling me the Jews in Israel are violent monsters, she says, and yet you tell me the Jews here are weak. She cannot make the two fit together. She is not meant to. The Jew who is too powerful and the Jew who is too cowardly are the same invented Jew, convicted in both directions at once. The charges against him have never needed to agree with one another.

Then there is Tom, Dahl’s British publisher, who is Jewish and wants no part of any of it. “I’m British!” he proclaims. This has nothing to do with me. Yes, I was rolling my eyes too. Later he exclaimed that when his people do something good he feels a flicker of pride, or maybe not pride, maybe just relief at not having to be ashamed for once. When they do something bad, he is ashamed. It is the diaspora bargain, the hope that enough distance from Israel will buy you a pass. It does not. Dahl turns on him anyway and calls him a house Jew. A house Jew? The man who worked hardest to be left out of it gets the ugliest name in the room.

Dahl saves a stranger argument for Jessie Stone, the executive his American publisher sent to manage him. His real quarrel, he tells her, is with Ashkenazi Jews like her. Europeans, with no claim to the Middle East, unlike the “Arab Jews and the Ethiopian Jews.” The flattery is a weapon. It makes some Jews native so the rest can be called foreign. I hear the identical argument now, usually from people who have never read a line of Dahl. The Israeli becomes the white colonizer and the Mizrahi the real thing, and none of it is meant to honor anyone. It is a way to decide which Jews are allowed to belong where they already live. Dahl got there in 1983. The sorting is a pose, and it does not survive the afternoon. By the end he stops pretending any of them are the real ones. He hates all of us.

The play is funniest right before it is at its worst. Stone presses Dahl on Israel fighting a defensive war and asks what Britain would do if its own cities were bombed. We would never be as barbaric as you are to the Palestinians, he says. She gives him two words back. Dresden. Nagasaki.

Later, cornered, he turns to his cook and asks whether she would ever visit Israel, whether she would boycott an Israeli avocado. Does the avocado know that it’s Israeli, she asks, and the house laughed. The laugh matters. The whole logic of the boycott comes apart the moment a real piece of fruit is in your hand.

What lifts Giant above a period piece is that Dahl wrote the ending himself, in life, and Rosenblatt understood that.

No, ambassador: Israel's anger with France is not 'staged,' it is earned

The ambassador defends France’s stance on Lebanon, but he ignores the rhetoric that accompanied it. To hear Macron accuse Israel of “spreading barbarism in the region” as it fought to stop Hezbollah’s relentless rocket fire was a breaking point. It felt less like a strategic critique and more like a defense of France’s historical raison d’être in Lebanon at the expense of Israeli lives. To use the word “barbarism” against the victims of October 7 while they fight an Iranian proxy is an inversion of reality that no “friend” should utter.

Then came the diplomatic sucker punch: the announcement of an upcoming, unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state. By moving toward recognition then, without a negotiated settlement or the release of our brothers and sisters still rotting in Hamas tunnels, France effectively rewarded the October 7 massacre. This move did not advance peace; it actively derailed the delicate negotiations to free our hostages by signaling to Hamas that it need only wait for the West to hand it a victory.

To add insult to injury, France then moved to boycott Israeli defense companies at major exhibitions. How can a nation claim to support our “right to self-defense” while simultaneously banning the very tools we need to exercise that right? A diplomatic double standard

Ambassador Journès, you claim there is a “double standard” being applied to France. On the contrary, we are simply applying the same standard to you that you apply to us. We see the consistency with which France treats Israeli security as a secondary concern to its own Mediterranean grandstanding.

I am not a fan of the current Israeli government. I protest its policies and worry for our democracy. But being a critic of my government does not make me suicidal for my country. Loving France does not mean I must accept its gaslighting.

We don’t need “smooth conversations,” Mr. Ambassador. We need an ally that doesn’t treat our survival as a bargaining chip for its own regional relevance.

Our anger isn’t “staged.” It is the natural response of a people that expected more from the patrie of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Author Theo Baker says he feels more Jewish as a result of antisemitism at Stanford

Theo Baker describes himself as “an accidental journalist.” But at just 21, his writing has already sent shockwaves through the academic world.

As a freshman at Stanford University in 2022, he exposed then-President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s decades-long pattern of manipulated data and research in scientific papers he co-authored or supervised, ultimately leading to his resignation. Baker, the son of New York Times reporter Peter Baker and New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser, became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award for his reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

During his sophomore year, Baker published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic called “The War at Stanford,” exploring campus culture following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel. He called college “a factory of unreason” and argued that anti-Israel demonstrations and rhetoric had created a pervasive climate of fear, accusing Stanford of failing to adequately condemn the attacks or protect Jewish students, all while training the next generation of tech and industry leaders.

Baker reflects on his turbulent college years in his new memoir and exposé, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, published earlier this month. The book lays bare an elite university corrupted by Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power, all while Stanford saw a historic rise of antisemitism.

Whether it was navigating the release of ChatGPT or grappling with the impact of the Oct. 7 attacks, Baker said every year of his experience at the elite Palo Alto, Calif., university presented a unique challenge. Weeks away from graduation, Baker spoke with Jewish Insider about his past four years on campus, the role that technology plays in rising antisemitism — and what the future might hold for universities.

Jewish Insider: You’ve described yourself as coming from a home with “just a tiny bit of cultural Judaism.” How has covering antisemitism changed your Jewish identity? What about your relationship with Israel?

Theo Baker: In fall 2022, I went home for Thanksgiving and said, “There’s so much antisemitism at Stanford.” I was shocked by that. It’s not something I really countered growing up. As soon as I arrived at Stanford — even in the first week — someone asked me, “why are all Jews so rich?”

By the end of that year — and this is before Oct. 7 —- someone in my dorm, a kid who was Jewish, talked about being Jewish for the first time and someone put a bunch of swastikas and an image of Hitler on his door later that day.

So Jewishness is an identity and not one I would have placed much investment in prior to coming to college. It was something that I knew about myself but was not particularly salient. Certainly, I, like many college students in the last few years, have been made to feel more Jewish just by the circumstances around us. It was certainly interesting to be here on campus as a reporter when the biggest story happening was something that also intersected with my own background.

I have not taken trips to Israel [in college] but I lived in Israel briefly when my dad was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times. I’ve tried to center my reporting on the things I have expertise on. Stanford is 7,000 miles away from Israel. It’s so fascinating that it became such an important issue for people, and then disappeared seemingly so quickly from the public conversation.

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05/29 Links Pt2: The Joy of Hating Jews; The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing; Mamdani endorses former Columbia encampment organizer for Congress

From Ian:

The Joy of Hating Jews

Nazi Germany understood this with terrifying sophistication. Some of the most disturbing footage from the period is disturbing precisely because people appear cheerful. Crowds smiled during boycotts of Jewish stores and later acts of public humiliation and degradation. Book burnings resembled university festivals. Torchlit parades became raucous public celebrations. Looting, gathering, and watching flames together transformed hatred into public theater in which ordinary people could participate.

Today’s digital culture has monetized these pleasures. Online platforms are engineered to maximize engagement by maximizing emotional reward. Antisemitism is extraordinarily well suited to such systems. Platforms amplify the thrill of forbidden knowledge, insider language, memes, and collective outrage while making them instantly accessible and endlessly repeatable. The digital dogpile—coordinated mass attack on a single Jewish target—is the mob made digital. Like the analogue mobs that preceded them, these too are often gleeful and public. But unlike earlier forms, participation no longer requires gathering in the street or much physical effort at all. The mob no longer needs to gather, it simply needs to log on.

Flooding Jewish journalists’ social media feeds with Holocaust jokes and “oven” memes; defacing synagogues, menorahs, or Jewish community centers with swastikas—often timed to holidays; filming antisemitic taunts of visibly Jewish people and posting them online for laughs; turning classic antisemitic tropes into viral “ironic” content or remix videos—none of these are coherent responses to a supposedly sophisticated international cabal controlling the world’s economy, politics, media, migration, and satellites. They are rituals of humiliation. The point is not resistance. The point is pleasure.

Revelation, belonging, and moral framing explain much of antisemitism’s appeal and durability. They are pleasures that can disguise themselves as insight, solidarity, and justice. Each has a cover story. Together, they remove the ordinary societal restraints on cruelty. Once hatred feels righteous and collective, Jewish suffering itself becomes the pleasure. The sadism—pleasure in Jewish pain, fear, and humiliation for its own sake—has no disguise. The suffering itself is the reward.

One of the most difficult realities confronting Jews about antisemitism is that their outrage is part of the reward structure. It is part of the fun.

Antisemitism is rarely content merely to express itself. It seeks reaction. The shock, anger, fear, and public anguish it provokes are psychologically and socially rewarding to the antisemite. It heightens the drama. This helps explain why even wildly implausible accusations persist despite their absurdity. The accusations are not simply designed to persuade—they are meant to scandalize, provoke, and energize. Their very absurdity is part of the thrill. Jews have been accused of using Christian children’s blood to make matzo, of controlling the weather, of harvesting organs from Palestinian children, of training and deploying dogs as instruments of sexual assault, of operating secret space lasers. The accusations need not be coherent. They need only be energetic. The more absurd the allegation, the more satisfying the reaction it provokes.

This creates a peculiar bind. Antisemitism cannot be ignored. History punishes indifference again and again. But public Jewish distress feeds the very reward system sustaining it. Condemnation does not deter, it deliver the pleasure the antisemite wants.

If Jews protest loudly, it will be cast as Jews having something to hide. If Jewish organizations demand collective condemnation, it will be cast as Jews having the power to suppress criticism. If Jews stay silent, it will be cast as indifference, arrogance, or worse—tacit agreement. Confront the accusation publicly and Jews feed the spectacle. Ignore it and normalization spreads. Explain it carefully and with nuance and lose ground faster. Complexity will always be outrun by emotional simplicity and the vocabulary of moral crusade. In short, Jews become unwilling performers in someone else’s theater. The antisemite wins either way.

This is part of the exhaustion Jewish communities experience in the wake of antisemitic waves that followed Oct. 7 and have not abated. It is not only fear. It is the demoralizing recognition that every available response is both necessary and compromised.

Antisemitism is not a burden its adherents bear—it is a pleasure they seek. Antisemitic narratives are not the cause of antisemitism—they are its cover stories. Spectacle is not a byproduct of antisemitism—it is often the product. Sadism is not a side effect—it is what revelation, belonging, and moral righteousness make possible. Jewish outrage is not a deterrent—it is a reward. And all of this is because, while the antisemite often claims to be outraged by Jews, history shows he is—far more often than not—thrilled by them.

Seth Mandel: The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing

The story of Taryn Thomas’s recovery from the intellectual isolation of pro-Palestinian activism provides a handy guide for anyone interested. Her quotes in her Telegraph profile are perfect as a CliffsNotes-style outline of the anti-Zionist movement in the West:

“People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.” This is Thomas reflecting on her social circle at Stanford after the massacres of October 7 but before Israel’s ground incursion in response. She didn’t know much about the conflict, but those around her had talking points ready to go to defend Hamas and indict Israel as soon as the attack happened. This is key to anti-Zionist activism: It isn’t grassroots or organic; it is pre-packaged and distributed to an army of propagandists.

“I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free.” Thomas, who is black, was introduced to the pro-Palestinian cause at Black Lives Matter events. This is classic anti-Zionist media strategy: Co-opt someone else’s oppression and tell them that they are the victim of the Jews. Immediately making it about someone other than the Palestinians also frees one from the burden of the Palestinian share of blame for the state of the conflict.

“It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide. The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.” Once inside the activist wing of the mission, one quickly finds that the lazy river flows only in one direction. If you float along, you drift into increasingly more extreme territory; it is staying in one place or exploring moderate positions that require effort.

Seth Mandel: Heed This Rabbi’s Words

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, gave a speech yesterday at a Reform Judaism conference that I predict will be studied, remembered, and referenced for the foreseeable future by his fellow rabbis.

The address should be watched, because Hirsch knows how to deliver a speech. And because often when there’s something you really need to hear, you need to literally hear it. The speech was a rousing call for Reform Judaism to wear its Zionism on its sleeve, to proudly embrace Jewish particularism, and to hold firmer than ever to its belief in Jewish peoplehood.

Because it is no surprise that I support Hirsch’s unapologetic love of Zion, I will comment on one specific aspect of the speech that I believe made it so profound. In organized American Jewry, just as in politics, an idea has taken hold: Because young people are wishy-washy on Zionism and Israel, institutions must either adapt to welcome their ideas or watch their membership crumble.

I won’t mince words: This is weaselly behavior. Which is why I’m not shocked to see it in politics, even as I find the self-debasement cringeworthy. But I have no patience at all for it in Judaism for one reason: Our clergy are our teachers.

Teaching, leadership, education—these are what saved Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing exile. We argue endlessly about what our rabbis say and do and mean, but it is largely thanks to this system that we have something to argue about at all.

So if young people are straying from Jewish peoplehood, is it our responsibility to join them? Or to teach them?

One of the repeated explanations one hears from liberal Jews is that so many young people have never known a not-right-wing Israeli government. In political circles, this can make Israel advocacy difficult for Democratic officials.

Hirsch also shares this sentiment. He has many disagreements with the current Israeli government, and he does not shy from saying so. But he does not use this as an excuse:

“Given the growing hostility to Israel, especially in our circles, liberal and progressive spaces, it is not enough for us to proclaim our Zionist bona fides every now and again, often expressed defensively, and with so many qualifications, stipulations, and modifications that our enthusiasm for Zionism is buried under an avalanche of provisos. It is not enough to issue occasional press releases, or tweets, that we are a Zionist movement. We are the leaders. We must lead.”

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