07/26 Links: Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’; Ruth Was Right; Karim Khan is gone. The ICC’s antisemitism remains; Ex-Dem NY gov compares Mamdani to famed segregationist

From Ian:

Adam Louis-Klein: Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’

False accusations of genocide are nothing new. In 1993 Hutu intellectuals at the National University of Rwanda accused the Tutsi-associated Rwandan Patriotic Front of genocide. They circulated inflated casualty figures in an open letter to Pope John Paul II and others. The RPF did commit war crimes, but these accusations were propaganda. A year later, the Hutu regime carried out a genocide of the Tutsis.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was an “anticolonial” genocide. Just as the Oct. 7, 2023, attack was hailed by many anti-Zionists as an uprising against Western imperialism, the Rwandan genocide used accusations of genocide to legitimize its own execution.

I am an anthropologist studying indigeneity, postcolonialism and ethnic violence. On Oct. 7, I had been off the grid for months, pursuing field research in the Amazon. When I logged on to my computer on Oct. 9, I realized to what degree these vocabularies had become a weapon against Israel and the Jewish people.

The genocide accusation against Israel has traveled far and wide since Oct. 7, but its intellectual sources have rarely been scrutinized. Every major iteration of the accusation, I learned, flows from an academic framework that presents the accusation of genocide in Gaza as a consequence of Israel being a “settler colonial” state founded by Europeans who don’t belong in the Middle East. The network of academics behind this framing—whose ideas inform nonprofit organizations like Amnesty International and B’Tselem—is especially conspicuous in the Journal of Genocide Research.

That publication has been a proponent for changing, extending or rejecting the legal definition of genocide enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, formulated by Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. A. Dirk Moses, the journal’s senior editor since 2011, argues it is useless to distinguish intentional killing of civilians from collateral damage caused by strikes against terrorists. Colonial states are founded on dispossession, he argues—and when indigenous peoples “resist,” they are simply destroyed in the name of security.

Amnesty International turns Mr. Moses’ erasure of moral distinctions into a novel combination: Israel harbors “dual intent,” a neologism reading Israel as engaged in lawful warfare and genocide at once. For a permanently illegitimate colonial state, even legal self-defense spells genocide.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian at Brown University, is the highest-profile scholar to accuse Israel of genocide. He claims the support of a cast of characters ranging from Raz Segal, who less than a week after Oct. 7 described Israel’s entire history as an ongoing genocide, to Amos Goldberg, who has more frankly acknowledged that depicting Israel’s essence as genocidal doesn’t jibe with legal standards. All of them see Israelis as colonists.

As in Rwanda, anticolonialism and genocide inversion have converged. Israel is imagined not only as a state accused of genocide, but as a people whose identity as foreign settlers makes genocide their destiny.

Ruth Was Right

REVIEW: ‘If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews’ by Ruth R Wisse
To encounter Ruth Wisse is to learn from her, and I was blessed to be her student for the first time a decade ago. She, an eminent scholar of literature at Harvard, spent a weekend with us, a group of Jewish students in the Tikvah Fund’s then-nascent Collegiate Summer Honors program, doing what comes most naturally to her: teaching. She did so in her inimitable way. One of my friends described it precisely, remarking that Wisse was three-quarters Harvard professor, raising novel interpretations of the texts before us with erudition and articulateness, and one-quarter your bubbe at the Shabbat table speaking plain truths about the world. That persona made her all the more endearing and perhaps even more effective; from among her students that weekend I now count multiple brilliant young litigators, several professors and teachers, and a prolific member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

Declaring what is plainly, if painfully, true about the world is today rarely conceived of as the role of the professor. Wisse’s willingness to do so, that weekend and throughout her career, qualifies her as something more akin to a prophetess. With clear descriptions of the world taking shape in the late 20th century, courageous denunciations of its comforting misapprehensions and false pieties, and a call for Jews (and indeed all Westerners) to examine the crumbling foundation of liberal universalism, Wisse delivered a most unwelcome set of prophesies in 1992’s If I Am Not for Myself. Committing heresy after heresy among liberal Jewish company, she proclaimed that Soviet antisemitism was transmogrifying into Arab anti-Zionism; that "in misguided effort" Jews are "tempted to try to elicit from bystanders and witnesses the same pity" they had seen other victims enjoy; and that antisemitism "continues to be regarded as a disreputable sentiment achieving a certain legitimacy only when it travels under the cover of anti-Zionism."

No wonder the publisher Wicked Son deemed it worthy of republication in 2026, with new front matter including a preface from Wisse herself. These revelations, scoffed at in their time, could have been copied-and-pasted into the bewildered social media posts of Jews after October 7, 2023, confronting the liberal West’s failure to consign anti-Jewish politics to history. Indeed, anti-Jewish politics have only gained prominence since throngs of barbarians gathered throughout the West to celebrate the Hamas-led massacre and blame the Jews for their own misfortune. If Jewish families didn’t want to be burned alive, perhaps they shouldn’t have dared to live in a particular place at a particular time—to be colonizers, the newest category of un-person invented to ensure Jewish children would once again endure medieval horrors without weighing too heavily on the conscience of the enlightened liberal West.

Some definitions are necessary to understand Wisse’s simple but penetrating thesis. She speaks often of "liberalism," by which she means the consensus postwar view that humanity was on a positive moral trajectory, with reason prevailing over dogma and peace generally prevailing over war. Without castigating liberalism’s political manifestations—individual liberty, the rule of law, and so on—Wisse takes aim at liberal universalism, or the view that everyone, even avowed enemies of the Jews, could be reasoned with and ultimately pacified. Once-ubiquitous demands for Israel to give up "land for peace" exemplified this view; in hindsight they would be quaint if they hadn’t been so destructive.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel’s envoy to Britain: ‘I’ll feel safer back home, where there’s no anti-Semitism’

In April 2025, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, the acting head of mission at the Embassy of Israel in London, came within inches of a terrorist who was embarking on an attack. "I remember it very well," she says. "I was being urged by security to leave the embassy because I was the last one out at the end of the working day. And as I left, within two minutes he was climbing the fence." She was speaking on her phone at the time and didn't pay any attention when she brushed past Kuwaiti migrant Abdullah Albadri, whose head was wrapped in a red-and-white keffiyeh and sunglasses. Albadri, 34, told his mother, "I chose the path of martyrdom," then traveled to Kensington and tried to enter the embassy armed with two knives. Thankfully, he was tackled by police. In May, he was found guilty of terror offenses.

Grudsky Ekstein says Israel's leadership cannot comprehend the levels of antisemitism on Britain's shores. "Anti-Semitism is on the rise. We've seen the murders at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester and the stabbings in Golders Green. What Jerusalem doesn't see is such a clear link between those attacks and that permissive environment" which allows antisemitic rhetoric and blatant misinformation - like the lie that Israel has been committing "genocide" - to spread unchallenged.

The media, she points out, plays a major role in this incitement. "Broadcasting 'death to the IDF' chants on the BBC [during the 2025 Glastonbury Festival] was massive, because before that, I wasn't aware of the slogan. Since then, do you know how many protests I have seen with that 'death to the IDF' chant?"

Grudsky Ekstein is relieved to be returning home. On a day-to-day basis, she says, she often feels safer in Israel than Britain, regardless of the threat of missiles and terror. Does she have a final message to Britain before she leaves? "Put yourself in the shoes of Israel," she replies. "I know that there is a great empathy for the Palestinians. I get that. But you should understand that our democracy is also one that needs a friendly hand."

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07/25 Links: To Win the Peace, We Must Fund the War; Trump’s Lebanese Fantasy; Ireland Rebranded; 9/11 Families want to ban Mamdani from sacred 25th anniversary ceremony

From Ian:

To Win the Peace, We Must Fund the War

Donald Trump said Thursday that he is readying "a massive attack" on Iran, but the most consequential battle this week was on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders, Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, spoke to the Senate Appropriations Committee about a bill to offset the costs of the Iran conflict. The House passed a defense act including those funds the next day, but the Senate package remains in limbo.

Senators on both sides of the aisle raised questions not just about the funding itself, but also about the strategy for dealing with Iran and for some of Hegseth's unrelated but controversial decisions. Grandstanding in front of the cameras is par for the course in Washington, but even the Democrats should want to pass this bill.

For most Democrats, a no vote is a no-brainer. Even before anti-Jewish and pro-appeasement forces began to gain momentum, the party generally has viewed defense spending with skepticism for decades. Most members do not want to cast votes that could be seen as endorsements of Trump's campaign to cripple Iran's nuclear and conventional long-range missile programs. Even if they want to see the threat from Iran reduced, supporting the Obama-era nuclear deal is practically an article of faith in the party. And opposition parties usually fare best when they oppose whatever the president wants to do.

But, even so, there are strong reasons to let through the funds. The first is that blocking the supplemental will not compel U.S. forces to withdraw. Caine echoed an earlier warning from Admiral Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, that the services will cut elsewhere to keep up the fight. That includes reducing operations in other parts of the world, canceling training, cutting back on equipment and weapon purchases, and potentially even letting go of servicemembers who want to reenlist.

As the editors noted Wednesday, moreover, the campaign's estimated $37.5 billion cost is a reasonable price for taking the fight to a vicious and fanatical enemy. Even if the overall cost surpasses $100 billion, as some anonymous Washingtonians believe it will, defeating the "death to America" crowd would be money well spent.

A delay on the Hill might even prolong the war. The Iranian strategy is to hold out until economic and domestic political pressures force Trump into more concessions. The House, which voted on Wednesday for the Iran supplemental and on Thursday to limit Trump's war powers, is already sending mixed messages. Congress could inadvertently lead the mullahs to believe their strategy is working and encourage them to hold out longer. The surest way to peace is for the Iranians to conclude that antagonizing the United States is a losing proposition, not a pathway to further gains.

Lee Smith: Trump’s Lebanese Fantasy

So when Trump says that Lebanon has “been a very badly treated place and country, and we’re going to have it properly treated and treated with the respect it deserves,” he should know that Lebanon’s biggest problem is Lebanon. Sure, Hezbollah is an Iranian implant, but the Islamic Republic having the final word on matters of war and peace for more than three decades is evidence there’s something deeply wrong with Lebanon and its political culture that can’t be fixed with infusions of U.S. taxpayer money.

Thus, when Lebanese President Joseph Aoun visited the White House this week to ask for money, he was selling a mirage. The “ultimate objective” of the framework agreement, he said, is “ending the state of hostility between Lebanon and Israel forever.” But to reach that objective, “America needs to support the LAF,” said Aoun. “Without the LAF,” he continued, “everything will collapse.” And as he told a group after his meeting with Trump, the aid must be “immediate and unconditional.”

What he means is the same thing Lebanese officials have been saying since the United States started funding the LAF in 2006: You have to pay us to disarm the terror group that threatens our own sovereignty, but you can’t condition the aid on us disarming Hezbollah.

Could the Lebanese army plausibly disarm Hezbollah? If it can’t get the job done after two decades of U.S. handouts—since 2022 Washington has been paying LAF salaries directly—more cash now isn’t going to change the balance of power. The crucial issue is that the interests of the government and the army are so closely tied to Hezbollah that disturbing the status quo with an attempt at disarming it would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

Seen in this way, Hezbollah is Lebanon’s top investment vehicle. Without a terror group parked on the eastern Mediterranean that’s at war with a U.S. ally, and that poses a potential threat to offshore energy platforms while it’s engaged in drug- and human-trafficking enterprises around the world, Lebanon would have to join the long line of failed states waiting for handouts. But Hezbollah makes Lebanon the squeaky wheel that needs to be oiled, or else it’ll blow up in everyone’s face. It’s fundamentally an extortion racket.

Can’t the Lebanese make it on their own? They’re an inventive and industrious people whose diaspora has made invaluable contributions across the world—surely, they can make a go of it in their own country! Look at all the aides of Lebanese origin Trump has named to the diplomatic corps: Tom Barrack, Michel Issa, and Massad Boulos, all successful men. But that’s not how most people think in Lebanon.

The default impulse of the Lebanese, hardwired over the course of millennia, is to draw in larger powers to do their dirty work, basically treating them like the live-in maids from Sri Lanka and the Philippines that the country’s leading classes employ: Pretty up the house, but don’t disturb our daily lives by making inconvenient demands, or you’ll break something and ruin madame’s dinner party on the veranda. And so, if the Americans are paying, why go and do something crazy like fight Hezbollah and mess up the Italian leather sofa? And to keep the Americans paying, you need Hezbollah.

According to Aoun and other Lebanese in on the scam, taking on Hezbollah is a long-term process, very long-term indeed. “It’s going to take time,” says Trump adviser Boulos. “This is not easy. Nobody believes for a second that this is going to be an easy task in any way.”

Why, yes, the money is for strengthening the Lebanese military—just not for the purpose of getting rid of Hezbollah—but that’s not all Lebanon needs to rebuild Lebanese society. Because Hezbollah is Lebanese and not “a foreign mercenary force,” as Aoun told an audience of high-level administration officials at the Lebanese Embassy in Washington, Lebanon needs funding for programs to reintegrate Hezbollah’s “Lebanese citizens” back into the fabric of Lebanese society. And, added Aoun, Lebanon needs U.S. investment, lots of it—enough to at least match Iran’s decades-long “massive and sustained investment” that funded Hezbollah.

And yet, as Aoun warned, Hezbollah will continue to be an issue until the Americans “remove the root cause” for Hezbollah’s existence—the “Israeli occupation.” All Aoun means is that Trump has to pressure the Israelis to withdraw. That’s the Lebanese consensus because it’s Hezbollah’s position: Get the Israelis out, and we’ll rebuild our tunnels and restock our arms supply while the Americans pay us through you and protect us from future rounds of Israeli military action even as we prepare to renew the terror war with rocket and missile fire and plans to invade Israel’s north as Hamas sacked its south on Oct. 7.

Hezbollah is weakened, thanks to Israel, but nothing has changed with the LAF since Washington started paying it in 2006. What’s different is that the Iran war has illuminated what is real and what is fake, and who America’s allies are. The way to disarm Hezbollah is not by paying the LAF to protect it, but rather by letting Israel finish off the terror group on its border.

The Strange Story of Kurt Gerstein

When I tried to shift our conversation toward Gerstein, Tomasz gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “He was a member of the SS and part of the Nazi machine. We know his story,” he said. He was less interested in Gerstein’s biography than in his report and how it can be used to scrape the “rust” off Bełżec. “He gave us something from the interior, something about the activity of the camp, the process.”

“And was it a form of resistance for him to provide that kind of information?” I asked. Tomasz shook his head and sighed heavily. “That’s a good question. ‘I’ve seen everything here,’” he said, as if he were Gerstein speaking, “‘and I must give testimony.’ That’s the essence of his resistance. He was the witness. He went inside the Holocaust. He touched evil and he talked about his experience. He told the truth. He broke the silence. ‘I gave information to diplomats and embassies,’” he says, again as if he were Gerstein speaking. “‘I tried to do something. A little—but something.’”

After the war, Gerstein’s widow, Elfriede, and a handful of archivists created Kurt Gerstein House, an educational institution for children in Germany. They also built a collection of Gerstein’s personal documents and papers, including his report on Bełżec. Gerstein’s descendants and future generations of archivists kept adding to the collection, collaborating with organizations around the world to unearth ever more documents and to frame his story in a wider context. The House shut down in the early 2000s, though, having gone bust. The collection was then donated to the Evangelical Church of Westphalia.

Today, the collection is managed by the archivists Ingrun Osterfinke and Martin Kamp in Bielefeld, a small city in northeast Germany. They struck me as a dynamic pair, jumping between German and English to fine-tune individual words throughout our conversation, ensuring that no meanings were lost. I asked them if Gerstein is better known in Germany than he is in the United States.

“I can’t think of any situation where Germans nowadays are really familiar with the fate or the figure of Kurt Gerstein,” Martin said. “It’s very obvious, when we’re doing a tour through our archives, and we talk about the Gerstein collections, that not many people know anything about him.” This surprised me. Why isn’t he famous, like Oskar Schindler or Anne Frank? “The popularity of Oskar Schindler and Anne Frank is based on the successful media processing of their stories,” Martin said, dryly. “I’m pretty sure that before Schindler’s List, comparatively few people knew the name and story of Oskar Schindler. Plus, Anne Frank’s diary is an unusually dense and well-written source that documents the persecution of the Jews in Europe on a personal level and through the eyes of the victim. I have to say …” He leaned back in his chair, as if to let his thoughts settle. “I have to say that I find the comparison with Kurt Gerstein a bit difficult. He’s a much more ambivalent figure than Schindler. Schindler saved the lives of hundreds of Jews, which was personally dangerous for him. Whether Kurt Gerstein really joined the SS only to gain insight into the murder machinery and to inform the outside world is open to doubt.”

“And figures like Anne Frank or Oskar Schindler are easy to understand,” Ingrun added. “Anne Frank’s diary is a real, singular document, and Oskar Schindler’s success is measurable. He saved a measurable number of people. Kurt Gerstein didn’t succeed measurably. His efforts to inform the Allied nations didn’t succeed. His actions and his motivations are all complex and not easy to comprehend,” she said with a resigned laugh. With all these thoughts in mind, I asked how they thought Gerstein resisted Nazism, if at all?

“That’s a very difficult question to answer,” Martin said. “It basically depends on whether you believe Gerstein’s statements to be true. And maybe that’s what we can learn from his story: that categories like perpetrators, bystanders, and resisters, and even victims, can be extremely difficult to define.” We discussed this point for a moment. As someone who was almost certainly sympathetic to the Nazis at the start, and who then turned on them, and who then joined the SS for uncertain reasons, and who then gathered information on the Nazis’ murderous activities, and who then failed to achieve anything with that information, and who finally ended his own life after going into Allied captivity voluntarily, Gerstein, you could argue, was a perpetrator and a bystander and a resister and a victim.

Ingrun took a slightly warmer view. “If we believe everything in Gerstein’s Report,” she said—and from the way that she talked about him, I think that she did—“then he resisted Nazism in not giving up his beliefs, his convictions, and his conscience.”

It is clear that Kurt Gerstein never looked away from Nazism or its crimes. He committed himself to telling the truth because it was the truth, he constantly interrogated his convictions, and he set out to gain knowledge however he could and to inform others of the crimes he witnessed. The ripples of these simple acts spread through the generations in ways that he could never have predicted. His report has been used as evidence in trials against Holocaust perpetrators and Holocaust deniers, for example, and by historians trying to understand what the Holocaust was and how it happened. He may not have been able to save any lives or stop any part of the Holocaust. But he did successfully resist the possibility of it being forgotten.

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07/24 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: A tsunami of lies; Global Intifada, Local Mayor; Streeting’s cynical smears against Israel prove he’s not fit for office

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A tsunami of lies

The threat posed by Mamdani needs to be identified correctly. He’s using far-left populism to advance the destruction of America. But he doesn’t want to replace it with a rainbow-hued nirvana. He wants to replace it with Islam.

Despite his adherence to Shia Islam, Mamdani’s behavior corresponds to the strategy of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has set out how it will conquer America by infiltrating democratic institutions and using them to push the Islamist agenda.

Mamdani constantly makes references to Islam. He has cheered the growth of Islam in the city, repeatedly visits mosques and Islamic centers including ones linked to the Iranian regime, and said that America should follow the example of Islam and Mohammed’s teaching on migration and sanctuary.

Not only does the mayor need to be called out as an Islamist plant; action needs to be taken against him as a danger to America.

Pointing out that Mamdani could be denaturalized and deported, the head of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, has said that the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate evidence that before becoming an American citizen in 2018 he “knowingly provided funds or services to Hamas or another terrorist group—and concealed this from immigration authorities.”

The monumental onslaught on truth and facts about Israel has knocked the West off its moral compass. A despairing Ferguson wrote that, as a teacher, his aim was to ensure that people learned the lessons of history, including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it’s adopted by a modern state. “Yet today,” he laments, “I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized.”

Ferguson implies that reason itself has been defeated. Such demoralization, while entirely understandable, risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Truth is being defeated because none of the custodians of the public sphere is standing up for it. People need to start calling out the agents of this contagion and holding their feet to the fire. And that includes Jews calling out Jewish anti-Zionists, too.

Andrew Fox: Streeting’s cynical smears against Israel prove he’s not fit for office

The High Level Military Group, comprising retired senior officers and officials from Nato countries, entered Gaza and questioned IDF personnel. Its submission to the International Criminal Court described Israel’s civilian-harm precautions as unprecedented and rejected the claim that the conduct of operations showed an intent by senior leaders to starve civilians or commit unlawful killings.

That judgment is also mine: Israel’s institutional policy is to operate within the law of armed conflict. No serious military observer expects a force in a long, brutal war to avoid all individual crimes. Gaza has credible cases requiring investigation and, where proved, prosecution.

Amid the social media outcry, no evidence whatsoever has been presented of a systematic policy of targeting or massacring civilians, nor of deliberate or carpet bombing. At the same time, we may certainly identify incidents that may indicate individual war crimes. The distinction between individual criminality and state policy is elementary. Streeting blurs it.

The most revealing absence from his analysis is Hamas. Gaza was not a neutral city over which Israel chose to pour fire. The IDF confronted a battlefield Hamas had spent years engineering. It built an extensive tunnel system, concealed shafts and weapons in civilian structures, booby-trapped buildings and roads, fought from densely populated areas, and denied the IDF clean targets. My own analysis of Gaza’s destruction found that much of the damage stemmed from ground manoeuvres, engineering demolitions, and the neutralisation of IEDs and tunnels, rather than air strikes alone.

Armoured bulldozers, explosive breaches, and tunnel collapses produced the lunar landscape now presented on social media as self-evident proof of criminality. Those images record a battle within a militarised enclave. They are not a legal judgment.

Hamas designed this terrain both tactically and narratively. By embedding military infrastructure throughout the civilian environment, it forced Israel into destructive urban combat and then presented every collapsed building and civilian death as evidence of criminal intent. Its information operation depends on removing Hamas from the frame. Streeting has obliged. He spoke of Israeli standards without addressing the adversary’s tunnels, IEDs, hostages, or the systematic exploitation of civilian sites.

Britain should scrutinise its allies and friendship does not require silence. Criticism from a defence secretary must be grounded in military analysis, not in televised devastation and casualty figures whose legal significance is routinely misunderstood. Streeting’s job now includes understanding how an enemy weaponises law, media and civilian suffering against democracies. A minister susceptible to that approach will impose impossible standards on allies, only to see those same standards used against British troops in the next urban war.

Streeting should ask the Ministry of Defence lawyers and operators for a serious review. If he still believes Israel fell below British standards, he should publish the basis: which incidents, which intelligence, which legal test and which British comparator. If he cannot, he should withdraw the charge. A defence secretary who cannot distinguish the horror of urban warfare from evidence of unlawful warfare is unfit for office.

Editor's Notes: Germany’s ‘good Jews’ thought they were safe, New York should pay attention

On Tuesday night, the mayor of New York posted a two-minute video to explain that he cannot arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

He had been promising to arrest him since December 2024. At some point, the city’s lawyers told him what any first-year law student could have told him, and so he made a video. That was the news in it. The other hundred seconds were the reason he bothered.

Israel was targeting neonatal care centers. It was starving countless people. It was gunning down hundreds of aid workers and journalists. Americans were paying for the bombs that do the killing. Netanyahu was the architect of a horrific genocide, a war criminal, not welcome in New York City. Washington should arrest him instead.

October 7 did not come up. There is only one “bad” country outside the United States, and it’s Israel. Not China. Not the Islamic Republic of Iran. Not North Korea. Only Israel.

By Wednesday morning, Zohran Mamdani was at City Hall suggesting New Yorkers go protest Netanyahu at the United Nations in September. Protest, he said, is one of the bedrocks of this city. He also said he is committed to representing all New Yorkers, whether they agree with him or not.

The UJA-Federation, which does not usually talk this way, opened its statement with “Shame on you.” The Orthodox Union said the video “endangers Jewish New Yorkers” and that the mayor peddles “lies and misinformation that risk inciting further violence against Jews.” Gadi Eisenkot, who has spent his political career trying to get Netanyahu out of office, called it “pure antisemitism, with no basis in fact.”

Eight months ago, 33% of Jewish voters in the city put him there.

That number is what sent me into the German archives. Jews backing a movement that hates them is not a new story. I wanted to know how close the match was.

More of it matched than I wanted. Some of it does not match at all.

Max Naumann
Max Naumann was not a crank. Berlin attorney. Captain in the Bavarian Army. Iron Cross First and Second Class, 15 months at the front. When he founded the Association of German National Jews in 1921, respectable people signed up, including the chief editor of one of Germany’s biggest daily papers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes he had money behind him, from established quarters of German Jewry.

His theory was that antisemitism is a reaction. Germans were not born hating Jews. They were reacting to things Jews did. To the Eastern European Jews showing up with foreign manners. To Zionists saying out loud that their loyalty was somewhere else. To Jewish writers who made fun of German patriotism. Take away the provocation and the hatred goes with it.

Everything else follows from that. If Jews cause it, Jews can stop it. Naumann wrote it out in his first bulletin in September 1921: Every decent antisemite admits decent Jews exist but calls them exceptions, and he will stop being an antisemite once we prove “we are not a handful of deserters but an army.”

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07/24 Links Pt1: Two Israelis killed in Samaria terrorist attack; ICC removes Karim Khan as prosecutor; Mojtaba Khamenei more interested in nuclear weapons than predecessor

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: We deserve better: Three years after October 7, Israel still waits for an investigation

Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, Israelis are still waiting for one of the most basic obligations the outgoing government owes its citizens: A full, independent investigation into the worst security failure in the country’s history.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government informed the High Court of Justice that it will not be able to complete legislation establishing its proposed political commission to investigate the failures surrounding Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

In response to petitions challenging its failure to establish the probe, the government said the legislation would instead be completed after the October 27 elections. Further attacking the judiciary, it also argued that “it is not appropriate for the court to rule on the matter or intervene in it.”

The government’s explanation for the delay should be unacceptable to every Israeli.

Much has been argued – both in the Knesset and on Israel’s streets – over whether a political commission or a state commission of inquiry is the appropriate mechanism. The coalition has repeatedly opposed a state commission, standing firmly behind its objections to an independent inquiry.

Its first argument has been that it is impractical and inappropriate to investigate the events surrounding October 7 while Israel remains at war. The second is that Chief Justice Isaac Amit is not viewed as legitimate by many members of the coalition, raising concerns that any commission he appoints would lack public confidence among a significant segment of the public. 'Scheduling constraints' prevented Oct. 7 probe legislation finalization

Even if the government’s objections to a state commission are genuine, they still do not explain why it failed to follow through on its own proposal for a political probe – one specifically designed to address those concerns by replacing Supreme Court appointments to the committee with members selected through a Knesset-led process.

According to the government’s response to the High Court, the legislation could not be finalized because of “scheduling constraints.”

That justification is nothing short of insulting.

Members of this government have spent nearly three years hearing the pleas of bereaved families demanding a commission of inquiry. They have heard them inside the Knesset. They have heard them outside their homes and offices, where grieving relatives have stood for months demanding answers, accountability, and transparency.

Some of those Israelis lost sons, daughters, spouses, parents, and friends on October 7. Others fought for up to 505 days until their loved ones returned from Hamas captivity. All have carried an unimaginable burden while waiting for the state to confront its own failures.

Responding to those families by citing legislative scheduling conflicts is a slap in the face.

The explanation becomes even harder to accept when viewed alongside the coalition’s legislative blitz carried out during the Knesset’s final weeks before its dissolution.

In those weeks, the coalition found time to pass legislation it considered politically essential: A bill preventing the enforcement of draft orders against ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, legislation enshrining Torah study as a fundamental value in Israel’s Basic Law, a bill restructuring the powers of the attorney-general, and sweeping reforms to Israel’s broadcasting sector.

In passing said bills, the government demonstrated that when legislation is considered urgent by the prime minister, it can move with remarkable speed.

Trump admin’s $200 million to Red Cross offers chance to press it over Oct. 7 hostages, B’nai B’rith tells JNS

The Trump administration should use Thursday’s announcement that it is providing more than $200 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, to demand that the ICRC “show accountability for its shameful performance during the Israeli hostage crisis,” Rabbi Eric Fusfield, director of legislative affairs at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS.

The U.S. State Department stated that the aid to the ICRC and IFRC will go toward disaster and humanitarian assistance. “Today’s contributions support organizations that respond quickly when disasters strike, provide unparalleled access to people in need in conflict settings, and leverage preexisting worldwide disaster and humanitarian response infrastructure,” it said.

Fusfield told JNS that “the ICRC failed every test with respect to Israelis held captive by Hamas terrorists.”

“They never met with the hostages, never assured them comfort or medical supplies, never demanded proof of life and never did anything to speed their release,” he said. “The ICRC has much to answer for, and the U.S. and the international community should demand those answers.”

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07/23 Links Pt2: Antizionism Kills: the danger of Zohran Mamdani; Jake Sullivan Can’t Sleep; Rachel Moiselle: Why Ireland Became Europe's Most Antisemitic Country

From Ian:

Due to blogger's wobbly, yesterday's (22nd) links are in the comments here.

NYPost Editorial: We know why Mamdani keeps banging the Israel drum — vibes are all he can offer his base

Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally felt compelled to admit he couldn’t order Benjamin Netanyahu arrested, so his consolation prize for his fanbase was a new Oval Office-style address late Tuesday where he repeated the whole litany of post-Oct. 7 pro-Hamas agitprop — without, of course, even mentioning the genuine atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.

When you can’t deliver substance, go big on vibes.

The “arrest” thing was always pure fantasy, a story the global left-Islamist alliance tells itself about “international law.”

Neither the United States nor Israel ever signed on to the International Criminal Court under which the bogus “indictment” was laid; indeed US law forbids honoring any ICC warrants.

If Mamdani didn’t know the truth before Tuesday, it’s because he didn’t want to; either way, he kept talking about arresting Netanyahu because the idea cheers his pals and irritates his enemies.

Which is why the “oops, I can’t” speech had to repeat all the “genocide” lies in spurious detail, including fury over a starvation that never happened and a slaughter of aid workers that never took place.

From the start of his campaign, Mamdani’s mayoralty has rested on visions of magically transforming New York City into a Big Rock Candy Mountain of free stuff, social revolution and bitter tears for the enemies of the socialist agenda: homeowners, rich white people, Zionists.

But delivering on his material promises is another matter.

Mamdani’s Netanyahu bluster is a smokescreen for his real goal: crushing Americans’ freedom

For 25 years, US administrations on both sides of the political aisle shared the concern that corrupt nations would use the court to bypass the fairest justice system in the world and subject Americans to politically motivated prosecutions.

As a result, the court holds no power or legal authority over our nation.

After all, we have the US Constitution.

Article II gives the president primary control over foreign affairs, and the Supremacy Clause means that federal law overrides state or city actions in that arena.

The Founders vested this power in the federal government alone, specifically to prevent rogue local officials like Zohran Mamdani from dragging the nation into diplomatic disasters.

Moreover, the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002 blocks state or local agencies from cooperating with the ICC.

Congress passed the ASPA precisely because lawmakers feared ICC harassment of American troops and officials for political reasons.

Mamdani knew all this — and that, under New York State law, he’d have been exposed to possible criminal prosecution for unlawful imprisonment or official misconduct if he actually ordered Netanyahu’s arrest.

So on Tuesday, he had no choice but to roll back this particular Trojan horse he’s been using to conceal his real agenda.

For him, this episode was just the first skirmish of a much longer war.

He was testing globalization’s dangerous waters by using an easy scapegoat, Israel’s Netanyahu, for cover.

And now everyday Americans will be the guinea pigs for his project.

This is a long play: If Mamdani’s advocacy succeeds and American mayors and governors start acting on ICC papers, it hands legitimacy to a corrupt foreign court — and to adversaries that could target our service members with warrants at home and abroad.

Mamdani was willing to demand the arrest of a foreign head of state under ICC law, and on Tuesday he indicated he would advocate the same for his constituents who are subject to ICC warrants.

The recent incident at Park East Synagogue was instructive.

When members held an event about Israel inside its doors, Mamdani allies attacked it — and Mamdani himself used ICC propaganda to blame the victims for being harassed.

The mayor’s willingness to weaponize ICC decrees against New Yorkers engaging in First Amendment protected activities was shocking and dangerous.

On Tuesday, he made his mission and agenda clear: He wants foreign governance supplanting US sovereignty.

He’s advocating a globalized rule of law influenced by adversarial nations to “impart justice” on Americans.

Our service members, leaders and everyday citizens will be left vulnerable to the weaponized warrants of nations that despise us if he gets his way.

A mayor playing diplomat to appease a radical base is dangerous enough.

But a mayor actively working to erode the sovereignty that protects his constituents is a threat to the republic itself.

Huckabee calls Mamdani an ‘evil antisemite’

U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee lashed out at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, calling him an “evil antisemite” in the wake of his recorded message branding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”

“Would be easy to say NY Mayor is just an ignorant bigot, but he is not dumb,” Huckabee tweeted.

“He’s an evil anti-Semite who deliberately lies about serious things like ‘genocide’ to stoke Jew hate. If anyone should be arrested, it’s the Mayor of NY for incitement. NYC should be ashamed,” the diplomat said.

Eve Barlow: Antizionism Kills: the danger of Zohran Mamdani

I am a British Jew who fled antizionism in 2014. I told my story. I am calling upon you: Soviet Jews, Yemeni Jews, Iraqi Jews, Egyptian Jews, Libyan Jews, Polish Jews. We need your stories. I cannot tell them for you. Tell your story of fleeing antizionism. The same sickness with the same lies of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonizing” is spreading like wildfire in an ignorant America among the same racists who pushed you to flee. The same lies recycled - lies that existed decades before any war in Gaza. The ignorant do not know. They are on social media. Tell your story. I will share it. We need your testimony. Do not hide. I need you. We all do.

Today is Tisha B’Av; the day many Jews partake in fasting to mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by our enemies. Last night, Mamdani did as predicted. To prove he is not an antisemite, he tweeted a sunny Tisha B’Av greeting to Jewish New Yorkers, wishing them a peaceful fast and reflecting on Jewish resiliency, mere hours after calling their people’s elected leader a war criminal who should be arrested. This is an abuse tactic known as narcissistic love bombing. Mamdani may pretend he’s no antisemite, but he is proudly antizionist. Antizionism is racism. Name it.

It is mad living in a time when those of us with pattern recognition and strong lived experience look at Mamdani and the DSA and see the Cold War, while the progressives see utopia. There is a smokescreen between us and them, and we are so behind in figuring out how to bring the wall down.

Antizionism is not criticism of a government. It is the organized denial of Jewish self-determination - the only people on earth whose right to a state is treated as uniquely illegitimate. No other nation is subjected to this singular campaign of eliminationist rhetoric. It is Jew-hatred with a progressive veneer, and it kills. It kills by gaslighting victims into silence. It kills by normalizing the idea that Jewish self-defense is the real crime. It kills by creating the moral permission structure for the next October 7, the next synagogue attack, the next Jewish student forced to hide their identity.

Listen to Jews, or make the same mistake the German citizens of 1938 made while that era’s charming violent man smiled for the cameras.

One day it will be as shameful to have been an antizionist in this period as it was to have been a Nazi in the 1930s. The patterns are the same. The cult is the same. The stakes are civilizational. Shake off your attachment. Antizionism is a hate movement. And hate, when left unchallenged, always kills.

Please watch this video, maybe my most important to date, and share it as widely as you possibly can. We are in big, big trouble. Jeremy Corbyn was a mere chopped liver cracker in comparison.

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07/23 Links Pt1: Americans Keep Buying the Same Used Car from Iran; Trump: US-Saudi nuclear deal contingent on Abraham Accords acceptance

From Ian:

Due to blogger's wobbly, yesterday's (22nd) links are in the comments here.

Iran Must Never Have a Nuclear Weapon

For months, the Commander-in-Chief has repeated a clear endstate: Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon. That objective is the only outcome consistent with American security, Israeli survival, and the prevention of nuclear-armed theocratic blackmail of the global energy system.

Iran's nuclear program is not a technical problem that can be solved by bombing centrifuges or stockpiles. It is a political-military program driven by a regime whose founding ideology and operational doctrine treat the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a means to destroy Israel and, ultimately, confront the U.S. As long as that leadership remains, the program can be reconstituted.

The June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes and the far larger February 2026 campaign severely damaged Natanz, Fordow, and related sites. Yet, the regime's scientific cadre, its archival blueprints, and its procurement networks survived. With residual scientists, data, and institutional knowledge intact, Iran can drastically shrink the timeline to a nuclear weapon in the near future despite recent setbacks.

"Managing" or "monitoring" the regime over time is a strategic illusion. It places the burden of eternal vigilance on future administrations that may lack the will, the congressional majorities, or the public support to act when Iran next sprints for the bomb. We have already watched this movie with North Korea. The difference is that a nuclear North Korea can be contained; a nuclear Iran cannot.

The permanent elimination of the regime's nuclear weapons ambition is achievable only by removing the regime that harbors it. Unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in 1945 is the relevant historical precedent. Germany and Japan were not "managed." Their regimes were destroyed, their ideologies discredited, and their war-making capacity permanently dismantled.

Leaving the Iranian regime in power after we have already killed its Supreme Leader and degraded its military is not prudence; it is strategic incoherence. Continuing to pursue diplomatic settlements with a proven non-compliant actor simply defers the day of reckoning.

Americans Keep Buying the Same Used Car from Iran

In Washington, negotiations are viewed as a pathway to an agreement. In Tehran, negotiations are viewed as another means of waging conflict. For Americans, an agreement represents the finish line. For the Iranian regime, it is, at most, an interim waypoint. Americans seek a resolution; Iranians seek an advantage.

For more than four decades, every time the U.S. has sought progress, the same Iranian "hardliners" have suddenly emerged as obstacles that must be appeased. Another small concession. Another limited sanctions waiver. Another symbolic gesture. Only then, perhaps, can the talks continue. From the Iranian perspective, this is the negotiating strategy.

There is little sense of defeat in Tehran. The regime's internal narrative is one of resilience. From the regime's perspective, the mere fact that the world's leading superpower continues to seek its consent constitutes a psychological and strategic victory in its own right. The U.S. increasingly appears to be responding to a tempo set by Tehran. Instead of rewriting the rules of the game, it seeks to negotiate more favorable terms within the existing framework.

In nearly every negotiating cycle, Americans convince themselves that an agreement is just around the corner, while Iranian leaders conclude that a little more patience will improve their bargaining position even further. Perhaps the question in Washington should no longer be, "What new proposal should we put forward?" Instead, policymakers should ask, "Why do we continue to assume that the other side views negotiations as serving the same purpose that we do?"

An operational alternative does exist. The U.S. possesses ample military capabilities to place overwhelming pressure on the Iranian regime. Rather than pursuing a costly ground invasion, Washington could impose a sustained maritime blockade.

Such an approach, however, would require strategic patience, political endurance, and a willingness to absorb retaliatory costs - qualities that successive American administrations have lacked. Consequently, the U.S. will most likely pursue yet another negotiated agreement.

Netanyahu’s insistence offers a clear hint of what lies ahead

“Call us when you’re serious,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in the early 1990s.

Under the current Republican administration, with the current Likud prime minister, Washington is still answering the phone. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are speaking, although no longer every day.

Something has been amiss in relations between the White House and the Prime Minister’s Office since the war with Iran became more complicated. The president’s inner circle is smaller and more closed than in previous administrations, and gaining access to it has become increasingly difficult. The Americans are making it clear to the Israelis that they are running the war and that everything is fine, thank you very much. But it is evident to everyone that Israel is moving into the back seat.

As a seasoned politician, Netanyahu presumably knows how to recognize deliberate distancing. One example came when Vice President JD Vance said, “Israel’s standing in America is not good, and I don’t think anyone can dispute that.” Last week, Vance had already made clear that he occupied the “sensible center,” between those who see Israel as a problem and those who see it as an asset. That is interesting, but the president’s silence is even more so.

And then there is Saudi Arabia. This week, Trump granted the kingdom the civilian nuclear program it had long sought, contrary to Israel’s position and without the broader package deal Israel had wanted. Former President Joe Biden held up a similar move in an effort to link that incentive to the Abraham Accords. His successor went ahead without tying the two together. Lindsey Graham must surely be turning in his grave.

This is already the second time that has happened. After all, lifting the sanctions on Syria also eliminated the possibility of securing a peace agreement with Israel. And all this is unfolding while the departure of Wing of Zion, Israel’s official aircraft for the prime minister and president, is delayed again and again.

The situation also has implications for the election.

I once heard a campaign strategist say that as far as Israelis are concerned, everything happening in the Middle East is foreign news until missiles begin landing here.

Mossad says it foiled Iranian plot to infiltrate Israel, attack senior officials

Working with foreign intelligence services, Israel foiled an Iranian plot to send operatives into Israel to harm senior Israeli officials, the Mossad intelligence agency said in a statement on Thursday.

The effort, led by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, involved turning to criminal organizations, who would in turn recruit people inside Israel or who could enter Israel for gathering intelligence on a target, then carrying out an attack.

Two criminals living in Iran under the protection of the Intelligence Ministry — Baba Mahuzadeh Haji Jafan, also known as “Babak”; and Mehmet Nadim Ya’it, also known as “Nadim” — recruited Turut Ozkor, a criminal living in France who went by the nickname “Philip.”

The handlers of Babak and Nadim in the Iranian Intelligence Ministry are named by the Mossad as Asadollah Behzad Oskhari, Vahid Matzoumi, Mohammad-Hossein Zoghi and Hamid Qasemi.

Oskhari was killed in Israel’s 12-day bombing campaign against Iran in 2025 and was a key figure in plots to attack Jewish and Israeli targets worldwide, said the Mossad.

Philip was tasked with recruiting a cell of foreign nationals who would enter Israel, it added.

He traveled to Iran on several occasions to meet handlers and be paid, according to the statement.

Philip was expelled by France, while Babak and Nadim remain in Iran.

“Despite the attempt to avoid an Iranian fingerprint, the proxy method repeatedly demonstrates the carelessness of the operatives on the ground, leading to the exposure of their handlers in Iran,” said the Mossad.

The Mossad worked with Shin Bet and foreign intelligence agencies to uncover the network, the statement added.

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07/21 Links Pt2: The Church of England has betrayed British Jews – again; Australia has ‘disturbing parallels’ with Nazi Germany; The lies behind Mamdani’s Netanyahu stunt are the real threat

From Ian:

The Dangers of Dog Whistles

Political scientists describe the range of ideas treated as acceptable in mainstream discourse as the Overton window, and coded language is one of the most efficient tools for shifting the window over time. A claim too radioactive to state directly gets introduced in euphemism, absorbed as normal, and then, because it no longer shocks, becomes available for a more overt statement by the next speaker. Researchers tracking this pattern have pointed to figures like Tucker Carlson, who took replacement theory language from its fringe, explicitly anti-Jewish origins and delivered a version of it, describing an effort to “replace the current electorate… with new people… from the Third World,” to a mainstream cable audience. Carlson stripped most overt of the anti-Jewish framing but left its basic structure intact. Once that version is broadcast and normalized, the fuller, more explicit version becomes an easier next step for anyone already primed toward it.

The platforms that carry this language today reward exactly the dynamic that makes it dangerous. Long form, low pushback interview formats, hours of unchallenged conversation, are especially efficient vehicles, because ambiguous claims can be floated, sit unexamined by the host, and reach enormous audiences before anyone fact-checks them. Researchers who study platform radicalization describe a pipeline effect: audiences move from ambiguous, “just asking questions” content toward progressively more explicit material, because engagement driven recommendation systems reward escalation over caution. The mechanism doesn’t require any deliberate strategy on the part of a host or platform. It emerges naturally from incentives that favor the more provocative claim over the more careful one.

This is the sharpest edge of the danger, and it has a name. Stochastic terrorism describes how hostile rhetoric, repeated and amplified across media, statistically raises the likelihood that some unknown individual, somewhere, commits ideologically motivated violence, without any direct coordination or explicit instruction from the person whose rhetoric inspired it. The concept traces to a 2002 risk modeling paper by analyst Gordon Woo and was popularized in its current form around 2011. Researchers who study it describe a three part chain. An originator deploys hostile, coded rhetoric while maintaining plausible deniability. Amplifiers (media outlets, platforms, algorithms) repeat and spread the rhetoric. Receivers, individuals already primed by exposure to the underlying conspiracy, act on the rhetoric without ever having been in direct contact with the originator.

This isn’t an abstract model. Robert Bowers, who killed eleven people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, spent the weeks before the attack posting on the platform Gab that the refugee resettlement group HIAS “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.” Bowers blended replacement theory anti-immigrant rhetoric with older conspiracy theories about George Soros and Jewish organizations secretly directing immigration policy with coded language he had absorbed, restated, and ultimately acted on. Months later, John Earnest opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, California, citing the same replacement theory framework and explicitly blaming Jews for orchestrating demographic change. Brenton Tarrant‘s 2019 Christchurch mosque attack manifesto was titled, without irony, “The Great Replacement.” Patrick Crusius, who killed twenty-three people in El Paso that same year, referenced a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas in language that drew on the same replacement framework, minus the explicitly anti-Jewish layer but built on the identical structure. None of these men were following direct orders from anyone. All of them were downstream of language that had been circulating in increasingly mainstream form for years before they picked up a weapon.

The scale of what that produces is measurable. The ADL’s 2024 audit recorded 9,354 anti-Jewish incidents in the United States, the highest total in the organization’s 46 year tracking history. This was a 5 percent rise over 2023, an increase of 344 percent over five years, and 893 percent increase over the past decade. Assaults rose 21 percent year over year, vandalism rose 20 percent, and incidents on college campuses rose 84 percent, now accounting for the highest share of total incidents on record. None of that traces to a single podcast episode or a single politician’s word choice. It traces to a decades long accumulation of coded and semi-coded language that made the underlying ideas feel, to enough people, like something other than what they actually are.

None of this means every use of a loaded word is evidence of bigotry, and it’s worth saying plainly that overcorrecting carries its own cost. “Globalist” is sometimes just a policy label. Skepticism about a specific intelligence agency’s conduct is not automatically an anti-Jewish accusation. Treating every instance of contested vocabulary as proof of hidden intent empties the term “dog whistle” of its actual meaning and makes it easier for bad faith critics to dismiss real instances as overreach. The useful distinction isn’t between words that are always innocent and words that are always coded. It’s between an isolated, ambiguous phrase and a documented pattern, repeated across time, drawing recognizably on a specific and traceable lineage, delivered to an audience where at least some listeners will receive the second meaning whether or not the speaker intended to send it.

That distinction is the actual danger of a dog whistle: not the phrase itself, but what repeated, deniable exposure to the phrase does over time. It reaches the people who already believe the conspiracy underneath it and gives them confirmation. It slowly acclimates a much larger audience that never consciously signs on to anything. And in the worst and rarest cases, it reaches the handful of listeners who decide the coded version was never coded enough and act on the plain meaning they hear underneath. Recognizing the vocabulary, knowing that “globalist” has a lineage running through Bannon back to Stalin’s purges, that “secret banker” runs through the Rothschild pamphlets to the Protocols, that “replacement” runs through Camus to Charlottesville to a string of synagogue and mosque shootings, isn’t about assuming bad faith in every speaker who reaches for a loaded word. It’s about being able to tell, over time and in aggregate, when a pattern with a documented, century-long track record is being repeated in front of an audience of millions, regardless of who happens to be holding the microphone that day.

The Church of England has betrayed British Jews – again

Endorsing Kairos II without this history of anti-Semitism would have been bad enough. But given the Christian church’s record of Jew hatred, voting in favour of this document makes it significantly worse. It has lent authority to the modern blood libel that Israel is deliberately murdering Palestinians as part of a genocidal campaign. Kairos II also leans on a theology in which Jesus is refashioned as a Palestinian martyr – a modern update of the medieval ‘Christ killer’ myth. It even offers moral cover for the 7 October massacres by framing them inside a narrative of righteous resistance.

The church’s endorsement of Kairos II has left Britain’s Jewish community shattered. UK chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said: ‘It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood.’ He also warned that it risks undermining relations between Christians and Jews. Indeed, it already has.

Here is the double betrayal. The first victims are British Jews, watching an ancient institution rehabilitate a modernised version of the oldest lies in Christian anti-Semitism. The second victim is less discussed but no less wronged: Middle Eastern Christians. Kairos II places the blame for Christian suffering on Israel, while staying entirely silent on the reasons Christian populations have collapsed across the Palestinian territories. It is a silent exodus driven only partially by the conflict, but also by land-grabbing from Muslim clans, as well as extortion and Sharia-based discrimination under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. It says nothing about the Christians harassed out of Bethlehem and Gaza by their own neighbours. Instead, it pins the blame exclusively on the Jews.

With a few honourable exceptions, Synod chose to ignore the fact that one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab Christians hold full rights, worship freely and are growing rather than vanishing is Israel. That isn’t the case in the Palestinian territories, and legitimising this text does nothing to improve the lives or safety of Christians in the region.

History shows us that poisonous documents like Kairos II seldom remain theoretical. They outlive those who draw them up and can even end in bloodshed. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion – which gave rise to the belief that influential Jews rule the world – remains popular, particularly in Muslim countries in the Middle East. Let’s be under no illusion: by promoting Kairos II, at a time of unprecedented anti-Semitism and rising threats to British Jews, the church has chosen to fan the flames of prejudice.

The church didn’t have to choose. It could have stood with persecuted Christians in the Middle East by naming their actual, Islamist persecutors and taken a position more conducive to genuine peace in the Middle East. Instead, the church has reached for that trusty old hatchet: it’s all the fault of the Jews.

Where does new UK premier Andy Burnham stand on Israel and antisemitism?

Recent comments on Gaza
Burnham has been critical of Israel’s military campaign in the aftermath of October 7. He doubled down in a leadership campaign video released last week and took his own party to task.

He condemned Hamas and once again rejected antisemitism, but he argued Britain should “do more to put pressure on the Israeli government,” including considering further restrictions on arms exports and action against illegal West Bank settlements.

“I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza, my party didn’t get it right, and I am sorry about that,” he said. The party was “too slow to call for a ceasefire.”

He called images from Gaza “a scar on our collective conscience.”

His comments reflect a parliamentary push across the board that Britain should do more to take action against Israel, including supporting a ban on all Israeli goods coming from the West Bank — something that Ireland and other European countries have been pushing for.

In his video, Burnham stopped short of describing Israel’s actions as genocide, saying that such a determination should be made by international courts.

Mixed reaction in Jewish community
The video drew a swift response from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council. Burnham had seen “first hand the links between hatred of Israel, antisemitic extremism and deadly violence against British Jews,” the groups said.

They urged Burnham and other political leaders to “show the utmost care in their rhetoric” at a time when antisemitism in Britain had become “more normalized, more extreme and more violent.”

British Jews will watch closely how Burnham balances his longstanding engagement with the Jewish community and his increasingly critical stance toward the Israeli government. Members of the Jewish community watch as forensic officers search the area after two people were stabbed in north London’s Golders Green neighborhood, on April 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Chief Executive Gideon Falter read aloud an open letter to Burnham on Monday calling on him to take a stand against the rise in antisemitism in the country.

“Your legacy will not be remembered solely in terms of tax rates and hospital waiting times,” Falter said. “It will be whether Jews were murdered or thrived in Andy Burnham’s Britain.”

Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg congratulated Burnham on X, and welcomed the new prime minister’s “early commitment to tackling antisemitism,” and that the Board “will work with his administration towards the UK playing its strongest role in global peace and security.”

Ephraim Mirvis, the country’s chief rabbi, posted a photo on X of himself and Burnham and offered a blessing.

“He assumes the immense responsibility of leadership at a time of great challenge, both at home and abroad,” Mirvis said. “May he be blessed with the wisdom, strength and good judgment to keep our country safe and may his service bring prosperity and harmony for all.”

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07/21 Links Pt1: What the U.S. and Iran Are Fighting Over; Foreign Threats Breed Self-Sufficiency; The inconvenient truth about Gaza’s ability to govern; The UN Has Run Out of Alibis

From Ian:

Is an Abraham Security Alliance Possible in the Middle East?

Is a greater Middle East security alliance, encompassing Israel, Lebanon, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and beyond, a realistic prospect? Or will Hamas- and PLO-supporting Turkey replace Israel as the U.S. administration's preferred regional partner?

In his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in July 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu floated an "Abraham Security Alliance," a NATO-style framework open to states that "have made peace with Israel and those that will."

In February 2026, Netanyahu unveiled what strategists call the "Hexagon Alliance": Israel's technological and security core, linked to India's manufacturing weight, Greek and Cypriot Mediterranean corridors, Emirati economic channels, and Somaliland's Red Sea oversight. Lebanon has since agreed to direct negotiations with Israel. Syria's al-Sharaa government has held direct dialogue with Jerusalem.

Nonetheless, there appears to be a strategic shift inside the U.S. administration: beyond personal rapport between Trump and Erdogan, there is a growing view that Turkey can assume roles Israel has traditionally played, engaging Arab states wary of Iran. Ankara is exploiting this opening, positioning itself as the Islamic world's next leader, replacing the Iranian regime's role as regional hegemon and becoming Israel's principal long-term strategic competitor.

Despite Turkey's upgraded military presence in the Middle East and East Africa, Erdogan has not operationalized his threats on Israel. He has avoided military confrontation thus far, and has refrained from disrupting Israeli operations in Syria, despite housing and training Hamas on Turkish soil. Notwithstanding Turkey's malign regional behavior, the U.S. administration still is considering Turkey as a politically "lower-cost" regional security manager.

If the Abraham Security Alliance is to mean anything beyond aspirational rhetoric, the U.S. must expand the Abraham Accord alliances. Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Somaliland, Greece, Cyprus, and others are realistic candidates. However, the expanded security alliance will depend on a strong U.S., Israel, and Gulf Arab foundation that would be shaken by Turkey's neo-Ottoman imperial ambitions and destabilizing influence.

Foreign Threats Breed Self-Sufficiency

There are people who imagine that cutting American aid would irreparably damage the Jewish state. Yet Israel defeated the Arabs in June 1967, again, as it did in 1948, without any U.S.-supplied weapons.

Precisely because of Israel's long history of denials and embargoes by the British and U.S. governments, its nine million people are enough to support disproportionately large and diverse military industries.

This state of nine million is one that can research, develop and manufacture the world's heaviest battle tank, a full range of tactical and strategic missiles, and the interceptors that inaugurated humanity's first instance of space warfare two years ago.

Israelis reacted to the start of U.S. military aid after the Six-Day War with deep, genuine gratitude, eagerly pursuing any opportunity to reciprocate.

Israel's Mossad was inside the Soviet Union, which the CIA could only watch from afar, and offered up all it uncovered.

After its October 1973 tank-warfare victories, Israel supplied the U.S. Army's tacticians with every bit of data for their, and NATO's, revolutionary "fight outnumbered and win" manuals, explicitly based on the desperate Golan Heights fight in which 200 Israeli tanks destroyed four times as many Soviet-built Syrian tanks.

In my many encounters in Israel over the years, I have heard a great eagerness to contribute Israel's research and development talents, whose fruits are now built into some of the most capable U.S. weapons, most conspicuously in the F-35 fighter jet, whose innovative helmet-mounted piloting system was entirely developed in Israel.

Israel's pilots sat in their cockpits for hours to reach and bomb Iran's distant missile launchers, which were attacking U.S. bases and U.S. allies, as well as Israel itself.

Israel would never refuse any military help it could provide, as countless U.S. officers have known for decades.

Michael Doran: What the U.S. and Iran Are Fighting Over

Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is a die-hard jihadi. For him, the officials negotiating with Washington serve as infidel handlers: officials who translate the demands of the IRGC into language acceptable to Western diplomats.

The IRGC struck ships that transited the Strait of Hormuz without coordinating with it to enforce Vahidi's interpretation of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed in mid-June. Vahidi never accepted the U.S. view that Iran would reopen the strait and treat it as an international waterway rather than a sovereign asset.

Trump has opted for a campaign of calibrated escalation designed to force Vahidi to accept the American definition of the MoU, seeking to impose enough pain to make the status quo untenable without igniting a wider regional war. But this theory expects Vahidi to place the welfare of Iranian society above the institutional interests of the IRGC.

Trump's ongoing campaign is unlikely to eliminate the drone threat. Intermittent drone attacks on commercial shipping are enough to drive insurers from the market and achieve severe disruption. Vahidi recently struck a desalination plant in Kuwait with ballistic missiles that are also hard to eradicate.

This reveals how profoundly warfare has changed. The era in which U.S. airpower could rapidly neutralize a regional adversary at acceptable cost is ending. It is being replaced by a more contested, attritional environment in which weaker states can buy time and impose significant costs.

These battlefield realities are already reshaping American strategy. Washington will increasingly prize allies that possess battle-tested militaries, functioning defense industries, advanced intelligence, and practical experience defeating missiles, drones, and hardened targets. It will prize, above all, allies that help the U.S. understand and counter the emerging Sino-Russian-Iranian military system. Israel meets those criteria. Very few others do.

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

That’s exactly what Ireland’s law is.

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

That puts American companies operating there in a legal bind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its ban applies only to Jewish towns.

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

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

Perhaps they think America is bluffing?

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

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

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

Ireland's Antizionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have now received the response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Case closed.

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

Friedman: A Palestinian state will destroy Abraham Accords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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