03/31 Links Pt2: Israel’s sniveling classes are in the minority; The Sham of 'Disarming' Hamas; UN Sends Billions to Islamic Terrorists Who Kidnap its Staff

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Israel’s sniveling classes are in the minority

In other words, outside the curated echo chamber of the likes of Seroussi, Israelis are doing what we always do: debate, grumble and persevere—raising families at the highest rate in the Western world, and managing, against all odds, to sustain an upbeat mood under the constant strain of having to defend against enemies bent on wiping us off the map.

Seroussi’s woe-is-me theatrics aside, Israel ranks eighth on the latest World Happiness Report. Evidently, the citizens polled neglected to align their answers about their overall well-being with the gloom and doom emanating from left-wing Hebrew-language TV studios.

Not only that. Surveys indicate that an overwhelming majority of Israelis back the war against Iran and its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon—despite having spent the past month running to bomb shelters throughout the day and wee hours of the night.

Seroussi and her fellow moaners are free to view things differently. They’re also at liberty to depart for what they imagine to be greener pastures abroad.

Such prerogatives are among the many options taken for granted by the sniveling classes. You know, the people who tend to omit a certain inconvenient phenomenon for Jews, regardless of their political persuasion: the explosion of antisemitism in New York, London, Paris and just about everywhere else.

It’s open Jew-hatred that would have seemed unfathomable not long ago, though probably not to Seroussi’s grandparents.

Jonathan Tobin: Gavin Newsom and the Democrats’ Israel problem

Simply put, there is a broad consensus within Israel that stretches from left to right on these issues. That consensus views a Palestinian state, such as the one that existed in Gaza prior to Oct. 7 in all but name, as an invitation to future slaughter and perpetual war. It also understands that the only option available to them with respect to Iran, as long as it is governed by fanatical Islamist theocrats, is a fight to the finish.

Seen from that perspective, it makes even those Democrats who claim to be supporters of Israel, though bitterly opposed to its government, like Newsom or even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, as not merely out of touch with the realities of Israeli politics but also with their own voters. Such candidates may try to finesse the issue, as Newsom and Shapiro are trying to do, by declaring their support for Israel while avowing perpetual opposition to Netanyahu and Trump. But even if you take Netanyahu out of the equation, there is no conceivable government that could emerge from the next Israeli election that would have policies on two states or Iran that any almost any Democrat outside of an outlier like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa) could support. And as far as the left-wing base of the Democratic Party is concerned, all Israelis and their American supporters—be they Jewish or Christian evangelicals—are backers of the mythical “genocide” and “apartheid.”

And that is why Israel is a land mine that Democratic presidential contenders understand can blow up their ability to reach their party’s activists who are the key to winning primaries and the nomination.

The two parties move in different directions
It’s true that there is also a vocal anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic faction on the right that is unhappy with Trump’s pro-Israel policies. But it is clearly a minority with most Republicans, including the MAGA base. Most are enthusiastic supporters of Israel and of Trump’s stands, including the current war on Iran. And that has also placed Vice President JD Vance, the putative champion of the Tucker Carlson anti-Israel wing of the party, in a very uncomfortable position. He and his staff are reduced to leaking their unhappiness with Netanyahu, as well as their hopes about brokering a deal with Iran, to left-wing publications like Axios.

The anti-Israel right may think that it can reverse the GOP’s pro-Israel stance if Vance wins the presidency in 2028. But their problem is that unlike the situation on the other side of the aisle, the Veep’s coolness to Israel and the conflict with Iran is making that prospect far less of an inevitable occurrence than it seemed just a few months ago.

But for Democrats, the trend is moving in the opposite direction.

The best that supporters of Israel can hope for from a Democratic presidential candidate going forward is exactly the sort of dodge Newsom has just demonstrated—by talking out of both sides of his mouth. He signaled acquiescence to the “apartheid” and “genocide” blood libels while saying he supports a mythical Israel that has, like the few remaining liberal Zionists, learned nothing from Oslo, the events of Oct. 7, or Iran’s role in fomenting terror and war. Some “moderate” Democrats may think that trying to thread the needle in this way will allow them to be acceptable to both left-wingers and Jewish donors. That’s a sham that increasingly fewer opponents or supporters of Israel will accept.

Yisrael Medad: ‘The Three Cs’ and company

The person on the other side of that conversation was Robert Emmet Patrick Barron, a theologian who serves as bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. In a follow-up post on X, he was more explicit in his opinion about Boller.

He wrote on March 20: “Boller … has called out myself and other Catholic members of the commission for not defending her. This is absurd. Mrs. Prejean Boller was not dismissed for her religious convictions but rather for her behavior at a gathering of the commission last month: browbeating witnesses, aggressively asserting her point of view, hijacking the meeting for her own political purposes.”

He also clarified the Catholic position on matters of “Zionism.” For Barron, the State of Israel has a right to exist, though the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism. He ended, writing: “To paint herself as a victim of anti-Catholic prejudice or to claim that her religious liberty has been denied is simply preposterous.”

These people, righteously raging their Christianity, may be suffering from a form of persecutory delusion. That mental and psychological framework has led them willingly to be accused of irrationality as an element of modern-day martyrdom. They feel, for some strange reason (unless it’s all about the greenbacks), that being in a minority—one that is ridiculed—is actually “proof” of the truth of their convictions. They are pig-pen delighted to exist in their unique in-group status as champions of an outlier view of Jews.

Owens, and specifically, Boller, display the obvious new convert fervor that forces them to be so overtly extroverted in their disgust of fellow Christians and hate for Israel and Judaism.

Social psychology researchers have found that people can form self-preferencing in-groups, even if they are in a significant minority position. In doing so, while experiencing feelings of exclusion, they nevertheless achieve a higher awareness of their identity. In the case of “The Three Cs,” this perception excites them and provides a form of self-justification. They resist the obvious evidence of their irrationality and reject sensible, contrary logical arguments that disprove their beliefs.

And why do we not hear what Carlson, Boller and Owens have to say about the actions of Arab terror groups and Islamist countries against Israelis and Jews? Or about the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands? Why the dichotomy? Why sound the one note?

The danger is that their lack of any real success—beyond temporary media fame and, possibly, fortune—is that their anger only increases. While all they are doing is talking, the true evil is emboldening all those others who hate, channeled through computers and online instruments.

Read More

03/20 Links Pt2: Douglas Murray: Deranged Tucker Carlson backstabs Trump; Melanie Phillips: ‘Mamdani is a monster’; Chuck Norris dies at 86

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Joe Kent sums up everything that’s wrong with the MAGA Israelophobes

There are two things to be said about Kent’s frothing missive. The first is that it is incredibly dumb. George W Bush and Tony Blair, not Israel, were responsible for the calamity of Iraq. In fact, some Israeli officials warned against invading Iraq. They told the White House ‘Iraq is not the enemy – Iran is the enemy’. And it was the barbarians of the Islamic State who inflamed mayhem in Syria by violently subjecting large swathes of that nation to their cruel, bigoted writ. Treating Israel as the cauldron of all human wickedness absolves the true culprits – in this case, Islamist monsters – of responsibility for their crimes.

As for Iran – as has been well documented over the past three weeks, Trump has long been worried about the Islamic Republic. As the Atlantic says, he ‘telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades’. In his two terms as president, ‘he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity’. Painting not only a brash president but mighty America itself as the plaything of Israel is historical illiteracy on stilts. Indeed, this week Trump publicly rebuked Israel for striking Iran’s South Pars gas field. Not very poodle-like of him.

The second, more serious thing to say about Kent’s animus for Israel is that it has the pungent whiff of anti-Semitic conspiracism. The damning of Israel as the author of all war, as the chief manipulator of the Western powers, as the dragger of our nations into the pit of ‘decline and chaos’, has clear and eerie echoes of the Jew-baiting of old. Where it was once the Jewish people who were seen as the source of our cultural decline, now it’s the Jewish homeland. Same shit, different century.

Kent sums up everything that’s wrong with the MAGA Israelophobes, that wing of Trumpism that is fast disappearing into the sewer of Jew-linked conspiracism. These people are morally indistinguishable from the woke mob they claim to hate. Not one word of Kent’s self-regarding letter would be out of place in the mouth of a blue-haired campus loon screaming obscenities about ‘Isra-hell’. Both the crank right and gender-bending left see the Jewish nation as the rotten seed of our moral crises. There’s a fascist feel to their neurosis.

It didn’t surprise me when Kent’s first big post-resignation interview was with Tucker Carlson, the man who sacrificed his skills of critical thinking at the altar of blind rage for Israel. Or that Kent has reportedly had associations with certain members of the ‘groyper army’. Trump is right to say ‘it’s a good thing he’s out’. But why was he in? I can’t be the only person horrified that the head of counter-terrorism was an anti-Israel nut. You might as well have Mehdi Hasan up there. The Israelophobic intrigue of the Very Online right runs directly counter to the open, hopeful spirit of the tens of millions of Americans who took a punt on Trump. In fact, it threatens to undermine it, by replacing that working-class yearning for greater democracy with the obsessional delusions of the digitally addicted.

The MAGA movement needs to sort itself out. Just as the old left was dragged down by the carbuncle of wokeness, so American populism is at risk of serious ailment from the crankery of its digital flank. These movements might seem miles apart, the former believing you can have a cock and be a lesbian, the latter being more ‘tradwife’. But they are as one in their vain, self-exonerating hatred for the world’s only Jewish state. Listen, Israel isn’t the cause of your wars or your depression or your girlfriend troubles or your baldness – grow up and take responsibility.

As NYC Oct. 7 hate crime offenders get sentenced, a victim wonders what justice looks like

In November 2023, weeks after the Hamas invasion of Israel, two women tore posters of Israeli hostages off a lamppost on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

A Jewish woman who was walking her dog confronted the pair, saying, “Why are you ripping down posters of victims?”

“I don’t think these are real people. I think this is AI-generated,” one of the women, Stephanie Gonzalez, said. “I believe whoever is in Palestine is real. Whoever’s in Palestine is truly suffering.”

The other woman, Mehwish Omer, gave the Jewish passerby the middle finger, according to video of the incident the victim filmed and shared with The Times of Israel.

As the pair began to walk away, things escalated further: They attacked the Jewish woman, smacking her phone out of her hand and shouting, “Go fuck yourself,” as the victim pleaded, “Don’t assault me.”

“I’m going to assault you. I don’t care,” Gonzalez said.

The women then ripped a Star of David necklace off the victim’s neck, grabbed her by the throat, and clawed her face, causing bleeding in her eye and leaving red welts on her forehead and down her right cheek.

The attack took place on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a mere week before the victim’s wedding.

After a police search, the attackers were arrested a week later and charged with a hate crime assault.

Now being resolved in New York courts, the case was one of a series of hate crimes that took place in the aftermath of the Hamas onslaught on Israel that saw 1,200 murdered and 251 taken hostage to Gaza.

Gonzalez, Omer and the victim, who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, appeared this month for a court hearing that illustrated complications surrounding hate crime sentencing and the lasting trauma caused to victims.

“For two and a half years, I really have lived with this,” the victim said. “My soul has not been able to rest.”

MinterEllison pulls logo from Sydney Biennale after DJ storm

Law firm MinterEllison asked the Sydney Biennale to remove its logo from a list of major partners, distancing itself from the arts festival due to DJ Haram’s inflammatory opening-night speech praising “martyrs” and attacking Israel.

MinterEllison, a pro bono legal adviser to the biennale for more than 20 years but not a financial sponsor of the festival, had been credited on the biennale’s website as a major partner as recently as Tuesday.

DJ Haram created a storm after her comments at the Sydney Biennale opening night at White Bay Power Station.

But by Thursday the logo had disappeared. When contacted by The Australian Financial Review about the logo on the site, a MinterEllison spokeswoman said that “following comments made at the White Bay event on 13 March 2026, we requested its removal”.

“We did not want our branding to suggest any association with, or endorsement of, those views,” the spokeswoman said. “We firmly and unconditionally condemn antisemitism in all its forms – that is a core value of this firm.

“Our pro bono legal relationship with the biennale as an institution is continuing. It is separate from this year’s exhibition and from the actions or views of any individual performer or artist.”

On Saturday, the Financial Review revealed the content of DJ Haram’s speech of March 13, which included leading a chant of “long live the resistance” and referring to “the Zio-Australian-Epstein empire”, a phrase appearing to link Israel to the crimes of convicted sex offender and New York financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The speech has been condemned by NSW Premier Chris Minns and Arts Minister John Graham, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

Read More

03/17 Links Pt2: How to fight the lunatic haters: don’t get scared — get smart; What Jurgen Habermas Knew; Mamdani accuses Israel of genocide on St. Patrick’s Day stage

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How to fight the lunatic haters: don’t get scared — get smart

Today, Jews are at the sharp end of this onslaught — but all those seeking to defend Israel and America must also begin to make themselves heard.

The security of all Americans is in peril if we refuse to grasp the threats of Islamism at home and of Iran abroad.

My home country of Britain should stand as a warning.

The United Kingdom’s traditional freedoms and liberties have been all but lost amid its leaders’ supine appeasement of a politically powerful Muslim community.

That community has made steady progress toward its goal of Islamizing the country — just as Mayor Zohran Mamdani appears to be attempting in New York.

The Islamists are only able to make such inroads because of their all-too-willing accomplices on the left.

They are bound together by their shared goal of bringing down Western society — despite diametrically opposed views of what should replace it — and their mutual hatred of Jews and Israel.

We aren’t merely witnessing a rise in antisemitism, but a global madness that threatens the West as a whole.

Not just the Jews, but all who are desperate to defend civilization against barbarism need to fight back.

Seth Mandel: What Jurgen Habermas Knew

For the past 96 years, cynicism had few greater enemies than the super-famous philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the former leader of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, who died on Saturday. Among the numerous ways Habermas stood out from his peers in modern social theory was that this former Hitler Youth went to his grave defending Israel’s right of self-defense.

This meant breaking with the post-October 7 manufactured consensus in academia that the Jewish state was guilty of the same category of crimes committed against the Jewish people by Nazi Germany. Yet Habermas’s philosophy made his objection to this calumny inevitable: He believed in the power of engagement—his most famous idea arguably remains his belief that societal problems can and should be solved in the public square—and by the time of his death, that made him an outsider among intellectuals.

Indeed, his peers’ turn against Israel was inseparable from their turn against Enlightenment ideals. Official and unofficial speech codes in academia cast the Jewish state out of the public square: BDS became not just a boycott-focused tactic against Israel but a way of life. You simply did not talk to those who held insufficiently hostile opinions about the Jews.

Habermas understood precisely where that attitude can lead. But his critics on the left misunderstand the way his Germanness informed his fairmindedness on Israel. The last great intellectual controversy of his life is instructive.

In November 2023, Habermas and three co-authors published the following:
“The Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back. How this retaliation, which is justified in principle, is carried out is the subject of controversial debate; principles of proportionality, the prevention of civilian casualties and the waging of a war with the prospect of future peace must be the guiding principles. Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population, however, the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.”

In retrospect, of course, Habermas was well-served by his reluctance to join the mob. As we now know, the “genocide” accusation against Israel has no basis and has been revealed as a bad-faith libel constructed by supporters of a “global intifada.” That Habermas wasn’t fooled by it remains unforgivable to his progressive critics.

Ivan Jablonka, historian: 'The use of last names is a particular trait of antisemitism'

A history professor at Université Sorbonne-Paris Nord and a member of the Institut universitaire de France, a French academic honorary institution, Ivan Jablonka has published several works on the history and memory of the Holocaust. He is the founder of the Traverse series and co-director of the La République des Idées ("The Republic of Ideas") series at the Seuil publishing house. He is also the author of A History of the Grandparents I Never Had (2016).

The leader of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, made a sarcastic remark during a meeting in support of his movement's candidates for the municipal elections in Lyon on February 26, about the name of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He suggested that the American pronunciation of Epstein's last name [Epsteen] was intended to hide his Jewish identity by making him seem Russian. The Socialist leader, Olivier Faure, condemned what he called a drift into "the dark waters of antisemitism." How do you interpret the remarks made by the LFI leader?

Jean-Luc Mélenchon recently joked about the pronunciation of two Jewish names, Jeffrey Epstein and [on March 1] Raphaël Glucksmann [a French member of the European Parliament]. These remarks are part of a consistent series of statements dating back to 2020. According to him, Jesus was crucified "by his own compatriots." Eric Zemmour [far-right figure] is said to reproduce the "cultural scenarios" of Judaism that are hostile to creolization and Yaël Braun-Pivet [president of the Assemblée Nationale] allegedly "went camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre" in Gaza. La France Insoumise also boycotted the march against antisemitism [in November 2023] and published a poster of Cyril Hanouna [a French TV personality] using Nazi iconography from the 1930s [in March 2025].

This way of referring to Jews reminds me of [late far-right leader] Jean-Marie Le Pen. The daughter [Marine Le Pen] has made people forget the father's misdeeds, but he was a specialist in antisemitic mockery about last names. In 1985, he listed the names of four Jewish journalists – Jean-François Kahn, Jean Daniel, Ivan Levaï and Jean-Pierre Elkabbach – before referring to "all the liars of the press." A few years later, he made the grim pun "Durafour crématoire" [a play on the name of then minister Michel Durafour, alluding to cematorium].

That is where Jean-Luc Mélenchon now stands. He does not advocate an anti-Jewish agenda, as some politicians did between the late 19th century and the Vichy regime, but he offers an interpretive framework typical of antisemitic thinking: Jews are pulling the strings and leading the world into war.

Read More

01/30 Links Pt2: Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’; Stealing the Holocaust from the Jews; Yoram Hazony’s 15 Minutes

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: For U.S. Jewish Groups, There’s No Going Back to the Old Ways

No one in their right mind will ever again pay into that racket. It was, in a sense, an expression of organizational decadence, mixed with complacency. Anti-Semitism was at low tide, and instead of remembering that the tide always turns, Jewish groups believed they could afford to chip in and show solidarity with fellow “marginalized communities.”

Regardless of the merits of this thinking before October 7, it is clear now that such a strategy cannot be employed again.

So where should the money go instead? A good place to look for answers remains Jack Wertheimer’s 2024 Mosaic essay on the American Jewish community’s post-October 7 philanthropy, since the overall trends remain the same even if the dollar figures have changed since then.

One area Jewish donors have turned to is groups that do nothing more than seek to combat anti-Semitism in the public square. One of Wertheimer’s sources in the philanthropy world told him: “The eyes of funders are now open in new ways; anti-Zionism is well-funded and pervasive in certain sectors. For the first time, funders realize how much those ideas have captured institutions.”

Indeed, this has only become more apparent since the essay’s publication. Anti-Zionism, it turned out, has been molded into a full-fledged ideology, more prevalent on the left than the right. That ideology has little or nothing to do with what Zionism actually is; instead, it’s a movement that sets itself in opposition to Zionists. That is, rather than participate in a debate over Zionism, anti-Zionism is a mercenary ideology that targets people who identify as Zionists—and, crucially, people the anti-Zionists accuse of harboring Zionism in their hearts.

What that means in practice is classic anti-Jewish discrimination in the professions, in academia, and the media. That’s because most Jews believe that Jews have a right to self-determination. So targeting self-identified “Zionists” is a way of targeting Jews.

Anti-Zionism is preposterously well-funded, because it has become a catchall progressive tag, and so some of the mountains of dark money set aside for progressive activism falls in the lap of any group that claims the anti-Zionist mantle. Which, at the current moment, is most of them.

So that’s one place Jewish communal resources must go toward: The battle against anti-Zionism must be joined in earnest. This also means that Jewish organizations should stop playing footsie with Jewish anti-Zionists. Even a big tent must draw the line at those who want to tear the tent down.

Andrew Fox: How academic propaganda is made

The intellectual lineage of this project is obvious: it is AirWars all over again. The same methodological sleight of hand. The same overconfidence and lack of access to genuine intelligence. The same collection of social media claims and hearsay, presented as forensic truth. AirWars gained a reputation by counting allegations as facts and treating propaganda as data, and this project repeats those errors nearly exactly. The only difference is that the flaws are now so well-documented that repeating them can only be a deliberate act.

Then there is the plan to publish via AOAV, described as “respectable.” This is simply not true. AOAV’s leadership has openly campaigned against Israel for years, including promoting the genocide hoax in Gaza, and they specialise in the kind of partisan hit jobs that are the trademark of the far left. Whilst presented as a neutral research platform, in reality it is an activist ecosystem. Publishing there does not enhance credibility: it indicates that the author knows their work would not withstand rigorous peer review by neutral military, intelligence, or legal professionals. It is a safe ideological bubble where conclusions are celebrated rather than examined.

Remove the academic jargon, and this project is extremely simple. It starts with the assumption that Israel is intentionally killing civilians. It then develops a method guaranteed to “prove” that conclusion by excluding all evidence that might challenge it. Classified intelligence is disregarded because it is inaccessible. Operational context is ignored. Hamas-controlled information is given priority. Anything that is not visible in open sources is considered non-existent. The final product is presented as objective scholarship.

This is propaganda with footnotes, but it is rare for a researcher to be so pompous and confident in his echo chamber that he explains the sleight of hand before the magic show begins. The most charitable interpretation is that its author genuinely does not understand how wars are fought, how intelligence operates, or how the law is applied in combat situations. The less charitable interpretation is that he understands perfectly well – and is counting on his audience not to. Either way, no serious person should take this work seriously. We can only thank him for revealing his hand in advance.

Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one claim: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Not a week passes without another open letter from academics – often amassing hundreds or even thousands of signatures within days – denouncing Israel in the strongest terms. Across Europe, dozens of universities have now severed ties with Israeli institutions, citing alleged complicity in genocide – or at the very least, systematic war crimes.

In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution that appeared to settle the question: the Jewish state, it declared, was guilty of the “crime of crimes”.

In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.

A contrived consensus
And yet, there are clear indications that this supposed academic consensus was artificially contrived, a product of intense social pressure, ideological hectoring, and a “spiral of silence.” The IAGS resolution, for example, is not grounded in any original research and offers little substantive argumentation.

In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the US. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of American signatories, but only a handful in Europe – primarily in Germany and around a single London-based centre for antisemitism research.

In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on Gaza has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. The rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my view on Israel.​

A spiral of silence
And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarised as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet – I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel has become so intense that many “dissidents” no longer dare to speak out.

This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent, as Steven Pinker notes in his book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.

I wanted to see if there was a way to break the cycle. What if people could speak honestly without risking their careers? I tested this by inviting primarily Dutch-speaking academics to share anonymous views on Israel and Gaza. What arrived was sobering – and chilling.

'Nothing Less Than Holocaust Inversion': Prominent Holocaust Scholars Denounce Israel-Bashing Nonprofit Named After Holocaust Survivor

More than 100 prominent Holocaust and genocide scholars are sounding the alarm on an "extremist" Israel-bashing nonprofit named after a Holocaust survivor who coined the term "genocide," according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Exploiting the survivor's name while accusing the Jewish state of genocide, the letter's leader said, is "nothing less than Holocaust inversion."

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit named after Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, was established around 2021 without permission from its namesake's family. It has since used the late lawyer and activist's reputation to undermine Israel on the international stage, the scholars wrote ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The institute began accusing Israel of "genocide" just 10 days after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, later claiming Hamas did not commit sexual violence against Israeli civilians.

"As scholars who have written about the Holocaust or other genocides, we share your family's concern about extremists exploiting Raphael Lemkin's name to attack Israel," the experts, led by Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, wrote in a letter to the Lemkin family. "Israel's counter-terror campaign in Gaza is not genocidal, either in intentions or actions. The civilian deaths there are the result of Hamas embedding itself in residential areas and using the population as human shields."

Medoff told the Free Beacon that the institute's "false accusation of genocide in Gaza" amounts to "nothing less than Holocaust inversion," adding that "the fact that extremists are exploiting Lemkin's name to do so adds insult to injury."

The letter is meant to bolster the Lemkin family's months-long bid to pressure the institute to drop Lemkin's name, saying the institute's "policies, positions, activities, and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin's belief system." The family, with legal backing from the European Jewish Association, petitioned Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.) and the state's Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations to intervene on their behalf, though the governor and state have not taken yet any action. As Free Beacon senior writer Ira Stoll reported in late 2024, a Lemkin family member said he was "totally outraged" to see his relative's name used for anti-Israel activism.

Read More

01/27 Links Pt1: The Hostage Crisis Is Over. So What Has the World Learned?; Netanyahu: Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza due to Biden-era arms embargo; PIJ knowingly fired faulty rockets in Gaza, killing 'a thousand' Palestinians

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Hostage Crisis Is Over. So What Has the World Learned?

Much like Hamas’s strategy of operating from civilian homes, hostage-taking is part of what Palestinian terrorists see as Israel’s chief vulnerability: that it cares about the life and dignity of every individual. In other words, the conflict we see today is, zoomed out, a Palestinian war to exploit Israel’s humanity. Why anyone thinks a conflict that is set along these lines can or will be solved by turning artificial borders into official ones is beyond me. No one who kidnaps babies is interested in real estate.

And second: what Avera Mengistu’s story revealed. Apparently grief-stricken over the loss of his brother, and undergoing periodic mental-health treatment, the 28-year-old climbed over a border fence and into Gaza in 2014. He was returned in 2025.

Who holds a grief-stricken, mentally ill person hostage for a decade? Hamas does.

Nor is the danger of such aimless walking limited to Gaza. Here’s a headline from late December: “IDF escorts Israeli woman out of Palestinian West Bank town she entered.” There really wasn’t much more to the story. A military statement read: “After IDF troops scanned the area, the forces located the civilian and extracted her safely out of the village.”

When did headlines about Israelis having to be extracted from Palestinian neighborhoods become so dog-bites-man?

Here’s one from a week earlier: “Mentally ill Israeli extracted safely from Hebron overnight after wandering for hours.” Jews are only permitted in about 20 percent of Hebron. If one enters the other 80 percent, it makes headlines no matter what happens to them.

This one’s from less than two weeks ago: “Israeli and PA forces extract Jewish man seen wandering in West Bank city of Qalqilya.” Sounds dangerous; what happened? “An initial investigation has found that the man entered the city to go to a car repair shop.”

Another from late December: “Troops extract 2 Israelis who entered West Bank’s Area A near Hebron, Nablus.”

The case of Avera Mengistu highlights the fact that still, after all these decades of “peace” negotiations, the Judenrein nature of Palestinian Arab towns is simply accepted to the point where nearly every headline about an Israeli leaving such a town alive contains a version of the word “extraction.”

The October 7 hostage crisis is over. But has the world learned any of the lessons that have been on display since it began?

Jonathan Sacerdoti: How Israel did the impossible – and brought the hostages home

To outside observers, these goals sound impossible. But bringing back all the hostages was dismissed as impossible, too. Israel did it. These promises may sound arbitrary, idealistic, even performative, but to Israel, nothing is too dramatic. It is a country whose history has read like a thriller from its earliest days, whose survival has defied odds at every turn. A people whose annihilation has been attempted repeatedly by armies larger, better armed, and more numerous, often backed by far broader coalitions.

It is tempting to reach for biblical or spiritual explanations. Perhaps they have their place. Not everyone’s taste runs in that direction. What can be said, without mysticism, is that human beings united by purpose, driven by pain and fury, and threatened by brutality can achieve things that appear impossible from a distance.

Anyone in doubt can look at a map and trace a finger to that narrow sliver of land so many have sought to erase. It is still there. It does not get everything right. It argues, stumbles, fractures. Yet it persists, and it fights to defend its existence. Yesterday, it delivered on one impossible promise. The second now waits.

This is where the American role becomes decisive, and often misunderstood. The US initiative on Gaza should not be read as a naïve development plan or a humanitarian fantasy. Its headline promises of employment, reconstruction and futuristic redevelopment are not about realism. They are about framing.

Washington has placed a maximal, almost utopian offer on the table precisely because it expects it to fail. The point is to force a binary choice. Either Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, move decisively away from armed jihadist governance, towards demilitarisation and external oversight, or they absorb the consequences of continued war and isolation. The message is blunt: everything is being offered. Rejection transfers responsibility.

This strategy buys time. Even a temporary pause delays large-scale fighting, reduces Israeli casualties, and allows further consolidation of the diplomatic case against Hamas. It exposes bad faith. It drains sympathy. It reframes the conflict as one of Palestinian political choice rather than Israeli obstruction. Or so the US may hope.

Governance proposals emerging from Washington reflect this pragmatism. There is no search for a morally pure Palestinian leadership. Any figure with local standing will carry factional history. The aim is a technocratic authority operationally reliant on external backing, financially constrained, and removable if it drifts towards Hamas. Disarmament is the price of reconstruction. According to the agreements signed at least, there is no flexibility on that point. Israel will wish to hold the US to that promise.

Demilitarisation remains the true red line. If Hamas refuses, the strategy should shift. Opening the border with Egypt functions as a pressure valve: population movement reduces Hamas’s ability to embed itself behind civilians. Israel gains greater freedom of action, with fewer civilian entanglements and clearer international justification.

More broadly, Gaza itself is not the central strategic theatre. Iran remains the core concern, with Turkey hovering uneasily on the edge of hostility and opportunism. The American military posture signals as much to Tehran as to Gaza. That many European states have chosen to stand on the sidelines and scoff at President Trump’s plans, even as atrocities unfold elsewhere in the region, only underscores how marginal they have become.

What is clear is this: Israel has delivered on one impossible promise. The second is now being tested, under harsher conditions, with fewer illusions. Whether demilitarisation can be achieved will determine not only Gaza’s future, but the credibility of every promise made since October.

History offers no guarantees. It rarely does. But it does record moments when nations, bound by pain, pressure, and purpose, achieved what seemed implausible. Israel has reached such a moment again. What follows will not be symbolic. It will be decisive.

Read More

12/01 Links Pt1: Israel Is Where Theory Stops and Reality Begins; The NYT's Claims Fighting Hezbollah Is Israeli ‘Imperialism’; Pardoning Netanyahu is wrong – and exactly what Israel needs right now

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel Is Where Theory Stops and Reality Begins

One can grant the claim that there is no theological imperative for Christians to support Israel at all, but that is not the same as saying that there is a theological imperative to be hostile to Jewish Israelis.

As the theologian Brian G. Mattson asks, “what has Israel to do with a modern Christian heresy? Has the state of Israel ever embraced or promoted or associated itself with Christian Zionism, other than to accept enthusiastic support wherever it can be found, particularly when in short supply? The modern Jewish state no doubt has its own notions of its origins, essence, and purpose … and they are unlikely to have been cribbed from modern evangelical Christian sensibilities, making it strange to hold Israel responsible for ideas held by some of its American supporters.”

Again, the theological discussion looks interesting from the outside. But the discussion the rest of us can more easily weigh in on is the political one, and here is the political reality. The Christian population of Israel is still growing, some years even as a percentage of the total population, and that is not the norm in the rest of the region. But this time of year, the issue tends to focus on one place more than others: Bethlehem.

The answer to why the Christian population is struggling in this historical Christian city is the same, however, regarding the question of Christian struggles in the Palestinian territories. The Christian population of Gaza has plummeted since Hamas’s 2007 takeover. The community’s population in Bethlehem has deteriorated since the Palestinian Authority took control of the city in 1994.

Hamas’s activities both in Gaza and in places like Bethlehem (Hamas exists in the West Bank, as well) have made the Christian population unsafe and also forced into a second-class citizenship status. As Eness Elias notes, it has become increasingly difficult for Christians to buy land in places under Palestinian control. Elias also recounts a story in which “Sanaa Razi Nashash from Beit Jala described how she went to the police to file a complaint against a Muslim man who assaulted her—only to find the assailant wearing a police uniform.”

Chasing Christians out while preventing them from buying property is a pretty airtight strategy to ensure the population only goes one way: down. And it’s the prevailing policy in places under Palestinian governance. Others report that the Palestinian Authority “is erasing” Christians from education curricula as Muslim students become the majority in previously Christian schools.

Walk around Israel and instantly understand that is the opposite of the case for Christians governed by the Jewish state. Ideological and theological debates over Zionism (of any flavor) are beside the point here, because it is where theory ends and reality reigns.

Seth Mandel: There’s No Such Thing As a Time-Bound Path to a Palestinian State

Pope Leo made his much-anticipated trip to Lebanon, and of course coming that close to Israel makes questions about the peace process unavoidable. Leo got the question from the press before his plane was halfway to Beirut. His response was unremarkable.

“We all know that at this time Israel still does not accept that solution, but we see it as the only solution,” the pope said, adding that “we are also friends with Israel and we are seeking to be a mediating voice between the two parties that might help them close in on a solution with justice for everyone.”

That formulation has become routine: As soon as Israel pushes the “Palestinian State Poof” button Bibi Netanyahu apparently keeps on his desk, there will be a fully functioning state living in peace and security alongside the State of Israel. There are no prerequisites for the Palestinians as far as the world is concerned.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s version of this demand reportedly includes a shot clock: Israel must initiate a “time-bound path” to such a denouement.

This is the sort of demand that sounds reasonable—“time-bound” evokes calendars and deadlines and commitments. But in fact there is no such thing as a time-bound path to a Palestinian state. The reason there is a peace process is because there are actions that must be taken, building blocks put in position and in the right order. If a construction crew agrees to a time-bound path to a new apartment building but doesn’t get all the walls finished by the deadline, does the building receive its certificate of occupancy anyway? This new State of Palestine sounds uninsurable.

At the same time, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is the fruit of a genuine diplomatic success: the Trump administration’s triumph in getting the United Nations Security Council to vote to endorse his plan for the end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza. Some of Netanyahu’s coalition partners didn’t like that the resolution on the plan mentioned a path toward a Palestinian state. But they should take the win: France and the United Kingdom voted to essentially annul their own previous recognition of a Palestinian state by signing on to a document that made clear no such state exists.

No, Gaza Is Not the Worst or Deadliest War by Any Measure

True Statistic: Gaza has a Comparatively Low Civilian-Combatant Ratio
Based on available data, the civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is roughly 1.8 to 1 (and probably even lower), using Hamas’ claim of 70,000 total fatalities and an estimated 25,000 combatants killed. This ratio is far lower than in recent Western-led urban battles. In Mosul, an estimated 10,000 civilians were killed compared to about 2,000 to 3,000 ISIS fighters, a ratio of 3 to 1 at the low end. Broader operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced ratios in the range of 3 to 1 up to 5 to 1. The Gaza ratio therefore contradicts accusations of genocide or indiscriminate targeting.

Critics who cannot accept this reality have attempted to manipulate both sides of the ratio to fabricate a higher figure. On the denominator, they undercount combatants by relying only on the number of fighters the IDF can literally identify by first and last name and match to a pre-war roster. By this absurd standard, any combatant the IDF could not fully identify in the midst of battle, combatants remaining in tunnels or beneath rubble, or any individual recruited by Hamas after the war began, is automatically labeled a civilian. This is how the false claim of “83% civilians killed” is manufactured.

On the numerator, these same critics assert, without evidence, that total fatalities are undercounted by some 40%. They never explain how this is possible when Gazans could and did report thousands of deaths without needing to present bodies, and given the compensation incentives to do so. Two years into the conflict, the notion that thirty thousand or more deaths remain unreported by their families has no evidentiary basis.

Taken together, the credible data leaves Gaza’s civilian combatant ratio well under 2 to 1, low for high-intensity urban warfare. And tellingly, when this metric contradicts their genocide narrative, the same critics who inflated every other statistic suddenly work to discredit it, proving that accurate numbers were never the point; the manipulation exists solely to promote an anti-Israel agenda.

Conclusion
When the facts invalidate the claims, the predictable response is to move the goalposts. After portraying Gaza as an unprecedented, genocidal conflict, critics suddenly dismiss all comparative evidence, insisting that previous catastrophic wars are too terrible to cite as data points. The impulse to portray Israel as uniquely criminal, rather than any commitment to truth, drives this constant reframing. It exposes the ideological goal driving the narrative: to cast Israel as uniquely criminal, even when the evidence shows otherwise. In the end, tragedy does not prove genocide, and facts still matter, even to those determined to ignore them.

Read More

11/02 Links: Omer Neutra confirmed as one of three slain Gaza hostages returned to Israel on Sunday; The Arab World Rejects Hamas While New York City Glorifies It

From Ian:

When Truth Splits in Two: The Arab World Rejects Hamas While New York City Glorifies It

The Great Moral Reversal
In the Middle East, proximity to Hamas’s rule has produced clarity. People who live under or near Islamist militias know the cost of their fanaticism. They have seen the beheadings, the executions, the corruption, and the cruelty. They know that Hamas, like the Houthis or Hezbollah, does not liberate, it enslaves.

In the West, by contrast, ideological distance paired with obsession of the oppressor vs oppressed narrative breeds delusion. The further one stands from Hamas’s victims, the easier it is to romanticize its violence. Western activists, many of whom would never tolerate a prayer led by a homophobic priest or a law that could affect a woman's right to control her own medical decisions, suspend all judgment when those same forces wrap themselves in Palestinian flags.

It is an irony only modern politics could produce. Arab liberals call for Hamas’s elimination, while American progressives dance beneath its banners.

Why This Matters
The implications reach beyond moral outrage. When American cities normalize pro terror rhetoric, they erode the social immune system that protects against radicalization. When politicians legitimize extremists in the name of diversity, they invite violence and antisemitism into civic life.

One world is waking up. The other is descending into moral sleep. In Riyadh, Cairo, and Manama, journalists write that Hamas’s “role has ended.” In Brooklyn, protesters shout that “resistance is glorious.”

The former seeks peace. The latter seeks purpose. The former has seen war’s reality. The latter plays at revolution from the safety of American democracy.

The lesson is painfully clear: moral clarity still exists, but you will find more of it today in the Arab world than on the streets of New York City, a city now poised to dive even deeper into fanaticism and moral inversion.

The Qatar Problem

Knowledge Production and Narrative Control
Tensions between Saudis, Iranians, and Qataris had simmered for years, and I could still feel the heat at a security forum in Europe in late August 2023. After I led a teach-in on the Middle East, the Qatari ambassador to Canada, Dr Khalid bin Rashid Al Mansouri, approached me to ask if I needed funding for my initiatives. I declined. Mid-sentence, a Gazan social-media activist cut in: “Will you keep financially supporting our people in Gaza even now that Saudi is normalising with Israel?” The ambassador turned, took his hands, and answered, “We will never ever stop supporting our Palestinian brothers.”

That was not a humanitarian promise, it was policy. Qatar has bankrolled Hamas since 2007, when the group seized Gaza after a bloody rampage that overthrew the Palestinian Authority. In 2012, Qatar’s then-Emir made a red-carpet visit to Gaza and pledged US$400 million for projects, a watershed moment that signalled Doha’s unabashed embrace of Hamas’s rule. Patronage matured into a routinised cash flow, and by 2021, about US$30 million per month was entering Gaza, framed as “humanitarian” transfers that sustained Hamas-run salaries and government operations.

At the same time, Qatar was investing heavily in Western knowledge production and narrative control. Since 2001, US colleges and universities have reported an estimated US$6.25 billion in Qatari funding, making Qatar one of the five largest foreign donors in American higher education. Think tanks and policymakers were folded in, too. Qatar gave upward of US$9.1 million to US think tanks between 2019 and 2023. The Brookings Doha Center and related initiatives received US$14.8 million in a single three-year pledge, part of a broader, longer-running relationship that raised persistent questions and prompted FBI investigations about policy manipulation and censorship across the Beltway ecosystem.

Lobbying followed the same template. In a single recent year, Qatar retained 33 FARA-registered PR and lobbying firms, spending around US$18 million to create surge capacity for bookings, op-eds, and Hill and press engagement. To give you a picture of the scale of Qatari reach in DC, I spent several months after 7 October trying to publish a piece titled, “Qatar Is a Leading Saboteur of Regional Integration.” I sent it to everyone I know in media and policy, including Ambassador Dennis Ross who promised, when I begged him at a Washington Institute event in November 2023, to get it published. I had hit multiple walls, including at a think tank of which I am a member.

A friend at one of these publications told me: “I think they [the editorial team] have an issue with the fact that they have an upcoming partnership in December with Qatar. One of the directors flagged it as problematic and might put them in a delicate situation and prefer to go with another piece they had commissioned with a lighter touch on the subject. Sorry for that.” I asked if there was somewhere I could send it where there would not be a conflict of interest. “It is hard in DC,” my friend replied. “Everyone has interests with the Qataris.”

Even public grief was asked to stand down in deference to Doha’s leverage. After 7 October, several planned protests by hostage families in front of the Qatari embassy were quietly shut down. A source close to the Hostage Families Forum in DC told me they were explicitly warned not to “endanger” diplomatic talks with the only mediators deemed capable of securing releases. I do not fault the families for yielding, especially when even Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff continue to celebrate Qatar’s role as the indispensable mediator for peace.

WAPO: Palestinian Talks on Gaza's Future Could See Hamas Help Shape Its Rule

Palestinian political factions are holding closed-door discussions that could see Hamas play a role in shaping a postwar administration in Gaza.

The eight Palestinian factions and armed groups involved - including Fatah, which leads the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank, and Hamas - are working to reach a consensus over key elements of an interim administration.

To avoid a protracted postwar insurgency, Hamas must be included in any political settlement, say Palestinian political factions and mediators from Arab countries.

A pivotal question is whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu or President Trump would object to a Gazan government born out of talks between Hamas and Fatah.

For Israel, nearly every aspect of the inter-Palestinian talks is unpalatable.

"The fear for Israel is that Hamas will open the gates of Gaza and say to the PA, 'You're the boss here. Just bring money to Gaza and you can declare yourself the minister of agriculture or education. Just don't touch weapons, and we'll be the dominant player,'" said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence analyst.

Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said, "There is a risk that the end state that emerges will be what we wanted to avoid....Hamas is battered and bruised but hanging on to power, preparing for the next round."

WSJ: Hizbullah Is Rearming, Putting Ceasefire at Risk

Hizbullah in Lebanon is rebuilding its armaments and battered ranks, defying the terms of a ceasefire agreement, and raising the prospect of renewed conflict with Israel, according to Israeli and Arab intelligence.

The intelligence shows Iranian-backed Hizbullah is restocking rockets, antitank missiles and artillery. Some weapons are coming in via seaports and still functional smuggling routes through Syria. Hizbullah is also manufacturing new weapons itself.

Under the agreement that ended a two-month Israeli campaign against the group a year ago, Lebanon is required to start disarming Hizbullah in parts of Lebanon, before continuing to the entire country as per a previous agreement.

Israel is losing patience after new intelligence findings highlighted Hizbullah's rearmament. "Should Beirut continue to hesitate, Israel may act unilaterally - and the consequences would be grave," Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a key American envoy for Lebanon and Syria, said in October.

The standoff highlights the difficulty of quashing an established militia with a base of support among the population even when it has been badly beaten. The difficulties are also evident in Gaza, where Hamas is resisting demands that it disarm and relinquish power.

Read More

10/16 Links Pt2: Enough is enough. We must clamp down on universities now; Maccabi Tel Aviv fans banned from Aston Villa match over ‘safety’

From Ian:

Warner Bros. Discovery Speaks Out Against Israeli Film Boycott: ‘Our Policies Prohibit Discrimination of Any Kind’

Warner Bros. Discovery has responded to a legal letter regarding calls for a boycott of Israeli film institutions, acknowledging such a pledge would likely violate its internal policies.

“Warner Bros. Discovery is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful environment for its employees, collaborators, and other stakeholders,” a spokesperson for WBD told Variety.

“Our policies prohibit discrimination of any kind, including discrimination based on race, religion, national origin or ancestry. We believe a boycott of Israeli film institutions violates our policies. While we respect the rights of individuals and groups to express their views and advocate for causes, we will continue to align our business practices with the requirements of our policies and the law.”

Last month a plethora of industry figures including Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem signed a pledge organized by Film Workers for Palestine vowing to avoid working with Israeli film institutions “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” Examples of “complicity” suggested by Film Workers for Palestine include “whitewashing or justifying genocide and apartheid, and/or partnering with the government committing them.”

In its FAQ section, Film Workers for Palestine clarifies that Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage would not be subject to the same boycott as Israeli citizens of other heritage, with a different set of “context sensitive” guidelines applied instead.

However law associations on both sides of the Atlantic have warned the boycott is likely to violate equality laws. As Variety reported exclusively last week, the group U.K. Lawyers for Israel has warned studios, agencies and unions that the pledge breaches the Equality Act 2010 making it “highly likely to be a litigation risk.” This could also have a knock-on effect on insurance and film finance.

Brendan O'Neill: Get your hands off the Holocaust, Mehdi Hasan

The most striking part of Hasan’s tweet is where he says ‘One of the ways’ in which Gaza feels worse than the Holocaust…. So post-war jokes are not the only thing that make Gaza worse? What else does, Mehdi? It’s not the numbers, that’s for sure. The estimated death toll for the two-year war in Gaza is 70,000, a great many of which will be Hamas militants. That’s far lower than the toll for other recent wars – Yemen, Syria, Sudan – which are rarely called genocides.

But here’s the thing: at the height of their Jew-killing frenzy, in 1944, the Nazis were exterminating 6,000 human beings a day at Auschwitz II in Birkenau. Men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled: gassed, burnt, vaporised. More in 12 days than in two years of war in Gaza. It is a grotesque insult against memory, against truth itself, even to say the word Gaza in the same sentence as the word Holocaust. Hasan must know this? He went to Oxford FFS. Actually, maybe that explains it.

The numbers are only one part of the story. There’s intention, too. The wild clamour of the keffiyeh mob and their enablers in the NGO world to have the Gaza war branded a ‘genocide’ wilfully overlooks that Israel’s aim was not to destroy the Palestinian people but to destroy Hamas. There was a time when progressives would have considered it noble for a Jewish army to take the fight to a fascist militia that had raped and massacred its people. How do the ‘genocide’ nuts explain that the war is winding down – we hope – now that the hostages have been returned and there’s a peace deal that says Hamas must disarm? Do you know when the Holocaust would have ended had the Allied forces not intervened? When there was not one Jew left on Earth.

Hasan is back-pedalling. He says his tweet was ‘clumsily’ worded. He’s telling those who accuse him of Holocaust relativism to ‘go fuck yourself’. Defensive much? The fact is he gave voice to an untruth that has spread like a pox in educated circles – that Gaza is a genocide, not unlike that genocide. NGOs gleefully peddle this calumny. Pompous columnists rattle it off. You see it on every soulless march against Israel, with placards calling Israel the New Nazis and likening Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

I can’t read Hasan’s mind. I have no idea why he parrots this myth. But I have my suspicions about why the broader ‘pro-Palestine’ movement does. Howard Jacobson says the reason Israel’s haters always reach for the Holocaust, despite there being ‘thousands of years of pitiless warfare’ they could reference instead, is ‘to wound Jews’, ‘to punish them with their own grief’. To my mind, it’s something worse than Holocaust relativism. It’s Holocaust inversion, where the Jews are reframed as the perpetrators rather than the victims of the greatest crime in history, all to the end of washing away the historic guilt of privileged woke Westerners. Now that the war in Gaza has stopped, please, can this war on truth stop, too?

Holocaust Museum director rebukes Gazans identifying as ‘holocaust survivors’

Those who say that Gazans are “holocaust survivors,” having endured Israel’s defensive war against the Hamas terror organization, are to be “widely condemned,” according to Sara Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Falsely comparing the Holocaust to Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attack is an outrageous weaponization of the genocide of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, who systematically murdered six million Jews,” Bloomfield told JNS. “It’s antisemitic, inaccurate, highly offensive and must be widely condemned.”

One social media account has received 3.2 million views for a post claiming to be a “holocaust survivor” of war in Gaza. Another post from a “survivor of the Gaza holocaust” garnered 525,000 views, and a post from an artist wearing a keffiyeh, referring to “my survival from this holocaust,” received 40,000 views.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who created a media company called Zeteo, wrote in a since-deleted social media post that “one of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of previous genocides—Rwanda, even the Holocaust—is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over. They were shunned, deradicalized, prosecuted.”

Deborah Camiel, senior vice president of communications at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that Hasan “based his outrageous comment comparing the Oct. 7 war to the Holocaust on the canard that Israel’s military response to Hamas atrocities was a genocide.”

That claim is a “tired inversion widely used by antisemites, who try at every opportunity, no matter how inexact or intellectually lazy the comparison is, to portray Jews as Nazis,” Camiel said. “Israel’s war of self-defense was not against the Palestinian people but the vicious terrorist group Hamas.”

“As Hasan well knows, Hamas, itself a group with a genocidal charter, embeds itself among Palestinian civilians, in private homes, mosques, schools and hospitals, purposefully exposing them to terrible harm,” the Wiesenthal Center spokeswoman told JNS. “It is clear today that most of the world agrees that it is this maniacal jihadist group that should be shunned, eradicated and prosecuted.”

Read More

10/02 Links: Jihad Al-Shamie, Terrorist of Syrian Descent, Kills 2 in Car Ramming, Stabbing Attack Outside UK Synagogue on Yom Kippur

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: Manchester was always coming –authorities let Jew-haters roam free

As I write, we know nothing about the perpetrator of today’s attack in Manchester. But we know lots about the context of the attack, because we Jews have been living and breathing it for some years, with increasing desperation that it would lead to an incident such as today’s.

Last night in London, for example, a “pro-Palestine” mob took over one of the busiest streets, setting of fireworks and chanting for Israel’s destruction. They were left to their own devices, free to do what they wanted when they wanted, and to chant whatever they liked. And it was entirely normal. Because that is where we are now. Mobs of supposed "Free Palestine” protestors are given free rein. The authorities stand and watch.

The other night I was driving along Holborn when a convoy of cyclists with Palestine flags screamed abuse and brought chaos to the area. There were no police anywhere to be seen.

Today’s attack in Manchester was always coming, because the authorities have made it clear to Jew haters that they are effectively free to go about their business. When they chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud! Jaish Mohammad sawf ya’ud!” on the hate marches, (“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews! The Army of Muhammad Will Return!” – a reference to the battle of Khaybar in 628, when Mohamed’s army besieged and destroyed a thriving Jewish community) the police stand and watch. When they call for global intifada – the murder of Jews – no one does a thing.

The message sent by the authorities could hardly be clearer – Jew hate is fine. And the Jew haters take that message and run with it. They run with it when they parade through the streets of our cities. They run with it when they desecrate memorials to those killed on October 7 and tributes to the hostages, as in Brighton. They run with it when they scream abuse at Jews. They run with it on social media, where antisemitism is so open and common that it barely even registers any more. And they run with it when they commit atrocities as in Manchester today.

We have already heard that awful lie today, that there is no place for antisemitism in Britain. It’s a lie because the evidence could not be clearer that there is a very welcome place for antisemitism in Britain, and the more the merrier. Today’s attack will prompt so much more of it. But when hundreds of thousands are allowed to do their worst, and the authorities stand and watch, we know what it means. It means Jew hate. It means attacks. It means Manchester.

Jake Wallis Simons: Jews feel safer facing Hamas in Israel than living in Labour’s Britain

When Jews hear Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, who have recently recognised a state of Palestine without first demanding that the hostages be freed, so cloyingly offer thoughts and prayers to the Jews, it is hard not to see them as part of the problem.

This is the party that has begun appropriating the Union flag and the language of patriotism – the very things it has spent decades scorning – for the sake of political expediency.

This is the party that adopted a definition of “Islamophobia” back in 2019, and is pushing to write it into law, caving to pressure from the most dangerous sources.

This is the party that has shamefully parroted every Israelophobic smear to have emerged from the UN, from “famine” to “genocide”, even though they are patently false. To this Government, nothing means anything, least of all words of solidarity for the Jews.

Since October 7, I have had many conversations with Israelis in which I have begun by asking how they are bearing up. The answer is always the same. “We’re fine,” they say. “But how are you?”

Of course, there are more terror attacks in Israel than Britain, for now at least. But there is low crime, strong social solidarity, a booming economy, a soaring birth rate, powerful defence and one of the highest levels of happiness in the world. There are few mental health problems, few deaths of despair. You can live as a family with your head held high.

Israelis know two things well. They know who they are and they know who their enemies are. They can spend the night in a bomb shelter and then go to work, attend a wedding, live, love and laugh. These are things that Britain has forgotten, and the results are all around us, not least on the bloody street outside the Heaton Park synagogue in north Manchester.

My final sentence, which I am about to type, is intended to be read most chillingly through Gentile eyes. To many Jews, life feels safer in Israel than in Britain.

Jake Wallis Simons: Spare me your crocodile tears

Either way, we have reached a point where our leaders more eagerly embrace those who would like to kill us than the people they are supposed to protect. From immigration to Israel, the government invariably picks the wrong side. Our culture is committing slow suicide while self-righteously demanding that Israel commits it more quickly.

Well, Israel won’t. And nor will the Jews. But the effect of all this over the two years since October 7 is that the public has become convinced that Israel is a genocidal, apartheid, Nazi state and Hamas are the courageous “resistance”.

You and I know that the opposite is true. Israel could have destroyed Gaza City with a single bomb, yet it sends its soldiers house-to-house at great risk to themselves. Why? Because it is not genocidal.

Israel could have starved every man, woman and child in Gaza to death within two weeks of October 7. Yet it continues to provide food to the Strip; in the last six weeks, it has provided 40 million meals. Why? Because it does not use famine as a weapon of war.

After the relentless propaganda campaign, however, instigated largely by the United Nations, most people will likely believe the very opposite of the truth. The Manchester killer almost certainly believed that, too.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the successful brainwashing of an entire society to embrace the agenda of the very jihadis who would have the West subverted and everybody who resists dead.

Keir Starmer, David Lammy and their cronies have spent the last two years directing all their condemnation at Israel, the democracy defending itself against jihad, and putting almost no pressure on Hamas, which started this war and would attack us all if it could.

That culminated in the recognition of a Palestinian state, which did not even require the release of the hostages as a condition, and for which Hamas heartily congratulated Britain. In May, the UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher claimed on the BBC that “14,000 babies” would die within “48 hours” in Gaza. This claim was repeated by no fewer than 13 MPs in Parliament. When those babies did not die after all, how many of them apologised? Precious few.

Now these people have the gall to shed crocodile tears about the attack in Manchester today. They have long been part of the problem, making a whole society believe that black is white and the jihadis are the victims. Shame on them.

Britain has abandoned Jews to this savagery

Even before 7 October in Israel – the most deadly assault on Jews since the Holocaust, two years ago this week – British Jews could see what was coming. Even before Hamas sent its killers and rapists into kibbutzim and dance parties, even before Western capitals erupted in jubilation about those apocalyptic incursions, British Jews made up 0.5 per cent of the population and a quarter of the victims of religious hate crimes. Jewish pensioners would be suckerpunched in north London. A Jewish cemetery in Kent was desecrated eight times in 10 years. Security around schools and synagogues became a grim fact of British Jewish life. Meanwhile, we had TV debates about whether it was racist for Boris Johnson to mock the burqa, or Adele to wear her hair in braids and wave a Jamaican flag during Notting Hill Carnival. It shames us.

Then came the pogrom, and the reins came off. Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain hit a 40-year high. Assaults on Jews surged by almost 100 per cent. Islamic activists chanted Arabic war slogans about the murder of Jews on London demonstrations, while Israelophobic leftists pretended not to notice. And this post-7 October 2023 carnival of Jew hatred peaked before the IDF rolled into Gaza, to destroy the jihadists and retrieve Israel’s stolen citizens. This was a bigoted, violent celebration of the murder of Jews. And it isn’t abating, either. The Community Security Trust recorded 1,521 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2025, the second-highest number… since 2024.

We wait to learn more about the killer and his motives. Counter-terror police believe they know his identity, but aren’t letting on just yet. Investigations are ongoing. Two further arrests have been made. But I dare say we need not wait to conclude that Crumpsall is where years – nay, decades – of a growing, ambient Jew hatred leaves us. In which the age-old blood libels have been repackaged for the ‘pro-Palestine’ idiots. In which Israel is cast as the killer of babies and the grand puppeteer of geopolitical affairs. In which British Jews – a tiny, embattled minority smaller in number than British Sikhs – are once again cast as the eternal scapegoat for all of society’s and the world’s ills. As the great, sinister, ‘privileged’ bogeymen of the intersectional pyramid.

After Crumpsall, we must stand in solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters. And we must do so much more than that. Any gentile who has ever talked publicly or written about the scourge of anti-Semitism – even just occasionally, as I have – will have had this experience: British Jews offering their heartfelt gratitude, for what we all know should be the bare minimum. And yet far too many struggle even to do that. We have let this happen. It is our cancer to remove. And remove it we must.

Read More

09/29 Links Pt2: The Gaza flotilla: the Woke Man’s Burden; Charlie Kirk wrote of his ‘deep love’ for Israel in letter to Netanyahu; Daniel Loeb: If Israel was a share, I’d buy

From Ian:

Cotler-Wunsh resigns as antisemitism envoy citing lack of gov't strategy to combat hate

Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism Michal Cotler-Wunsh resigned from her volunteer position on Monday in response to the failures of the government to develop a strategy to combat rising global antisemitism and to engage with the issue and her office, according to a press release by the former Knesset member.

Cotler-Wunsh said that a few weeks ago, she had received a government proposal for “continued engagement” that didn’t reflect the challenges of antisemitism, recognize the imperative of the role, or implement a national strategy against antisemitism as part of the state’s foreign and security policy.

While Israel was engaged in an existential war, what the ex-envoy described as the eighth front of antisemitism was being waged “without a comprehensive strategy or authority that enables and equips to fight in the manner necessary.”

This included the recognition of the role of the antisemitism special envoy around the world and in Israel, said Cotler-Wunsh, who claimed to have repeatedly asked the Foreign Ministry to institutionalize the role. She claimed to have submitted several drafts for the establishment of infrastructure, including cross-ministerial and organizational collaborations.

Recommendations ignored
Cotler-Wunsh said that these recommendations, and others more broadly on the matter of antisemitism, were ignored as she unsuccessfully attempted to meet to update and engage with officials in the government, Knesset, ministries, and other institutions.

A few weeks after the outbreak of the war, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director-general allegedly informed Cotler-Wunsh that the originally agreed-upon arrangement and budget for her office was being cut and was no longer approved. Without a budget, the volunteer envoy’s efforts abroad were initiated by inviting parties as the sponsors of the projects.

The Jewish TikTok Plot By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Anti-Semitism has a fascinating ability to commandeer the entirety of one’s thought process. When Jew-hating takes hold of you, not only does the Jew become the cause of all your problems; his evil handiwork can be seen in the most banal circumstance.

This makes anti-Semitism a merciless condition, as the Jew-hater can never give up the hunt for evidence of Jewish malfeasance. Anti-Semitism is the comprehensive, round-the-clock work of decoding reality to fit a fantastical script.

Take what happened online over the weekend. On Friday, after addressing the UN General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu met with some American social-media influencers and journalists in New York City and was asked about the very online, anti-Israel far right. Here’s the essence of his response:

They’re not any different from the woke left, I mean, they’re insane…. We have to secure that part of the base of our support in the United States that is being challenged systematically. A lot of this [anti-Israel propaganda] is done with money. Money of NGOs, vast money of governments…. We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers.… We’re going to have to use the tools of battle. The weapons change over time. You can’t fight today with swords. That doesn’t work very well. And you can’t fight with cavalry. That doesn’t work very well.… But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is? TikTok. Number one. And I hope it goes through because it’s consequential.

If your mind hasn’t been hijacked by anti-Semitism, it’s clear that Bibi stated nothing more than the obvious: Anti-Israel social media has an outsize effect on public discussion owing to the monetary investments of foreign organizations and governments. Several independent investigations have revealed as much. And among the many anti-Western propaganda elements of TikTok’s algorithm is the promotion of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic content. So, yes, Netanyahu expressed “hope” that TikTok gets sold to Americans.

But if the Jew-hating parasite has taken hold of your faculties, you see all sorts of nefarious activity in Bibi’s comments. “Imagine any other national leader speaking to Americans like this,” posted one X user with more than a quarter-million followers. “Oh, you can't actually. Because no other nation thinks they have a right to dictate what we say or how we feel.” This anti-Israel zombie believes “I hope” means “I dictate.”

Khaled Abu Toameh: Thanks to the West's 'Useful Idiots,' Iran's Terror Proxies Celebrate Recognition of 'Palestinian State' by Moving Jihad to West Bank

The groups and their patrons in Tehran do not care if Palestinians in the West Bank are killed and displaced as a result of their terrorism. Iran's mullahs and their Palestinian proxies have only one thing in mind: murdering Jews and eliminating Israel.

Those Western countries [France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, among others]... have chosen to ignore that the PA is unwilling to confront the terror groups in the West Bank.

In the eyes of the Iranian regime, Hamas and PIJ, these moves could not have taken place were it not for the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.

"Why are the countries recognizing a Palestinian state today? Before October 7, did any country dare recognize a Palestinian state? The fruits of October 7 are what caused the entire world to open its eyes...." — Ghazi Hamad, senior Hamas official, to Qatar's Al-Jazeera, August 2, 2025.

Even if the war in the Gaza Strip ends, Qatar, Iran, Hamas and PIJ will never give up the fight to destroy Israel and replace it with a radical Islamist state. The attempt to transform the West Bank into a second base for jihad highlights that ending the war in the Gaza Strip will not end the dream of wiping Israel off the map.

Read More

Abbas gives a perfunctory Rosh Hashanah greeting. Arab world is very upset.

Mahmoud Abbas ended his address to the UN High-level International Conference for Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and Implementation of the Two-State Solution with a message to Jews for Rosh Hashanah: " I wish all Jews around the world a happy New Year on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah."

He did this while wearing  a in with a key symbolizing his desire for Israel to accept millions of Palestinian "refugees" and destroy the Jewish state.

But it wasn't the cynicism that struck Arabs. A greeting to Jews is considered to be the worst thing one can do.

Here are all the comments on X to Al Hadath's tweet upset about the greeting:

• I seek refuge in Allah from humiliation and lack of dignity.
• This prostrate one is a danger to Palestine more than the Jews.
• Isn't it time for this failure to step down?
• Is this a Palestinian???? Congratulating those who killed your people!!!! Shame and destruction.
• You are a disgrace to the entire Islamic nation.
• May God uglify your face and resurrect you with them, you cuckold, you coward.
• Agent, son of a dog.
• Stupid man.
• You are on the religion of Judaism.
• A living example of prostitution, humiliation, and degradation.
• I am confused; should I cry or laugh?! There is no power and no strength except with Allah the Most High, the Almighty.
• This is an impudent animal, pig.
• A black year on you and on the Zionists, O Lord.

Can we finally drop the idea that Arabs aren't antisemitic, but only "anti-Zionist"?

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

The New York Times Invents a Jewish Pig Problem

The New York Times this week ran a headline: “Pig Organ Transplants May Pose a Dilemma for Some Jews and Muslims.”

A dilemma? For Jews?

In Judaism, the pig prohibition applies only to eating its meat. Full stop. There has never been a serious halachic debate about using pig-derived medical materials when life is at stake.   So what is the dilemma?

The article sharpens the supposed question:

Now biotech companies are raising genetically altered pigs to transplant their organs into patients whose own kidneys have failed. Experts in the field are only beginning to grapple with the question: Will Jews and Muslims accept a transplanted organ from a pig if it saves their lives?

It has not always been entirely clear whether the religious prohibitions on pigs apply strictly to consumption, and neither of these religions has a supreme authority, like the pope, who would issue a decree applicable to all.

Really? It has not always been entirely clear in halacha?   

The article itself goes on to show that this "dilemma" is not at all a dilemma for Jews.

For Jews, the short answer is a clear and unequivocal yes. It is one of the exceedingly rare instances in which the maxim “two Jews, three opinions” does not apply.

“It’s 100 percent permitted,” even for the most observant and Orthodox Jews, said Rabbi Pamela Barmash, a professor of Hebrew Bible and biblical Hebrew at Washington University in St. Louis.

Judaism teaches that in cases of life and death, the obligation to preserve life trumps all other religious commandments and obligations. And in the modern era, the prohibition against the pig applies only to eating it, according to Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

“A Jew can do everything from having a heart valve that comes from a pig to playing professional football with a football made of pigskin,” Rabbi Hauer said in an interview.

One doesn't need a Jewish pope to issue such a legal decision. 

Note the use of "in the modern era." This is not true - Judaism always recognized saving lives as a higher priority than kosher laws. Even consuming pig-based products would be allowed when there is no alternative.

The entire article is clickbait - manufacturing a controversy when none exists. This is how the Times works: create a "dilemma", flatten distinct religions into a single stereotype of primitive belief systems struggling to deal with modern topics, then walk it back in the body of the article. 

But the clickbait headline - and the insinuation - sticks.

Now, when the New York Times shows such disregard for headline accuracy in a trivial article about Judaism, how can you trust the headlines when the topic is much more important - like how the IDF is fighting in Gaza?

If the Times cannot get something as basic as this right - a question with an unequivocal, one-word halachic answer - why would anyone trust their reporting when the subject is Israel’s war in Gaza?

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More