01/18 Links: Why Netanyahu Asked Trump to Wait on Attacking Iran; US considering asylum for British Jews; Iran doctors put death toll in suppressed uprising at over 16,500; Syria’s Next Phase Offers Little Hope for Kurds

From Ian:

Why Netanyahu Asked Trump to Wait on Attacking Iran

Israel has reportedly urged President Trump to postpone any immediate military action against Iran. Israeli decision-making is not rooted in diplomatic hesitation or lack of defense systems but in a sober intelligence assessment.

Israel's intelligence establishment has concluded that the current moment is strategically unfavorable for a strike and that such an action would be unlikely to achieve the collapse of the Iranian regime.

Regime change in Iran is not determined by popular dissatisfaction alone, but by the continued loyalty of the state's coercive institutions - most notably the regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The regime has demonstrated a willingness to use unprecedented and brutal force to suppress dissent. Israeli intelligence analysts assess that as long as the Iranian military and the IRGC remain cohesive and willing to shoot protesters, the likelihood of regime collapse remains low.

History has shown repeatedly that authoritarian governments fall not when protests erupt, but when security forces fracture, refuse orders, or shift allegiance. At present, there is no credible indication that such a split is imminent within Iran's power structure.

In short, Israeli intelligence concludes that the Iranian regime will not collapse as long as the army and the IRGC remain willing and able to fire on their own population. Until that reality changes, restraint is viewed not as weakness, but as strategic prudence.

Amb. Alan Baker: Are Israelis Not Entitled to Human Rights?

On a daily basis, we are witnessing a mass-phenomenon of deliberately one-sided accusations being leveled solely against Israel, alleging human rights violations against Palestinians. Slanted social media platforms, once-reputable international media outlets, politically-biased UN bodies and human rights committees, and clearly ignorant show-biz celebrities all unthinkingly accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid, cruelty and disproportionate military actions.

Curiously, all these "paragons of international virtue" appear to be selectively blind as to the human rights of everyone else in the world. They flagrantly ignore the fact that Israel and its citizens are no less deserving of human rights. They ignore the fact that the public in Israel suffer from ongoing and daily acts of terror by Palestinian terror groups and Islamist fanatics. They have deliberately chosen to forget, or deny, the tragic massacre, rape, butchery, burning, and torture of many hundreds of Israelis and foreign citizens on Oct. 7, 2023.

All this is being orchestrated through a meticulous, well-oiled and well-financed system of brainwashing, emanating from the coffers of the likes of Qatar, Iran, and Turkey. Sadly, this is all being willingly and enthusiastically absorbed and cheered-on by an international choir in Europe and other Western countries, all too willing to absorb and propagate such propaganda and brain-washing and to direct it solely against Israel.

It is high time that the states and organizations within the international community, as well as international media outlets and the manipulated social media platforms, become aware of the absurdity and acute lack of any logical proportion in their anti-Israel fixation.

US considering asylum for British Jews

The Trump administration is discussing the possibility of offering asylum to Britain’s Jews, The Telegraph can reveal.

Robert Garson, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, said he had been in talks with the State Department about providing sanctuary for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in the UK.

Mr Garson, who was born in Manchester, told The Telegraph that the UK was “no longer a safe place for Jews”.

He said the Islamist attack on a Manchester synagogue and the widespread anti-Semitism evident in the wake of the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel had led him to conclude British Jews should be offered refuge in the US.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Garson said he could see “no future” for Jews in the UK and laid much of the blame on Sir Keir Starmer for allowing anti-Semitism to flourish.

Mr Garson said he had raised the idea of offering the US as a safe haven to British Jews with Mr Trump’s anti-Semitism tsar in his capacity as a board member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Mr Trump appointed Mr Garson to the council last May after firing board members appointed by Joe Biden.

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01/17 Links: The Board of Peace Isn’t About Gaza — It’s About Replacing the UN; Trump Calls for End to ‘Sick Man’ Khamenei’s Rule; The strange and beautiful love story of the Maori and the Jews

From Ian:

An undercover reporter joined France’s anti-Israel movement. Here’s what she found

If antisemitism has long plagued France, dating back to the Middle Ages, it’s now metastasizing in new, alarming ways, according to a recently published book by French journalist Nora Bussigny.

Titled “Les Nouveaux Antisémites” (“The New Antisemites”), it exposes virulent Jew-hatred endemic to many far-left organizations in France, infiltrated by Bussigny as part of a lengthy undercover investigation. Using a false identity, Bussigny uncovered pervasive antisemitism and anti-Zionism, now a common denominator among diverse groups that often disagree on other matters.

“I saw with my own eyes to what degree Islamists, far-left so-called ‘progressive’ militants and feminist, LGBT and ecological activists are closely linked in their shared hatred of Jews and Israel,” Bussigny told The Times of Israel during a recent interview on Zoom.

“It’s ironic because historically, the extreme left was fragmented. Many radical groups never got along despite dreaming of a convergence of their struggles. Before October 7, [2023,] I was convinced they could only unify around a common hatred of the police and what it symbolizes for them. But I’ve now seen how their hate for Jews, or rather Zionists, to use their term, is more effective in bringing them together in common cause.”

The Hamas-led invasion on October 7, 2023, saw some 1,200 people in southern Israel slaughtered by thousands of marauding terrorists, and 251 abducted as hostages to the Gaza Strip. The massacre touched off the two-year war against Hamas in Gaza and an unprecedented spike in global antisemitism.

“Les Nouveaux Antisémites” — whose subtitle translates in English as “An Investigation by an Infiltrator within the Ranks of the Far Left” — opens with a dedication to Régine Skorka-Jacubert, a Holocaust survivor and member of the French Resistance. Nora Bussigny at the podium of the French Senate as she receives the 2025 Prix Edgar Faure for best political book of the year. (Courtesy Nora Bussigny)

“While writing the book, I was invited to the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris,” said Bussigny, 30, speaking in French. “As part of its education program, they have a terminal which scans your face and attributes to you someone deported to a Nazi concentration camp. You’re then asked to commit yourself to help preserve the person’s memory and keep their story alive. I told myself I’d dedicate my book to Régine.”

In the book’s introduction, Busssigny explains her incognito endeavor, for which she risked her personal safety.

“During an entire year, I participated, with full discretion, in demonstrations, meetings, online discussions,” she writes. “I investigated university campuses. I applauded next to hysterical crowds glorifying terrorism. I took part in feminist protests and dialogued in municipal facilities with members of an organization [Samidoun] outlawed in many countries for its close, proven links to terrorism. I chanted against ‘genocide’ and for ‘Palestinian resistance’ — obviously armed ‘resistance’ — during demonstrations supposedly defending the rights of women and LGBT people, with no mention of homosexuals being tortured or murdered in the name of Sharia law in the Gaza Strip, governed by Hamas.”

Trump’s Fateful Choice in Iran

To be sure, there are valid strategic reasons for his reluctance. Most U.S. interventions to exact justice on foreign tyrants have ended poorly. No American silver bullet will cleanly depose Tehran’s Islamist leaders and peacefully transition the country to a stable, representative democracy. Since World War II, fewer than a quarter of authoritarian collapses have led to democracy, and those triggered by foreign intervention have been particularly unlikely to do so. Violent revolutions are coercive contests; they are won by those who can organize force, not mobilize hashtags.

That said, U.S. military action can still constructively shape events, even if it can’t control their ultimate outcome. Foreign intervention will not spawn an Iranian Denmark, in other words, but it could prevent the entrenchment of an Iranian North Korea.

In this context, Trump should be clear about his objectives, focusing on three fronts. He should seek to deter the violence against civilians by signaling that the cost of this slaughter will outweigh the benefits of suppression. He should insist on tearing down the digital iron curtain that has allowed the regime to massacre people in the dark (for the past week, connectivity in Iran has hovered at 1 percent). And he should make a goal of fracturing Iran’s security forces by degrading the regime’s command and control, thereby creating doubt within their ranks and emboldening the population.

On the last point, I consulted with three friends in the U.S. military and intelligence communities who have a century of collective experience dealing with Iran. Johnny Gannon, a Persian-speaking veteran of the CIA, advised that any U.S. action should serve to “demoralize, damage, and denigrate” the adversary. He paraphrased Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince about the risk of half measures: “One should either caress a man or crush him. If you injure him, you should do so in such a way that you need not fear his revenge.” If you aim for the supreme leader, you best not miss.

A retired senior U.S. military official who has studied Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for decades recommended striking the country’s missile capabilities and also aiming for command centers, such that the regime would be unable to coordinate internally and protesters could reemerge without fear. According to another former intelligence official, Trump’s action must convince the IRGC that it has just three options: change voluntarily, be changed by protesters, or be changed by Donald Trump.

The Islamic Republic may have prevailed in this latest battle, but it is destined to lose the war against its own society. The medium-term bet on who will prevail between an 86-year-old dictator and his young society is clear. Khamenei will soon be vanquished by time, and 47 years of the Islamic Republic’s hard power will eventually be defeated by the soft power of a 2,500-year-old nation that wants to reclaim its proud history.

Trump appears relaxed about the fate of Iran. Yet the machinery of war is already in motion: The USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier, is reportedly en route to the Middle East. Given their violent history with Trump, Iran’s leaders know they cannot rest easily.

The Silence of the Left on Iran

For the exiles I spoke with, the most disturbing—and telling—thing about the tepid response was the contrast with the impassioned reaction to Gaza. “Why is it that when Palestinians—armed or unarmed—fight for liberation, it is seen as a moral duty to support them, but when Iranians protest, they are labeled ‘armed terrorists’ or ‘agents of Mossad?’” Shams, the feminist scholar, said.

Janet Afary, a religious-studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, helped put this dissonance in context. She described for me a long history that would explain the left’s knee-jerk sympathy for the Islamic Republic, starting with the leftist elements that helped lead the 1979 revolution (alongside the clerics who ended up seizing full control). For those who want to see the end of Israel, the regime’s identity as a defender of Palestinian rights—and a funder of extremist anti-Israel groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah—has given it cachet.

Afary recalled confronting a colleague who was dismissive of the 2022 protests, which were largely driven by feminists; this person wondered why Iranian women can’t just wear hijab like other women in the Middle East. “Are you saying this because you don’t want the government of the Islamic Republic to be overthrown because it supports the Palestinian cause?” Afary asked her. She said yes. “To my face!” Afary said.

The ideological left doesn’t know what to do with violence that doesn’t involve a Western aggressor, according to Kamran Matin, another exile and an international-relations professor at the University of Sussex in England. Matin noted other groups that received only muted support from anti-imperialists, including the Yazidis, persecuted by ISIS, and Rohingya, victims of the Myanmar government—in which case the aggressors were not Western hegemons. If you jump to the barricades against these atrocities, “then the whole edifice of postcolonial anti-imperialism basically collapses. Because for them, it feels like they dilute their case against the West by accepting non-Western cases.”

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01/16 Links Pt2: Our duty to British Jews; A Century of Rewarding Palestinian Terror; West Midlands Police chief retires following Maccabi fan ban scandal

From Ian:

Our duty to British Jews

We must be clear about this hatred’s source: a toxic alliance between the nihilistic ‘decolonial’ campus left that views Israel as the embodiment of everything that it despises, and Islamist influence in Muslim communities where anti-Semitic tropes too often go unchallenged. Britain cannot be a successful multifaith democracy if Islamist ideology is not exposed and challenged. Islamic organisations found to be peddling extremism must be shut down. Immigrants who espouse Islamist views must be deported.

Those in civic life, too, must be exposed and challenged when they fail to protect minorities. Bodies such as the National Education Union must be forced to confront open anti-Semitism within their ranks – a culture that normalises bigotry must be rejected with the full force of the law. The NHS is not so short of staff that it must keep employing those guilty of anti-Semitic behaviour. Many doctors found guilty of espousing violent hatred of Jews find themselves suspended, but far fewer are struck off, despite the obvious risk to Jewish patients.

The problem goes right to the top. Keir Starmer pledged to do ‘whatever it takes’ to tackle anti-Semitism following the Heaton Park synagogue attack. Yet he celebrated the release of an Egyptian activist who it later emerged had once said that ‘we need to kill more’ Zionists. Starmer had been un-aware of the comments; for British Jews, it all suggests their security is an afterthought.

Resisting anti-Semitism at home means fighting it abroad. Britain should be doing everything it can to assist Iran’s protestors. The Islamic Republic is the world’s leading sponsor of attacks on Jews – from its support for the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, to its funding of ‘anti-Zionist’ NGOs and television channels. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is believed to operate in Britain, surveilling dissidents, intimidating campaigners and even planning kidnappings. Yet No. 10 confirmed this week that it would not proscribe the organisation, which would make it illegal to support the IRGC.

What begins with Jews does not end with them. Countries that become unsafe for Jews – the Spain of the Inquisition, Germany in the 1930s, Russia in the past decade – are those where freedom eventually dies. Never Again is not a platitude, but a promise we must keep for all our sakes.

Lahav Harkov: Fight Harder

Review of 'As a Jew' by Sarah Hurwitz
Hurwitz dedicates a significant portion of her book to defending Zionism and Israel, and she calls her avoidance of the topic in Here All Along a “cop-out.” She blames herself for having wanted to spare the controversy and avoid acknowledging the importance of Israel to today’s Jews and the justice of its existence. But she still makes sure to broadcast that she’s not one of those Zionists. She’s “appalled by Israel’s current right-wing government; sickened by the racism and extremism of its most senior government officials; horrified by radical settler violence…deeply troubled by Israel’s ongoing military occupation…anguished about the war in Gaza with its devastating casualties and destruction.”

This kind of virtue-signaling is not surprising from a former Obama staffer, even one who has immense Jewish pride and who has engaged in serious self-examination on the matter and hopes to encourage other Jews to do the same.

Hurwitz repeatedly refers to her political “side,” facetiously and in scare quotes, when distancing herself from the left because of its weaknesses on anti-Semitism. She admirably takes on some liberal Jewish shibboleths, as when she expresses “a feeling of loss” about how Reform Judaism chose to discard Jewish spirituality. She is correct to question whether those who pursue social justice as the true core of Judaism are implying that their “existence as a Jew is valid because it benefits people other than Jews.”

As a Jew is peppered with reminders, however, that Hurwitz is willing to distance herself from liberal axioms only up to a point. She writes that she doesn’t mean to dwell on Christian anti-Semitism—and one can grant her that it is, historically, very important—but she mentions the Soviet-inspired and Muslim-dominated anti-Semitism of our current discourse only glancingly.

Hurwitz is reminiscent of the talented British-American writer Hadley Freeman, who wrote the book House of Glass, about how her family survived the Holocaust. It could have been a classic, if only she hadn’t larded it with constant references to President Donald Trump being a fascist. In As a Jew, Hurwitz lays her incomplete self-examination bare by essentially blaming rising anti-Semitism in America on Trump.

Hurwitz says that she was first struck by the anti-Semitism of her side of the aisle during the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. But more than once she makes the argument that “this rhetoric from the far left came in the wake of a wave of alarming rhetoric and violence from the far right, particularly during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.” While the spike in online anti-Semitism in 2016 was undeniable, and while there has been an alarming increase in anti-Semitism, or at least a willingness to accept it, by influential right-wing figures in 2025, data unambiguously show that anti-Semitism in the U.S. started to rise sharply in 2014, when the first wave of Black Lives Matter riots began and when Hurwitz was still working for the Obama administration.

As a Jew is well written and thoroughly researched, and worth recommending to the people Bret Stephens called “October 8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and suddenly realized that a lot of people hate us. It’s really not a book for people who came to that realization long ago and have knowledge of Jewish history beyond a 101 class. Perhaps, in her third volume, Sarah Hurwitz will follow the logic of her own arguments, take account of her own experience at the Federation General Assembly, and go to battle openly with the enemies she refuses to engage with directly in the pages of As a Jew.

A Century of Rewarding Palestinian Terror

Palestinian Arabs have been fighting Jews violently in the Holy Land for more than a hundred years. The strategy has hardly brought them success, but they have retained it, in part because anti-Jewish mayhem brings them political rewards from important foreign actors.

Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities were innovative - the attackers livestreamed their actions with Go-Pro cameras - but they also fit an old pattern. Hamas said it was defending Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, and named its attack "al-Aqsa Flood." In the 1929 Hebron massacre in British Mandate Palestine, the Arab rioters, who killed nearly 70 Jews, likewise screamed that they were defending al-Aqsa. Linking the two episodes is the killers' sense that massacres of civilians are politically beneficial.

British officials condemned the rioters in 1929 for pitiless murder, and then tried to mollify them. They failed. The consequences of their appeasement effort remain with us today. In Britain, the 1929 riots energized anti-Zionist forces, who interpreted the inhumanity of the bloodletting as a sign of the vehemence of Arab grievances.

High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor, the British-appointed governor of Palestine, proved far more eager to accommodate than to punish those responsible. He favored radical policy changes to remedy Arab complaints against the Jews and pressed for these changes as necessary to prevent future riots. As a result, the threat of more riots became the mainspring of Palestinian Arab diplomacy and this intimidation campaign succeeded. Colonial Office experts proposed backing away from the Balfour Declaration.

The parallels to the current war in Gaza are obvious. People around the world did express horror at the murders, rapes, mutilations, and kidnappings of men, women, and children by Hamas on Oct. 7. Yet very little time passed before many of these same people argued that the key to preventing future terrorism of this kind is to placate the Zionists' enemies - by recognizing Palestine as a state, endorsing untrue reports of famine in Gaza, and accusing Israel falsely of "genocide."

As in the aftermath of the 1929 riots, rewards for savagery will increase, not decrease, the likelihood of future terrorist violence. This lays a foundation for another century of self-defeating Arab anti-Zionist belligerence. The rewards can be expected to empower the more hateful and oppressive elements in Palestinian Arab politics, making peace with Israel harder to achieve.

The Nazi War Criminal the Arab World Protected

Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia provided a stage for the lethal operations of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Jerusalem's Grand Mufti.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he had orchestrated anti-Jewish pogroms in the Land of Israel, and during World War II, he managed German propaganda to the Muslim world and developed strategies to mobilize Muslim minorities across the Soviet Union and the Balkans for the Third Reich.

In Yugoslavia he helped raise three Waffen-SS divisions composed entirely of local Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

These units perpetrated horrific war crimes - massacring Serbs and Jews, incinerating entire villages with their inhabitants still inside, carrying out systematic rape, torture, and pillage.

When the war concluded in 1945, Yugoslavia's liberated government moved to investigate the Mufti's role in Nazi atrocities, formally listing him as a war criminal and petitioning a UN special committee for his extradition.

Al-Husseini's allies throughout the Arab world unleashed tremendous pressure and threats that forced Yugoslav authorities to retreat from extradition demands.

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01/16 Links Pt1: Israel cannot heal from war with Hamas while Ran Gvili remains in Gaza; Neither the ayatollah nor the shah; Israel’s quiet gambit on the Red Sea chessboard

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Israel cannot heal from war with Hamas while Ran Gvili remains in Gaza

Israel is approaching a new phase in the Gaza plan: a technocratic committee, tentative negotiations over disarmament, and renewed international focus on reconstruction.

Yet one unresolved wound keeps cutting through every communiqué and timetable: the fate of one young man whose absence sits at the center of the country’s conscience.

St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili, the last hostage held in Gaza, is a son, a soldier, and a human being with a family waiting for him. His return, even for burial, remains unfinished business for a nation built on a promise that those who serve will never be abandoned.

Phase II is being described in diplomatic language as the movement from fighting to governance. In The Jerusalem Post’s coverage of the new phase, US special envoy Steve Witkoff framed it as “moving from ceasefire to demilitarization.”

The words matter, because they signal intent. They also expose a hard truth: A plan that claims to turn a page still cannot close the most basic chapter, bringing home the last hostage.

As the Post’s Seth J. Frantzman has noted in analysis and reporting around the plan, Phase II proceeds while Gvili's remains are still in Gaza, still unrecovered.

Policy architecture matters. Ceasefire terms matter. Demilitarization frameworks matter. Committees and clauses still fail a society when they float above the human cost that created them. Israel’s public can hold complexity and trade-offs in its head. Israelis also understand something simpler: There is no “next stage” in national healing while the last hostage remains in limbo.

Gvili's family has said this plainly, and it deserves to be treated as national guidance, not private grief: “We cannot move to the next phase of the deal while even one hostage remains in Gaza.” That sentence carries more moral weight than a dozen briefings.

For Gvili's family in Meitar, the war’s human ledger will feel balanced only when he is home. His mother’s words captured a widely felt truth: “Without Gvili, our country can’t heal.” Grief does not respond to diplomatic phrasing. Communal cohesion does not form around progress reports. It forms around shared obligations kept.

Gvili's story is deeply Israeli. He was recovering at home, wounded and awaiting treatment, when the October 7 massacre unfolded. He put on his uniform and ran toward danger to protect people in kibbutzim who were not his own. He acted out of responsibility and out of a reflex Israelis know well: You move when others are in danger. His last known actions were in defense of life.

Longest-held Israeli hostages David and Ariel Cunio break their silence

Among the longest-held living Israeli hostages freed from Gaza, brothers David and Ariel Cunio, have begun speaking publicly for the first time since their release, describing their prolonged captivity marked by starvation, abuse and constant fear that escape would cost their loved ones their lives.

The Cunio brothers, kidnapped from their homes during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, are giving their first joint interviews as part of an international media tour coordinated by Fuente Latina, a nonprofit news organization that works to bring accurate reporting and firsthand testimonies about Israel, the Middle East and antisemitism to Spanish-language media worldwide.

Ahead of their media appearances, the brothers spoke exclusively with Fuente Latina, which provided their testimonies to JNS.

The Cunio brothers were released from Hamas captivity on Oct.13, 2025, as part of a hostage-release agreement under the Gaza ceasefire plan. After 738 days in captivity, Ariel Cunio said he believed for much of that time that he would never see his brother David again.

“In captivity, every day I planned an escape,” Ariel said. “But I knew that if I got out, I would be lynched in the street. And even if I survived and got home somehow, I feared discovering later that my brother or my girlfriend had been killed because I escaped.”

The brothers, both Argentine-Israeli citizens, were among eight members of the Cunio family abducted during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, making them the largest single family taken hostage that day.

Ariel described watching his brother Eitan’s home burn as Hamas terrorists attacked their kibbutz. In a family WhatsApp message sent shortly before he was taken, Ariel wrote, “Here begins the nightmare.”

Terrorists entered his safe room, killed his puppy, and abducted him and his girlfriend, Arbel, on a motorcycle. During the journey into Gaza, they fell multiple times, and their captors intervened to prevent a mob celebrating the attack from lynching them.

Ariel said he was held above ground in civilian buildings and observed weapons stored in UNRWA-marked bags and in areas designated as humanitarian zones.

“My captors tried to convince me to convert to Islam,” he said. “They told me it was a pity that I would die and go to hell as a Jew instead of going to paradise as a Muslim.”

White House confirms Gaza Board of Peace members including Turkish, Qatari representatives

The White House announced the members of the new Gaza Board of Peace (BoP) on Friday, which will be responsible for rebuilding the enclave and ensuring the disarmament of Hamas.

The announcement includes a list of members of the BoP, alongside the designation of the commander of the International Stabilization Force (ISF), and the Gaza Executive Board, which includes representatives from Turkey and Qatar.

The statement also detailed that Dr. Ali Sha’ath will be in charge of the technocratic National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), which will "oversee the restoration of core public services, the rebuilding of civil institutions, and the stabilization of daily life in Gaza, while laying the foundation for long-term, self-sustaining governance."

The BoP, with US President Donald Trump assuming the role of chairman, will be composed of seven executive founding members: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio; US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff; Jared Kushner; Sir Tony Blair; Marc Rowan; Ajay Banga; and Robert Gabriel.

The statement also confirmed that former UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov will have an executive role "on the ground" as the High Representative for Gaza and serve as a link between the BoP and the NCAG administration.

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01/15 Links Pt2: Is America still good for the Jews?; When Synagogues Burn; Missing Anne Frank; Rachel Goldberg-Polin publishing memoir on grief-filled journey after son’s abduction

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Do Jewish Organizations Have the Resources For This Battle?

Indeed that is the main lesson, and it has far-reaching implications. Within the progressive coalition, it seems the expectation is that each crop of candidates will be more vocally anti-Zionist than their predecessors.

Which is why the Jersey City case is so interesting. On the one hand, one is tempted to say that the stakes are low in Jersey City—it has a Jewish population of 6,000 compared to nearly a million in New York City. Nor does it set any sort of national cultural or media tone the way Gotham does.

But on the other hand, that is why it is worrying that the outgoing mayor feels the need to put up these guardrails. BDS’s primary purpose in the U.S. is to foment suspicion and exclusion of Jews. That the DSA and similar progressive organizers are trying to blanket the country’s city councils with anti-Zionist fanatics shows their level of dedication to the spread of anti-Semitism. Your local town’s decision to divest from Israel may have no tangible economic effect, but it isn’t intended to: The point is to spread the social and cultural effects of anti-Semitism.

This doesn’t really have much to do with Israel at all. Jews are the targets, and not just in major U.S. cities or in state governments but everywhere.

All of this has been clarifying. And it means American Jewish organizations must find the resources to join the fight on all fronts.

Stephan Daisley: Is America still good for the Jews?

Just ten or twenty years ago, the U.S. was the most philosemitic nation on Earth with the exception of Israel.

The Constitution guaranteed religious pluralism and the culture was one in which Jews flourished in every conceivable profession and civic field.

Support for Israel was firmly bipartisan. By the dawn of the 21st century, antisemitism had been all but expelled from the mainstream.

A nation founded on liberalism and Protestant ethics is one primed to feel not just sympathy but solidarity with God's chosen people.

Jews found a home in America because it was their God who built the house. The Jews cannot be written out of America's story because their tradition is its co-author.

When Synagogues Burn

You cannot claim to care about antisemitic violence while elevating people who have celebrated those who preach it.

You cannot decry burning synagogues while honoring those who helped paint targets on them.

Because when public figures tell the world that Jewish institutions are “satanic”—or decline to challenge those who do—they are not engaging in provocative rhetoric. They are creating moral permission structures. They are telling unstable, angry, or radicalized people that Jews are evil—and that evil, in their minds, deserves to be destroyed.

That is how an idea becomes an accelerant.

Candace Owens did not light the fire in Jackson. Tamika Mallory did not. Louis Farrakhan did not. But they helped make it thinkable. They helped turn Jews from neighbors into metaphysical villains. And once that transformation occurs, a synagogue is no longer seen as a house of worship—it becomes, in the imagination of a radicalized mind, a legitimate target.

This is what antisemitism looks like in 2026. Not only swastikas and slurs, but influencer-driven demonology: Jews recast as cosmic enemies whose symbols, institutions, and very existence are portrayed as corrupt, satanic, and illegitimate.

So, the question for Mayor Mamdani is not whether he condemns arson after the fact. Almost anyone who is not steeped in antisemitism can do that. The real question is whether he is willing to confront the people who helped build the narrative that made it feel justified.

Because Jews do not need more empty – after the fact – statements of concern.

They need fewer people in positions of power who flirt with, excuse, or elevate those who traffic in the language that turns synagogues into kindling and Jews into targets.

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01/15 Links Pt1: Yes, Israel Can Apply Israeli Law to the West Bank; The Promise and Peril of Phase 2 in Gaza; Do Iranian lives matter?; Court Rules: Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Rearrested

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Yes, Israel Can Apply Israeli Law to the West Bank

Israel’s sovereign rights over all of Judea and Samaria do not dictate the form of governance there. Indeed, since the Oslo process of the early ’90s, Israel has not governed the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, who are instead misruled by the Palestinian Authority. Israel neither taxes them nor conscripts them; it does not write their schoolbooks or make their welfare policies or clean their streets. Israel’s current interactions with the Palestinian population focus almost entirely on hard security issues. Given that all nations enjoy an inherent right to self-defense, this would be the case whether the Palestinian areas were technically an independent sovereign or not.

President Trump’s 2020 peace plan, recently reaffirmed in his 20-point plan for peace, contemplated Israel extending its civil law to roughly half of Judea and Samaria, where the Jewish population is concentrated, and leaving the other half for a potential Arab state. This helps explain his comments about “annexation of the West Bank.” However, while Trump does not support Israel applying its law to those areas under Palestinian Authority control, that is not inconsistent with the proposals being discussed in the Knesset.

The so-called annexation plans being discussed in Israel are thus not about the incorporation of foreign territory into Israel proper. Rather, they are about ending the anomalous military administration that has applied in this area since 1967. After the Six-Day War, Israel never fully applied its domestic laws to the territory because it always expected the Arab states to sue for peace, and it was always prepared to transfer to them at least some part of the territory. Until the late 1980s, many Israelis assumed that the party for such negotiations would be Jordan. With the Oslo process, Israel’s “peace partner” became the Palestine Liberation Organization. In both cases, there was no point in hurriedly applying Israeli law to territory that might not remain Israeli because of a negotiated peace settlement.

Israel’s system of military governance in Judea and Samaria was always intended to be temporary. In retaining that system through decades of negotiations with the Palestinians, all of which resulted in their rejection of internationally backed statehood offers, Israel seems to have both severely misjudged the preferences and intentions of its Arab neighbors while also injuring its own citizens, creating a new problem of its own making.

Today, roughly 700,000 Jewish Israelis live in Judea and Samaria—where they have every legal and historical right to live and buy property. Yet Israelis and Arabs alike continue to find themselves governed by an odd patchwork of military regulations that has deliberately never been normalized or transparent to anyone and, over time, has become increasingly unwieldy. Property law is based on obscure Ottoman statutes, permitting for infrastructure projects is difficult and burdensome, and environmental regulations don’t exist for either Jews or Arabs. Clearly, this ad hoc situation is being sustained by a combination of official Israeli delusion and sloth and by external actors whose goal is to make life in these areas as practically unpleasant as possible for everyone.

Five decades of Arab rejectionism interspersed with violent terrorist assaults has made it untenable to continue to hold the legal regulation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in limbo. And neither international law nor Western principles of democracy stand in the way of Israel finally applying its own civil law to its own citizens in those areas.

Seth Mandel: The Promise and Peril of Phase 2 in Gaza

The decision to move to the second phase without a clear Hamas disarmament plan in place was not a mistake. As I argued last month, any extensive delay helps Hamas, which is gearing up for another round of fighting at some point. Also, the cease-fire deal pretty much locks any progress in place, since the IDF is in charge of security for any territory under reconstruction. Hamas can dig in, but it won’t advance.

The challenge that Hamas still presents, however, is significant. The scenario that Trump’s team expects to play out is the following: Life for Gazans improves exponentially in the half of the enclave stewarded by the Israelis and a supplemental international force, and pressure on Hamas increases while the humanitarian crisis abates.

But here’s another scenario: The moment shovels get put in the ground on the Israeli-controlled side, Hamas begins firing rockets and challenging the troops along the Yellow Line with skirmishes and attempted incursions. In this environment, the stabilization force never materializes and the technocrats wait for the skies to clear. With rebuilding frozen, Israel has no choice but to go into Hamas-controlled Gaza and disarm the terror group by force. But the renewed fighting takes a toll on the civilians left in Hamas’s half of the enclave, and scenes from the two years of war start replaying themselves.

Trump will obviously support the forced disarmament of Hamas even (or especially) if Israel is the one to do it. But will the Europeans fold? Will the stabilization force dissolve before it’s even on the ground?

There are only two reliable actors in this saga: the U.S. and Israel. Hamas is going to attempt to make it so that the U.S. and Israel are the only actors in the saga at all. As long as the U.S. and Israel are committed to victory, they’ll succeed. Because the enemy always gets a vote, and Hamas always votes for war.

John Ondrasik: The "Free Palestine" Crowd Seems to Have Zero Interest in Freeing Iran

In recent days the tyrannical Iranian regime has conducted mass arrests and massacred thousands of protesters. Yet American college campuses, so recently the site of passionate encampments in support of the Palestinian people, are eerily quiet about what's happening in Iran. The congressional microcaucus known as the Squad are oddly mum about the suffering of women and children in Iran.

What's happening in Iran is a human rights nightmare. The UN Human Rights Council in recent years has been a merry-go-round of "genocide" accusations against Israel. Yet it has issued zero resolutions and held no inquiries about Iran. There is no global demand for humanitarian aid for the Iranian protesters, or even a ceasefire, from the people and institutions who don't hesitate to weigh in on Israel and Gaza.

Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, an attorney with the Institute for Justice in Washington who spent her childhood in Iran, says the millions risking their lives in Iran don't fit neatly into "the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white."

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01/14 Links Pt2: The Jewish Test; Lessons in Leadership – with President Isaac Herzog; How anti-Zionism emerged as a modern ideology; Home Secretary: West Midlands Police chief ‘no longer has my confidence’

From Ian:

The Jewish Test

Near the Colosseum in Rome stands the Arch of Titus, built by the Emperor Domitian in 81 A.D. to honor his brother as a god. The triumphal monument testifies to the divine power of Titus by memorializing his defeat of the monotheistic Jews 11 years earlier. A relief panel shows legionaries marching in procession, carrying sacred objects looted from the Second Temple during the destruction of Jerusalem: the seven-branched Menorah, the Table of Showbread, the ritual trumpets. On the base of the arch, a modern visitor has scrawled three words in Hebrew: Am Yisrael Chai. “The people of Israel live.”

Two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor built an arch to commemorate the defeat of the Jews. Today, Rome is a museum. The Jews survive. Israel has been reborn in its ancestral land.

Empires rise and fall. The Jews alone among peoples are eternal. Their survival is one of history’s great mysteries. Conquered, dispersed, and persecuted, a small tribe endured across millennia. From antiquity to the modern age, Jews moved from empire to empire, barred from land ownership, excluded from politics, and confined to narrow professions while pressured to convert. In times of eased repression, many assimilated, while others adapted and flourished. With repression’s return, survival again took precedence. A faithful remnant preserved communal cohesion and carried tradition forward without territory, army, or state.

To explain the mystery of Jewish survival, European observers have repeatedly reached for supernatural causes. Their accounts tend to fall into two camps. The first interprets Jewish endurance as demonic. Its most influential exponent was Martin Luther, who insisted that “the devil … has taken possession of this people,” leading them to worship not God but “their gifts, their deeds, their works.” Accusing them of usury, deception, and moral corruption, Luther concluded that “no heathen has done such things and none would do so except the Devil himself and those whom he possesses, like he possesses the Jews.”

The second camp retained the supernatural frame but reversed its moral valence. Instead of demonic possession, it discerned divine design. St. Augustine argued that the continued existence of the Jews after their defeat by Rome served a specific function within Christian history. God preserved the Jewish people so that they might remain living custodians of the Scriptures, whose antiquity and integrity underwrote Christian claims about prophecy and fulfillment. For that reason, Augustine insisted, the Jews were to be neither exterminated nor gathered back to their land and restored politically. Citing Psalm 59, he emphasized that Scripture does not say only, “Slay them not, lest they forget Your law.” It adds, “Disperse them.” Survival without dispersion would have frustrated the divine purpose. Scattered among the nations, Jews endured as witnesses—preserving the texts of the old covenant while, through their continued subordination, testifying to the triumph of the new.

America rejected Europe’s supernatural framework altogether. The Puritans identified with the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible and saw America as a second Promised Land. They did not treat the Jews as cursed enemies. The covenant they imagined was shared, not hierarchical. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment had stripped Jewish survival of theological mystery altogether, grounding civic life in the equality of individuals before the law. From its founding, the United States absorbed Jews into public life as fellow citizens rather than symbols—neither demonic nor providential, but equal participants in a common political order.

Melanie Phillips: Britain’s cultural emergency

There’s been deep shock that a Jewish MP, Damien Egan, was barred by a school in his constituency, Bristol Brunel Academy, from visiting it last September after being invited to speak there about democracy and public service.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, teachers and activists from the school and the National Education Union objected to him being given a platform on the grounds that he is vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

The union wrote gloatingly in September:
This is a clear message: politicians who openly support Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are not welcome in our schools.

The incident was revealed by the Communities Secretary, Steve Reed, when he told a meeting of the Jewish Labour movement that a Jewish MP had been refused permission to visit a school in his own constituency “in case his presence inflames the teachers”.

Reed called this “an absolute outrage”. Labour’s antisemitism adviser Lord Mann described as “one of the most serious incidents of antisemitism” that has happened in Britain.

Others have expressed their horror. What has become of us as a society, they lament, when an MP is prevented from visiting a school in his own constituency? How can this have been allowed to strike both at the core precepts of education and at the basis of parliamentary democracy?

Clearly, such people haven’t been paying attention. They’re shocked because they haven’t realised what’s been happening in acute form ever since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on October 7 2023, and in less extreme form long before that.

The real concern should be not just that the exclusion of Egan is an attack on education and democracy. More fundamentally, it’s the result of a set of poisonous lies to demonise and destroy the Jewish state, and represent it as such an abominable evil that every Jew who supports it (which most do) are also evil in turn. This puts a target on the back of every Jew in Britain unless they denounce Israel for daring to defend itself against genocidal attack.

This monstrous calumny has now achieved the status of settled wisdom among the educated classes. That hasn’t just happened as a result of the “pro-Gaza” campaign that’s been roaring out of control for the past 27 months. It’s the result of a process that’s been going on for decades.

Seth Mandel: Kathy Hochul, Keep Our Names Out of Your Mouth

In between then and the Hamas rally, violent incursions of synagogues took place outside New York, too. At a synagogue in Los Angeles, anti-Semitic “protesters” broke in and smashed things up during an event. Then Mississippi’s largest synagogue—the same one firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights era—was burned to the ground by a man who claims he was acting against the “synagogue of Satan.” A few days later, the remains of a California shul destroyed in last year’s wildfires was vandalized.

And this is just the past six weeks.

The enemies of the Jews across the political spectrum, though especially the “globalize the intifada” set, have engaged in a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and violence at synagogues around the world, very much now including America. If you cannot say that without saying “and Islamophobia,” as the spineless Gov. Hochul did in her speech, you’d be better off not saying anything at all.

It’s not merely that “and Islamophobia” gives anti-Semitism the “all lives matter” treatment. In promoting a false equivalence between the two, Hochul has slandered the Jews of New York and put them in continued danger. She has also equated the victims and the perpetrators in a moment of moral obtuseness and political recklessness.

It’s not that I don’t understand why other cultures would strain to hitch their wagons to the Jews: We are the world’s eternal people, always standing back up in time to watch our pursuers fall into the ash heap of history.

But the “and Islamophobia” nonsense needs to stop, and Jewish leaders must insist on it. The next time Kathy Hochul, or any other of America’s sponge-willed political mediocrities, considers suggesting that being Jewish is itself “Islamophobic,” they should say nothing at all. If you can’t give us the basic respect we deserve, then just keep our names out of your mouth altogether.

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01/14 Links Pt1: How the Islamic Republic terrorised Iran – and the world; Why do they march for Gaza, but not Iran?; Witkoff announces start of Phase 2 of Gaza peace plan

From Ian:

How the Islamic Republic terrorised Iran – and the world

For all the phoney ‘anti-imperialists’ who have occasionally simped for the Islamic Republic, seeing it as some exotic bulwark against Western hegemony, it has long pursued its own Islamist imperialism across the Middle East. Hezbollah was founded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard following Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in 1982, and has been charged with menacing the Jewish State ever since. In the late-1980s, Iran courted Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Their full genocidal ambitions burst into the open on 7 October 2023, when they raped and murdered their way through southern Israel, to the rapturous approval of Tehran. Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen complete Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, pitted against America and the Jews – now brought low by Israeli and American bombs during the Gaza War, and by the ousting of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who had hosted its militants.

Beyond Tehran’s direct sponsorship of terror – which has extended into the West, too – the success of the Iranian Revolution became a symbol that the future belonged to political Islam. That another, barbaric world was possible. The Islamic Republic may have been a Shiite state, but insurgent Sunni groups took much inspiration from it, too. Ten months after the revolution, Sunni Islamists occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca, hoping to unseat a Saudi monarchy they saw as corrupted by the West and a Saudi clergy they saw as quietist and insufficiently Islamic. In turn, as Ali Ansari and Kasra Aarabi have noted, Khomeini’s efforts to spread the revolution, to stake a claim as the leader of a new global, Islamic vanguard, accelerated Saudi efforts to export its own Wahhabi ideology, ‘nurtur[ing] the rise of Sunni fundamentalism from Africa to the Far East’. We can also credit the ayatollah with effectively globalising anti-blasphemy violence, when he issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie on Valentine’s Day 1989, calling on Muslims the world over to murder the offending author.

Over five decades of infamy, the Islamic Republic has been a menace to life, limb and liberty far beyond Iran’s borders. What a moment for the world it would be if it were to fall.

Seth Mandel: Anti-America, Anti-Israel, and Anti-Knowledge

Jewish Insider has a fun scoop today that illustrates one of the iron laws of Western debate over the Middle East: The more knowledgeable one is on the subject, the more supportive of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship one is likely to be.

For example, U.S. aid to Israel is actually an economic stimulus program for American domestic manufacturers in defense-related industries. As a bonus, some hardware gets field tested in scenarios in which all of the risk is borne by Israel.

As a result, some of the maintenance of the U..S-led world order is offloaded to a capable ally while creating jobs here at home and keeping research and development humming along.

You can support this or you can oppose it, but this is what is meant by “U.S. aid to Israel.”

Yet opponents of U.S. military aid to Israel usually say things like “Americans are poor because the Zionist Occupied Government is sending their money to Jews abroad” rather than discuss the merits of actual policy, which is the opposite of sending Americans’ money away.

But because the arrangement is so beneficial to America, President Trump was shocked by the suggestion that U.S. policy would be influenced by these idiots. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to base defense manufacturing in Israel so as to defang the “aid” talking point among pundits who are far more influential in this debate than their range of knowledge would suggest they should be.

“When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed winding down U.S. military aid late last year,” Jewish Insider reports, “President Donald Trump was bewildered and did not immediately support the move.”

The president’s attitude seems to be: If a bunch of so-called America-first illiterates want to sabotage American defense manufacturing, they should just be ignored. To wit: “Trump could not understand why Netanyahu would propose ending American military aid to Israel and disagrees that the move would improve U.S. public opinion on the Jewish state, one source familiar with the president’s perspective told JI. He is skeptical that the plan would benefit either country, but is also not dismissing it out of hand, they said.”

From aid to alliance: Why Israeli leaders say ending US military assistance is long overdue

The Heritage plan calls for a 19-year phaseout, but Flesch said he wasn’t surprised to learn of the 10-year timeframe proposed by Netanyahu. “There were people on the Israeli side who were saying, ‘You’re being much too generous. Let’s end it sooner,” he said.

Partly driving the timing of the push are changing attitudes among Americans, including conservatives, regarding Israel. Harvard-Harris and Pew Research Center Polls show declining support for the Jewish state among younger Americans.

“We did this largely recognizing that on the U.S. side of the ledger, there were issues with U.S. support toward Israel, largely on the Democratic side, but obviously a little bit on the Republican side,” said Flesch. “Our assessment was it is time now with the renegotiation on the MOU to take into account these shifting domestic political dynamics and concerns.”

Despite supporting an end to military aid, Gideon Israel, of the Jerusalem-Washington Center, stressed that the growing American opposition to aid, including among young conservatives, can only be described as a “colossal Israeli public relations failure.”

“The fact that in America it’s seen as a charity is a failure by multiple prime ministers to explain that this is a great deal for America. All they’ve done is say, ‘Thank you,’ reinforcing the impression that it’s a handout,” he said. “And so we shouldn’t be surprised by a situation where everybody thinks it’s a waste of money and that Israel is a parasite.”

He described Israel as both a marketing and R&D department for American weaponry, boosting U.S. arms sales globally while also improving them. When Israel buys and successfully uses advanced U.S. weapons, such as the F-35, and takes out Russian and Chinese-made equipment, it proves their superiority, prompting other countries to buy them, he said.

“What they call ‘aid’ is pumped back into the America economy many times over,” he continued. “Yet, the only one who over the years has really talked about the benefits the U.S. received was Yoram Ettinger. He was an island in the sea.”

Ettinger said, “It’s true that I don’t hear anyone among Israel’s top policy makers or top diplomats in the U.S. educating Americans on the fact that this is the best-ever investment made by the United States, with a return on investment well over 1,000% year in and year out.”

When Israel first received the F-35 in 2018, it was a troubled aircraft with technical deficiencies, he noted. Israel quickly resolved those issues, “not because we are so smart, but because of the challenges facing Israel, which force us to upgrade any system which we receive from the United States.” Israeli F-35I Adir jets fly in formation. Photo by 1st Lt. Erik D. Anthony/U.S. Air Force.

It is well documented that Israel’s version of the F-35, called the “Adir,” includes extended range and significantly upgraded capabilities, including electronic warfare systems to counter Russian and Iranian air defense systems, which Israel has shared with the United States.

According to Defense.Info, in its June 14, 2025 issue: “Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Israel’s experience provides valuable insights into sustaining F-35 operations during high-intensity conflict.”

On Jan. 7, Lockheed Martin reported a record-breaking year for the F-35 program, delivering 191 F-35s, beating the previous delivery record of 142.

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01/13 Links Pt2: Why the West Is Split Over Political Islam; Scott Wiener’s Dangerous Cowardice; Australian writers’ festival canceled after booting Pro-Hamas author

From Ian:

Pierre Rehov: Why the West Is Split Over Political Islam

Trump's executive order represents the most serious American effort in decades to confront Islamist political networks that, in Washington, had long been considered merely political differences rather than lethal security threats.

Across the Atlantic... in the European Union and many of its major capitals, political Islam — often embodied by Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations — remains part of an approach for a larger "dialogue with Islamists". Can you imagine a "dialogue with Bolsheviks" or a "dialogue with the Third Reich"?

[T]he European Union has taken a far more cautious, at times permissive, approach, apparently preferring to regard Islamic extremists as potential voters.

The West ends up assimilating into Islam, rather than the other way around.

Rather than confronting liberal democratic values, these "entryist" actors advocate for "reinterpretations" that often blur the lines between religious freedom and political Islam.

Many Muslims in the West, of course, just want an opportunity for a better life, but they are not the ones in the engine room, driving the extremist Muslim train. The agenda, according to Islam itself, consists of sharing Allah's precious gift of Islam (Dar Al Islam, the "Abode of Islam") with the rest of the world (the Dar al Harb, the "Abode of War," those who have yet to submit to Islam) -- either by infiltration or force. Finally – when everyone in the world has submitted to Islam, whether they wanted to or not -- then there will be "peace." That, evidently, is when the world will enjoy "the Religion of Peace."

The result is a West that now follows two opposite paths. On one path, the United States under the Trump administration is moving toward clarity and confrontation, willing to codify ideological enemies and remove them from the political landscape. On the other path, Europe continues its policy of engagement, accommodation and submission, risk-balancing between wished-for civic inclusion and ideological risk. This split only serves to impede counterterrorism and jeopardize the West.

Who radicalized the Mississippi synagogue arsonist?

Hate found its way to Mississippi’s largest Jewish house of worship, Congregation Beth Israel, when an arsonist intentionally set fire to the synagogue at about 3 a.m. Saturday, damaging the only synagogue in Jackson.

The alleged suspect’s name, Stephen Spencer Pittman, was released late Monday. According to the FBI, he faces charges of maliciously damaging or destroying a building by fire or an explosive.

Russ Latino, a native Mississippian and founder of the Jackson-based Magnolia Tribune Institute, said an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi alleges Pittman admitted to law enforcement that he set the fire at Beth Israel because of its “Jewish ties.” Latino added that Pittman referred to the synagogue as the “Synagogue of Satan” and detailed the steps he took leading up to the arson.

Latino noted that “Synagogue of Satan” is an antisemitic phrase that both Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens have used in recent years. “Nothing in his personal profile points out anything political. There is no Trump or Biden or Harris. There are just a lot of bible verses,” he said, adding, “But ‘Synagogue of Satan’ well, that is a pretty specific alliteration and the same phraseology used by Fuentes and Owens,” he said.

His social media presence on X shows a young man posting about his Christian faith and baseball, where he was a standout player in both high school and college.

Latino said the entire Jackson community has rallied around the Beth Israel congregants. “Many different faith organizations had reached out and offered their houses of worship for the Beth Israel members so they can practice their faith,” he said.

Pro-Palestine protesters plotted to spy on Maccabi players

Pro-Palestine protesters plotted to spy on Maccabi Tel Aviv players after West Midlands Police “ignored” the threat to the Israeli football team.

The Telegraph has seen a message in a group chat that discusses trying to “obstruct” the visiting players from taking part in a fixture against Aston Villa on Nov 6.

Members of the West Midlands Palestine Solidarity Campaign were asked to scour hotel lobbies in Birmingham for Maccabi players, in an attempt to stop the match from going ahead.

Craig Guildford, Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, is facing mounting pressure to resign for banning Maccabi fans last year.

Critics argue his decision was politically motivated rather than based on genuine safety concerns, and that Mr Guildford has misled Parliament with his version of events. The force has also been accused of ignoring threats to the Israeli players and their fans.

The Telegraph can reveal attempts by pro-Gaza activists to track down Maccabi players the night before the match.

An unidentified campaigner said the group could “still cancel this match if we obstruct team Maccabi from attending” and called for volunteers for “MISSION CRITICAL search actions”.

Activists were tasked with searching “hotel lobbies and dining areas” on the night before the game, looking for faces in a lineup of Maccabi players on the team’s website in an attempt to cancel the match.

They were also asked to work as “spotters” at the stadium, to be “watching the Villa Park entrances for the team coach”.

“We can then mount a quick response, to protest them, or the spotters can follow them back to their hotels to find out where their [sic] staying, and mobilise a protest at the hotel.”

The message suggests there was an organised attempt to target the Israeli players ahead of the match, despite West Midlands Police’s insistence that it was Maccabi fans who were likely to cause violence or intimidation.

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01/13 Links Pt1: At least 12,000 killed in Iran crackdown as blackout deepens; Iranian Leaders' Claim to Legitimacy Shattered in the War with Israel; Syrian Druze leader: ‘Israel saved us from genocide’

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Iran’s Revolution

I tremble as I write these lines.

For Iran—brave and heroic Iran—trembles on the edge of a horrific bloodbath.

And I have no doubt that the fascist regime of the mullahs will take, if it can, a terrible revenge on the civilians who are defying it.

But the reality is clear.

What has been happening for the past eight days in the cities of ancient Persia is not a revolt. It is a revolution. The difference? Both tiny and immense. A revolt—Iranians have known at least five revolts in the past 15 years—demands reform, the mitigation of misery, negotiation. A revolution expects none of that and does not accommodate, at all, the hated order of things; it does not seek the adjustment of the regime, but its replacement.

Tocqueville: A revolution begins when people cease to imagine the future as an anamorphosis of the past.

Hannah Arendt: An insurrection challenges power; a revolution rejects its very principle and foundation.

This kind of event is rare in human history. But this is where the Iranians now stand. When they say, “Death to Khamenei,” they have crossed that threshold and entered this new era of both hope and tragedy.

Of course, the uprising may still be crushed. Of course, we are speaking of thousands of women and men executed in the secrecy of the electronic night that has fallen over the country. And, of course, we know of revolutions that ended drowned in blood.

But what has been has been. The Iranian women and men who have shouted at the top of their lungs that they want to live, but are ready to die for that, will not turn back. They will no longer accept the offers of negotiations made by cornered ayatollahs.

Those who fail to understand this are grotesque.

To those who still dare to reduce this conflagration to some so-called American Zionist plot—shame on them.

They are already and forever in the dustbins of History.

Trump Admin Designates Three Muslim Brotherhood Branches as Terrorist Organizations

The Trump administration on Tuesday designated three of the Muslim Brotherhood's largest branches in the Middle East as terrorist groups, unveiling long-awaited sanctions aimed at financially crippling the global Islamist organization responsible for fomenting violence against the United States and its allies.

The joint action from the State and Treasury Departments targets the Muslim Brotherhood's sects in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon in the first step "of an ongoing, sustained effort to thwart Muslim Brotherhood violence and destabilization wherever it occurs," according to the Treasury Department. The department noted in its release announcing the move that "additional terrorist designations" may occur as the Trump administration examines "all available tools to deprive these Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism."

"The Muslim Brotherhood has inspired, nurtured, and funded terrorist groups like Hamas that are direct threats to the safety and security of the American people and our allies," Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John K. Hurley said in a statement. "Despite their peaceful public façade, both the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim brotherhood branches have conspired to support Hamas’s terrorism and undermine the sovereignty of their own national governments."

Congressional Republicans have argued that the United States should designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization since at least 2015, but legislation doing so never reached the president's desk. After President Donald Trump took office for a second time and expressed an interest in targeting the Muslim Brotherhood through executive actions, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced a bill featuring a "new modernized strategy" to systematically sanction the groups' branches around the world rather than the brotherhood as a whole. The administration's announcement on Tuesday indicates that it is using Cruz's approach, going after individual Muslim Brotherhood sects across the Middle East.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control went after the Muslim Brotherhood's Jordanian and Egyptian branches, both of which provide material support for Hamas, while the State Department targeted the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood. The Lebanese branch, known as al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, received both the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist labels from Foggy Bottom, freezing its assets and preventing it from doing business with Western financial institutions.

‘Israel saved us from genocide’: Interview with Syrian Druze leader

‘We are paying a heavy price, but we struggle to remain steadfast and preserve our identity with dignity and pride,’ says Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze community.

According to him, the threat does not stem solely from the current rulers but from a continuous ideological current. ‘The previous regime also acted against us, but the current one is the most brutal. They do not want to eliminate only the Druze, but any minority that is not like them.’

Six months after one of the deadliest massacres the Druze community has suffered in generations, Sheikh al-Hijri speaks with rare openness about an open wound, a reality of siege and a clear aspiration to establish an independent Druze entity in Sweida province.

"The only crime for which we were murdered was being Druze", he says in a special interview with ynet. "This is an ISIS-style government, established as a direct continuation of al-Qaeda."

The massacre that took place last July, in which more than 2,000 Druze were killed, included executions, rape, abuse and the burning of people alive, women, children and infants, he says. "This was a decision by Syria’s dark regime and by all the terrorist groups operating from Damascus. It was genocide", he states.

‘The heavy price was not in vain’
Al-Hijri, 60, was born in Venezuela, where his father emigrated along with a large Druze community. Today, around 150,000 Druze live in Venezuela, making it the fourth-largest Druze population worldwide. He later returned to Syria and studied law at Damascus University.

In 2012, he replaced his brother as the spiritual leader of the Druze community following his brother’s death in a car accident that was never fully explained and was widely suspected to involve the Assad regime. Leadership of the community has remained with the al-Hijri family since the 19th century.

"The latest massacre proved that we cannot rely on anyone else to protect our community", he says. "The price was extremely heavy, but it will not be in vain. We are seeking a future in which the Druze are no longer victims."

"Since July 2025, we have been living in a state of full mobilization," he says. "Young and old alike are enlisted to defend our homes and our very existence. They wanted to annihilate us."

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01/12 Links Pt2: History is Not Whispering; Israel Won the Information War; Trump: No place for Jew-haters in GOP; Suspect admits to arson attack on synagogue in Mississippi due to its ‘Jewish ties’

From Ian:

History is Not Whispering

Anti-Semitism is never the end of the story. It is the warning flare.

It does not appear when societies are strongest, but when they are losing the ability to tolerate complexity, disagreement, and pluralism. Jews are the first test of that collapse—not because they are uniquely fragile, but because they have always stood at the center of pluralistic systems that extremism cannot tolerate.

This pattern is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. And it is not new.

When Jews are told their equality is conditional, that their safety depends on silence, that their collective existence is illegitimate, societies have already crossed a line. When violence against Jews is explained rather than condemned, escalation is no longer a question of if, but when. When elected officials refuse to name and shame anti-Semitism because doing so would alienate part of their base, the base has already been chosen.

The closing of the horseshoe is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis.

On the left, anti-Zionism reframes Jews as uniquely undeserving of national rights. On the right, post-liberal populism recycles the language of elites, global manipulators, and disloyal insiders. The vocabularies differ. But the structure is identical. Both reject liberal universalism. Both treat Jews as conditional citizens. Both abandon the same guardrails—and arrive at the same destination.

History does not forgive this convergence. It records it.

Those who imagine they can harness anti-Semitism without being consumed by it misunderstand how extremism works. The societies that tolerated it did not stabilize. They radicalized. Jews were never the last target—only the most reliable early prey.

We are not watching this unfold blindly. We have the documents. We have the precedents. We have the bodies.

This time, ignorance is not an excuse. Silence is not neutrality. Euphemism is not moderation.

We know exactly what is happening.

The only question left is whether we choose to stop it—or whether we allow history to resume its course, once again, at full speed.

Israel Won the Information War By Abe Greenwald

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Those who fret about the issue believe that Israel needed to continually explain the reasons for its military actions: It should have been more forceful in demonstrating that Hamas hides behind civilians and operates from civilian structures. It should have debunked Hamas casualty figures in real time, proved that there was no famine, explained the unparalleled effort the IDF makes to spare civilian lives, and so on.

But that’s not the story Israel needed to tell. There’s little point in the Jewish state trying to prove that it’s innocent of all the calumnious charges against it. Why? Because if Israel’s devoted critics could be persuaded that it’s a good and just country under continuous assault by barbaric fanatics, they would have been convinced by the decades of evidence—culminating in October 7—showing just that.

The vital information that Israel needed to disseminate, rather, was this: We will not perish. We are fiercer in battle than you could ever imagine, more accomplished in intelligence and operational execution than any nation in history, peerless in the art of war, and unapologetic in our commitment to survival. We don’t bend to public opinion; we stop at nothing to defend our existence.

And that message came across loud and clear.

Too many American Jews, on the other hand, spent two-plus years swallowing Hamas propaganda and publicly agonizing over Israel’s actions to varying degrees. Their story was: We’re just so sorry for all this ugliness.

And while they explained and apologized, they also bent over backwards to give the Jew-haters the benefit of the doubt. Some went so far as to kasher the mob.

We know exactly how that’s worked out. It’s long past time for Diaspora Jews to tell a different story of their own—one of bravery rooted in reverence for the Jewish tradition. But first they must believe it themselves. The Israelis do, and the world found that out.

No place for Jew-haters in GOP, Trump says

U.S. President Donald Trump said there is no room in the Republican Party for those with antisemitic views and that the GOP should condemn those espousing them.

“From my own personal standpoint, absolutely, because I condemn,” Trump told The New York Times in a two-hour interview last week that was published on Monday.

“I have a daughter who’s married to a Jewish person,” he told the newspaper. “My daughter happens to be Jewish, and the beautiful three grandchildren are Jewish. I’m very proud of them.”

The president also touted his support of Israel and his efforts to obtain a ceasefire in the war between Hamas and Israel.

“There has been no better president in the history of the world as we know it that has been stronger or better and less antisemitic, certainly, than Donald Trump,” he said in the interview. “I have been the best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel, and that’s, by the way, acknowledged by everybody, including the fact that we have peace in the Middle East, and that’s going to hold.”

Trump’s comments came as several prominent Republicans, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have faced criticism from several prominent party members for providing platforms to antisemites and Holocaust deniers, most notably Nick Fuentes. Carlson, a podcaster, was photographed in official images of a meeting that Trump held at the White House recently with oil executives.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual legislative conference in October, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and others went after Carlson for his friendly interview with Fuentes.

Speakers at the conference also aimed brickbats at the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and said the pro-Trump conservative research group was not in the business of “canceling our own people.”

The president earlier passed up opportunities to criticize Carlson, who had a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump told reporters in November.

But this time, he went after the antisemites in his own party.

“I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” he told the Times.

British Jewish veterans who fought for Churchill in WWII say the level of antisemitism in modern times feels like 'the whole world is against us'

They proudly fought for Britain to free the world from the clutches of Hitler's fascism.

But 80 years on, three Jewish veterans say they are increasingly alarmed by surging levels of antisemitism in the UK - and fear 'the whole world is against us now'.

Joe Slyper, 106, Don Breslaw, 102 and Solly Ohayon, 99, still remain largely positive about Britain, but believe anti-Jewish hatred today is at levels they themselves did not experience when they were younger.

Their views come in the wake of fellow veteran Alec Penstone, 100, who in November stunned the presenters of ITV's Good Morning Britain by declaring the sacrifice of the lost men of his generation 'wasn't worth' it.

He told Adil Ray and Kate Garraway: 'What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.'

While the trio are not so forceful in their opinion of today's Britain, they acknowledge the Second World War brought an end to Nazism - but not racially motivated hatred.

Don, who was just 19 when he was conscripted into the army, has come to sombrely conclude 'we've always been different - and when people are different, people tend to find cause to dislike us.'

The three spoke to Daily Mail as part of wide-ranging interviews on their wartime experience and how Britain compares today to before 1939.

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01/12 Links Pt1: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made; The courage of Iran’s women puts woke Westerners to shame; Trump: 25% tariff on all countries doing business with Iran

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: What the late great Bernard Lewis knew about Khomeini

The late Bernard Lewis—renowned multilingual Orientalist—didn’t agree that Carter or anybody else had an excuse for ignoring Khomeini’s true identity and agenda. In a 2010 interview that I conducted with Lewis while researching my book, To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the “Arab Spring,” the professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University described his rebuffed attempt to set the record straight.

“In 1978, there was this figure being discussed, Khomeini, whom I knew nothing about,” he recounted. “So, I did what one normally does in my profession: I went to the university library and looked him up. I discovered that he was the author of Islamic Government [a collection of speeches he delivered in Najaf, Iraq in 1970]. And I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. It could give me some idea of what the man is about.’”

Lewis took the volume home and read it in one sitting. What it revealed was a philosophy of Islamic statehood, using the harshest possible rhetoric to denounce non-Muslims and calling for the spread of Sharia law across the world.

Deciding that something had to be done to expose the ayatollah and his intentions, Lewis contacted then-New York Times op-ed editor Charlotte Curtis and offered to pen a piece on what subsequently came to be known as “The Little Green Book.”

“No thanks,” she answered. “I don’t think our readers would be interested in the work of some Persian writer.”

Whether her response was due to ignorance of the significance of Khomeini’s waiting in the wings to take over Iran from the Shah, or to a lack of desire on the part of the Times to acknowledge that however authoritarian a ruler the shah might be, he was the epitome of benevolence compared to his proposed successor, wasn’t clear.

Nor did Curtis’s attitude surprise Lewis, whose view of the press was already—justifiably—dim. But it did cause him to recall an exchange he’d had in Pahlavi’s office not long before the revolution.

“Why do they keep attacking me?” the shah burst out, as soon as Lewis entered the room.

“Whom do you mean, Your Majesty?” Lewis asked.

“The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London and Le Monde—the four weird sisters dancing around the doom of the West,” Pahlavi said. “Don’t they understand that I am the best friend you have in this part of the world?”

“Your Majesty,” Lewis replied, “you must understand that the editorial policies of these papers are based on Marxist principles.”

“What do you mean?” Pahlavi shot back incredulously, since Communism wasn’t on his list of the West’s faults.

“I’m not referring to Karl, but to Groucho,” Lewis quipped.

When the Shah looked puzzled, Lewis asked him whether he was familiar with Groucho Marx.

“Yes, of course,” he responded, almost insulted by the suggestion that he, a buff of American movies, might not be up on Hollywood.

Lewis explained, “Remember when Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to become a member of a club that would have him? Well, our media’s posture—like our foreign policy—is to shun any government that wants our friendship, and to placate and pursue our enemies.”

Brendan O'Neill: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made

Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.

The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.

The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.

The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.

After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself

Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.

Melanie Phillips: Iranian protesters are showing courage in the face of tyranny — but Israel-obsessed liberals don’t seem to care

The reason is that the uprising is not just against the regime but against the repressive tyranny of Islam itself. This is intolerable to Western liberals, because it gets in the way of their fixed narrative that, when Islamists commit mass murder against the innocent, it’s justified resistance against Western-backed imperialism.

Such liberals simply cannot acknowledge the reality of Islamic terrorism and repression.

Their belief that the Israelis and Western imperialism are always the villains, and Muslims are always their victims, is essential to their self-image as morally virtuous people.

It may sound incredible, but Islam has become synonymous with conscience itself among Western progressives.

This is because the Palestinian cause has become their signature motif.

The Palestinians are viewed as the ultimate oppressed people, dispossessed of their rightful inheritance and victims of Israeli “genocide,” “apartheid” and war crimes in Gaza.

Every part of that is a lie. But among liberals, it’s an article of faith.

So they’ve failed to grasp how this cause has been leveraged by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood bent upon the conquest of the West. This is particularly true of Qatar, which has patiently spread its influence throughout Western universities and even bought up various Western media personalities.

The Palestinian cause has embedded into the Western mind the inversion of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and tyranny, which is a hallmark of the Islamic world and has found such fertile ground in the post-truth, post-moral Western intelligentsia.

So the keffiyeh-clad classes have been cementing Islamic control over Western streets and public space.

In Britain this is far advanced, with the Labour government under Keir Starmer refusing to outlaw genetically damaging Muslim cousin marriage and dragging its heels over dealing with the mainly Muslim rape and grooming gangs.

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