From Ian:
Jpost Editorial:
Hostage protests: Fighting each other is what Hamas wants
There is no question that an entire nation wants its children to come home, only the method. But what cannot happen is turning one another into the enemy, is allowing disagreements – deep and essential ones – to delegitimize us in one another’s eyes. That is precisely where the line lies.
Zvika Mor, the father of hostage Eitan Mor, said on Sunday morning, in a plea to his fellow hostage families, “My brothers and sisters, I make this plea from the bottom of my heart. You called to shut down the country... You did not miss the opportunity to ensure that the public is repulsed by us, the hostage families.”
He called for the strike to be canceled. “It cannot be that reservist soldiers who are on their way down to the Gaza Strip – to fight Hamas and bring our hostages home – can’t get to their bases because highways are blocked. This cannot be.”
Mor is a member of the Tikva Forum, a smaller representation of hostage families compared to the larger Hostages and Missing Families Forum. These two represent the true standard to which public dialogue is supposed to be; they disagree, but they respect and hold space for one another.
The act of protesting is one of the most sacred and vital tools in the hands of citizens in a democratic state to express their sentiments, wishes, and opinions. It cannot be stifled or curtailed, especially in an era where many feel and fear that democratic institutions in Israel are under attack.
But it is important to draw a distinction between the cause – freeing all of the hostages and bringing the security situation to a state of calm – and the method. Not everybody agrees with the method, and there is validity to both sides.
The heartfelt nature of a nationwide shutdown cannot be stated enough, especially after nearly two years of war. People dropped everything and followed their hearts and their consciousnesses out to the streets to join in pain and demand action. This has merit, and woe to Israel the day that citizens don’t care for their brethren.
Dialogue, though – healthy, respectful dialogue – cannot get lost in the shuffle.
The Black Book
Leningrad, February 1976. The broad boulevards of the city, founded by Peter the Great as Russia’s “window to Europe,” lay frozen under the deep frost of a typical Soviet winter: gray, unmoving, sealed in silence. We were a Jewish family of four—my father, Gennady; my mother, Mila; my sister, Elena; and me—living in a city then called Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg) at a time when silence was often the only defense. Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party, presided over a vast and crumbling empire. The world would later call it “the period of stagnation”—a term far too mild for those living beneath its weight. The economy was paralyzed, the politics rigid, but repression moved with quiet efficiency. Political dissidents, Zionist activists, Prisoners of Zion, and Jews in general were treated as suspect—perpetual outsiders in a state obsessed with control.
We lived under constant watch, not for any action or offense, but simply for being a Jewish family in the Soviet Union. And yet the strength we drew from one another, and the trust of a few close friends, gave us just enough oxygen to endure. Snow-covered streets and frozen canals reflected a city choked in frost—bitterly cold, silent, and subdued. The average temperature hovered around 23 degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind, the damp, and the endless cloud cover made it feel far colder.
That winter, our family received an official invitation to immigrate to the State of Israel. The invitation had come from my mother’s uncle, Rabbi Ben-Zion Brook, head of the Novardok Yeshiva in Jerusalem. It was a legitimate request for family reunification—one of the very few justifications the Soviet regime would accept for emigration. After all, why else would anyone want to leave the so-called paradise of the Soviet Union, a country that spanned 12 time zones and one-sixth of the planet’s surface? To admit that Jews wanted to leave because of ideology, discrimination, or spiritual longing would be to expose the cracks in the system. “Family reunification” was a narrow but permissible loophole.
Ben-Zion had left the Belarusian town of Rogachev in 1920, when my grandfather (my mother’s father) was five years old. Decades later, they found each other again and began corresponding in Yiddish. My grandfather would read the letters aloud, his voice trembling, while my parents listened with tears in their eyes. But before long, the KGB summoned my grandfather to the infamous “Big House” on Liteiny Street and ordered him to stop all correspondence immediately.
Then, in February 1976, the visa invitation finally arrived. Not through the mail, but in person. The superintendent of our enormous Soviet apartment block—a sprawling concrete maze of modest flats—arrived at our door with the letter in hand. Standing beside him were two young men whose presence said everything: plainclothes agents. My parents, raising two young children, were filled with fear. They had spent years secretly listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty. They understood what this meant. The silence was about to break.
But along with the fear came a flicker of joy: Three previous invitations had simply disappeared, swallowed by the system. Now, at last, one had arrived. My father rushed to share the news with my grandfather. In a gesture both symbolic and chilling, my grandfather handed him a samizdat copy of The Black Book, compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman—a rare and dangerous volume from a small, secret library he had maintained. He believed, with quiet defiance, that his children and grandchildren needed to know the truth about the world.
Rubio’s State Department yanks more than 6K student visas due to assault, burglary, support for terrorism
The State Department has yanked more than 6,000 student visas in 2025 for overstays and law violations — including support for terrorism, Fox News Digital has learned.
The Trump administration has launched multiple initiatives aimed at cracking down on immigration and revoking visas of those attending academic institutions in the U.S.
Those who’ve participated in pro-Palestinian protests have faced heightened scrutiny, as one example, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that the administration was reviewing the visa status of those students.
The roughly 6,000 visas that were pulled were primarily due to visa overstays or encounters with the law, including assault, DUIs, burglary and support for terrorism, the State Department told Fox News Digital.
"Every single student visa revoked under the Trump Administration has happened because the individual has either broken the law or expressed support for terrorism while in the United States," a senior State Department official said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "About 4,000 visas alone have been revoked because these visitors broke the law while visiting our country, including records of assault and DUIs."
Those who had their student visas yanked due to assault — roughly 800 students — either faced arrest or charges stemming from assault, according to the State Department official.
Those whose visas were pulled due to support for terrorism — between 200 people to 300 people — engaged in behavior such as raising funds for the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist organization, the official said.
From Ian:
Aizenberg:
10 Questions 'Genocide in Gaza' Accusers Cannot Answer
Only days after October 7, a chorus of so-called “genocide scholars,” NGOs, and activists began hurling the charge of genocide at Israel. In reality, this accusation functions as a deliberate inversion of 10/7 itself. Hamas carried out mass killings with openly genocidal intent, yet the charge has been flipped onto Israel to whitewash those crimes and blame their victim. In the months since, the charge has only accelerated, turning into a kind of groupthink repeated through recycled slogans ("Israel is targeting healthcare"), canned storylines ("intentional starvation"), and misrepresented quote snippets ("remember Amalek"). These claims are delivered with an air of authority, but they collapse under even basic scrutiny. If Israel truly had a national policy to exterminate the Palestinian people, the evidence would be overwhelming and undeniable. The ten questions that follow cut through that haze. They cannot be answered honestly without exposing the genocide accusation as false, which is precisely why the accusers never confront them directly.
1. If extermination of the Palestinian people is Israel's goal, why hasn’t it happened?
If Israel wanted to kill 100,000 or more Gazans in a single day it easily could, for example by carpet bombing the Al-Mawasi humanitarian area. You claim Israel’s leaders are pursuing a policy of extermination, directed from the highest levels of government and the IDF, against Palestinians solely for their identity. Some point to Hamas’s claim of 60,000 deaths as proof, but that only sharpens the question: if extermination of the Palestinian people were truly the goal, why stop at tens of thousands when Israel has the capacity to kill millions in days? Why, after 22 months, has no such attack ever been carried out? Do not evade by pointing out that genocide does not require mass killings; address why a state supposedly bent on extermination of the Palestinian people has not taken the obvious steps to achieve it.
2. Why are millions of Palestinians safe under full Israeli control?
Arab-Israelis, about 2 million people, are ethnically the same people as the Palestinians in Gaza and are often called Palestinian citizens of Israel. They live under full Israeli authority, yet not a single one has been exterminated. History shows that when genocidal regimes have unimpeded access to the very population they seek to destroy, that population is in immediate and mortal danger. Can you cite a single genocide where millions of the supposed victims lived safely under the perpetrator’s rule, even serving in its government and institutions? If Israel is pursuing extermination of the Palestinian people, how do you reconcile this reality?
3. Why are Palestinians in the West Bank untouched?
Three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the same people as in Gaza. Israel could kill many thousands there in a matter of hours if extermination were truly the policy, but this has not happened in 22 months. Why would a state bent on destroying the Palestinian people leave millions unharmed while supposedly carrying out a genocide next door? If extermination of Palestinians as such were the policy, there would be no reason to differentiate by geography or governance. And do not fall back on the claim that the West Bank is different because the war is against Hamas, since your own accusation insists that the only reasonable inference from Israel’s actions in Gaza is exterminating Palestinians as such.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
The Palestinian Authority's Human 'Slaughterhouse'
None of these countries... [France, Canada, Australia, the UK] has demanded that the Palestinian Authority halt its human rights violations against its own people. Ending financial and administrative corruption and excluding Hamas from governance is pointless as long as the PA continues to crack down on its political rivals and impose severe restrictions on freedom of speech.
Last month, Palestinian Authority security officer Ammar Saeed Abu Thahri reportedly died while in PA custody. It remains unclear why Abu Thahri was arrested by PA security forces in the first place.
"Most of the arrests were related to freedom of expression or participation in demonstrations in solidarity with the Gaza Strip." — Palestinian human rights group Lawyers for Justice, safa.pa, July 30, 2025.
The Palestinian Authority security officers who beat political activist Nizar Banat to death in 2021 have still not been punished. Banat, an outspoken critic of the PA leadership, was beaten to death by PA security officers in Hebron.
"We have documented hundreds of cases of arrest, torture, and ill-treatment of activists and political opponents since Nizar's killing.... Those involved in most of these crimes have not been held accountable." — Lawyers for Justice, June 24, 2025.
If France, Australia, the UK and Canada really cared about the Palestinians, they should be demanding that the PA respect public freedoms and stop its crackdown on political and human rights activists.
The last thing the Middle East needs is another Arab dictatorship run by corrupt leaders whose main goal is to batter their own people while siphoning off still more European and international aid money into their own bank accounts.
Babylon Bee:
Problems In Middle East Blamed On The 0.3% Of It That Isn’t An Islamic Dictatorship
As experts and diplomats continue to search for the solution to the generations-long conflict in the region, one surprising study has concluded that problems in the Middle East should definitely be blamed on the 0.3% of it that isn't an Islamic dictatorship.
Though opinions on the conflict have been divided over the decades, a consensus was reached that all of the problems flow from the minute portion of the region that isn't ruled by bloodthirsty, murderous terrorists who want to conquer the entire world.
"It's definitely all Israel's fault," said analyst Ibrahim Hamzi of the Institute for Blaming Jews in Jordan. "We have looked closely at all of the evidence accumulated over the last century and have come to the conclusion that none of the issues that arise in the Middle East can be blamed on the multiple Islamic dictatorships that have caused oppression, rape, murder, and terrorism around the world. Yes, the West lives in fear of Islamic extremists carrying out deadly attacks on heavily populated areas, but that's not the problem. No, it's Israel. Totally Israel."
The scientific study was controversial in some circles but received support from experts in other parts of the world as well. "I concur with the findings," said Professor Mohammed al Muhamad in London. "Even here in the unbiased United Kingdom, we can confidently state that the nation of Israel is solely to blame for the problems in the Middle East. Not the other dozen countries ruled by crazy Muslims."
At publishing time, an impartial coalition of Middle Eastern countries that are Islamic dictatorships presented a solution to solve tensions in the region by wiping Israel off the map.
From Ian:
David Collier:
Rinse and Repeat: Another Gaza Famine Lie Goes Viral
Once bitten, twice – bite me again
What makes this latest famine hoax even more astonishing is that it comes barely a week after the last one collapsed. In that case, international outlets took the image of a child with healthy siblings, a boy suffering from a tragic but very specific medical condition (CP) and presented him as evidence of mass starvation.
The lie was so blatant that even the New York Times and other major outlets were forced to roll back their claims once the truth emerged.
Incredibly, the same terrorist-supporting journalist – Ahmed al-Arini – appears to have broken both stories (1, 2).
This is not sloppy journalism. It is not an innocent mistake. It is the same trick, deployed twice in as many weeks, by the same actors. That is proof that legacy media are not being misled – they are knowingly promoting a lie.
So what is the truth?
We live in an age where too many journalists have become activists, media standards have collapsed, and editors are chasing clicks with sensationalism over accuracy. When the story can be shaped to fit a preferred narrative, fact-checking is abandoned. The presence of 1000s of journalists in the UK who once worked for foreign Islamist outfits makes a bad situation even worse.
So if there is no famine, if starvation is not widespread, then what is really happening?
The honest answer ‘its complicated’ won’t suffice. Not when we are facing a coordinated media campaign that promotes a modern-day blood libel. So I am going to generalise.
For context – in the UK today there are currently about 86000 children with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions.
To support the ‘famine’ narrative, The recent Sky News said hospitals are ‘overwhelmed’ with cases. Yes – so are the UK hospitals and we are not even in a war-zone. There were over 3000 recorded child deaths in the UK in 2023. Over 400 people die in the UK each year from malnutrition.
Now imagine a desperate conflict here. A journalist could walk into an NHS ward, take images of desperately ill children, and spin them as evidence of deliberate starvation by our enemy. Technically nothing about the picture would be false, but the framing and narrative would be a lie. That is exactly what is happening now in Gaza.
Take the latest BBC coverage – a headline that feeds the false famine narrative, suggesting starvation-related death. A child’s image used to create additional emotional pull. Only buried deep in the text does the article admit it is likely the woman suffered from a ‘serious congenital disease’. This is not journalism. This is manipulation.
Yes – war is awful. During conflict, wherever possible, very sick people should be evacuated so they can access the treatment they need. The tragic reality is that many will still not survive.
But tragedy is no excuse for fraud. We do not want media to wave an Israeli flag. We just ask that they stop acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas, and return to the most basic duty of journalism – we want them to tell the truth.
IDF Reservist Describes Scene at GHF Aid Site in Gaza
The truth about Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid sites has been grossly distorted. During a recent tour in Gaza as an infantry reservist, I was tasked with helping to secure the area around a safe distribution site (SDS) in southern Gaza. I did not see mass starvation in Gaza. Of the tens of thousands of civilians, there was no one close to the emaciated state of hostage Evyatar David.
With the contracting of the GHF, the IDF sought to prevent a severe humanitarian situation for civilians while avoiding resupplying Hamas through compromised aid organizations. Part of Hamas's control over the population was through its near monopoly over food and other humanitarian aid.
The area around SDS sites is still enemy territory, and there are still enemy forces without uniforms concealed among civilians, seeking to kill IDF soldiers. At the site where I was, aid seekers were supposed to leave vehicles beyond a security barrier that also served as a marker for what not to cross when the zone and aid site were closed. Fences, barbed wire, and warning signs were placed to prevent civilians from entering military zones.
Once the GHF site opened, a daily deluge of tens of thousands attempted to enter the site and grab aid. The Gazans at times overran and tore down the forward barriers. I never once saw anything resembling a line or queue. Live-fire warning shots were only employed on the extremely rare occasion that Gazans in the aid site yard deviated toward the closed military zone that was out of their way.
While it's impossible not to feel sympathy for people who have to gather food in such a manner, Palestinian aid seekers are constantly seeking to overrun the compound. Desperation was not the only driving factor. War profiteering and criminality are also driving forces. Trades and sales were being made in the SDS courtyard. Brawls over aid were not uncommon, and larger men could be seen waiting on the periphery, not joining the rush with the others.
Shots were almost exclusively warning shots fired at sand dunes. It was emphasized repeatedly to our unit that we did not want to kill any civilians, which would be counterproductive to the mission. Our experience is in stark contrast to the idea that the IDF was deliberately shooting aid seekers. When these warning shots ceased to be employed for a time, pending a review, the aid sites were overrun several times and GHF personnel were injured. The chaos was only rolled back by the resumption of warning shots by designated marksmen and snipers.
Terrorists in the kitchen: How aid organizations help Hamas and fight Israel
Aid organizations' "starvation" campaign, together with the "genocide" campaign, have succeeded in driving down Israel's international standing. But how much of these campaigns is based on outright lies that the media uncritically amplify? Already, the amount of food entering Gaza far exceeds the threshold set by international standards.
On Thursday, 104 organizations published a joint statement claiming Israel is preventing them from delivering aid and imposing excessive preconditions. Of the 104, 84 never submitted requests. Only 20 applied, three were denied, one was approved and the rest are still under review. In practice, dozens of other organizations operate in Gaza in coordination with Israel because they met the requirements.
In other words, the joint statement is just another stage in the propaganda war. A storm over nothing. Many of these organizations are fringe groups that seize every opportunity to attack Israel. Organizations whose requests were denied refused to provide employee lists.
Hamas operatives have been known to infiltrate UNRWA and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) staff. Israel cannot approve activities by organizations that provide cover for terrorist operatives. Why should Israel allow organizations that deny its very right to exist to operate?
In recent days, food prices have fallen: 1 kg. of flour, which had risen to 500 shekels, dropped to 10-20 shekels. So how is there hunger? Shortages are caused by aid being stolen, primarily by Hamas. The population is under Hamas rule, not Israeli control. If Hamas wanted, food would reach everyone - but it does not, because Hamas wants to blame Israel. Western media lead the campaign and amplify Hamas propaganda. That does not help Gaza residents; it only serves Hamas.
From Ian:
What America Can Learn from the Hamas Propaganda War
Hamas and its allies reconfigured their tactics. Rather than hoping for a big story to delegitimize Israel’s counteroffensive, they pounded out a steady drumbeat of falsehoods. A Hamas-controlled organization produced highly suspicious tallies of deaths in Gaza, which then-president Joe Biden and his defense secretary Lloyd Austin both cited uncritically. The new propaganda campaign produced some headlines and, during the previous administration, some pressure from Washington against further Israeli actions against Hamas, but it did not force Israel to withdraw.
Israel’s recent actions to bypass Hamas-controlled humanitarian aid channels and send food straight to hungry Gazans forced Hamas to change its tactics yet again. Over the past few weeks, the media have breathlessly reported lurid stories of starving civilians and massacres near the Israel-supported aid locations.
Many of these stories fall apart upon closer inspection. In some cases, Israel has released videos proving that the supposed massacres never took place. But by the time the Israelis showed what actually happened, Hamas has released more equally implausible stories that generate new headlines.
Alternative media have been no better. Podcast hosts who supposedly question conventional wisdom regurgitate the same claims as their established competitors. Some even sympathetically interview disgruntled former employees of these aid organizations who only lobbed accusations of atrocities after their begging for new work failed.
Although it is currently fighting Israel, Hamas is creating a template America’s adversaries can use in future conflicts with the United States. The next time American troops go into combat against a major enemy, they can expect an incessant stream of reports about alleged massacres and other war crimes.
Many of these atrocities will not be based on anything that actually occurred, but they will nonetheless draw the attention of American media organizations. If the pattern holds, the disaffected people who dominate American mainstream and alternative media will eagerly seize upon these stories to attack their ideological rivals in the United States. Retired veterans with dubious records will endorse these claims. Policymakers should thus expect to start any conflict in a hostile media environment.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Ending The Muslim Brotherhood’s American Experiment
The most damning indictment is not what the Brotherhood did but what America allowed. We had the intelligence, legal authority, and every right to take meaningful action, but lacked backbone. Political leaders preferred comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths, bureaucrats mistook civil rights for moral relativism, and a media establishment treated legitimate security concerns as racist paranoia.
Meanwhile, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – three nations that know the Brotherhood’s threat firsthand – designated them as terrorists years ago. When countries that live under the shadow of Islamist terrorism act decisively while America, the self-proclaimed leader in counterterrorism, stalls, something is deeply and deliberately broken.
Now, however, things are changing. Rubio’s announcement concedes the scale of the failure; we’ve been asleep while our enemies built and fortified their networks. Waking up won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. The Brotherhood’s network was engineered for endurance: a multi-headed hydra — multiple organisations sharing resources while maintaining separate legal identities, overlapping leadership to coordinate strategy while concealing accountability, and financial arteries running beneath layers of charitable fronts. Redundancy is built into every tier, ensuring that if one head is cut off, the others strike back faster and more fiercely.
The designation process will face serious legal challenges designed to delay and deflect: political pressure from allies who cling to the fiction that these are civil rights organizations, and media narratives that frame enforcement as persecution. The Brotherhood will fight back using every tool America’s open society provides. They will leverage their alliances with progressive movements and institutions. The reckoning won’t be gentle. Thirty years of institutional capture doesn’t disappear overnight. Organizations that have positioned themselves as legitimate voices of American Muslims will fight to preserve their influence. Political allies who accepted their support will resist admissions of error. Academic institutions that host the conferences and endorse the scholarship will move quickly to defend their reputations.
But none of that changes the fundamental reality. America has been harboring networks built to advance “a grand Jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and sabotage its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers”. They have pursued this mission on a global scale. The evidence was always in plain sight, and the legal authority was always there, but the only thing missing was the political will to act.
Marco Rubio just provided it. The Brotherhood’s American experiment is ending, and its architects won’t survive the fallout. Whether Britain and the rest of Europe follow America or learn the hard way remains to be seen.
Jonathan Tobin:
Why the Dreyfus case matters now more than ever
Harris’s novel and Polanski’s film are different in one way because the main protagonist of the story related in the screenplay (co-written by Harris and Polanski) is not the victim, Dreyfus. Instead, its focus is Georges Picquart, the man who—though largely forgotten by history—did more to win Dreyfus’s freedom than anyone else involved in the controversy.
What makes that so remarkable is that Picquart, then the youngest colonel in the French army and who had been his instructor at a staff college, neither liked Dreyfus or Jews, in general. A rising star in an institution where antisemitism ran rampant, the cultured Picquart was typical of his class and despised the bourgeois, unsociable and rich Jewish officer. After being appointed the head of military intelligence in 1895, he uncovered what at first he thought was a second German spy, another French officer named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. He soon uncovered definitive proof that there was only one spy, Esterhazy, and that Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted.
Told to bury the damning evidence, Picquart—a man of honor, even if he was as hostile to the Jews as his peers—refused to do so. As a result, he was demoted, isolated and eventually imprisoned on other false charges. But by bringing the truth to the attention of the Dreyfus family and to French author Emile Zola, whose famous essay “J’Accuse … !,” revived the debate about the case, the path to the falsely accused victim’s redemption was set.
Alfred Dreyfus Monument in Tel AvivA monument to French Jewish artillery Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in Tel Aviv, Nov. 30, 2018. Credit: Dr. Avishai Teicher via Wikimedia Commons.
Polanski’s film unravels how Picquart learns the truth, and how both his superior officers and one of his subordinates—the despicable Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, who had forged some of the original evidence against Dreyfus and perjured himself in court—turned on him for not going along with their lies. Each step of the way in what is an even more complicated story than superficial students of the case may know—from the opening scene depicting Dreyfus’s appalling degradation in the courtyard of the École Militaire with a mob screaming for his death and that of the Jews, to Picquart’s astonishment at the dishonesty of his fellow officers to the trials where the truth comes out but is still denied by the courts—is heartbreaking. Indeed, so convincing is the account of how the plot unraveled that it’s almost possible to forget that we know how the story will turn out.
Of particular note is the performance of French actor Jean Dujardin, best known to international audiences for winning an Oscar for his role in the 2011 silent film “The Artist.” His Picquart manages to be both an imperturbable and somewhat stoic military type, yet so invested in the idea of integrity and honesty that he was willing to destroy his own career and life, as well as that of his married mistress, Pauline Monnier (played by Polanski’s real-life wife, Emmanuelle Seigner). Louis Garrel similarly embodies the desperation of Dreyfus, a man caught in a nightmare he knows is rooted in the Jew-hatred of the country he loves.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
The Madonna of Gaza
What church leaders are saying about Gaza has enormous influence, even in post-religious circles. Their message that Israel is a cruel force oppressing the wretched of the earth plays directly into the West’s Christian conscience, even among people who are not believers.
This is wrapped up further with the church’s ineradicable ambivalence toward Jews, which reflects Western society’s own deep-seated antisemitism.
The Islamists, who understand the West better than it understands itself, have grasped the centrality of Christianity to the West, as well as its profound Jew-hatred, and realize that they can manipulate this to their advantage.
That’s why the now-notorious picture of the skeletal Gazan child, prominently displayed in The New York Times and countless other media outlets around the world as allegedly dying of starvation, packed the punch it did. It wasn’t merely that it was a dreadfully distressing picture of a dying child. It was that it was posed to call irresistibly to mind the original Madonna, the mother of Jesus, cradling him in her arms.
This image has been repeated countless times in paintings and sculptures. It is burned into the Western consciousness not only as an iconic image of Christianity but one that identifies that faith with love and compassion for the vulnerable and innocent, represented by the baby in his veiled mother’s arms.
The carefully staged photograph of the veiled Gaza mother holding the skeletal child was thus a diabolical masterpiece of manipulation and deceit.
Not only was the child emaciated, but suffering from cerebral palsy, not from starvation. By inciting horror and revulsion at the Israelis for apparently provoking the suffering of a Gazan Madonna and child, the picture also replaced Jews with Muslim Arabs in the iconography of Christianity.
It thus manipulated some of the deepest feelings in the emotional range of the Western world to embrace an evil lie.
The propaganda war is all about playing on emotion. That’s why these mendacious claims are impervious to facts and evidence.
Christians are among the staunchest supporters of Israel, particularly in America. But many, especially in the progressive Protestant churches, are its enemy.
Even the support of American Christians is eroding, particularly among the young, under an onslaught of secularization and the unprecedented global propaganda war that’s manipulating the Western public into believing that evil is good and goodness is evil.
Their minds have been twisted into believing the big lie that the Israelis, who are defending themselves against an Islamic holy war of extermination, are themselves guilty of the very things of which they are, in fact, the victims.
It is a godless lie. And the Vatican’s support for it is a moral stain spreading backwards into its terrible history with the Jews.
Jake Wallis Simons:
This is how Leftist Israelophobia morphs into unabashed anti-Semitism
When Horst Mahler, lawyer, terrorist and anti-Semite, died last month at the age of 89, that nemesis of Germany had become little more than a deranged demagogue who had lost a leg to diabetes and was fatigued by years in prison.
Such is the derangement of the times, however, that Mahler – a member of the notorious hard-Left Baader-Meinhof gang who later converted to neo-Nazism – is more relevant in death than he ever was in life.
With sensible politics around the world challenged by anti-Western fervour, this is increasingly Mahler’s moment. Across the political extremes, his hallmarks are familiar today: conspiratorial thinking; a pathological hatred for the United States, the West and all our old certainties; a cleaving to utopian radicalism; and a loathing for both Israel and the Jews.
Since October 7, this omnidogma has accelerated its advance, reaching for influence in our schools, universities, throughout the arts and media, in our formerly great northern towns and cities, on the streets, in the digital universe and through the benighted corridors of Lanyardistan.
It reached a bloody nadir in Washington DC last May, when two young Israeli diplomats were gunned down in the name of “Palestine”, and in the firebombing of elderly Jews in Colorado by an Egyptian national a few weeks later. In Britain, it has prompted death chants at Glastonbury and the sabotage of RAF aircraft by the bourgeois radicals of Palestine Action, not to mention relentless street unrest. But its spirit has also inspired the far-Right, with figures like the American firebrand Tucker Carlson and European insurgent parties Alternative für Deutschland and Rassemblement National indulging an animosity towards Israel, fondness for the erstwhile Assad regime and adoration for Vladimir Putin.
Anything, in other words, that hurts us.
Rayner ignored complaints about Islamophobia adviser’s ‘anti-Semitic’ tweets
Angela Rayner ignored complaints about allegedly anti-Semitic posts written by a peer advising ministers on the definition of Islamophobia, The Telegraph can reveal.
Baroness Gohir, one of five figures appointed to the working group on defining anti-Muslim hatred in February, previously claimed that Israel “controls” the US in several social media posts.
In April, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA) wrote to the Deputy Prime Minister, whose department is responsible for drawing up the definition of Islamophobia, alerting her to the comments.
It quoted five tweets written from 2013 and 2014, which were public until at least 2022 but have since been deleted, that it claimed met the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
In September 2013, when the US was considering whether to conduct military action against Bashar al-Assad, the then Syrian president, Lady Gohir said: “Will Israel influence the US vote on whether to invade Syria? Are the Americans really in control of their own decisions? #JustAsking.”
A week later, she tweeted: “Who controls America’s foreign policy? ISRAEL – they would be the ONLY beneficiaries of a US attack on Syria.”
The following year, she shared a news article about comments made by Barack Obama issuing a warning to Benjamin Netanyahu over him not agreeing to a peace deal with Gaza.
She wrote: “US warns Israel over Palestine talks failure. I bet Israel are quaking in their boots – NOT! Don’t they control US?”
Also in 2014, Lady Gohir said: “The hold Israel has over world leaders, including Muslim ones, is extraordinary that they continue to murder Palestinians and get away with it.”
From Ian:
Whistleblower alleges misconduct by United Nations in Gaza
An international aid worker operating in Gaza has filed a formal whistleblower complaint to the Inspector General of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), alleging "gross misconduct and misuse of humanitarian funds by the World Food Programme and other U.N. Agencies," according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Fox News Digital.
Details of alleged United Nations interference in the delivery of aid to Gazans have been revealed by the whistleblower who was in Gaza in July. The whistleblower confirmed to Fox News Digital the content of the complaint.
The whistleblower’s complaint claims "A firsthand eyewitnessing of senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials offering any support necessary, including security protection and coordination, to representatives from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) only to have WFP and OCHA respond that they were not prepared to discuss such coordination."
According to the whistleblower complaint, this "raises serious questions as to why WFP and OCHA were unprepared to discuss or accept the assistance offered by the IDF, thereby preventing aid from getting to the people of Gaza."
The whistleblower confirmed to Fox News Digital during an interview the allegations outlined in the complaint. The whistleblower said in the complaint that "the IDF is actively helping the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) get food into the hands of civilians while U.N. agencies, including WFP and OCHA, through their unwillingness to coordinate with the IDF, are inhibiting the distribution of such aid."
The whistleblower continued, "As has been recently shown through openly available imagery, the IDF has provided clearance for thousands of tons of U.N. humanitarian goods that are now sitting inside of Gaza, awaiting distribution. The U.N. must be held accountable to pick up and distribute such aid. I urge you to launch an independent investigation into this matter to determine the extent to which U.N. agencies, by refusing to coordinate with the IDF on essential issues, including security, are abusing U.S. taxpayer funds rather than using them to deliver the aid the American people are donating – and whether such actions are being taken independently by U.N. officials in Gaza or at the direction of the U.N. Secretary General or other senior U.N. officials in New York. "
The GHF, with support from the U.S. and Israel, has distributed 127 million meals to Gazans since May. However, its aid distribution system has been under consistent attack from Hamas and from some unlikely quarters — the world's leading aid groups.
The whistleblower told Fox News Digital "There is a concerted effort to discredit GHF and any attempts to provide aid out of [the] U.N."
A senior U.S. State Department official sent Fox News Digital a lengthy response. The official said, "The fact of the matter remains that GHF is a threat to how Hamas functions and enriches itself because GHF provides meals to those in need with safeguards to minimize Hamas from stealing. This is why Hamas continues to attack GHF aid sites."
Seth Mandel:
A Plea for Sanity
Regarding the aid sites themselves, Starr’s essay is well worth reading in full. Soldiers trained for warfare had to adapt to policing strategies with enemy forces, in civilian clothing, still hunting them. The IDF suddenly had a mission of preventing humanitarian disaster while also defeating Hamas, which meant not letting Hamas get hold of the aid that they were simultaneously trying to provide civilians. Nevertheless, Starr writes, “The stories told by some of the more malicious news outlets about Palestinians being shot while peacefully queuing are ludicrous not only because live-fire warning shots were only employed on the extremely rare occasion that Gazans in the aid site yard deviated toward the closed military zone that was out of their way, but also because I never once saw anything resembling a line or queue.”
Instead, “the sites are controlled chaos, with Palestinian aid seekers constantly seeking to overrun the compound, save for the intervention of armed security contractors.” Those contractors would “use stun grenades to warn off belligerent men who attempt to enter the site in situations like when there are special distributions for women or children. Palestinian aid workers have also used mace to repel aid seekers who refused to leave the site.”
Because some items were more valuable on the market than others, Palestinians would set up literal trading posts off to the side of the distribution site. At the end of the day, Gazans were told to stay behind specific concrete roadside barriers to prevent the area from being overrun day and night. Still, many secretly dug trenches in the area and tried to sleep there. There was violence and theft between aid recipients, and a general atmosphere of fear and panic induced partly by Hamas’s threats against the aid seekers and the proliferating stories about the chaos.
Terrorists did mix in among the aid seekers: Starr recalls one throwing a grenade, another stabbing a soldier. At all times, the possibility of a stampede loomed; a crowd crush could kill and injure aid seekers and perhaps even overrun the security around the site. Soldiers used warning shots, which does hold some risk—but so does not firing any warning shots in many of the situations.
“Yet despite all the problems,” Starr writes, “people were getting fed by the SDS sites, and they appreciated it.” Some “Gazan aid seekers were waving, blowing kisses, and performing heart signs with their hands as they left. People in a ‘killing field’ wouldn’t act like that.”
It turns out well-meaning people are doing their best, which is still imperfect. Human, you might say. The narrative one hears from the Western press is far from the reality. A hearty dose of sanity would do everyone some good—and get more Gazans fed, too.
Seth Mandel:
Gaza Disengagement’s Overlooked Villain
A new working paper by the cognitive scientist Netta Barak-Corren of Hebrew University sheds some light on this topic, though it isn’t the focus of her research. Barak-Corren was studying aid diversion in war zones, including but not limited to Gaza. But she offers crucial context about the primary aid agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, that paints a clear picture not only of the agency’s problems but of its quasi-governmental status.
“There is abundance of evidence to indicate … that the relationship between UNRWA and Hamas was symbiotic to a degree that UNRWA sustained much of the Hamas apparatus in Gaza, via various methods, allowing Hamas to build and sustain its war machine and authoritarian rule,” Barak-Corrin writes.
The UN agency was Gaza’s largest employer and at one point provided four out of every five Gazans with some form of aid, she writes. It is, alone among refugee agencies, a “permanent state of affairs” rather than a temporary solution to a particular postwar problem.
As such, the UN and Hamas have essentially “formalized” a system of aid diversion. The UN also insists on Hamas-linked escorts for its aid convoys rather than independent security. And it has taken steps to prevent employee-identification policies that aid groups have acquiesced to elsewhere.
Yet the aid problem is almost beside the point when looking at the UN’s activities in Gaza. As Barak-Corrin writes, “the focus on physical aid diversion and taxation is to some extent a distraction from the role UNRWA plays in Hamas finances: Hamas has used its influence to insert its operatives and their family members into UNRWA, so that they account for 49% of UNRWA employees.”
UNRWA also has successfully prevented an independent audit of Gaza aid and refused to report diversion incidents regarding Hamas. That means—and this is really the kicker—that “UNRWA should be seen as a streamlined aid diversion operation enjoying a unique level of international immunity and freedom from accountability.”
That is, the UN agency is itself designed to be an adjunct of Hamas. Except in name, the UN is essentially not only part of the Hamas government but the key to Hamas’s ability to sustain its power over the Palestinian enclave.
What does all this have to do with the 2005 disengagement? As COMMENTARY contributing editor Jonathan Schanzer has argued, Hamas’s program of “Talibanization” of the Gaza Strip began almost immediately and has smothered the enclave in the nearly two decades since Hamas took full control.
But as we see from Barak-Corrin’s analysis, Hamas had a partner in that process: UNRWA. Especially considering the various Western boycotts of Hamas after it dislodged Fatah from Gaza by force, sustaining a totalitarian regime and its war machine wasn’t easy or cheap. The UN didn’t merely abet Hamas; it was designed to be part of Hamas’s key governing infrastructure. Rather than being an aid organization that Hamas took advantage of, the UN agency was constructed as a pipeline to assets and materials and influence on the outside for Hamas.
And Hamas used those resources to take the Palestinians’ best chance at full self-government and turn it into an argument against Israeli disengagement from further territory. It became an engine of war and death, and then on Oct. 7, 2023, it became a symbol of world-historical evil. Gaza since disengagement is a profound condemnation of the UN and its entanglement with Hamas. Both must go before Gaza will ever get another chance.
From Ian:
Yisrael Medad:
Communism’s early anti-Zionism campaign
Izabella Tabarovsky published an important essay last year in Tablet magazine titled “Zombie Anti-Zionism.” Its thesis is that the left is still addicted to “warmed-over Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda from half a century ago.”
That propaganda targeted “the Soviet-sponsored Third World” and started around 1967. Specifically, “the precise language used by the anti-Israel left today to condemn the Jewish state has been a conventional part of left-wing discourse for decades, and that it originated in the USSR,” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In an earlier piece, she noted that 10 anti-Israel academics and BDS activists had established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, a step “toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of “scientific anti-Zionism” on American college campuses. Its aim is “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.”
Tabarovsky is a senior advisor at the Kennan Institute, specializing in Eastern European history, and a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary left-wing antisemitism. In an Instagram post promoting her Zombie characterization piece, she emphasizes that the Soviets, after the Six-Day War in June 1967, revved up a linguistic campaign to undermine Israel. They “equated it with the central cause animating the Western left at the time: the war in Vietnam.”
They used terms such as “imperialist Zionist propaganda” and “anti-colonialism,” and promoted the “progressive and peace-loving” involvement of the Soviet Union. Israel was a “white imperial outpost.”
The Kremlin did indeed write the script. Spinoffs of this theme include a YouTube clip that goes back to the 1950s. However, they did not create, as it were, a Palestinian identity.
True, the idea that the Arab residents of Mandate Palestine viewed themselves as Southern Syrians, into the mid-1920s and on, is an important part of the ideological conflict. In 1926, it was suggested to call the Mandate “Southern Syria,” and back in 1920, at least until December, reunification with the territory of Syria was the local Arabs’ representative demand, as was clearly made.
But what was the role of the Communist ideology? And does today’s progressive approach echo it?
Seth Mandel:
Mamdani Makes It Easy
The DSA held its national convention this weekend and did us all the favor of making clear that it is self-consciously incompatible with public service.
According to the Algemeiner, the first example of this was the passing of a resolution affirming the DSA’s adoption of Thawabit, “the principles originally set by the Palestinian National Council in 1977 and repeatedly reaffirmed since.” Accordingly, the resolution made it an expellable offense to say “Israel has a right to defend itself” or to “have knowingly provided material aid to Israel,” among others.
As a socialist organization, it’s not surprising that the DSA has instituted totalitarian-style Stalinist rules or that the group considers free speech among its primary threats. But I suppose they’ve at least simplified the process by making clear that if you want to know what to do and what not to do, just check with the Palestinian National Council first.
The other notable part of the convention was the existence of a resolution censuring Ocasio-Cortez for being too pro-Israel, which is a bit like accusing Gargamel’s cat of being too pro-Smurf. AOC’s biggest offense appears to be reversing her opposition to Iron Dome, the purely defensive Israeli missile-defense program whose only role in the conflict is to lower the total number of Jews killed by Palestinian terrorists. The resolution was not voted on but may be at a future conference.
Ethan Eblaghie, a co-author of the resolution, told City & State: “What this resolution … aims to do is for us to be able to indicate very clearly with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s office that this is something that we feel very strongly is unacceptable, and that for us to continue to have any sort of productive working relationship with her, we would like to see her take much stronger positions.”
Eblaghie didn’t seem to think AOC would actually be expelled. The likely reason is that the DSA is too cowardly to do anything about her near-but-not-total disregard for Israeli civilians. But a better reason for her to avoid expulsion would be for Ocasio-Cortez to walk away from the organization of her own free will. Why would any politician want the grand wizards of the DSA exerting influence over them?
More important, why would any politician want their name to be associated with a classic race-war hate group?
Brendan O'Neill:
As Bono now knows, you criticise Hamas at your peril
The backlash has been mad. Bono’s statement is ‘word soup’, says the Twittermob. It’s ‘billionaire pacifism’. He’s making excuses for Israel, the nutters cry, having clearly been brainwashed by its ‘right to self-defence’ blather. Yes, how mad to think the Jewish State should have the right to defend itself from an army of anti-Semites hell-bent on its obliteration. Some accuse U2 of ‘dripping in Israeli blood money’, because of course the only reason someone would slam Hamas and defend ‘Israel’s right to exist’ is because they’d been thrown a few shekels.
The Irish Independent wonders if Bono’s comments are ‘too little, too late’. It reports on the ‘furious’ response to his statement, including from academics in Dublin who say he’s giving too much ‘justification for Israel’. Irish singer Mary Coughlan branded Bono’s statement ‘very, very weak [and] very, very measured’. Measured! What a crime. Music journalist Louise Bruton said Bono should have been braver, sooner, like Kneecap.
And there you have it. We must cheer the hip-hop trio who celebrated the butchery of 7 October 2023 by posting a photo of themselves grinning like loons alongside the words ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’ on 8 October. And we must condemn the band that says Hamas is ‘evil’. Bow down to the balaclava-wearing eejits who yelp ‘Up Hamas’ and rage against the old guard of Irish rock who rightly accuse Hamas of racist mass murder. Cosy up to neo-fascists and you’re a hero – criticise neo-fascists and you’re clearly a blood-moneyed billionaire who deserves public shaming.
You couldn’t ask for better proof that popular culture has fallen under the spell not only of Israelophobia but of Islamo-fascism itself. The slavish conformism of the anti-Israel mania has blinded the cultural elites to balance, truth and basic moral decency. Bono’s true transgression is that he says he didn’t ‘speak out’ earlier because he felt ‘uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity’. Uncertainty? Complexity? These are verboten emotions under the rule of the keffiyeh mob. Only the most brutally reductive and fact-lite posturing is permitted. Israel is evil. Gaza is innocent. The End. Deviate from these cultish diktats forged more from bigotry than reality and you will be branded one of the Jews’ money-grubbing stooges.
Hopefully, Bono now knows there is no appeasing the neo-religious fury of Israelophobia. Only obsequious prostration before their commandments of loathing for Israel will suffice. 7 October was designed to ‘sow the seeds for a global intifada’, he said in his statement. Indeed – and the fruits of that global intifada can be seen in the fact that even an established rocker like you now criticises Jew-killers at your peril. Forget slamming Israel for likes, guys. It won’t work. Instead turn your ire on that very ‘global intifada’ that poses such a dire threat to Jews, liberty, the souls of our young and culture itself.
From Ian:
An Allegedly Civilized World Genuflects to Hamas
Suppose we had an incident like what Israel suffered on Oct. 7, 2023. The equivalent of 1,200 murdered in Israel is over 44,000 Americans.
Suppose they, like what Israel suffered through, were not just murdered but violently raped and sexually mutilated.
Would we negotiate with these creatures? Would their demands touch sympathetic chords among our population?
Could we even imagine granting them sovereignty next to us, knowing their great dream is that we are eliminated?
The Israelis would have to be crazy to concede autonomy to a Palestinian state with a history of terror.
There are some 50 majority-Muslim countries in the world. There is one Jewish state.
No solution will be reached if those who pretend to represent the civilized world give credibility to depraved murderers.
Please define, Western leaders, this Palestinian state
Watching France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia announce plans to recognize a Palestinian state is maddening. While 50 Israeli hostages, some alive and some dead, remain trapped in Hamas tunnels in the de facto Palestinian state of Gaza, these Western governments are sending a message: They are not with us.
They don’t seem to care about the hostages. They seem unmoved by footage of an emaciated Evyatar David, an innocent 21-year-old Israeli forced to dig his own grave in a tunnel in the coastal enclave. They ignore the truth that Israel’s war against Hamas is not about land, borders or statehood. These Western leaders are not bothered that the Houthis, from thousands of miles away, continue to fire rockets into Israeli land, despite having no territorial dispute with the Jewish state.
They must know that if the dispute between the Arab world and Israel were simply about borders, then it would have been resolved long ago.
Can French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese articulate where the so-called Palestinian state they want to recognize exists? Can they identify who governs it or where its borders are? These questions remain unanswered, but the mainstream media will not press world leaders on any of this. Why
Because much of the mainstream media agrees with these Western leaders and the more than 140 other nations that, CNN says, have or will recognize Palestinian statehood. Yet such recognition does not advance peace. Instead, it is a political slap in the face to Israel and the Jewish people in their home countries.
Many dismiss these recognitions as legally meaningless—a hollow gesture with no real-world impact—and so they don’t matter.
But they do. Not in the sense of changing facts on the ground but in continuing to shift the global climate against the Jewish state. These proclamations embolden our enemies and further isolate Israel diplomatically. And it serves as tacit support for the wave of antisemitism flooding the streets of their cities.
Western Recognition of a Palestinian State Is a Betrayal of Israel
On July 30, Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, known for their pro-Palestinian positions, published an op-ed in the UK's Guardian warning that Britain and France's recognition of a Palestinian state would actually undermine efforts to end the Gaza war. "This step is completely detached from reality and contradicts its own stated goals. It will do nothing to bring the sides closer to a two-state solution."
Israeli officials said the move amounts to giving a gift to terrorism. A terrorist organization that has effectively become an army, attacking Israel with a level of barbarism unseen since the Holocaust, is now being rewarded. Israel views the recognition moves not merely as betrayal but as active support by Western governments for Hamas and its Oct. 7 massacre. These Western governments have lowered Hamas's motivation to agree to a ceasefire or a hostage-release deal.
The fact remains that the Palestinians have no functioning governing or state infrastructure worthy of recognition. When they have been granted territory and the opportunity to govern, the entity created has descended into violent barbarism. Hamas's brutal aggression is directed not only at Israel but also at the civilians of Gaza, a level of exploitation of one's own population that experts say has no precedent in history.
Robert Satloff:
The Twisted Logic behind Recognition of Palestinian Statehood
France, Britain, and Canada have announced their intention to extend full diplomatic recognition to the "state of Palestine" at the UN General Assembly next month. Recognition of Palestinian statehood may address some domestic political needs in Europe and Canada but it will do nothing to assuage the concerns of the constituency that matters most - Israel's voting public - which fears the dangers to its safety that might accompany Palestinian statehood, rejects the idea by a large majority, and has elected successive governments that reflect that view.
It is difficult to see the mechanism by which even near-global recognition of Palestinian statehood translates that concept into fact. The unalterable reality that has governed diplomacy since 1967 is that Israel needs to be convinced that its security will be enhanced, not threatened, by territorial withdrawal and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.
This requires winning over Israel's increasingly skeptical public, a fact that countries who choose the easy symbolism of recognizing a Palestinian state seem to ignore. The deeper reality is that the second intifada and two decades of diplomatic stalemate followed by the trauma of Oct. 7 have turned the vast Israeli center against the two-state solution.
From Ian:
Israel, Protector of the West, Treacherously Undermined by France, UK, Canada and Australia
Macron's announcement to recognize a fantasy "Palestinian state" not only demolished the negotiations that were reportedly nearing completion for a ceasefire and the return of the 50 remaining hostages; it also might cause the death by starvation, shooting or explosives possibly strapped to them, of the 20 hostages believed to be alive
The Druze -- a small ethnically Arab religious minority that originated as a breakaway from the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam -- do not consider themselves Muslim. Therefore, the other Arabs in Syria do not consider them Muslim either. For months, regime "security forces" have been slaughtering them. Islamic terrorists believe that they are obligated to slaughter anyone not Muslim, based on passages in the Qur'an.
Something appears wrong with this picture. Al-Sharaa promised Trump that he would protect Syria's minorities; so far, he seems to be doing everything but that.
In the latest of these opposition demonstrations, on July 21, dozens of protestors in Gaza shouted "Hamas Out." There is still strong reason to doubt, however, however, if Gazans would be more favorably inclined toward Israel if Hamas were gone.
Israel is already over-extended in defending virtually every minority in the region – while receiving nothing but opprobrium from most of the insensate media and many in Europe. They seem not to realize that they are the beneficiaries of Israel's actions, even as they keep on giving away their continent to newcomers who seem intent on replacing Europe's values with their own.
The question remains, however, if Syria's al-Sharaa in is not still just a terrorist, but in a suit and tie.
Jonathan Tobin:
The futility of compassion for those who want to kill you
Validating blood libels
Even worse, it provides Jewish validation for the mendacious Hamas propaganda campaign that alleges that Israel is committing genocide and deliberately starving Palestinians.
Too many Jewish groups, including liberal religious denominations, have chimed in to support a false narrative that the Israeli government’s resolve to continue fighting until Hamas is eradicated is unjust or an act of aggression, as opposed to a defensive war that needs to be won. Influenced by biased liberal media coverage, they take it for granted that blood libels about starvation and genocide are at least partially true, and not just canards rooted in antisemitism.
Israel’s many efforts to trade land for peace in the past didn’t solve the conflict. In fact, it only convinced its foes of the validity of their false claim that the Jewish state’s presence in Judea and Samaria, as well as Jerusalem, was illegal and that the Israelis were behaving as if they were criminals holding onto stolen property.
Rather than a demonstration of Jewish morality, donations aimed at alleviating Palestinian suffering are more likely to convince the recipients and their foreign cheerleaders that they are a manifestation of Jewish guilt and an indication that these Americans feel that they are complicit in Israeli crimes against humanity. In this way, it will buttress the very same blood libel about genocide that UJA says it opposes and help encourage the surge of antisemitism that followed on the heels of the attacks on Israel.
While being charitable sounds like the right thing to do, it won’t do much to help people caught up in the war. But it will be held up as evidence that even Israel’s American Jewish supporters understand that they are part of an evil conflict.
Once the war is over and Hamas eradicated, there will be a time when aid to Gaza might do some good—provided, that is, that the Palestinians are ready to move on from their obsession with an endless, futile war to destroy the Jewish state. Until then, Jewish funds should be exclusively directed toward alleviating the very real suffering of Israeli victims of the war, the wounded and the families of those slain by Hamas, as well as the health of the hostages, and rebuilding the communities sacked by Palestinians who took part in the Oct. 7 invasion and assault.
Doing so isn’t selfish, especially when considering that foreign charities, countries and the United Nations spending so much on Gaza are indifferent to the war’s impact on Israelis.
Compassion, even for one’s enemies, may seem high-minded. And, of course, we deplore all the deaths and the suffering that this war has brought to both sides. However, when it is applied to those who wish you dead, it becomes an incentive for hate, not an act of kindness. Donating to Gaza now isn’t an indication of a healthy moral compass. It’s a particularly dysfunctional indication of having lost one.
JPost Editorial:
Human rights orgs. should demand Al Jazeera stop hiring terrorists, not condemn Israel
The evidence seems irrefutable. Sharif may have been a journalist, but he was also a Hamas member. And as such, given his euphoric social media posts on October 7, 2023, praising the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis, he wasn’t an objective bystander – he was an enemy of Israel. Putting a “press” sticker on his shirt doesn’t give him immunity.
The disclosures about Sharif put Al Jazeera in an even darker light than it found itself in last year when Israel banned the media network from having offices and broadcasting from the country.
However, Israel isn’t alone in being suspicious of the Qatar-funded network. No less than The New York Times, in a Tuesday report on Al Jazeera, acknowledged it, writing that “in 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain all banned Al Jazeera amid a diplomatic spat with Qatar. Along with Egypt, the countries had accused Al Jazeera of backing terror groups.”
Even the Palestinian Authority has outlawed the network, which has no credibility, either inside or outside the Arab world.
Instead of condemning Israel, journalists' associations and human rights organizations should be demanding that Al Jazeera stop employing terrorists in their midst. Its policy of doing so puts bona fide journalists in grave danger.
The issue of whether the military benefits of eliminating al-Sharif outweigh the international pummeling Israel has taken as a result of it is something the army and the government will have to grapple with.
However, to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting journalists and ignoring al-Sharif’s Hamas connection is being disingenuous – but not surprising.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Why Experts Torch Their Own Credibility to Smear Israel
Yet another case of corrupted international standards once again raises the question: Why is it so important to the world to falsely accuse Israel of causing famine? The genocide charge falls into this category as well: Why is legitimate criticism of warfighting not enough, and why are global agencies and other institutions driven to change their own standards just to convict Israel of a crime it didn’t commit?
The latest examples come from USAID and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the latter being a food-related coalitional enterprise under the auspices of the United Nations. The Washington Free Beacon reports that the IPC “quietly changed one of its key reporting metrics … making it easier to formally declare that there is a famine in the Hamas-controlled territory.”
For many in the media and activism spheres, this was the announcement they were long waiting for. The credentialism game was again afoot: Activists could point to “experts” who would appeal to their own authority. The IPC said let there be famine, and there it was.
As the Free Beacon pointed out, the IPC simply tailored its metrics to fit the accusation. Indeed, it is the extent of the changes that really tells you how big was the gap between what Israel was being accused of and what Israel was guilty of:
“Unlike previous IPC reports on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the July report includes a metric—known as mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC)—the agency has not historically used to determine whether a famine is taking place. The report also includes a lowered threshold for the proportion of children who must be considered malnourished for the IPC to declare a famine, down to 15 percent from 30 percent.”
Those arm circumference measurements, by the way, replaced “detailed weight and height measurements to determine whether a child is suffering from acute malnutrition.”
In other words, the agency took rigorous standards and tore them to shreds. And for what? For the opportunity to accuse Israel of a crime the IPC knew it wasn’t committing.
This is an absolutely bizarre trend. Scientific agencies are blowing up their own credibility to score political points in one conflict. That credibility won’t return to them when they turn their attention to other conflicts and perhaps go back to using accurate data.
Why is flawed Gaza data in top US journal? - opinion
The journal Foreign Affairs is one of the most prestigious academic journals in the world. It is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered in New York. Articles submitted to it undergo strict peer review before publication. Recently, the journal published an article by a respected professor from the University of Chicago, Robert A. Pape, on Israel’s fighting in Gaza.
In our view, the article suffers from fundamental flaws in the professional standards required in any academic publication, especially in one so highly respected. Here we will focus only on the numerical data given by the author.
The data on which the article is based come from reports by Hamas’s health authorities. To the author’s credit, he explicitly notes this. However, he then proceeds to rely on this data without raising the obvious question of its reliability. By omitting such a statement, he sends a clear message that, in his view, these are genuine figures – as if they were reports from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The starting point of the article is the figure disseminated by Hamas, according to which the number of Palestinians dead in Gaza exceeds 61,000, and more than 145,000 have been seriously wounded. How many of them are “Hamas fighters” and how many are “uninvolved civilians”? The author acknowledges that Hamas does not make that distinction, and he follows suit.
Flawed and misleading information
The author does not bother to pose to his readers the obvious question: Why does Hamas not present a clear distinction between “combatants” and “civilians”? Are these truly “real figures”? Or is it simply convenient for Hamas to present a blurred picture, hoping that public opinion will tag them as “civilians” – just as the author of the article does?
This “implicit” message already appears in the subheadline: “Why Punishing Civilians Doesn’t Produce Strategic Gains.” Later, he explicitly states that Israel’s tactic in the war is the “punishment of civilians.”
Only with such a label can the esteemed author define Israel’s military activity in Gaza as “slaughter.” Does this approach meet the standard required of reliable academic research? To us, it seems not.
Clifford D May:
America’s fair-weather friends
In an interview on Fox News last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set out the plan’s goals: “We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free, and to pass it to civilian governance.”
Israelis are divided over the wisdom of the plan. Many think they’ve reached a point of diminishing returns militarily and should strategically retreat to security buffer zones.
What about Gazans? Are they divided? Or would most prefer that Hamas release the hostages and seek a truce—or at least resume negotiations that could lead to delaying Israel’s Gaza City plan?
Gazans who say such things publicly are likely to be summarily executed, with the Hamas-obedient international media giving scant coverage to either their courageous dissent or their untimely deaths.
The Trump administration’s position was clearly articulated by Vice President JD Vance last week: “Number one, we want to make it so that Hamas cannot attack innocent Israeli civilians ever again, and we think that has to come through the eradication of Hamas. Second, the president has been very moved by these terrible images of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, so we want to make sure that we solve that problem.”
I wish Germany, France and Britain were saying the same.
They’re adamant that U.S. President Donald Trump work with them to support Ukraine, a fledgling European democracy defending itself against a revanchist dictator.
Does it not follow, as a matter of principle and self-interest, that they ought to work with Trump to support a mature Middle Eastern democracy defending itself against a terrorist proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran whose goal is openly and even proudly genocidal?
I wonder if Messrs. Merz, Starmer and Macron understand how tough they are making it for Atlanticists like me to push back against the growing number of Americans who regard West Europeans as fair-weather friends, always there for us when they need us.
Woman who worked in morgue on October 7 accuses Starmer of ‘torpedoing’ peace in Gaza
An Israeli morgue worker who witnessed the extent of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 firsthand has accused Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of “torpedoing” any chance for peace or the return of hostages by recognising a Palestinian state.
Shari Mendes, 64, who, as a member of the team at Israel’s national morgue, examined the bodies of many of the women murdered and mutilated on October 7, wrote an “urgent plea” to Starmer yesterday.
“Your offer to recognise a Palestinian state has put the lives of the 20 or so living Israeli hostages in jeopardy and made it harder to recover the bodies of 30 other Israelis,” she wrote. “More significantly, it has torpedoed any chances for peace.”
She wrote that despite her being a “regular person” and not in the habit of writing to prime ministers, it is “unfathomable” to her that Jews should be starved and forced to dig their own graves again so soon after the Holocaust.
She said if Hamas is pressured to surrender then the war would end and a “true demilitarised and peaceful government in Gaza is the first step toward Israeli acceptance that real peace and security is possible.”
If Starmer issues a statement similar to the following, she claimed, he would be able to save lives of both innocent Israelis and Palestinians: “‘In order for there to be lasting peace in the Middle East I must add a condition to any offer to recognise a Palestinian state. Hamas must surrender and release all Israeli hostages they hold before any negotiations over Palestinian statehood can begin. Hamas cannot stay. They must disarm and go into exile. They must leave Gaza as the first step to ending this terrible war which they started, so that reconstruction and a chance for the citizens of Gaza and Israel to live side by side in peace, can start.’”
As part of the unit in the IDF specialising in the identification and preparation for burial of female soldiers, Mendes was invited in early 2024 to the House of Lords in London to give testimony on what she had witnessed working on the mutilated bodies of October 7 victims.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The ‘Empathy’ Lie and the Erasure of the Hostages
As I explained yesterday, there is no longer any disputing that French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that his country would recognize the “state of Palestine,” in conjunction with his and other European leaders’ one-sided pressure on Israel, sabotaged the cease-fire deal that would have brought 10 living hostages home.
Which means that every leader who followed Macron in announcing a plan to recognize a Palestinian state—Mark Carney of Canada, Albanese of Australia, Keir Starmer of the UK—did so knowing the price that would be paid by the hostages.
The remaining hostages, including those who would have been freed had Europe not intervened on Hamas’s behalf, may not survive. But even those who do survive will be tortured, starved, and likely exposed to sexual mistreatment of one kind or another. Every added day of captivity brings them closer to death through painful and utterly inhuman treatment at the hands of Hamas monsters.
To join in the wave of “Palestine” recognition, knowing this, means several Western leaders have made a calculation: They can live with the deaths of the hostages, even when they are partially on their conscience. Such people may not be Hamasnik monsters themselves, but they are at the very least monster-adjacent.
Furthermore, this whole situation exposes something important about the international community. Those who claim to care for the wellbeing of Palestinians in Gaza are not displaying empathy. They are not displaying generosity of spirit or anything of the kind. They are, as they have explained time and again, acting out of domestic political pressure. That is certainly a legitimate driver of political policymaking, but it is not a display of morality or decency.
Were the “humanitarian” activists to advocate with equal force for the hostages, they might be saved. But the rest of the world doesn’t care, and politics is a numbers game: There simply aren’t enough Jews in these countries. That itself is a vicious cycle, and one the callous cowards of the West are unbothered by as well.
Seth Mandel:
Why Israel Is Losing the ‘Propaganda War’
Just as recognizing a Palestinian state does not make a Palestinian state suddenly appear. It may be a boon to the people dressing up as the Palestinian state, though.
Is an NGO or some other nonstate entity a “humanitarian” organization because it calls itself humanitarian? Over the weekend there was some excitement in the anti-Israel world over an open letter written by French self-described experts in international law, which made two pretty wild points: that Israel did not have the legal right of self-defense after Oct. 7, and that Israel’s “genocidal intent” toward Gazans was made clear when someone in Israel proposed a “humanitarian city” for Palestinians civilians that was never actually pursued. I’m sure these folks have university degrees in their chosen industry, but not a single person who signs a letter like this is an “expert” in anything except signing their own name.
The propaganda debate over the war is reminiscent of MSNBC’s Joy Reid once explaining that “The enemy of the far-right, in their own words, are Antifa, meaning anti-fascist. So, they are anti-anti-fascist by their own reckoning.” If you oppose a group called anti-fascist, you are a fascist. Magnify this galactic stupidity by a thousand and you have something like what Israel is facing in the international media.
What if we call the Hamas government’s police forces the “Gaza civil police”? Then the UN can argue its trucks are being guarded by legions of people like Dwight from The Office, who boasted of his status as a Lackawanna County volunteer sheriff’s deputy.
And where do you go when you need some solid medical or hospital information? May I suggest the Gaza Health Ministry? The ministry is not affiliated with Hamas because, as you can see, the word Hamas appears nowhere in its name.
Is there a single person on earth in a position of power and influence who actually believes any of this? Of course not. And that is the problem with the propaganda war. Someone who cites the “Gaza Health Ministry” is not someone who has been fooled by one side; it is someone who has chosen one side. There’s no question at all that Israel could stand to improve its response time in providing the real story behind whatever nonsense is leading, say, the Guardian on any given day. But one must also remember why someone would read the Guardian for its Mideast war reporting in the first place.
Meir Y. Soloveichik:
We Will No Longer Tolerate ‘Pay for Slay’
In 2002, Benjamin Blutstein was an American student from New Jersey, studying for a semester at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. As he began lunch in the school’s Frank Sinatra Cafeteria, a Hamas-planted bomb blew up, ending his life instantly. He had planned to fly home later that day. Blutstein was one of several Americans murdered in that attack and one of many Americans murdered by Palestinian terrorists over the past 20 years. Several of his murderers sit in Israeli prison—and are to this day given a stipend as reward by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The families of Palestinian “martyrs,” suicide bombers, receive similar sustenance.
It was more than two decades later, this past June, that the Supreme Court addressed the legal rights of Blutstein’s relatives and those of others. The case is technical, focusing on matters abstruse and abstract, but if we pay close attention, we will discover that the jurisprudential debate also makes manifest larger questions relating to American foreign policy, mistakes made over the past years—and the new attitude that must be adopted.
The case, Fuld et al. v. PLO et al., concerns the policy of the Palestinian Authority that is known as “pay for slay,” through which the PA continues to bestow financial rewards on terrorists and their families, thereby incentivizing terrorist acts. Families of murdered Americans like Benjamin Blutstein sued the Palestinian Authority for damages. They relied on the 1990 Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows for verdicts bestowing triple damages to those hurt by international terror. They, in turn, were constantly rebuffed by the courts, which insisted that U.S. law had no jurisdiction over the Palestinian Authority.
In response, Congress in 2019 passed the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, specifically stating that the PA would be deemed to have consented to the jurisdiction of United States law if it maintained a presence in American territory and if it continued its “pay for slay” activities. Because the PA does indeed maintain an office in midtown Manhattan, and because its payments for terror are still ongoing, the families of the victims successfully sued the PA in federal court, achieving a civil verdict of hundreds of millions of dollars.
That decision was overturned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which deemed it a violation of the PA’s due-process rights because it unfairly imposed the burden of “litigating in a distant or inconvenient forum.” While the PA does have an office in New York, the circuit court argued that aside from its presence at the United Nations, the PA had no right to engage in its activities in the United States; the American government was merely turning a “blind eye” to its activities. The PA could not be deemed to have consented to U.S. jurisdiction unless it received some “reciprocal” benefit for its presence in the country.
From Ian:
Jonathan Schanzer:
How Israel Can Defend Itself in the Future
Israeli grayzone operations are undeniably ramping up as the multi-front war quiets down. But the risk-reward calculus for Israel is now likely to vary from one theater to the next across the Middle East. Striking assets in Lebanon and Syria poses little risk right now. Neither Hezbollah nor the regime of Ahmad al-Shara appears particularly eager to fight.
The Iranian regime, however, may be up for another tussle. Should the IDF conduct operations that cross Iran’s red line—a line that is currently ill-defined—there is real risk of escalation. Interestingly, the main critique of the campaign prior to October 7 was that it was too provocative and risked igniting a major war for minimal gains. That may seem ironic in hindsight, but the risk of provoking another major conflict now is not negligible.
Air strikes on military facilities in response to the Iranian regime renewing its ballistic missile production capabilities could trigger a painful response. The regime maintains the ability to launch ballistic missiles at Israel and to strike with considerable accuracy. The Israelis need to think carefully about how and where they conduct future operations in Iran. Indeed, few Israelis relish the notion of returning to their bomb shelters for extended stays.
A different sort of Israeli campaign is likely necessary, perhaps in tandem with calibrated efforts to prevent the regime from returning to its previous strength. This additional campaign might be one in which Israel supports the Iranian opposition movement and otherwise weakens the regime from within. Psychological, political, diplomatic, economic, and other measures designed to erode the power of the mullahs would be deployed with increasing intensity. The Israelis understand that the regime must not be allowed respite after the drubbing it absorbed in June. More important, such a strategy is crucial because it offers a more enduring and non-kinetic solution to the Islamic Republic’s annihilationist ambitions. The Campaign Between Wars could never offer that.
What the return of the campaign does offer is time, and time is what Israel needs. The pager and walkie-talkie operation that cut down Hezbollah’s commanders took years to execute. The gathering of the intelligence required to take out Hassan Nasrallah in his Beirut bunker was painstaking. The forward operation that launched Israel’s “Rising Lion” campaign in Iran, too, required years of preparation.
Israel has fewer tricks up its sleeve than it had a year ago. Most of its recent feats cannot be repeated. So Israel’s war planners and spies are back to the drawing board. They will need time to prepare for the next round against Iran, not to mention other enemies.
Concurrently, Israel has a few other related long-term projects that will also require time. The reconstruction of Israel’s northern communities destroyed by Hezbollah is one. The rebuilding of the communities in the Gaza envelope is another. The revitalization of the Israeli economy, which has taken a brutal hit, is crucial. The expansion of the country’s defense industrial base is another priority identified by the Israelis, after the Biden administration withheld ordnance in 2024 and offered a glimpse into a potential future in which America does not have Israel’s back. Forestalling major conflict for several years to facilitate these initiatives will be vital for the country’s long-term health. Of course, these initiatives cannot begin until the current war ends.
As my colleague Clifford May often says, in the Middle East, there are no permanent victories, only permanent battles. The rise, fall, and rise of the Campaign Between the Wars reflect this reality. It won’t solve all of Israel’s problems. But keeping Israel’s enemies weak and buying time would constitute a major achievement after the grueling war Israel has endured.
UN-Backed Famine Watchdog Quietly Changed Standards, Easing Way To Declare Famine in Gaza
The U.N.-affiliated watchdog group that recently declared a "worst-case scenario of famine" in Gaza quietly changed one of its key reporting metrics while doing so, making it easier to formally declare that there is a famine in the Hamas-controlled territory.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—a network of Western governments, the United Nations, and nonprofit groups—determined in a July 29 report "the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip," claiming that "mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths." Media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and ABC News relied on the IPC report to claim that Israeli policies have led to mass starvation, with the Times stating that "months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel on the territory" have caused a famine "across most of Gaza."
Unlike previous IPC reports on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the July report includes a metric—known as mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC)—the agency has not historically used to determine whether a famine is taking place. The report also includes a lowered threshold for the proportion of children who must be considered malnourished for the IPC to declare a famine, down to 15 percent from 30 percent.
Aid workers traditionally conduct detailed weight and height measurements to determine whether a child is suffering from acute malnutrition. MUAC, by contrast, consists only of a child's arm circumference, a measurement that can be done more quickly and is considered less precise. In the past, the IPC has declared famine after finding that 30 percent of children in an area are suffering from acute malnutrition using their weight and height measurements. In the recent Gaza report, the IPC said it would declare famine if it found that 15 percent of children were suffering from acute malnutrition using their arm circumference measurement and if the agency found unspecified "evidence of rapidly worsening underlying drivers."
The "pretty big shift" in standards, one veteran aid industry insider told the Washington Free Beacon, suggests the IPC is "lowering the bar, or trying to make it easier for the famine determination to be made."
Why Is Reuters Carrying Water for Hamas?
When it comes to the war in Gaza, how is it that the legacy media always defers to the narrative that benefits Hamas? A recent Reuters story illuminates the problem.
Last month, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) produced an internal analysis tracking reports of waste, fraud, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Gaza.
According to that report, between October 2023 and May 2025, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance received 156 notifications of “fraud, waste, and abuse notifications” from its NGO partners in Gaza, amounting to a loss of more than $4.6 million. The key finding was that “for all 156 incidents, partners did not provide any information in their incident reports alleging SG [sanctioned group] or FTO [foreign terrorist organization] involvement,” according to a slideshow of the findings obtained by The Free Press.
But when the analysis was leaked to legacy news organizations, they reported something completely different.
In late July, first Reuters and then CNN reported that the analysis “found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.” ABC later reported that USAID “failed to find any evidence” that Hamas “engaged in widespread diversion of assistance.” Those news organizations didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
There is a world of difference between “notifications” of aid misuse and actual misuse.
Two sources familiar with USAID and its analysis confirmed that the partners’ failure to report terrorist involvement does not mean there is “no evidence” of theft by Hamas. “The report appears to be wholly reliant on self-reporting by UN agencies and NGOs who are extremely reticent to report Hamas interference out of fear of violent retribution by Hamas,” a senior U.S. official familiar with the USAID report told The Free Press.
When the Reuters story was published, “nobody at the highest levels of the USAID administration had seen the report,” said a senior official at the State Department, which oversees USAID. “It was deliberately and intentionally manufactured. . . and distributed to plant a deliberate false narrative.”
Worse yet, Hamas used Reuters’ framing to fuel accusations of starvation and genocide against the U.S. and Israel. Allegations of theft “were recently refuted by an internal investigation by the United States Agency for International Development, which confirmed the absence of any reports or data indicating the theft of aid by Hamas,” said Izzat al-Rishq, a founding member of Hamas’s politburo, on August 1. “We strongly condemn U.S. President Trump’s reiteration of Israeli allegations and lies accusing Hamas of stealing and selling humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
Monday, August 18, 2025
