From Ian:
America's Electoral Moment of Clarity in the Shadow of Israel’s Black Sabbath
By 2023, anti-Zionism and antisemitism had become synonymous, particularly in academia, the former having become the new “honorable antisemitism.”Footnote14 Though both parties made room for bigots who did not like Jews, the big story that was being missed by too many, notably American Jews, was the growing antisemitic anti-Zionism on the left. One reason was its relative rarity in the US until quite recently: “Up to the tenure of President Barack Obama,” observes the Italian-Israeli journalist Fiamma Nirenstein, “left-leaning American Jews and Democrats were not anti-Israeli like the European left.”Footnote15
The situation worsened with breathtaking rapidity. By 2020, she detected “a new reality in which one is not a Democrat if one does not criticize Israel and will be criticized oneself for not criticizing it.” Psychologically and ideologically unprepared for being ostracized by fellow progressives, most Jews chose inertia. They simply hadn’t seen all this coming.
Nor, indeed, had most Americans. Little did they know that even before October 7, the same neo-Marxist cancer that had infected Western academic institutions and the establishment media also engulfed the publishing industry. Politically incorrect (read: not leftist) and Jewish-authored book proposals were being rejected at a more rapid pace than ever.
Writer, scholar, and publisher Adam Bellow told Tablet’s editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz that his harrowing experiences in mainstream publishing have left him deeply pessimistic.Footnote16 Classics are not reprinted, and potentially brilliant works fail to see the light of day. The loss is incalculable. Since the publishing industry keeps alive the treasures of our common heritage, its atrophy and politicization bode ill for the entire culture.
The fate of democracy, after all, is intertwined with its culture, specifically its books. As the great sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University and founder of Transaction Publishers in 1962, wrote shortly before his death in 2012: “Publishing flourishes best in a democratic society … . [It] also enhances democracy when decisions are made on the basis of literary merit rather than top-down legislation.” But it is a precarious balance. He worried deeply about “the delicate interaction between publishing and politics.”Footnote17 For when politically motivated censorship creeps into editorial decisions, democracy is in peril.
He knew the history. The son of poor Jewish immigrants from a Russian shtetl growing up in Harlem during the 1930s, the notoriously outspoken Horowitz would have vigorously denounced the unprecedented rise of antisemitism among publishers today. For his part, at Transaction and in his own writings, he was devoted to the preservation of Judaism. He considered it indispensable to civilization, arguing that erasing the first People of the Book from human memory amounts to humanity’s intellectual and spiritual suicide. For while a civilization that cancels the Jews might somehow survive, without liberty it is doomed.
Back in 1969, he had warned that “for the [classical] liberal society, the attitude toward Jews has become a test case of whether liberalism is possible. Insofar as Nazism, Communism, or any totalistic system is unqualifiedly victorious, Judaism will be finished.” So, too, will adherents of other faiths. “Judaism has become, perhaps against its own theological predilections, a cardinal expression of liberalism.”Footnote18
His words resonate even more powerfully today. The Jew, declared Horowitz, has historically been the one who provides “global society with an operational set of liberal values and who in turn fares best in a global society that has a vested, legitimated interest in precisely fostering open-ended values for its own thoroughly non-Jewish reasons.”Footnote19
“Revelation” seems to be a singularly apt word with which to describe what happened on October 7. The biblical root of this English word reflects the Hebrew hitgalut, meaning “to uncover something that was hidden.” In America, this was due either to the wishful thinking that enemies can be appeased if shown goodwill, or to willful ignorance and ideological myopia—often, all of the above. These all-too-human predilections, so prevalent among Western European elites, were also shared by some Israelis—until that fateful day in October. Then November 5, 2024, proved that most Americans also experienced a profound revelation. That may well be the right word to express its spiritual significance. But it is its Greek counterpart, apokalupsis, that captures the full drama. As history has demonstrated, apocalypses tend to have monumental consequences.
Part of the Western Left is now a clear and present danger to Jews and the West
Didier Fassin’s orations at Princeton, like Judith Butler’s article ‘The Compass of Mourning’, continue a tradition of the American left that was initiated by Susan Sontag, who in response to accusations that Bin Laden’s terrorists were cowardly, defended their aggression, calling it the consequence of ‘specific American alliances and actions’.[lv] In Sontag’s eyes, America itself was guilty, just as Israel was, according to Butler, and French journalists in Fassin’s perspective. Until recently, it seemed that there were limits to blaming the victim. This all changed though with the left’s reaction to the rapes committed by Palestinians on 7 October.
The first pointer was a photograph of a dead woman, taken the day after the attack on Route 232, a country road near Gaza. The victim was wearing a black dress and she had a charred face.[lvi] Gal Abdush had attended the Nova Festival, and it turned out that she had been raped and then shot. The last message she sent to her family was ‘You don’t understand.’
A two-month investigation by journalists from the New York Times, making use of GPS data from the mobile phones of over 150 people, as well as interviews with victims, therapists and soldiers, revealed that this was not an isolated rape, but ‘part of a broader pattern’.[lvii] A report released by the UN in March stated that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery’, against both women and men, ‘including rape and gang rape,’ and that there was ‘clear and convincing information’ concerning ‘rape and sexualised torture’ of hostages.’[lviii]
How did the left react to these findings? More or less like the Catholic Church did to the Kielce Pogrom of 1946: violence was condemned per se, but without going into specifics. Voices that were usually forthright, such as Human Rights Watch, #MeToo and Amnesty International, chose to remain silent, and it took the UN’s organisation for women’s rights eight months to express its concern.[lix] The film Bearing Witness, which was made by Israelis using clips of drastic scenes, as well as Sheryl Sandberg documentary, [lx] was received with incredulity, and one of the more sensitive journalists who watched it claimed that he had been unnecessarily traumatised. A hundred and forty American feminist scholars, including Angela Davis, an iconic figure during the Vietnam War, spoke out against the manipulation of sexual violence (1800 people from other countries signed this letter too[lxi]), and one of them claimed that the descriptions of the rapes were not trustworthy, as they were extremely fetishistic – as if that was not the case with normal rape. The slogans ‘Believe Women’ and ‘Silence is Violence’ had suddenly ceased to be valid.
Judith Butler reacted to the whole situation like a typical 1950s policeman who had been confronted with claims of rape – she demanded proof. This led Israeli sociologist and feminist Eva Illouz to comment: ‘Judith Butler built their career off of challenging notions of objectivity, essence, and reality. Judith Butler was able to circulate a letter supporting someone accused of harassment without evidence [this concerns Avital Ronell, a professor at New York University, who was suspended after a PhD student accused her of harrassment in 2017[lxii]]. But now, they seem (for the time being) to have changed their mind. (…) They declare that were this evidence provided, they would “deplore” these rapes. The indecency of Butler’s words desecrates the blessed memory of those women who were tortured, raped, shot, or stabbed and disqualify them from being considered a feminist.’[lxiii]
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian from The New School in New York, theorises that the left’s negation of the rapes is connected with the failure of the previously described anti-discrimination programmes in the US: here too the problem hinges on the unacceptable whiteness of the victims.[lxiv] In the past, sexual violence against white women was a tool used by racists to carry out lynchings, yet today’s defenders of Hamas compare the terrorists[lxv] to Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi because he whistled at a white married woman.[lxvi] However, the problem is that these two events are fundamentally different, and we, weakened by relativism à la Judith Butler, have ever fewer tools to illuminate this difference.
The dehumanisation of an antisemite
Will left-wing antisemitism become a new fashion, which will ultimately enable the progressive elite to fraternise with the masses? It cannot be ruled out, all the more so given that it is supported by a historical mechanism that has led us by the nose for a couple of thousand years. In keeping with the best definition of antisemitism that I know, proposed by David Nirenberg in his book Anti-Judaism (2015), antisemitism does not depend on one or other way of thinking about Jews, but on thinking ‘by means of Jews.’
Since ancient times, various cultures, including religions such as Christianity and Islam, have defined themselves via opposition to how they viewed Judaism. This had nothing to do with what Judaism was, and everything to do with wanting to avoid the evil which it was perceived to be.
In the age of piety, Israel was a blasphemer and an unbeliever. When secularism became fashionable, Jews were loathed as ‘dark reactionaries’. Under capitalism, they were persecuted as communists, and under communism, as capitalist exploiters. Nationalist movements were not indifferent to them either, labelling them cosmopolitans, whereas ebbing nationalism allows Jews to be stigmatised as crazed chauvinists.
We can also observe the functioning of these principles in today’s world. In a time when human rights are so highly valued, Israel has once again been cast as the villain, and we unstintingly strive to convince ourselves that we are on the right side.
Day after day, progressive newspapers – The New York Times, Gazeta Wyborcza or Oko Press – exacerbate the crisis in the Middle East, by contrasting omnipotent Israel with Palestinians who are deprived of agency. Hamas and Hezbollah are not dehumanised by Jews, who, even if they hate them, have to deal with the everyday, life-and-death consequences of their actions – but by those who treat them like non-human factors, like an element, or a natural disaster, things which cannot be asked to take responsibility for themselves.
For left-wing politics today, support for the Palestinian cause has become as important as anti-capitalism, vegetarianism, opposition to coal mining and support for the right to abortion. The left craves a simple way of looking at the world, and it needs some groups which it can hate with impunity, and others which it can bombard with love.
Jews do not need the left, for in spite of what antisemites say about them, they are a collective of anti-victims: following the greatest catastrophe in history, they took advantage of a historical opportunity to build a collective life. That is why we will never forgive them for what we did to them.
Two former sr. US officials from Biden, Trump admins call for return of hostages in joint op-ed
Two former senior American officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations wrote a joint op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that called for the return of the hostages held by Hamas, specifically the seven American citizens held hostage.
Robert C. O'Brien served as national security advisor under President-elect Donald Trump's first administration, and Tom Nides is the former US ambassador to Israel, who served in President Joe Biden's administration.
O'Brien and Nides wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "Excluding 9/11, this [October 7] was the largest single-day attack on American citizens by a foreign terror organization since the 1980s."
They condemned Hamas's use of hostages as bargaining chips and human shields and condemned the murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin at the hands of Hamas terrorists before the IDF could reach him.
The two officials wrote in the op-ed, "We, like the presidents we served, don't always agree on how to serve them. But we are united in our belief that the seven US hostages still in Gaza, along with the other 93 hostages, must come home now."
They spoke of both Biden and his team's work to make a deal happen and Trump's statements that say there will be "hell to pay" if they are not returned before he returns to office.
Senior officials urge hostage deal
Nides and O'Brien also wrote of the timing of a deal in The Wall Street Journal after several of Iran's proxies, including Hezbollah and Hamas, had been weakened, and Assad's regime topped in Syria.
"All parties to these negotiations must know that any agreement must include the immediate release of the American Seven. They aren’t a bargaining chip. They are our fellow citizens with names and family members who await them with unbearable pain. This Hanukkah and Christmas, these families will be forced again to sit at their holiday dinner with an empty chair at the table."
"Hamas and their backers must hear the message loud and clear: Release the Americans in the first phase of the deal. All of them. Release the American Seven and remember their names at your holiday celebrations this week: Edan Alexander, Itay Chen, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Gadi Haggai, Judi Weinstein Haggai, Omer Neutra, and Keith Siegel."
From Ian:
Caroline Glick:
The war of resurrection
In a special cabinet meeting marking the first year since the Palestinian invasion on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a draft decision to his ministers to rename the war, which until then had been dubbed “The Iron Swords War” by the Israel Defense Forces, the War of Tkuma. Tkuma is one of those Hebrew words that taps the ancient chords of Jewish memory. Its literal translation in English is “rebirth” or “resurrection.”
Netanyahu’s draft decision passed unanimously.
Why did he pick that name? Why resurrection? What had we died from?
On the surface, it could simply refer to the 1,200 Israelis who were murdered on Oct. 7. Israel arose from the ashes of that one-day Holocaust to destroy the enemy who perpetrated it.
But there is a deeper meaning to tkuma that speaks to the cause of that day. The deeper meaning refers to the spiritual or ideological disposition of the nation of Israel. What lay dead in the ashes on Oct. 7 wasn’t only the men, women and children killed that day, but a 50-year doctrine of dependence.
The day Hamas led the Palestinians of Gaza on their orgy of mass murder, torture, rape and abduction, the Israel they entered was marking not only the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War but the 50th anniversary of Israeli strategic dependence on the United States. Similarly, they entered an Israel that had recently entered its 32nd year of dependence on the Palestinians.
In the days and months that followed that invasion, as Israelis recovered from the initial shock, the delusions that had directed Israel’s strategic policies for two generations were exposed for what they were. The first that fell by the wayside was the delusion that Israel could peacefully coexist with a group of people who defined themselves by their collective goal of annihilating the Jewish people.
That idea had already been discarded by 65% of Israelis when Oct. 7 rolled around. But even though a mere 35% of Israelis still supported Palestinian statehood on that Black Shabbat, Israel’s national policy was still to enable Hamas to run a terror state in Gaza and for the Palestinian Authority to run terrorist enclaves in Judea and Samaria.
The reason that was the case was America.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the United States saved Israel from destruction by airlifting desperately needed weapons to the IDF after initial supplies were all but exhausted. In the years that followed that war, Israel’s security brass gradually embraced strategic dependence as their guiding light. For these generals, whose dominance in the ranks increased over the decades, national independence and strategic freedom were dangerous concepts.
They didn’t believe that the indomitable will of the Jewish people, the courage of IDF soldiers, the ingenuity of Israeli scientists and the power of the Israeli economy (not to mention the God of Israel) were the forces working to procure Israel’s survival. Over time, they came to believe that it was the largesse of the U.S. State Department, coupled with America’s foreign and defense policy establishment, that secured the existence of the Jewish state. As they saw it, if Israel didn’t subordinate its strategic policies to U.S. preferences, it would endanger its very existence.
The strategic dependence on America that Israeli generals and their cohorts in the media developed and cultivated began as a psychological side effect of their near failure to save Israel in October 1973. But over time, it became apparent that their doctrine of dependence served the ideological and political interests of the Israeli left. And once that became clear, their psychological dependence was presented as responsible strategic wisdom.
When Turkey becomes Iran
Ironically, there was a time in the last century when Israel enjoyed the friendship of both Turkey and Iran. Both nations were moderate, pro-Western states resisting the attempts of radical clerics to impose religious rule.
But in 1979, Iran fell to the Ayatollahs, who transformed it into a radical Islamic republic. In recent months, Iran has faced repeated failures in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. These external setbacks are compounded by ongoing domestic failures in governance and the economy, fueling sharp criticism on the Iranian street. Disillusionment with the regime has led many to believe that its downfall is inevitable, though it may take months or even years.
While Iran seems to be counting down to the end of the Ayatollahs' rule, Turkey is moving in the opposite direction, increasingly Islamized. Bernard Lewis's observation from years ago—that "Iran will become Turkey, and Turkey will become Iran"—appears to be coming true, with one country moderating and the other transforming into a backward, radical Islamic republic.
It is too early to determine whether Turkey will achieve its grandiose aspirations in Syria and the Middle East. Even before that, it remains to be seen whether al-Julani can solidify his rule in Syria and turn it into an Islamic theocracy.
What is certain is that al-Julani's rise to prominence in Damascus under Turkey's sponsorship has created tension in many Arab states, foremost among them Jordan. While Israel fears the spillover of terror from Syria, Jordan worries about the infiltration of radical Islamic revolutionary ideas into its already fragile society.
Israel, along with Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf states, is closely monitoring the situation and exploring avenues for cooperation to address this new border threat. Yet, it is important to remember that this challenge pales in comparison to the threat Iran still poses—a threat that remains as significant as ever.
Is Moscow losing its hold on the Middle East?
The rise of a new Syrian regime could push the country closer to the West or result in efforts to curb Russian influence, jeopardizing Moscow’s regional sway. Although Russia has historically allied with the Assad family, it may now be forced to negotiate with the rebels to preserve its interests.
Western analysts argue that warm-water ports are a cornerstone of Russian foreign policy aimed at competing with NATO and the United States. The primary concern is that vacating these bases could create a power vacuum that could potentially be filled by Western or even Chinese forces, further diminishing Russia’s ability to safeguard its interests.
Logistically, the Khmeimim and Tartus bases have been crucial for transporting goods and arms to Africa, particularly to nations like Libya, Mali, Niger and Sudan. Abandoning these facilities could compel Russia to find alternative infrastructure, increasing costs and complicating its influence in Africa.
Amid its prolonged war in Ukraine, which has resulted in more than 200,000 Russian military casualties in the last two years, any withdrawal from Syria could be perceived as a retreat from global influence. While Russia’s military remains the world’s second-largest with 1.5 million troops, Moscow is acutely aware of the demographic and strategic toll of its ongoing conflicts. A retreat from Syria could reinforce perceptions of Russia as a declining power on the international stage. President Vladimir Putin is likely to make every effort to extend his country’s presence in the Middle East to safeguard its critical interests.
Anonymous sources in Moscow, Europe and the Middle East confirm ongoing negotiations to maintain operations at Tartus and Khmeimim. Russian officials claim to have “unofficial understandings” with the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham regarding continued access to these strategic facilities.
Nevertheless, reports indicate that Russia is withdrawing at least 400 troops from the Damascus area in coordination with Syria’s new authorities. The implications of this withdrawal extend beyond military presence, potentially affecting Russia’s security, economic and strategic interests in the Middle East, Africa and even Southern Europe.
Aware of these risks, Russia appears determined to prolong its military presence in Syria. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has described the bases as subjects of “serious discussion” with Syria’s new leadership, emphasizing that all necessary precautions are being taken to secure Russia’s interests.
Should an agreement with the new regime prove elusive, a full withdrawal could reshape the global balance of power, diminishing Moscow’s influence in the Middle East and beyond for years to come.
From Ian:
Why Israel Can Count on Us
Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Israel Alone contains much truth, but its title is fundamentally false. And this means that as insightful and eloquent as the author of this volume often is about the threats Israel faces, his thesis reveals that there is much about the world, and the Jewish place within it, that he does not understand. And for Jews to embrace this book is to countenance a calumny against some of the best friends Israel has in the world.
Lévy, a French-Jewish philosopher and public intellectual, begins Israel Alone by telling us how shocked he was by the events of October 7 and movingly describes how he visited Israel immediately after. His pain is evident as he decries the use of the word "context" utilized in defenses of Israel’s enemies, in statements that were "sung in unison by France’s politicians, the editorialists of the global South, and, in the United States, by the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania." In fact, he asserts, "Israel was defending itself. Struck in the heart, Israel was attempting to neutralize the Nazis that had drawn its blood precisely to ensure that they could never do it again."
All this is laudable. Israel is indeed at war against a Nazi-like evil, and many in European parliaments and palaces around the world have turned against Israel—as they have in the past. But is Israel, as the book’s title claims, truly alone? Are there not prominent political figures that have stood with the Jewish state? Lévy’s reply is that figures such as Donald Trump or Viktor Orban are unworthy of a Jewish embrace. "No accord is possible, no historic compromise is conceivable, with ‘friends’ such as these. The Jews are therefore alone."
Yet whatever one’s views of Orban, or the once and future president of the United States, it remains clear that millions of regular Americans also stand with Israel. The exit polls of the recent election reflect that almost two thirds of voters advocate American support of the Jewish state, with half of those voters contending that the current administration has not supported the country enough. If these polls are even close to being correct, this would mean that at least many tens of millions of Americans harbor an affection for Israel.
What this means is that in fact, the exact opposite of Lévy’s contention is the case: Israel is less alone than it has ever been. In a certain sense, this is more historically wondrous than the rise of modern Israel itself. For consider: The Jews have had sovereign states before, first in the biblical period, and later during the reign of the Maccabees. Throughout these periods, one may have seen a world leader that reflected an affection for Jews. Hiram, king of Tyre, was an ally of David’s; Cyrus of Persia allowed for the Jewish return to Jerusalem; Julius Caesar was grateful for Judean support and bestowed special liberties on Jerusalem for as long as he led Rome.
Islamism still haunts us
As for Christmas markets, a cherished institution in Germany and increasingly a target of Islamist killers, a 15-year-old was sent to youth custody for four years in June for his plan to attack a market in Leverkusen. Earlier this month, a 37-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker was arrested on suspicion of planning a massacre at a Christmas market in Augsburg, and three young suspected Islamists were arrested, the police seizing knives and an assault rifle, for their plot to attack a market in Frankfurt or Mannheim.
That’s just Germany. 2024 was a grotesquely successful year for Islamist terror on the European continent at large. Tajik gunmen backed by ISIS-K, the ISIS franchise operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan, slaughtered 145 people and injured more than 500 at the Crocus City Hall near Moscow. It was the deadliest terror attack on Russian soil since 2004. If it wasn’t for a tip-off from US intelligence, similar horrors could have been inflicted on Vienna in August, where two teenagers, who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, were planning to bomb and slash their way through a Taylor Swift concert.
Massacring concert-goers. Mowing down families at Christmas markets. Slashing at people’s necks as they gather together in their city centre. This is a barbarous war on our very way of life, waged by death cults and their sadistic fanboys. And yet Europe’s rulers have come to treat such attacks as akin to natural disasters – as awful, tragic, oh-so-sad things that just happen from time to time.
They seem to have convinced themselves that confronting the Islamist threat too forcefully risks whipping up anti-Muslim hatred, as if the majority are a pogrom in waiting, or risks ‘alienating’ European Muslims, as if they are all terrorist sympathisers. In their supposed efforts to quell bigotry, the elites reveal their own.
The horror in Magdeburg is a reminder that barbarism comes in many different packages. But as we head into 2025, we cannot lose sight of where the primary threat lies. We must refuse to be cowed by Islamist terror – and we must refuse to be condescended to by an establishment that would rather see us as the problem.
An obscene irony: Talk of arresting Netanyahu at Auschwitz
Nearly five years ago, as preparations were underway to hold a major event in Jerusalem on January 20, 2020, marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, dozens of world leaders were slated to attend. Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, however, announced he would not participate because he would not be allowed to speak at the event.
Instead, keynote speeches were to be delivered by then-US Vice President Mike Pence, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
For Duda, the decision to exclude him from speaking was more than a diplomatic slight—it was, he argued, “a distortion of the historical truth,” denying him the chance to honor Polish citizens who perished in the Holocaust.
This sensitivity to “historical truth” raises questions about how Duda might view a potential scenario unfolding today: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being unable to travel to Poland and Auschwitz for an event marking the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation on January 27 because Poland has stated it would honor an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his arrest on alleged war crimes stemming from the October 7 war.
Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Władysław Bartoszewski, told a Polish newspaper on Friday that Netanyahu would indeed be arrested if he came to the ceremony. Think of that: Poland, upon whose soil millions of Jews were killed, would detain the leader of the Jewish state for taking actions to protect the country from those seeking to destroy it. And this is based on an arrest warrant issued by a court that lacks jurisdiction over Israel.
Talk about a distortion of truth — both past and present.
Auschwitz stands as the ultimate symbol of antisemitism, where 1.1 million people were murdered, a million of them Jews. To arrest Netanyahu under an ICC warrant—a move widely viewed in Israel as antisemitic due to its double standards and bias—would send an unconscionable message. For Poland to enforce such a decree, especially at a memorial event for history’s greatest crime of Jew-hatred, is almost unfathomable.
The moral bankruptcy here would be staggering.
From Ian:
Israel is winning the war, while the West retreats
Every act of betrayal of Israel has been accompanied by the constant barrage of international media coverage that works on the principle of blame Israel first, and ask questions later. In this Gaza-through-the-looking-glass version of events, Israel’s just war against the genocidal death cult responsible for the 7 October pogrom is somehow twisted into an act of genocide.
In reality, the IDF has gone to greater lengths than any army in history to reduce civilian casualties, while making clear that Hamas is responsible for every death. Yet many in the West are too blinded by anti-Israeli hatred to see the truth. As a top US military strategist asked in Newsweek in March: ‘Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare. Why will no one admit it?’ The only answer appears to be – because it’s Israel that has set that remarkably humane standard of warfare.
The double standards by which the world judges Israel were starkly displayed after the fall of the Assad regime. Faced with dangerous uncertainty, Israel sent troops into a previously demilitarised zone to secure its border with Syria, and launched air strikes to prevent chemical weapons falling into the hands of Islamists. The United Nations and states including France immediately condemned these reasonable defensive actions for allegedly breaking international law. Yet when the Turkish government launched a fresh offensive against the Kurdish minority within Syria, there was not a word of condemnation from the ‘international community’.
The desertion of Israel is a travesty not only for Israelis and Jews worldwide forced to face a wave of anti-Semitism alone, but for the West itself, too. The Israelis are fighting for the principles on which our civilised societies were built: democracy, national sovereignty and freedom. We should be supporting them as the front line in the global war against barbarism and slavery.
Yet the globalist elites of Western society have abandoned those foundational principles, and they now fear and loathe the Israelis who dare to stand up for them. That is why since 7 October, we have seen the consolidation of an unholy anti-Israeli alliance in the West, between Jew-hating Islamists and self-loathing left-liberals. Through 2024, everything that is rotten in our societies has continued to congeal around the banners of the anti-Israel crusade.
To its eternal credit, Israel continues to ignore the Western naysayers and fight its corner. Yet as the old order in the Middle East falls apart, with the Western powers losing their grip on events, the future remains uncertain.
It is time, as Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told the hostile UN a few months ago, to make a choice: will we bequeath future generations the ‘blessing’ of a Middle East shaped by Israel and its pro-democracy allies, or the ‘curse’ of a region dominated by Islamists, with all the implications of that worldwide?
In 2024, the West made the wrong choices. In 2025, there is still time to put that right and get behind the Israelis who are fighting for us all.
Thank You, Israel, for Saving the World, Defending Freedom and Reshaping the Middle East
When it comes to national security, appeasement is not an option. Bribing aggressors only finances their militaries for attacks on the West in the future. Israel's approach to combating terrorism has always been characterized by thoroughness and determination -- for which is usually put through the tortures of hell by the very countries it is working to save.
With a vision of ultimately fostering peace, harmony, security and prosperity throughout the region, as in the Abraham Accords, Israel expanded its military operations beyond Hamas... reshaping the Middle East into a region free of the grip of terror... Make Persia Great Again!
So long as Iran's regime remains in power, brutalizing its people and making plans for global expansion, there can be no chance for peace in the region.
Removing the regime... would bring lasting security and prosperity to the Middle East and beyond.... One could then set about subduing Turkey and its terrorist proxies in Syria.
Gestures won't remedy antisemitism, actions will
Respecting an office of state when its holder is controversial or perceived as undeserving presents a profound moral and practical dilemma, particularly in moments of crisis.
This issue came sharply into focus last Shabbat, when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made an unannounced visit to the Perth Hebrew Congregation, offering solidarity after the suspected arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.
The visit, arranged with only half an hour’s notice, sparked a storm of debate within the Jewish community and raised broader questions about the interplay between respect for institutions, personal convictions, and the challenges posed by social media discourse.
The backdrop to Albanese’s visit was a tragedy: The Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne had been targeted in what police have described as a likely terror attack. This occurred amidst a surge in antisemitism across Australia, exacerbated by the Israel-Hamas War following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Albanese, who was in Perth at the time, likely saw the synagogue visit as an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with Jewish Australians during a deeply unsettling moment for the community.
However, the prime minister’s relationship with the Jewish community is fraught. Many Australian Jews view him as, at best, unsympathetic to Israel and, at worst, indifferent to the rise of antisemitism. His recent appearance at a protest against antisemitism in Sydney was marred by boos, reflecting widespread frustration and distrust. These sentiments complicated his reception at the Perth synagogue and placed the synagogue’s rabbi in an unenviable position.
Respect for the office vs distrust of the individual
The core of the dilemma lay in balancing respect for the office of prime minister with the community’s grievances against the individual holding that office.
In Jewish tradition, the Shabbat service includes a prayer for the welfare of the government, underscoring a recognition of the importance of civic authority and communal responsibility.
Rejecting a sitting prime minister from attending such a service, particularly in the context of a solidarity visit, would have been a profound statement – arguably one of disrespect not just to Albanese as a person but to the institution he represents. Yet, for many congregants, Albanese’s presence felt incongruous, even offensive.
This tension highlights a broader issue faced by faith communities and civic groups worldwide: how to engage with political leaders whose actions or policies are viewed as antithetical to their values. Can one separate the office from its holder? And should respect for the office override personal or communal grievances?
The rabbi of the Perth Hebrew Congregation ultimately chose to welcome Albanese, inviting him to address the congregation briefly and say the prayer for the government.
This decision demonstrated an adherence to the principle of respecting the office while providing the Jewish community an opportunity to receive a gesture of solidarity in a moment of fear and vulnerability. It was a difficult, nuanced decision that placed communal unity and decorum above personal grievances – a stance rooted in the Jewish value of being a mensch (a person of integrity and honor).
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
The cult of the keffiyeh
The keffiyeh classes, in contrast, are attracted to the Palestinian people not for their dynamism, but for their wretchedness. Not for their vim but for their victimisation. Where the elite posturing that Wolfe so mercilessly ribbed was ‘vicarious radicalism’, the cult of the keffiyeh is something far more unpleasant: vicarious victimhood. The keffiyeh classes seem keen to ‘appropriate’ not only the clothing of the Palestinians, but their suffering, too. Witness the organisers of the Gaza encampment at Columbia University in New York City mimicking both Palestinian style and Palestinian privation. One student leader said she and her comrades were going hungry and required ‘humanitarian aid’. Do you want us to die of dehydration and starvation?, she asked university bosses. In a viral clip, a group of keffiyeh-wearing students was seen receiving ‘humanitarian aid’ through the college gates. I say humanitarian aid – it was probably a Starbucks order and blueberry muffins from a nearby bodega. Here we had privileged youths on an Ivy League campus cosplaying as victims of a humanitarian crisis; comfortably off Ivy Leaguers masquerading as the wretched of the Earth.
It provided a grim insight into the true nature of ‘Palestine solidarity’. It shone a light on why so many of our young chant, ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’. This is a new and unsettling form of activism. It is not 1960s-style solidarity with foreign struggles or even radical chic, that old politics as fashion. No, it is a coveting of suffering. The keffiyeh classes, it seems to me, crave the moral rush of oppression, the thrill of persecution. They pull on the garb of a beleaguered people in order to escape, however fleetingly, the pampered reality of their own lives. In order to taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era: victimhood. In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting. It’s less politics than therapy. They seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on Earth. That’s what the keffiyeh has become: the cloth with which the rich seek to scrub away their white guilt.
If the keffiyeh is the uniform of this Palestine politics of victimhood, then its currency is images of Palestinian suffering. Where yesteryear’s purveyors of radical chic revelled in images of revolting minorities, today’s followers of the cult of the keffiyeh savour images of Palestinian destitution. They trade in photos of Palestinian pain, meaning that social media has become ‘oversaturated with traumatic imagery’, as one writer describes it. Log on and you’ll be instantly exposed to a ‘kaleidoscopic view of human suffering without respite’. Not content with commodifying Palestinian attire, they commodify Palestinian trauma, too. They make a spectacle of Palestinian agony. Not to assist Palestinians in any meaningful way – how could it? – but rather to inflame their own satisfying feelings of collective moral revulsion.
Even requests from Palestinians to stop sharing horrific images from their wars have not been enough to slow this grim trade. A few years ago, Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr counselled Westerners against sharing ‘shocking content’ showing ‘shattered people’ in the Palestinian territories, on the basis that such ‘pictures of pain’ violate ‘the privacy and dignity of the subjects’ and can ‘create terror’ among Palestinians who might fear suffering the same fate. These images might ‘provide thrills’ to outside observers, and nurture ‘more “likes” and “shares”’ online, but they can be devastating to ‘public morale’ in the Palestinian territories, Jabr wrote. It was a fruitless plea. Imagery of Palestinian suffering is too valuable to the keffiyeh classes to be sacrificed to trifling concerns about Palestinian dignity. Your pain is ours now, just like your headwear.
The elites’ vicarious victimhood through the Palestine drama is a dangerous game. It seems undeniable now that the more the cultural powers of the West crave and collect depictions of Palestinian distress, the more the ideologues of Hamas will be willing to supply such depictions. Witness Yahya Sinwar’s insistence, in the summarising words of CNN, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will likely ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Sinwar, the then military leader of Hamas in Gaza, callously described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’.
Hamas clearly recognises that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, when the West’s activist class, media elites and online influencers hold up every picture of a broken Palestinian as proof of the Jewish State’s ‘uniquely murderous nature’, then it is in Hamas’s interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur. Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue. Hamas’s intransigence in the face of its far more powerful foe is a direct consequence of the keffiyeh classes’ commodification of Palestinian pain as a testament to both Israeli malfeasance and Western indifference.
The cult of victimhood’s greatest offence is to reduce everything to a simplistic clash between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil, light and dark. This movement requires not only victims it might ostentatiously empathise with, but also the opposite: victimisers, the monsters of persecution, who must be noisily raged at. As Professor Joshua Berman writes, the ‘Palestinian ideology of victimhood… constructs a struggle between a victim-hero in opposition to a scapegoat’. And this can lead to a ‘revelling in caricatured depictions of the oppressor’, he says. So where Palestinian radicals ‘traffic in classic hook-nose anti-Semitic tropes’, their Western supporters traffic in the insistence that the Jewish State is uniquely murderous, given to bloodletting, obsessed with murdering children, and so on. This is the thin line between pity and hate. Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, courtesy of the morally infantile narrative the cultural establishment has weaved around this most fraught of conflicts.
The end result? Protesters in keffiyehs telling Jews in New York City to ‘go back to Poland’. Activists in keffiyehs shouting on the New York subway: ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.’ Britons in keffiyehs marching alongside radical Islamists who long for further pogroms against the Jewish State. The aftermath of 7 October is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.
Seth Mandel:
Tucker Carlson, Superspreader
Carlson begins his interview of Sachs by asking about the big news of the day: the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s monstrous dictator. The crimes of Assad and his father, who ruled Syria before Bashar, pockmark the earth: mass graves and torture prisons dot the face of the Levant. A rebellion against Assad that began during the Arab Spring finally succeeded. The story is gruesome but simple: A butcher was overthrown by his subjects.
In the clip that opens the show, Sachs has another explanation: the Jews. “It’s part of a 30-year effort. This is [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war to remake the Middle East.”
Just after Sept. 11, 2001, Sachs preaches, Gen. Wesley Clark was brought in to the Pentagon and “told that the neocons and the Israelis are going to remake the Middle East.” It would require war with seven countries, and “we’ve been at war in six of them now. And I mean we, the United States on behalf of Israel… So what happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image.”
Sachs refers to the “Israel lobby” as the agents of nefarious foreign interests in America, and he describes Jewish control as so airtight that it “doesn’t really matter who’s president. This is long-term deep-state policy.” Indeed, says Sachs, “Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow Assad.”
Why would Obama do that, asks Carlson. “Because Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years,” Sachs responds. “That’s how it works.”
Sachs gives us a ballpark figure of the human cost of this supposed Jewish control: 1 million people are dead today who would otherwise have been alive if not for Israel’s supposed bloodlust. That places a lot of blood on Jewish hands. But as noted earlier, that’s a story that never gets old.
The second characteristic of anti-Semitism that keeps it so potent is the way information moves. It travels on a populist current because “the powers that be” are compromised and cannot be trusted. Tucker Carlson has an audience primed to imbibe all the information “They” supposedly don’t want you to know. Carlson can’t just repeat it all himself every single night because that would get boring, so he brings on guests to help out.
People like Carlson and Sachs rely on the network-contagion effect, in which information moves through social networks after being introduced by a trusted source, to spread their poison. Typical followers of Jeffrey Sachs aren’t relying on Tucker Carlson for their information. So Carlson hands it off to Sachs, who is essentially playing the role of ideological drug mule.
Elon Musk, the owner of X/Twitter and an adviser to president-elect Trump, reposted the interview himself online. Musk didn’t say anything specifically about the Israel portion, but a Musk post gives a superboost to anything looking for more networks to spread to.
So, yes, Carlson matters here. He is a superspreader of the brain mold that makes our politics and culture sicker, gloomier, angrier, and more extreme at a time when there is an eager market for it.
Antisemitism backfires on the perpetrators: Will the church ever learn?
Will the church ever learn? When it comes to Israel, it is debatable. First, the soon to stand-down-Archbishop of Canterbury effectively urged member states of the United Nations to back the call of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, the heart of their territory.
Now the Pope is calling for a genocide investigation about Israel’s military actions in Gaza. But is the investigation justified? Leading American and British military men think otherwise. (Ret.) Col Richard Kemp (UK) and Prof Geoffrey Corn (USA) are just some who after fact-finding missions to Gaza have publicly exonerated Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor.
Why this fixation on Israel? Not for the first time Jewish people have asked why the church is largely silent regarding the murder of Africa’s Christians, for instance. At the heart of the problem is the chosenness of Israel.
“The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors…” (Deuteronomy 7:6-9 NIV) The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob chose the Jewish people, and the rest of the nations apparently have difficulty accepting this.
“If there were no chosen people, there would be no war in the Middle East,” claimed a Canadian lecturer. Hitler has been credited with saying there was no room for two chosen peoples.
Chosenness, though, comes with a price. So does antisemitism. It backfires on the perpetrators. A case in point is the recent resignation of former Archbishop of Canterbury, albeit for a completely unrelated issue – the cover-up of the abuse scandal. Could this be in part the outworking of Scripture? “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse…” (Genesis 12:3 NIV)
From Ian:
Poland Says It Will Arrest Bibi If Israeli PM Attends Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary
Polish officials said they will arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in compliance with a warrant from the International Criminal Court if he attends the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
"We are obliged to respect the provisions of the International Criminal Court," Władysław Bartoszewski, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, told Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Friday.
Dozens of world leaders are expected to attend the anniversary event on January 27, which will honor the estimated 1 million Jews who died in the Nazi genocide. Netanyahu is not due to attend the ceremony, according to Rzeczpospolita.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November, which Israel appealed last week. Israel argued that the ICC does not have power over Israelis since the country is not bound to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the international court in 1998. Neither Israel nor the United States are parties to the treaty.
"The State of Israel denies the authority of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the legitimacy of the arrest warrants," Netanyahu said in response to his arrest warrant.
U.S. Republican lawmakers also vowed to sanction the ICC and erode its legitimacy on the world stage following Netanyahu’s arrest warrant.
"The ICC has no credibility and these allegations have been refuted by the U.S. government," said Rep. Michael Waltz (R., Fla.), President-elect Donald Trump's incoming national security adviser. "Israel has lawfully defended its people & borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January."
Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment
Then there was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave the story a further epic dimension by returning to the original field of battle. Bibi, as you may recall, played the role of Obama’s piñata during the fight over the Iran deal, fated to go down to defeat by opposing the will of a sitting U.S. president on a foreign policy question that most Americans cared very little about. But this past summer, Netanyahu turned himself into the active party, with the means to reverse Obama’s achievement and unveil the origins of his power grab, by showing that the “peace deal” that he had sold to the American people—founded on the idea that Iran was itself a formidable adversary—was a mess of lies. Iran was not and never was a regional power, capable of “balancing” traditional American allies. It was a totalitarian shit hole regime that is deeply hated by its own people and throughout the region, entirely dependent on American backing in its efforts to gain a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu’s decision to invade Rafah on May 6, 2024, was the culmination of two long and otherwise separate chains of events whose consequences will continue to reverberate throughout the Middle East, and also at home. Netanyahu had been promising to invade Rafah since February. The fact that he had not done so by May had become both a symbol of Israeli weakness and indecision in the face of a global onslaught of Jew-hatred, as well as the continuing solidity of the regional power structure established by Obama’s Iran deal. Within that structure, Israeli interests were held to be subordinate to those of Iran, which was allowed to finance, arm, and train large terrorist armies on Israel’s borders. Even when one of those armies decided to attack Israel in an orgy of murder and rape directed against civilians and recorded and broadcast live by the terrorists, Israel’s response was to be limited by its subordinate place in the regional hierarchy, underlining a reality in which Israel was fated to grovel before the whims of its American master—and would sooner or later most likely be ground into dust.
Israel could not strike Iran. Nor could it directly strike Hezbollah, the largest and most threatening of the Iranian-sponsored armies on its border, except to retaliate tit-for-tat for Hezbollah’s missile attacks on its civilian population. While it could invade Gaza, it could do so only while being publicly chided by U.S. officials from the president and the secretary of state for violating rules of wars that often appeared to be made up on the spot and were entirely divorced from common military practice and necessity. In particular, Israel was not to invade Rafah, a prohibition that ensured that Hamas could regularly bring in supplies and cash through the tunnels beneath its border with Egypt while ensuring the survival of its command-and-control structure, allowing it to reassume control of Gaza once the war was over, thereby assuring the success of U.S. policy, which was that Israel’s military invasion of Gaza must serve as the prelude to establishing a Palestinian state—an effort in which Hamas was a necessary partner, representing the Iranian interest, and must therefore be preserved in some part, even after being cut down to size.
Netanyahu’s decision to override the U.S. and take Rafah would turn out to be the prelude to a further series of stunning strategic moves which would enable Israel to smash the Iranian regional position and take full control of her own destiny. After conquering Rafah, in a campaign that the U.S. had said would be impossible without large-scale civilian casualties, Netanyahu proceeded to run the table in a series of rapid-fire blows whose only real point of comparison is Israel’s historic victory in the Six-Day War. In fact, given the odds he faced, and the magnitude of the victories he has won, that comparison may be unfair to Netanyahu, who has provided history with one of the very few examples of an isolated local client redrawing the strategic map of the region against the will of a dominant global power. Netanyahu killed terror chiefs Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah; spectacularly eliminated nearly the entire upper military and political echelons of both terror armies on his border, Hamas and Hezbollah; turned both Gaza and Hezbollah’s strongholds in southern Lebanon and Beirut into rubble; and finally, last week, took out the entire stock of modern tanks, aircraft, naval vessels and chemical weapons and missile factories accumulated over the past six decades by the Syrian military.
While the questions of how and when the Iranian regime might fall are for the moment unanswered, it seems clear that Obama’s imagined new regional order in the Middle East, centered on the imagined power of the ayatollahs, is now gone—having disintegrated on contact with Netanyahu’s unanticipated willingness and ability to aggressively defend his castle. What role Biden’s resentment of Obama, especially after the humiliation of his removal from the Democratic ticket, contributed to his continued public backing of Israel, and his repeated declarations of his own Zionism, can be left up to the individual imagination, and to the diligence of future historians. I doubt it was zero, though. Again, the fault in the Obama party’s scheme to use Biden as an empty figurehead was the same fault in his handling of Musk: hubris.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
How the International Community Can Best Help the Palestinians
Had the international community held the Palestinian Authority (PA) accountable for financial and administrative corruption after the signing of the Oslo Accords 30 years ago, the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group would not have gained popularity among Palestinians.
Although many Palestinians support Hamas's policy of rejecting Israel's right to exist, the Islamist group's victory greatly reflected the desire of the Palestinian public to end corruption in the PA government and institutions.
The most common forms of corruption seem to be the offenses of favoritism, nepotism, embezzlement of public funds, breach of trust, abuse of power, bribery and money laundering.
The best way to undermine Hamas and help the Palestinians is by offering the people a better alternative to the Islamist movement. The current Palestinian Authority leadership is just not seen by many Palestinians as a better alternative to Hamas. That is because the United States, European Union and other donors are not banging on the table and demanding an end to the PA's authoritarian and corrupt conduct.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
The diplomatic crisis between Israel and Ireland
Why are the Irish so bigoted against Israel and the Jewish people?
Ireland has a deplorable history. As Sa’ar said, it was at best neutral during World War II. In 1945, the Irish leader Éamon de Valera sent his condolences to the German people over Hitler’s death.
One reason often given is the country’s Catholicism with its ancient history of theological antisemitism. But this can’t be the whole reason since other Catholic countries aren’t suffused with this degree of venom towards Israel and the Jews.
An important further reason is that the Irish identify with the Palestinian Arabs as perceived victims of Israeli “colonial” oppression just as they identify the Irish as victims of British “colonial” oppression.
Some point to the critical influence in Ireland of Sinn Féin, the party that served as the political fig leaf for the Irish Republican Army. The IRA waged a terrorist war against Britain and the Protestants of U.K.-run Northern Ireland on and off from early in the last century and was responsible for a campaign of bomb attacks in disturbances known as the “Troubles” from the late 1960s to 1998.
The IRA received massive arms shipments from Libya in the 1980s, and was funded and trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization. After the IRA disarmed in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams met Hamas leaders in 2006 and 2009.
According to Irish journalist and anti-extremism researcher, Dr. Eoin Lenihan, the links in the Irish mind between Israeli and British “colonialists” and between the Palestinian and Irish “resistance” resulted from Adams yoking together Arab and Irish nationalism under the banner of revolutionary socialism.
This permeated more widely, he says, because, unlike other countries, Ireland doesn’t have a tradition of centrist politics. Its two big parties, Fiánna Fail and Fine Gael, have no core values; so they veer towards wherever the wind is blowing—in this case, Sinn Féin’s revolutionary leftism and the Israel-bashing NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.
Through Sinn Fein’s influence, Ireland has become enmeshed with the international radical left and its promotion of intersectionality and victim culture. Under this dogma, the Jews can never be victims because they are seen as all-powerful, controlling the Western world in their own interests to the disadvantage of everyone else.
Victim culture is therefore itself innately anti-Jew. So there’s a double source of Jew-hatred in Ireland—both from its Catholic heritage and from the secular religion of universalism and victim culture.
Ireland is simply a danger to Israel and the Jewish people. It should be treated as a pariah until and unless it decides to support civilization rather than its nemesis.
Biden admin, universities failed to crack down on antisemitism in ‘disturbing pattern’ after Oct. 7, scathing House GOP report finds
The Biden administration, top universities and medical institutions utterly failed to crack down on antisemitism that exploded in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, according to a scathing House Republican report released Thursday, which laid bare “systemic” and “astounding” shortcomings.
Six GOP-led House committees declared in a joint report that “antisemitism has been allowed to fester unchecked” due to “a disturbing pattern of defensiveness and denial,” according to a copy exclusively obtained by The Post.
“Across the nation, Jewish Americans have been harassed, assaulted, intimidated, and subjected to hostile environments — violations that stand in stark contrast to America’s fundamental values, including a foundational commitment to religious freedom for all,” the 42-page report says.
“The failure of our federal government departments and agencies is astounding.”
The outpouring of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish remarks and actions tested America’s free speech precepts and the fact that hate speech is generally lawful in the United States, unless it amounts to harassment or is an aggravating factor in a criminal act such as assault.
The Republican-led report points out, however, that federal law generally prevents recipients of taxpayer funds from tolerating discrimination — allowing a foothold to leverage recipients to stiffen policies on campuses and at medical settings should federal officials so choose.
In almost every case, institutions allegedly took almost no disciplinary action against alleged antisemites and made no changes to codes of conduct, and faced no loss of grants to stop the rapidly spreading Jew hatred.
The report focuses heavily on Columbia University and its recommendations urge federal agencies to use money to incentivize more stringent anti-discrimination policies — and also proposes potential legislation to that effect.
“The executive branch should aggressively enforce Title VI [anti-discrimination rules] and hold schools accountable for their failures to protect students. Universities that fail to fulfill the obligations upon which their federal funding is predicated or whose actions make clear they are unfit stewards of taxpayer dollars should be treated accordingly,” the Republican panels said.
Commuting federal death sentences would include Tree of Life shooter, McConnell says
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) urged U.S. President Joe Biden not to heed the call in a letter from 21 retired, liberal judges to commute the sentences of all of those on federal death row.
“President Biden’s decision earlier this month to pardon his son may well have set a unique and unfortunate precedent. But abuse of the presidential pardon doesn’t stop there,” the Kentucky senator said on the Senate floor on Dec. 18. “Last week, the president went on to commute 1,500 sentences, and the way liberal activists see it, he should have done even more.”
“More than 20 liberal retired judges—including the Boston radical, who recommended the disgraced pro-crime U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins—have now urged the president to turn his eye to federal death sentences,” McConnell said.
“If the president heeded these former judges’ call, it would mean commuting the death sentences of the perpetrator of the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,” the senator added.
Robert Bowers was convicted of murdering 11 people at the Tree of Life*Or Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh on the morning of Oct. 27, 2018.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The ‘Machinery of Death’ and Its Apologists
The sheer scale of the horror in Syria is going to be almost incomprehensible. And the names of many of the missing will never be known.
Organized mass atrocities require enormous bureaucratic systems. “The graves were prepared in an organized manner — the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave,” one farmer told Reuters. He lived near a former Syrian military base and would often see refrigerated trucks full of bodies driving to a nearby cemetery with a full military escort.
Digging and then expanding such graves can be decade-long projects, as satellite images showed. And that means the UN is only part of the problem, because the world cannot plausibly feign ignorance. The anti-Western propaganda on campuses and in textbooks and flooding through the discourse of the activist class is being disseminated precisely for the benefit of the regimes digging those mass graves.
It may get tiresome to keep hearing questions like “Where were the tentifada protests and the flotillas to Syria?” But the answer is important. The students and activists marching for Gaza are not overlooking the Syrian victims; they are actively on the side of those committing the atrocities. Waving a Hezbollah flag is an act of anti-Israel incitement, yes. But it is not only that. It is also a show of support for the “machinery of death” putting Syrian civilians in the ground.
At moments like this we see the activists and protesters who have enabled these crimes for who they are. They aren’t just now finding out what goes on in Sednaya prison and others like it. They did not back a regime that turned out to be evil. They chose to back an evil regime, eyes wide open. The Syrian civil war has been going on for nearly a decade and a half. Eleven years ago, the Obama administration announced to the world that, yes, Assad had used poison gas on families trying to hide in their basement:
“The situation profoundly changed… on August 21, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas. Others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits — a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war.”
The Iranian empire responsible for the barbaric crimes in Syria, in Gaza, in Lebanon may be receding, but now is not the time to look away. Now is the time to sear into our memories just how low Tehran’s apologists are capable of sinking.
Middle East Scholar: "The Sunnis Can Smell Blood"
Dr. Mordechai Kedar interviewed by Nadav Shragai (Israel Hayom)
Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, 72, a frequent guest on Al-Jazeera, served for 25 years in IDF Military Intelligence. Now closely monitoring developments in Syria, he said, "Iran has abandoned its proxies - Hamas, Hizbullah, and Assad. The glue that has held the Shi'ite alliance together is now disintegrating, and the Sunnis can smell blood."
"I sense that Iraq, too, might disavow the Iranian presence there in the not-too-distant future, and we could even witness the fall of the Houthis in Yemen. The events in Syria have provided a real boost to the Sunnis everywhere, encouraging them to get organized against the Iranian presence."
"We need to encourage the minorities in Iran to rise up against the Persian hegemony....There is no Iranian people. There are Persians and other large groups, such as Baluchis, Arabs, Kurds, Azeris, and Turkmen, alongside an additional 40 or so smaller groups....In Iran today, at least 80 out of the 90 million people there are over the moon about what has been happening in Syria, as this is a blow to the Iranian government and its plans to spread out over the entire Middle East."
In Syria, "we have exchanged radical Alawites for Sunni jihadis, who are backed by a megalomaniac in the form of [Turkish President] Erdogan, who provides refuge for Hamas, who talks in favor of Hamas, from his land Hamas mastermind terrorist attacks carried out in Israel, who has sworn to revive the days of the Ottoman Empire....Only last July, he made a clear threat to invade Israel."
Regarding the hostage talks, he said, "Hamas will not release all of them. The hostages are their life insurance policy. That is the reason why, to date, they have yet to provide Israel with a complete list of names of all of them. In any deal, they will seek to keep hold of a certain number of hostages."
"Even after a deal, they will definitely suddenly discover some additional hostages, holed up somewhere or other, with some other organization or local clan, hostages of whom they really 'had no idea.' They have absolutely no intention of returning them all."
Reasons to Be Hopeful
In a crisis, you are going to want an Israeli on your side. In times of difficulty, Israelis have a way of stepping up to help that goes way beyond the norm.
Whether you were a farmer who couldn't get the crop in on time, the partner of a reservist struggling to support the family, or a business from the north or south in trouble, Israelis rushed in their hundreds of thousands to help.
During the first two weeks of the Oct. 7 war, more than 1,000 civil initiatives emerged across Israel and 48.6% of the Israeli population engaged in volunteering, according to a report from Hebrew University.
In addition, locally-based international humanitarian aid organizations continued to send out dedicated and trained staff to help in all sorts of crisis situations.
In January, SmartAID sent help to earthquake-hit Japan, then to Taiwan after another earthquake in April.
In October, SmartAID provided solar power units and communication systems to communities in Florida and North Carolina in the wake of two devastating hurricanes.
In June, IsraAID sent help to Papua New Guinea after a deadly landslide. It also expanded access to safe water in Ukraine and drilled new bore holes in Kenya after the country suffered its worst drought in 40 years.
Israeli villages and towns near Gaza are finally rebuilding. Destroyed buildings are being bulldozed and rebuilt, volunteers are cleaning and clearing, residents are returning, businesses reopening.
Since the ceasefire with Hizbullah on Nov. 27, the north has also seen signs of recovery.
Citizens are beginning to return home, communities are regrouping, farms are getting back to normal, businesses are reopening, and rebuilding is beginning.
Israel's air defense systems more than proved themselves in the last 15 months. According to Rafael CEO Yoav Turgeman, the Iron Dome and David's Sling systems intercepted more targets than all other air defense systems combined in the past 50 years.
In one year since Oct. 7, there had been 26,000 rockets, missiles and drones launched at Israel - 13,200 from Gaza, 12,400 from Lebanon, 400 from Iran, 180 from Yemen, and 60 from Syria.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Israel’s Irish Goodbye
The debate over whether Israel should formally establish diplomatic relations with Germany was an impassioned, often vicious, deeply emotional probing of national trauma. It came long after Israel’s internal fight over whether to accept German reparations, which nearly tore the government apart. By the time the two countries proposed exchanging ambassadors, the wound had clearly not yet healed, and maybe never would.
In the end, diplomatic pragmatism and a shared hope for moving forward prevailed. Israel’s first embassy in Germany was opened in 1965.
Do you know when Israel’s embassy in Ireland was established? 1996.
So please, Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Simon Harris, spare us the feigned offense and the community-theater histrionics and the supposed shock in reaction to Israel’s announcement that it would close its embassy in Dublin. Ireland’s history with Israel is uniquely shameful among supposed Western democracies. Whether that justifies the closing of the embassy is another matter, but let’s stop pretending we’re talking about a normal situation. Ireland was the last EU country to host an Israeli embassy, and the gesture was watered down by making the same offer to the PLO, a terrorist organization that did not represent an existing nation-state.
Here’s the point: Ireland has always treated Israel with special contempt. Decades after Eamon de Valera offered Germany his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, the country he helped found seemed permanently stuck in time. Ireland had to be dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing the Jews. The Israeli embassy barely predates the Good Friday Agreement.
This is not ancient history, in other words. The closing of the Israeli embassy in Dublin, whatever its merits, is not the end of an era; it’s the end of an insulting modern experiment that Irish leaders spent a couple decades routinely sabotaging. Irish leaders thought they could have a Jewish pet who would crawl around on all fours and eat out of a bowl on the floor. And they have the chutzpah to scold him as he stands up on two feet and walks out.
Jonathan Tobin:
Don’t expect any humor about antisemitic ‘genocide’ smears
It’s easy to dismiss this story as a minor kerfuffle about a misguided effort to inject comedy into the debate about the Middle East. But it should be seen as providing more insight into the gap between the two sides than perhaps many liberal Jews who are still seeking dialogue have been willing to admit. The failure of this initiative speaks volumes about how toxic leftist ideas like critical race theory, settler-colonial theory and intersectionality have made dialogue or efforts to promote compromise solutions on a whole range of topics—of which Israel is just one—impossible. It also shows how the pervasive influence of this destructive intellectual fashion is more or less killing comedy.
If the debate about the Middle East were really, as liberals have long insisted, about the imperative for Israel to trade “land for peace” or its need to avoid building homes in Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria, then dialogue intended to build trust on both sides would be not only possible but necessary. But as decades of Palestinian rejection of every compromise offered to them have shown, if that would mean recognition of the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East, that is a price they are not willing to pay. Meaning, the conflict is not about borders or settlements.
The Palestinian Arabs and their supporters abroad who have rallied to their cause since Oct. 7 have made no secret of the fact that what they desire is turning back the clock to 1948 or 1917 and the elimination of Israel. Being so quick to manufacture lies about Israeli actions and intentions is not just a manifestation of Jew-hatred, though that’s part of it. Those who buy into the myth that Israel is a manifestation of a “settler-colonial” imperialism are drawn inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing at all to talk about with Israelis or their supporters.
The anti-Israel movement’s adoption of this frame of reference is reflected in more than just the intolerant invective employed in the social-media ravings of those comics and others who believe that even a debate with Zionists would compromise their moral standing as progressives. Much like the best-selling book by anti-Zionist author Ta-Nehisi Coates, their accusations hurled against Israel are not merely divorced from the facts of what has actually happened in Gaza; they ignore the genocidal goals of the Palestinians, their embrace of terrorism and their unwillingness to compromise.
Such sentiments have, due to the progressives’ adoption of woke ideologies that falsely label Jews and Israelis as “white oppressors,” migrated from the ivory towers of academia to the political grassroots. This was made apparent as first President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris spent the 2024 presidential campaign trying to placate their party’s left-wing base, which has grown increasingly intolerant of any stand on the Middle East that isn’t resolutely opposed to Israel.
Woke is killing comedy
The impact of these toxic ideas is not limited to politics. It is also a major reason why comedy—or at least the sector of it that is pitched to appeal to the half of the country that didn’t vote for Donald Trump—is dying.
For years, comedians have decried the stultifying impact that a spirit of political correctness has had on their craft. As anyone who has watched the political skits that appear on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” or the monologues of the late-night comedy shows that don’t appear on Fox News, liberals can only accept humor that pokes fun at their political foes or those who hold different views about religion and culture. Edgy humor that doesn’t respect the shibboleths of woke sensibilities about certain protected minorities is no longer tolerated. Groundbreaking comedians of the past, like Lenny Bruce, had to navigate the intolerance of established society and the conservative values of the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, someone like him doesn’t have to worry about being arrested for offending decency codes. But they would surely be canceled by the left that dominates popular culture.
The result of this cultural trend is that much of what is now considered comedy is humorless virtue-signaling, essentially a nod to audiences’ shared contempt for those outside of their group.
Until mainstream culture shakes itself free of this leftist orthodoxy, efforts to arrange such joint events will always fail. Conversations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian comics, as well as their audiences, are impossible in a cultural context where progressives in America have declared that we are all locked in an endless race war between oppressors and victims.
Under these circumstances, pursuing dialogue across the unbridgeable gap between those who want to destroy Israel and those who work to support it is a fool’s errand. And that’s no joke.
Qatar: The Arsonist and the Firefighter
On Qatar National Day, as the Gulf nation celebrates its sovereignty and development, it’s essential to examine the darker side of its international role. While Doha projects itself as a stabilizing force and a mediator in global conflicts, evidence reveals a more duplicitous reality. Qatar has acted both as the arsonist and the firefighter—publicly advocating for peace while covertly funding and supporting extremist actors like Abu Mohammad al-Julani and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who destabilize the Middle East and threaten Western interests. HTS, which has links to al-Qaeda and ISIS, has been widely recognized as one of the most dangerous jihadist groups in the region, posing a direct threat to global security.
The Roots of the Allegations
Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s prominence as the leader of the al-Nusra Front, which initially aligned itself with al-Qaeda, and its later rebranding efforts under Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have drawn significant international attention. While HTS has sought to distance itself from extremist origins, its links to Qatar have remained under scrutiny. Despite its rebranding, HTS retains strong ties to al-Qaeda, with its leadership and operations deeply intertwined with global jihadist networks. Furthermore, its battlefield alliances with ISIS-linked factions have amplified its capacity for terror.
A 2016 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report suggested that the al-Nusra Front “probably received logistical, financial, and material assistance from elements of the Turkish and Qatari governments.” This report, while cautious in its language, highlighted Qatar’s role in supporting extremist groups.
Qatar’s Public Denials and Its Hidden Agenda
While Qatari officials have consistently denied connections to al-Nusra Front or its successor organizations, their actions tell a different story. In a 2017 interview with Middle East Eye, former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani admitted that Qatar “maybe” supported al-Nusra Front during the early years of the Syrian conflict but insisted such support had ceased. These admissions expose Qatar’s strategic duplicity—courting extremist groups to expand its influence while publicly denying culpability.
Media Appearances and the Role of Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state-funded media outlet, has amplified the voices of extremists like Abu Mohammad al-Julani. In December 2013, the network aired an exclusive interview with al-Julani, marking his first televised appearance. This was followed by a 2015 interview where al-Julani emphasized his focus on fighting the Assad regime and denied plans to target Western nations. These interviews legitimized al-Julani and HTS, bolstering their recruitment and propaganda efforts, all while Qatar claimed to be an ally of the West in counterterrorism efforts.
From Ian:
Can Israel Save the World from a Nuclear Iran?
For the last 20 years, two primary fears have held Israel back from launching a preemptive military strike to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. The first was a concern that a military strike would not succeed. Senior defense officials in Israel and the West warned that the Israeli Air Force could not reach Iran, could not overcome the advanced Russian air defense systems that surrounded its strategic facilities, and could not penetrate some of the nuclear installations, which are buried deep underground beneath layers of thick concrete and steel.
The second fear was the practical price Israel would pay if it attacked. Iran is believed to have about 2,500 long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking Israel; Hizbullah, until recently, had an arsenal of 150,000 missiles; Hamas had around 40,000 and the Houthis in Yemen have hundreds. Lastly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, until recently, was in possession of hundreds of Scud missiles and several tons of chemical weapons.
These fears are no longer relevant. In October, more than 100 Israeli Air Force aircraft flew more than 2,000 km. and struck more than 20 targets throughout Iran, including Iran's S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, knocking out Iran's ability to defend itself and repel a future attack. All this means Iran is today vulnerable.
Israel, whether on its own or in coordination with the U.S., has a unique opportunity to remove the primary threat that it has warned about for more than 20 years - Iran's nuclear program. This window of opportunity is not unlimited. If Israel or the U.S. fail to act, Iran will take the final steps and build a nuclear bomb.
Danny Danon calls for UN to designate IRGC as a terrorist organization
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon addressed the Iranian regime directly in Farsi during Wednesday's session of the United Nations Security Council, saying to not miss this rare, historic opportunity and "take action now."
"I am telling the Iranian people, we know the cost of freedom and the courage it demands," Danon said before the Security Council. "Your fight is not just for yourselves but for the millions of lives the regime has destabilized and destroyed. In your hands lie the power to restore the beautiful Iranian nation, to rebuild a land rich in history, culture and resilience."
Danon was the last diplomat to speak in Wednesday's session centered on the Palestinian question and Israel's ongoing war with Hamas. Earlier in the session, Michael Levy, brother of Israeli hostage Or Levy, testified before the council about his family's experience as a hostage family.
The chance before us is clear, Danon said, to finally end the Islamic regime of Iran's aspirations for a Shiite supremacist Empire, the chance to "liberate the world from the most corrupt, most violent, most destabilizing regime."
"Israel has acted decisively," he said, by striking terror networks that once "cast a shadow over our region."
A New Era of Hezbollah Defeat
In the eighteen-year interwar interregnum, Israel shifted to a strategy of preventing the outbreak of a major war. Employing its intelligence-gathering skills to maximum effect, the Israelis struck repeatedly at Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah, primarily in war-torn Syria. This became known in Israel as the “campaign between the wars.” But the pinprick Israeli strikes, meant to slow Hezbollah’s arms buildup—specifically precision guided munitions—never challenged Hezbollah’s overall strength.
But in preparation for this war, the Israelis seem to have spent at least the past decade penetrating every level of Hezbollah’s organizational apparatus. Indeed, when the time came to fight, no Hezbollah official and no Hezbollah asset was safe. Israel seized the initiative and crippled the group’s military apparatus before it could even mobilize. The Israelis located and liquidated one Hezbollah “ghost” commander after the next, including the elusive mid-level Radwan force commanders who had invested heavily in anonymity. Israel’s campaign this go-round even demonstrated a better understanding of the pressure points on Hezbollah’s support base and the group’s broader Lebanese environment. Hezbollah’s path to regeneration, while not impossible, is more complicated than ever before.
On the Israeli home front, the Israeli public was steeled for this fight. The October 7 horrors and Hezbollah’s ability to conduct its own identical attack created an unprecedented recognition among Israelis that Hezbollah would need to be defeated, no matter the price. Compounding this, Hezbollah’s strikes drove an estimated 160,000 Israelis from their homes since October 8. According to one Israeli official who spoke on background to us, Hezbollah has destroyed $10 to $15 billion in Israeli insfrastructure in the countries north.
The war may not be over yet. And more damage could still be sustained. But after nearly a year of indecision, the IDF gained the conventional upper hand, and this time employed it to maximum effect. Israel deployed its forces according to a combined-arms doctrine that was specifically developed over the past eighteen years to confront Hezbollah. This included internal restructuring of the IDF to create forces like the Oz Brigade, which brought all the IDF’s special forces units under one umbrella, to confront an irregular actor like Hezbollah. When Israel entered Lebanon this time, it favored powerful and agile ground maneuvers over armor or standoff firepower.
Israel had also invested in building a multitiered missile defense array, including the short-range Iron Dome and and mid-range David’s Sling systems. These systems are defensive and not hermetic. They could not always neutralize Hezbollah drones and or “sniping” attacks on northern communities. There simply is no substitute for offensive action. Nevertheless, these systems blunted Hezbollah’s attacks just enough to minimize the group’s impact on the Israeli Home Front and to keep up public moralem a vital component of any democracy’s war effort.
Predictably, Hezbollah is now attempting to claim victory. Merely surviving is the group’s key metric in this regard. Admittedly, the group has scored several hits against Israel, killing 56 Israeli soldiers and wounding hundreds of others, and confounding Israeli defenses with anti-tank guided missile attacks and swarms of loitering munitions. But as the dust settles, a stark picture of the group’s defeat emerges: at least 2,500 members killed, many of them elite and irreplicable leaders, a decimated arsenal, and flattened military infrastructure. All of this will take years to rebuild.
Monday, December 23, 2024
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