04/09 Links: Murray: We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror; The war in numbers: 650 Iranian missiles fired, 24 killed, and 10,800 Israeli strikes; Yoo: Iran's Flagrant Assault on the Rules of War

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror

There is a reason why the Middle East suffers from so many conflicts.

Why have there been so many wars in Gaza? Why has Lebanon been in a state of war for almost five decades? Why has the whole region, from Yemen to Cyprus had to put up with Iranian interference for 47 years?

Because while the Mullahs and their proxies are thinking about the end-times we are stuck worrying about the midterms. It is this short-term thinking that has lead the West and its allies to keep stopping hostilities just before the point of total victory.

The present ceasefire looks likely to lead to a return of the pre-war status quo. Which means a return not to peace but to war. If the ceasefire lines stop where they are, Iran will help Hezbollah rebuild its stockpiles in Lebanon. The regime in Tehran will rebuild its other terror proxies in the region.And the Iranian regime will continue its decades-long project to develop nuclear weapons.

President Trump has the ability not just to disrupt but to destroy this cycle. He may be the only person in this era of history who can. It is not as though there is any leadership from any other democracy.

The president may not be able to make the regime in Iran fall. But he has the ability to bring it to its knees. And then to leave them on their knees until time, and events, can take their own course on them.

As another sage once put it, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” To which I might add that any job worth starting is worth finishing well.

John Yoo: Iran's Flagrant Assault on the Rules of War

Iran's response to the war launched by the U.S. and Israel provides a reason beyond pure American self-interest to end the rule of the ayatollahs. Tehran broadened the conflict by attacking civilians in neighboring countries uninvolved in the war. A regime that launches systematic warfare against civilians violates the core rules of civilized warfare. The U.S. and Israel would do the world enormous good by ending a regime that flouts our common moral norms in such a flagrant and destructive manner.

Iran has launched missiles and drones at Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan - nations that had committed no aggression against Iran and posed no threat of attack against Iran. It also attacked neutral vessels in the Persian Gulf and prevented them from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. and Israel have sought to conduct the war with the highest regard for minimizing civilian casualties. Compared to this, Iran has struck major civilian targets in neighboring countries, including residential buildings, airports, utilities, and ports. Iran hit the Aramco complex at Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, the Ras Laffan LNG facility in Qatar, oil and gas facilities in the UAE, and a water desalination plant in Bahrain, none of which are American military assets.

It fired missiles at the Old City of Jerusalem, landing fragments 1,200 meters from the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It struck residential areas in Dimona and Arad, wounding over a hundred civilians, including children. It has fired more than 350 ballistic missiles at Israel, half carrying cluster munitions designed to scatter explosive bomblets in civilian neighborhoods.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world's most important shipping lanes and a waterway governed by the international law of the sea, which guarantees free passage to all neutral nations. Tehran's disruption of the Strait is pure economic blackmail against the rest of the world. Iran effectively attacks the rest of the world by targeting purely civilian ships.

The rules of war are not complicated. Militaries may strike military targets. Militaries may not deliberately target civilians or threaten the commerce of neutral nations. Iran has crossed those lines repeatedly. Tehran's flouting of all the rules of morality in war explains why the U.S. and Israel were right to confront the Islamic Republic now, rather than wait for its threat to gain in strength in the future, potentially wielding nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Spyer: The Winners and Losers of the Iran Ceasefire Deal

The announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran resolves none of the issues which caused the conflict. From Israel's point of view, the Iranian regime has been significantly weakened in its capacities in a number of key areas. At the same time, its intentions remain unchanged. This means that the long war is set to continue.

Israel wants to use the entrance of Hizbullah into the war on March 4 as an opportunity to establish a buffer zone north of the border, inside Lebanon, to put the residents of Israel's border communities out of range of Hizbullah's anti-tank missiles and free of the constant danger of an Oct. 7-style ground incursion. This process is not yet completed and five IDF divisions are currently in Lebanon engaged against Hizbullah south of the Litani River.

For Israel, a lull in operations against Iran with Lebanon still an active front would enable air power to be deployed in greater force against Hizbullah. From Israel's point of view, the ceasefire with Iran does not extend to Lebanon.

The essential components of the regional strategic picture remain in place. Iran remains an aggressive and dangerous power, with the ambition of expelling the U.S. from the region, dominating the Gulf states, and destroying Israel. The U.S., Israel, and the Gulf states remain determined to resist Iranian ambitions. The events of the last five weeks represent a round in this ongoing struggle. Israel and the U.S. have demonstrated their vast conventional military advantage over the Iranians. They have also not yet demonstrated the capacity to turn that advantage into a strategy able to bring the struggle to a successful strategic conclusion by toppling the Tehran regime - the only way that this will end.

What Was Achieved in the War Against Iran?

I suggest that anyone swept up in the euphoria of claims that Israel's war in Iran was a failure should look at the information and analysis coming from American sources.

It is hard to believe that such a large-scale operation, in which, according to the Israel Air Force, target destruction rates were 10 to 20 times greater than in the 12-day war in June 2025, is being portrayed by talking heads as a failure.

By any measure, this was the most successful military operation since the IDF and the Israel Air Force began conducting such operations.

Israel and the U.S. achieved the objective of destroying every production cycle, every component, and every plant and laboratory connected to Iran's nuclear project.

Security needs mean neutralizing the nuclear threat and reducing missile-launch capabilities.

The Iranians could have raced ahead and built a missile wall that would deter Israel and the U.S. from taking military action against them, as North Korea did in its time.

That parallel missile and nuclear race was cut short. This is an enormous success.

Trump and Netanyahu acted against the trend that had prevailed in the U.S. and Israel over the past 35 years. They chose military action, and they succeeded.

The precedent set by this dual alliance, combined with demonstrated military superiority, carries enormous significance.

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04/07 Links Pt1: Trump: US To Enter Two-Week Ceasefire if Islamic Republic Allows opening of the Strait of Hormuz,’; 1 attacker killed in gun battle with police outside Israeli consulate in Istanbul

From Ian:

Three Things the Consensus Gets Wrong About the Iran War

First, the war has not, despite what many claim, trashed America’s alliances. NATO was battered by Donald Trump well before the war began, and not least by his egregious threats to wrest Greenland from Denmark. No doubt, some of our European allies have bristled at this war and in some cases refused to assist with it. Not all, though: German bases are important for the air bridge to the Middle East. In a moment of candor during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June, Chancellor Friedrich Merz allowed that the fight against Iran was “dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” He understood, in other words, that Iran poses a challenge to European security that Europe chooses not to address on its own. “We are also victims of this regime,” he said.

More to the point: The United States is actually working very closely with a group of allies, just not the Europeans. Israel, of course, is actively engaged in the war, employing an air force twice as large and more than twice as capable of conducting this kind of campaign than the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force. The Gulf states are providing basing, and some Asian nations have been quietly supportive. Several hundred Ukrainian drone experts, who have behind them the most advanced military industry of its kind anywhere, are sharing what they’ve learned. If the Trump administration could only see Ukraine as a powerful partner rather than a charity case, even more could be done. A new partnership, joining Gulf finance with Ukrainian military technology, appears to be emerging from this war, to the advantage of the United States.

Second, the common claim that the war is a boon for Russia and China is exaggerated. Will it provide a short-term boost for Russian oil earnings? Probably, although it will be offset by the spectacular success the Ukrainians are having in hitting its petrochemical industry and its ability to export. Russia has profoundly deformed its backward economy, and now appears to be getting the worst of it on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the prospect that Ukrainian military innovation might be powered by Saudi and Emirati money cannot be a happy one for Moscow.

China, for its part, might indeed be licking its chops at the idea of the United States depleting its stocks of expensive interceptor missiles in this war. If governments choose to attack because they think they know exactly how many exotic munitions their opponents have in their warehouses, then China might well invade Taiwan. But, by and large, that is not how governments decide to launch global wars. Rather, they look at a host of considerations, including the nature of their opponents. In this case, the Chinese will see a president quite willing to wage an unpopular war and employ extreme violence. That president possesses a remarkably capable armed force, and is willing to spend the money ($1.5 trillion in the latest budget) to build an even larger and considerably more modernized one. Sober Chinese analysts, moreover, will have some appreciation of how the United States and its armed forces have a history of innovating and adapting when the pressure is on.

And finally, there are people who argue that Iran has been turned into a great power by this war. But being subjected to tens of thousands of precision air strikes; having your senior leadership assassinated, your air defenses almost entirely destroyed, your navy virtually annihilated; and losing crucial parts of your industrial infrastructure do not make you stronger. Can Iran keep the Strait of Hormuz closed? For now, yes. Perpetually? That is harder to believe. Ukraine has been able to keep its grain corridor in the Black Sea open despite Russian attacks; the U.S. Navy, ill-prepared as it was for the mine-clearing mission that it should have anticipated, is no doubt working full-time on solving what is essentially a tactical problem, albeit one with strategic implications.

Iran’s leaders and their sympathizers may declare that survival means that Iran wins this war, but that is, on the face of it, preposterous. The regime has profoundly alienated its neighbors by lashing out at them, brought the two most powerful air forces in the Middle East into intimate cooperation against it, and suffered new blows to its already impoverished economy. Is Iran’s new leadership—the members of whom have not fallen to Israeli bombs, that is—inclined to take an even harder line than its predecessors? Possibly. But the pictures published this week of the niece and grandniece of Qassem Soleimani—the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force killed in Trump’s first term—who have been living the good life in the United States, should trigger the thought that the elite leadership of Iran might be less pure and hard than one might think. And even committed ideologues have their breaking point; Heinrich Himmler was as hard-core as they come, yet attempted open negotiations with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services in 1945.

There is so much that we do not know—including which targets have been hit, what damage has been done, and to what effect. But when we see things like the extraordinary rescue of the aircrew of the F-15E shot down over Iran, we need to remember that the military organizations pounding Iran are extremely formidable. That does not guarantee success. But it should make us, at the very least, thoughtful about where this war may go.

Seth Mandel: Unfrozen

Iran’s ability to open and close the strait at will is similar to its attacks on regional energy infrastructure, its demonstration of missile-firing capabilities that threaten Europe, and its use of cluster munitions against Israeli civilians. All three made the West adjust its war aims to prevent Iran from being able to hold the region and near-abroad hostage in the future. To this list we can add a pre-existing goal—the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program—and the recent fixation on the Strait of Hormuz, which seems to have overtaken the others (except for the nuclear threat) in Trump’s mind.

There are two ways of looking at this, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first is that Trump backed himself into this corner by showing his sensitivity to oil prices without having put into place a strategy to preempt Iran’s ability to flip that switch. The second is that Trump’s fixation on the strait is a post-hoc realization that Iran must be divested from its leverage over the shipping lanes.

A cease-fire without a mechanism for enforcing the opening of the strait would make it what Trump seems to really want to avoid: a frozen conflict.

Take Gaza. The cease-fire between Israel and the remnants of Hamas may turn into its own new status quo, which would be less than ideal. But it is far superior to the state of the frozen conflict that was in place on October 7, 2023. If the Israel-Hamas war ends here, then Gaza’s genocidal and barbaric government has paid a permanent price for its aggression.

Likewise, Trump has been surprisingly hawkish on Lebanon, at times more so than Israel, regarding Hezbollah. As it currently stands, either Lebanon will disarm Hezbollah or much of “Hezbollahland” in South Lebanon will remain open space. Israel has proposed the following deal: If Israelis can return to their homes in the north without fear of quickly being displaced again by rocket storms from Lebanon, then the residents of South Lebanon will be welcome to return to their own homes. Lebanon has thus far rejected these terms. Trump, at the moment, is backing Israel’s position—in part, surely, because Israel has proposed a permanent peace rather than a return to the frozen conflict.

Trump’s penchant for finality can be seen in his approach to Venezuela as well. The decision to greenlight the capture of Nicolas Maduro was a bold one, but it was not done in the name of Venezuelan democracy. It was an attempt to permanently alter the relationship between Washington and Caracas. If the remnants of the Maduro regime are willing to play ball with Trump, they’ll stick around. That’ll mean the end of what Trump saw as the Venezuelan tail wagging the American dog.

This template cannot be applied at will—there will be no “Venezuelan option” in Iran, and lord knows what Trump even thinks he is accomplishing in the Russia-Ukraine war. It isn’t a doctrine, or an -ism. But the president does seem to have a preference for avoiding the “pause” button if a status quo can be radically and permanently changed in America’s favor.

Jonathan Tobin: Unlike Israel, many of America’s NATO allies aren’t really allies

Other countries will cheer or jeer from the sidelines, but Israel not only has a powerful military but is willing to use it, along with its unmatched intelligence capabilities and operations, to fight a war alongside America. And it is doing so with the knowledge that Trump could end the war before the Jewish state has achieved the objectives that Netanyahu has set.

Contrary to the largely antisemitic myth that the world’s most powerful man in charge of a superpower was dragged into a war by the prime minister of a country the size of New Jersey with a mere 10 million people, this war was America’s idea. And it is being fought to protect America’s interests as well as Israel’s. Stopping nuclear and missile threats—and the world’s largest state sponsor of terror—isn’t a favor to Israel. It’s vital for the security of the Middle East, which affects the economies of all, as has been shown in Iran’s stranglehold of the Strait of Hormuz and international shipping.

A clear look at the events of the last two months doesn’t just show Israel’s value as an ally, even though there is no pact of alliance between Washington and Jerusalem as there is with America’s 31 NATO allies, which the United States is obligated to defend under that treaty’s Article V provision. It has also done invaluable damage to what remains of American support for the belief that the alliance is vital to the country’s defense.

Israel has friendly relations with other countries, including some in Europe. And it has strong security ties with key regional nations like Saudi Arabia, even though they remain under the table rather than out in the open. But it has only one genuine ally. There are no plausible alternatives, even when Washington is run by those who are lukewarm or worse about the relationship, as under the administrations led by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

NATO may yet be revived at some point in the future. Even now, it still serves some use, if only to help ensure that Russia’s troublemaking can be contained. But the stark truth of 2026 is that it has largely become a vestige of the past that has outlived much of its usefulness.

At the same time, the idea that Washington’s affection for Israel is a hindrance to the pursuit of U.S. national interests or makes it difficult for it to make friends in the Middle East has been conclusively exploded by recent events.

It is the alliance with Israel that is the one irreplaceable asset for American foreign policy and security needs in the region. And one is hard-pressed to think of another such reliable ally elsewhere with both the military assets—and the willingness to use them in a difficult fight— and common values of democracy. It’s high time that American pundits and politicians, whether seduced by antisemitic tropes and arguments or wallowing in hatred for Trump, stop speaking of Israel as an American problem and start acknowledging this reality.

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04/04 Links: Trump: Tehran has 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz; USAF rescue missing F-15E crew member; Francesca Albanese and the Perversion of Academia; ICC votes to discipline Karim Khan

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: World leaders should be grateful the US is doing what’s necessary in Iran

This is their war even more than it is the United States’ war. Iranian missiles threaten British interests even more than they threaten the US. And Iran’s terrorist proxies are even more active in Europe and the UK than they have been in America.

It’s just that the UK, Europeans and others don’t have the military power or the political will to do anything against that threat. They hoped that one day the US would take this problem off their hands. Because otherwise they’d have sat on those same hands as the ayatollah got ever-closer to the bomb.

Critics of President Trump at home point to the rising price of gas. And that is certainly a concern. But the price will come down as America’s objectives are achieved. And while a month of high gas prices is a concern it is much less of a concern than the price of gas if the Revolutionary Islamic Government in Iran started throwing nuclear weapons around.

Consider how they lashed out at every single one of their Arab neighbors after America’s first strikes on Tehran. This is how they behaved with missiles and drones. Imagine how they would react if they were nuclear.

Meantime some critics of American policy have pointed out how North Korea was allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But that program is a signal lesson to the civilized world as much as it is to dictators. North Korea was able to develop its nuclear program because they were constantly threatening South Korea with an attack by conventional weapons if their unconventional capability was attacked. So they got away with it.

The Iranians hoped they could pull off the same trick. But after the destruction of their armies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria there was a window — this past month — to stop similar blackmail from Iran.

Of course the Iranian regime has lashed out — aiming missiles at Qatari energy facilities and Saudi airports. They have also — interestingly for an “Islamic” regime — sent missiles that have nearly hit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It would be quite an epitaph for the radical Mullahs if they struck that.

Yet the region has managed to suffer through this. All in the knowledge that American and Israeli pilots are stopping a much greater threat ever emanating from Iran.

And that will be the end of the war.

This war does not need to end up with anyone being bogged down. It doesn’t need the dreaded “boots on the ground” that Western powers seem to have become so fearful of.

Another couple of weeks and the Iranian regime will not be able to threaten anyone again for the foreseeable future. Perhaps a little further along the road the regime itself will fall. That will be in the hands of the Iranian people.

But for the time being the pilots of the US Air Force are doing noble work on behalf of the whole world. And not just for this generation but for the generations to come. We should be proud of them.

John Spencer: What Would Sun Tzu Say About War with Iran?

Throughout the war, Sun Tzu would have returned to a simple measure of success, not only what was destroyed, but what was achieved. If the enemy’s decisions change, the strategy has worked. If they do not, then tactical success may prove insufficient.

That is why The Art of War endures. It is not a guide to battle. It is a framework for thinking about war as a contest of wills, shaped by political purpose, constrained by cost, and decided not by destruction, but by decisions.

Sun Tzu would also have recognized the political constraints that shape the use of force and the importance of perception beyond the battlefield. He warned that “there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare” and that the use of the military must remain tied to the interests of the state, not drift into objectives that expand beyond what was originally intended. He placed extraordinary importance on information, writing that foreknowledge must be obtained and used to shape outcomes, a principle that today extends to the information domain and the perceptions of both enemy leadership and the population.

Sun Tzu also understood the role of threat, not as a matter of rhetoric, but as a function of perception and pressure. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” and that requires shaping the enemy’s understanding of what continued fighting will bring. But he also warned against excess. “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” The purpose of pressure is not to eliminate all options, but to shape them, and to shape how they are understood. In this context, that means applying enough force to influence decision-making while preserving a path toward a political outcome aligned with stated objectives.

That matters in this context. If the regime were to collapse as a result of the war, the outcomes associated with regime change could occur, but that would be distinct from making regime change the stated political objective. If the objective shifts, or is perceived to shift, from forcing a change in behavior to regime change requiring large-scale ground forces, it risks repeating patterns seen in past wars, where limited objectives expanded into nation building and protracted counterinsurgency campaigns against enemies able to adapt, disperse, and find sanctuary. Those conditions favor the defender, extend time, and erode political cohesion.

Sun Tzu’s warning is clear. Strategy must remain aligned to political purpose, and that purpose must remain disciplined, or the advantages gained early in a campaign can be lost over time.

IDF commando KIA in Southern Lebanon, another critically wounded

An Israel Defense Forces soldier was killed overnight Friday in southeastern Lebanon, the Israeli military said.

He was named as Sgt. Maj. Guy Ludar, 21, a member of the Maglan reconnaissance unit of the IDF Commando Brigade, from Yuvalim in the Lower Galilee.

Another commando from the Maglan unit was critically wounded, the IDF said.

Their families were notified.

According to Ynet, Ludar was killed by “friendly” fire during a nighttime operation to arrest a Hezbollah helper in the village of Shebaa, north of Mount Hermon.

An IDF soldier from another force believed he detected two terrorists and opened fire.

The report noted that the building where the suspect was believed to be was not detonated in advance because Shebaa is predominantly a Sunni village, whose residents are not typically affiliated with the Iranian-backed Shi’ite terrorist group.

The IDF opened a probe into the incident.

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04/01 Links Pt1: Trump claims Iran 'no longer a threat' in update on Operation Epic Fury; Iran's Danger Must Be Judged by "Unacceptable Risk," Not "Imminent Threat";

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Yes, This Is Your War, Too

But whatever the administration decides to do, what isn’t viable is for Americans and our allies to pretend that they can be indifferent to the outcome of the war. When someone like Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, says, “This is not our war,” the appropriate response is: Are you serious?

In June, Pistorius’s boss, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, acknowledged that Israel’s attack that month on Iran’s military and nuclear sites was “dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.” Has something changed in his government’s strategic calculus about the threat Iran poses, other than its overriding opposition to the Trump administration?

In January, the United Arab Emirates announced in no uncertain terms that it would not allow its airspace, territory or ports to be used for an attack on Iran. The declaration was a transparent effort to insulate the Emirates from Iranian reprisals. For its pains, Iran has since hit Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other Emirati targets, military and civilian, with at least 433 ballistic missiles, 19 cruise missiles and 1,977 drones.

Now the governments of Spain and Italy are replicating the Emirates’ strategy, barring the U.S. from using bases (and, in Madrid’s case, its airspace) for attacks on Iran. Do those governments think they’ll be spared Tehran’s furies should they one day come into range of Tehran’s missiles? For that matter — given Trump’s ambivalence about the war in Ukraine — do Europeans think the administration is more likely to support NATO in the event of a Russian attack when NATO has been so hostile to American efforts to defang Iran?

For Americans, especially those who often oppose the administration, the question is whether our distaste for this president should get the better of our strategic judgments about the threats Iran poses. In The Wall Street Journal recently, the lawyer David Boies, a prominent Democrat, noted that if Trump had failed to act, “his successor would have been left with an even more dangerous choice than his predecessors left him. Three or four years from now, the Iranian missiles now hitting Iran’s neighbors could be hitting Berlin or London, perhaps even New York or Washington.”

If Democrats can’t bring themselves to support Trump, they can at least support policies that will make the strategic choices for the next Democratic president easier rather than harder.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” is a line widely attributed to Leon Trotsky. If that’s the case — and history tells us it is — shouldn’t you be interested in winning it, too?

Iran's Danger Must Be Judged by "Unacceptable Risk," Not "Imminent Threat"

Did Iran pose an imminent threat to the U.S.? "Imminence" is not a precise or objective term that presidents should employ only if intelligence experts endorse it. In national security affairs, it is almost always debatable. Besides, "imminence" is not the right concept for deciding whether and how to respond to a grave threat from abroad.

To grasp why it is not right, ask yourself: When did the Sep. 11 attack become imminent? When did the attack on Pearl Harbor? When did Russia's invasion of Ukraine? When did the Holocaust? When did the threat of British tyranny that justified the American Revolution? The concept of "imminence" offers no useful guidance for confronting complex threats of this kind.

Is a threat imminent when the enemy becomes hostile? Only after they perfect the means to attack us, or only after the enemy puts them in motion as part of an attack? Does it matter if the enemy appears unstable or ideologically fanatical? Does it matter if the enemy's means of attack are apocalyptic - nuclear weapons on long-range missiles, for example?

The relevant concept is unacceptable risk, not imminent threat. Presidents have the duty to decide whether a foreign threat poses risks that require a U.S. response. They have the responsibility to decide whether a threat is grave enough - and no means short of war can reduce the risk to an acceptable level - to make war necessary.

As a rule, only an imminent threat justifies police officers' use of deadly force. But is it sensible to import that concept into national security affairs today, when a country like Iran calls over decades for "Death to America," commits numerous murderous aggressions, and devotes enormous resources to developing terrorist proxy networks, nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles?

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03/28 Links: Europe’s shameful appeasement of Iran; In Israel, wartime reality doesn’t match what you see on the internet; What secular liberals don’t get about Islam

From Ian:

Tony Blair: Why the West Fails to Stop Antisemitism

These counterarguments need to be made loud and clear by leaders. I don’t know exactly what the response of the people of Britain would be if we woke up one day and between the hours of 6 a.m. and midday, 1,200 of our citizens were murdered, including young people at a music festival, with women raped and others taken hostage (and for Britain, proportionate to the size of population, the figures would be much larger). But I suspect it would be total determination that those responsible were going to be removed as a threat, and nothing would deter us from doing so.

The problem is that, under pressure from party activists and parts of the Muslim community, many progressive politicians who do sincerely reject antisemitism are not making these arguments, and failing to take head-on this literally “unholy alliance” between parts of the left and Islamists in our own societies whose ideology leads inexorably to antisemitism.

Because failure to do so creates the climate in which, even if antisemitism is not explicitly condoned, it flourishes.

One poll during the Gaza war showed that only 24 percent of the British Muslim community believed that October 7 happened in the way it did. Some even believe it was all an elaborate Israeli plot. That is frankly unacceptable.

I know some say that defending the State of Israel is not the way to defeat antisemitism. But there is more at stake than simply defending Israel. It’s about defending reason. Defending facts. Standing up to the noise and intimidation to assert the truth.

None of this means that you cannot support the creation of a Palestinian State or disagree strongly with this or that action of the government of Israel, particularly when that government includes within it figures from the very far right—with whom, it should be said, most members of the Jewish community would disagree.

But it does mean understanding that without a challenge to the ideology that encourages antisemitism, whilst clothing it in indignation at the human cost of war, incidents like the one with the ambulances will continue to the shame of our society.

Europe’s shameful appeasement of Iran

The truth behind the weak response of the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and other countries is far simpler: They refuse to accept that the only way to confront the ayatollahs is with force, plain and simple. The same mindset that produced the 2015 nuclear deal is ascendant now—namely, that military force is always wrong and counterproductive, and that what is needed is a return to soft power and diplomatic initiatives.

Yet such options have been tried and failed repeatedly, testing to destruction the idea that the Islamic Republic is capable of moderation. Years of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, followed by punishing sanctions, failed to curb Iran’s appetite for an atomic weapon or a ballistic-missile program. With its long history of concealment, evasion and deception, the regime could never be trusted with agreements that limited its power. That equation has not changed.

The other reason for E.U. passivity may have to do with Ukraine. Many European diplomats are deeply concerned about the diversion of attention and military resources from Kyiv to Tehran. They fear that the war against Iran will be a boon to a Russian president who is desperate for some success after four years of indecisive war.

But this is to mistake short-term benefits for long-term strategic loss. Any weakening of Iranian power (and destruction of the very missiles that have been sent to bombard Ukrainian cities) reduces the threat both to Ukraine and the wider Middle East, ensuring that Russian President Vladimir Putin loses a much-valued client state in the region.

Another Iranian ally watching this war somewhat nervously is China, a major purchaser of cheap Iranian oil. President Xi Jinping will certainly believe that American hegemony in the energy-rich Gulf will not suit its long term interests, especially if he chooses to flex his muscles over Taiwan. He has already lost one important economic ally in Venezuela.

Perhaps a third reason for passivity is domestic in nature. There are substantial Muslim populations in a number of European countries, many members of which remain deeply radicalised by the war in Gaza. While some will side with Iranian Muslims who have borne the brunt of the regime’s savagery, many others will reflexively condemn the United States and Israel for their perceived aggression toward a Muslim country.

There are genuine fears of Iranian proxy attacks on European soil, including in the United Kingdom, where 20 attacks by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have been foiled recently and where two Iranians were charged with spying on the Jewish community. Yet while such fears cause genuine concern, they are no excuse for sitting on the diplomatic fence.

To their credit, Trump and Netanyahu are helping ensure that the Iranian threat is destroyed for a generation, potentially freeing that nation from the tyranny that has enslaved it. To their shame, European leaders remain mired in shameful and self-defeating appeasement.

Keir Starmer is giving Iran's terror cells free rein to operate in Britain says Israeli president Isaac Herzog

Israel's president has accused Keir Starmer of allowing Iran's 'empire of evil' to operate freely in Britain.

Isaac Herzog said the prime minister allowed Iranian terror cells to 'do what they want' in the UK and said the Middle Eastern 'rogue state' should be 'crushed'.

President Herzog made the comments in an interview earlier this week which came after four Jewish charity-owned ambulances were set on fire on Monday in an incident which is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime.

Metropolitan Police officials previously said the investigation into the arson attack was looking at an Islamist group with potential links to Iran after unsubstantiated claims of responsibility by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya - The Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand.

Counter-terrorism police arrested two British nationals, aged 45 and 47, earlier this week and released both on bail.

Speaking to the executive director of pro-Israel campaign group StandWithUs, Mr Herzog said Iran spent 'billions of dollars' and had 'terror cells all over the world'.

He added Iran operated 'directly and through their proxies' and it was 'about time the world stands up to them'.

President Herzog continued: 'How come in Britain, the Prime Minister of Britain says there were about 10 or 20 events only last year linked to Iranian terror? What is this?'

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03/26 Links Pt1: Herzog warns Europe ‘you’re next,’ blasts UK's Kier Starmer over Iran terror response; Trump delays Iran energy sector strikes another 10 days

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Bombs are the only form of diplomacy Iran understands

The truth is as tragic as it is disturbing: This is a zombie regime that can only be stopped by bombs. It doesn’t care for the welfare of its people and it doesn’t care for death. It cares only about its theology. To hear Keir Starmer and his ministers bleating on about how a “negotiated solution” was in the pipeline before Donald Trump went to war was to witness the final, preposterous gurgling of luxury pacifism. Very soon, Britain is going to be woken up good and hard. Alternatively, it will die in its sleep.

If Iran ever signs a meaningful deal that leads to regional and global stability, it will only be after its most fanatical and effective demagogues are dead; its armed forces, missile stockpiles and nuclear programme are destroyed; its ability to choke the Strait of Hormuz is eliminated; and its regime suffers the final humiliation. So much should be obvious: the West has been negotiating fruitlessly with this devious theocracy for decades. How long before we accept the conclusion?

It is high time we recognised that not all people are the same, not all cultures are like our own, and that the values of an open society are not universal. We hold precious things like democracy, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law because they are ours, which is to say, they were developed and defended by those who came before us and entrusted to the present generation. The Iranian regime is of a different, nihilistic tradition. They can no more abandon their mentality than we can abandon ours.

War is the worst thing mankind has invented. But we wage it out of necessity, not choice. For all Trump’s demonstrable failings and shortcomings, Britain’s fateful flaw has been exposed for the world to see: Our contemptible appetite for appeasement. How little we have learned since 1938!

Jared Kushner says Iran wasn’t serious about negotiations prior to war

Jared Kushner, an informal Middle East envoy to the White House, said Thursday that Iran had not been serious about reaching a nuclear deal with the United States before President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, chose to attack the country in a joint military operation with Israel.

“We basically saw that there was no seriousness, and that they were trying to play different games to just get beyond President Trump in order to preserve their capabilities and pathway to get to a nuclear weapon in a way that would have been very, very hard to be stopped in the future,” Kushner said at Saudi Arabia’s exclusive FII Priority summit, held in Miami this week.

Kushner, whom Trump tapped alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to help lead talks with Iran amid the ongoing conflict, told the crowd of political and financial leaders gathered in South Florida that the Iranians’ public statements on the war should not be trusted.

“The one thing with the Iranians, and we’re seeing this even now, is you have to just ignore a lot of what they say publicly, because I think that their statements are usually more for their domestic audiences,” explained Kushner, who had met for indirect negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva two days before the war began in late February.

Likening Iran’s military tactics to a player losing at backgammon, Kushner said the Islamic Republic is now seeking “to create as much chaos as possible” across the region, as it has fired “indiscriminately” at nearby Gulf states and beyond. “That basically describes what they’ve been trying to do there.”

“President Trump’s focus is to try and get to a good outcome with them,” Kushner added. “He wants to just be in a position where they act like a normal country.”

Uganda is willing to fight alongside Israel, military chief says

Uganda’s military chief tweeted on Wednesday that his country is willing to go to war on Israel’s side.

“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it. But any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring us into the war. On the side of Israel!” wrote Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the chief of the Uganda People’s Defence Force and the son of the country’s President Yoweri Museveni.

The tweet went viral, generating more than 1.3 million engagements on the social media platform as of Thursday morning.

Elaborating on his stance the following day, Kainerugaba tweeted: “We stand with Israel because we are Christians. Saved by the Holy Son of God ... Jesus Christ the only One who can forgive sins. The Bible says ‘Blessed are you Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper and your glorious sword.’ (Deuteronomy 33:29).”

In a separate tweet, he said, “Israel stood with us when we were nobodys in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn’t we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa.”

Last month, Kainerugaba revealed that his country was planning to erect a statue of IDF Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was killed in action in Uganda during a counter-terrorism operation that rescued more than 100 hostages on July 4, 1976.

The statue is expected to be erected at Entebbe Airport, where Yonatan Netanyahu fell in battle, according to Kainerugaba.

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03/25 Links Pt2: Israel Derangement Syndrome Needs to End; Coleman Hughes vs Glenn Greenwald; Two men arrested in connection with the Hatzola ambulance arson

From Ian:

Time for non-Jews to call out this hatred

I find myself emailing Jewish colleagues, “So sorry for abuse you’re suffering”, when I read comments on social media. But it happens so regularly I can’t keep up. I fear becoming desensitised. Gentiles aren’t included in WhatsApp groups where Jews discuss escape plans to New Zealand. The young aren’t going to call out this racism. Their cause is Palestine. Greta Thunberg, like most of her generation, appears to equate Jews collectively with the Israeli government. It doesn’t matter how many times Jewish friends and colleagues apologise for atrocities occurring in the Middle East, how often they distance themselves from Binyamin Netanyahu’s wars — it’s not enough for some unless they disown the state of Israel and disavow Zionism.

Hate crimes against Muslims are now twice as likely to result in prosecution as offences against Jews, yet Jews are nearly ten times as likely to be the targets of these attacks, according to Home Office figures. The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day is down 60 per cent since the October 7 massacre in 2023. Jews aren’t considered victims any more.

Sir Keir Starmer says little, he’s too compromised. This half-term he slipped away to visit Auschwitz with his wife, Victoria, who is Jewish, and their children. “Antisemitism has no place in our society,” he said stiffly this week, but it is clear he is anxious about offending both the Muslim and youth vote as the government fast-tracks a new definition of Islamophobia. The Green leader Zack Polanski has mentioned his Jewish heritage yet is more fixated on his party’s vote this week on the motion “Zionism is racism”. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, needs to speak up for Britain’s Jews. It was Jewish News that reached out last week to show a British sense of tolerance in supporting Muslims celebrating Iftar in Trafalgar Square.

I am nominally Church of England but my creed is acceptance and respect for all faiths that adhere to our country’s values. I never thought we could be like the communities in Kyiv, Lviv, Salonika and Amsterdam in the last century who allowed their Jewish brethren to be shunned and then attacked before being annihilated. Standing by and saying nothing now corrodes us all.

The everyday heroism of our Jewish children

It’s primary school. 12:30. Sun is shining. Some of the kids are having lunch, others are out in the playground. The climbing frame is full, the football pitch is buzzing, kids are running around playing ultimate tag. There’s a lunchtime netball club in the hall. This is the primary school of every kid in the UK. But this is where the familiarity for the general population ends.

The alarm goes off. It takes a second, but the kids know exactly what to do. They’ve practised for this very moment. This alarm isn’t the fire alarm. It’s the other one. The one where you have to stay safe, stay down, and stay silent. Thirty seconds later the entire school has locked down. Out of sight. Four to eleven year-olds sitting without making a sound. A minute goes by. Then the next, then the next. Seconds feel like hours. The teachers don’t know any more than the kids, but they have to keep them calm. They have to keep them quiet. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

Finally, the all clear sounds. It was a false alarm. Everyone breathes out.

And the kids? They just go back to the rest of the day like nothing happened.

I just finished watching Crossfire on BBC iplayer. It’s harrowing. Gunmen attack a hotel. Families, kids, running everywhere. But all I could think (and it was wildly depressing) was, “my kids would know what to do. If I told them it was an intruder alarm, they’d know what to do”. And that awkward lump in my throat, the slight tear in my eye, grew just slightly bigger.

Every kid at a Jewish school walks past the security, and often the police outside their school, and instead of turning to their parent and asking why these people are here, they just say good morning. Because it’s normal. But it’s not, is it? It’s not normal to be surprised when the front gate is open rather than locked shut. It’s not normal to have your bag searched going into a Jewish community centre. It’s not normal for my son’s teacher to have to skip a section of CBBC Newsround because it might hit a bit too close to home.

It’s not normal for every single synagogue in the country, every Jewish school, every Jewish building, every Jewish event to have security stood outside large gates and fences. And it’s not normal for my kids to think it’s normal.

And this isn’t just some sort of over-reaction. The threat is real. This month alone there has been an attack against a Jewish “cheder” school in Amsterdam, an attack on a synagogue in Michigan which housed a nursery, arrests of Iranians accused of spying on Jewish locations (including a school) in London, and of course the firebombing attack on the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.

Police chief who responded to Detroit synagogue attack targeted by online vitriol

During a press conference last Thursday, organized to address rising antisemitism in the wake of the ramming attack on Temple Israel in Detroit earlier this month, the Oakland County sheriff who helped organize the police response to the incident announced the arrest of what seemed like the latest perpetrator: an individual who had posted an antisemitic meme ridiculing the sheriff.

Sheriff Mike Bouchard displayed the image, featuring his face altered to include a Star of David over his forehead and payot, the sidelocks worn by some Jewish men, dangling near his ears.

“Some pond scum felt empowered and emboldened enough to put this picture of me up to try to threaten and intimidate me,” Bouchard, who is not Jewish, said during the press conference. “And by the way, the person that did this said a bunch of terrible things, not just against me, but against a lot of groups and individuals, who, by the way, was arrested today in Wisconsin.”

But while the arrest was only briefly mentioned during the press conference, which featured Bouchard and a group of religious leaders, including Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel, by Tuesday, it had been seized on by thousands of users on X as evidence of censorship and Jewish supremacy.

“Arrested in America for pointing out that a sheriff is jewish,” Jake Shields, a far-right influencer and former MMA champion, wrote in a post on X.

“Jews are murdering free speech in America,” wrote another influencer.

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03/22 Links: Netanyahu: Iran a threat to entire world; Over 4,500 injured in Israel since start of ‘Operation Roaring Lion’; BBC News and the Tale of Two Hospital Explosions

From Ian:

John Spencer: The rise of the ‘leadership first’ strike — and why it’s so important in warfare

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described war as a contest of wills between political communities. His framework assumed friction, uncertainty, and resilient command structures under pressure.

What he did not imagine was a world in which the senior political and military leadership directing a war might be physically targeted in the opening minutes of conflict through integrated intelligence and precision strike.

The objective of these strikes is not simply destruction. It is a disruption.

For decades, opening strikes focused on suppressing air defenses, destroying aircraft on the ground, and degrading infrastructure. The goal was to weaken an enemy’s military capacity.

Today, some states are experimenting with something different: targeting the leadership directing the war itself.

That possibility introduces a new dimension to deterrence.

If adversaries believe their political and military leadership could be struck in the opening phase of a conflict, the personal risks of initiating war change. Deterrence has traditionally relied on threatening damage to territory, forces, or infrastructure. Leadership vulnerability adds another layer to that calculation.

This capability is not omnipotent. Intelligence can fail. Targets can escape. Succession structures can absorb the loss of leaders.

But the increasing ability to locate and strike senior leadership rapidly at the outset of conflict represents an important shift in how wars may begin.

For centuries, eliminating a supreme leader was usually the end of a war.

In the emerging character of modern conflict, it may sometimes become the opening move.

To Fulfill Iran War's Objectives, More Time Is Required

The regime in Iran continues to function and fight, largely because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has effectively taken control of the state and is directing the war effort.

Both Israel and the U.S. seek to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, ideally permanently, and to deny it the ability to develop and produce ballistic missiles and drones in quantities and sophistication that no defense system could counter. These are the two existential threats the war is meant to eliminate, at least for years, even if the current regime survives.

Israel is acting across multiple channels to create conditions in which the Iranian people will want and be able to take control of their fate. Efforts to weaken the regime include targeted strikes against security officials and political leaders, and attacks on Basij and Revolutionary Guard facilities.

Israeli officials report results including defections, particularly among Basij members. At the same time, efforts are underway to organize opposition groups and encourage public protests. According to informed sources, these efforts are beginning to bear fruit.

Iran has learned lessons from previous confrontations and prepared well for the current war. It dispersed its military assets geographically and granted local commanders authority to act based on pre-set directives. It moved critical assets underground, including nuclear laboratories, ballistic missiles and launchers, drones, and even fast attack boats. Iran also divided the country into 31 ballistic missile commands, each with independent launch authority. Iran has also moved much of its nuclear weapons program infrastructure underground.

Israel is targeting Iran's missile, launcher, and drone production infrastructure spread across the country. The air force will likely need at least two more weeks to achieve a satisfactory level of damage. Meanwhile, interception rates by Israel's air defense systems have risen from over 85% to more than 90%.

In both Iran and Lebanon, significant achievements have already been made. But for the war's objectives to be largely fulfilled and for those gains to endure for years, more time is required.

Iran Believes It's Winning and Wants a Steep Price to End the War

Three weeks into the war, the Iranian regime is signaling that it believes it is winning and has the power to impose a settlement on Washington that entrenches Tehran's dominance of Middle East energy resources for decades to come.

Despite optimistic U.S. and Israeli pronouncements, Iran has retained the ability to fire dozens of ballistic missiles, and many more drones, every day across the Middle East. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf's chokepoint, remains only possible with Iranian permission. Surging oil and gas prices are exacting growing pain on economies worldwide.

Tehran has pledged that it will agree to a ceasefire only if Washington and the Gulf states pay a steep price. The spokesman of the Iranian Parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, Ebrahim Rezaei, said any talks with the U.S. are off the agenda as Tehran "focuses on punishing the aggressors."

"This hubris is dangerous because they are not smart enough to understand that President Trump will never let them win. They don't understand how far he's willing to go," said Jason Greenblatt, who served as the White House special envoy for the Middle East. "The cost of not taking care of the problem will be many times more expensive over many, many years."

Demands voiced by Iranian leaders in recent days as conditions for ending the war include massive reparations from the U.S. and its allies and the expulsion of American military forces from the region. They have also called for transforming the Strait of Hormuz - an international waterway where free navigation is guaranteed under international law - into an Iranian toll booth controlling 1/3 of the world's shipborne crude oil. It is hard to imagine the U.S. - or the Gulf states - accepting such an arrangement.

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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.

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03/18 Links Pt2: Amid Anti-Semitism Wave, Europe Calls in the Military; The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard; October 7 report will remind ‘useful fools’ that Hamas started Gaza war

From Ian:

The Israel Lobby: A Historical Primer

The United States became the second country to accord official recognition to Israel upon its establishment (the Soviet Union was the first), but in the new state’s early years, when it had the greatest need of outside support, America provided very little. In Israel’s War of Independence against the five Arab armies that invaded it in 1948, the American government did not supply it with weapons. (The Israeli army did obtain some American arms through nongovernmental channels.) In the Anglo–French–Israeli 1956 war with Egypt, Washington forced Israel to withdraw from positions it had gained in the fighting. In its sweeping victory over three Arab countries in June 1967, Israel relied on French, not American, arms.

Not only did Israel not receive American help when it was most needed, as the events after the 1956 war demonstrate, American Middle Eastern policy did not always favor Israel, the efforts of the pro-Israel lobby notwithstanding. In 1981, the lobby and the Israeli government strongly opposed the sale of a sophisticated Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, fearing that it would be employed in ways that would undermine Israel’s security. The sale went ahead anyway. In 2014, the lobby and Israeli government (and a majority of the American public) opposed the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA). That deal also went forward.

American foreign policy worked to Israel’s advantage when and because the two countries’ domestic political values, and more important, their strategic outlooks, were aligned. More often than not, they were. During the Cold War, Israel acted as a bulwark against pro-Soviet countries and movements in the Middle East; and in that region, Israel stood out as the lone democracy.

In the post–Cold War period, it has retained both distinctions, becoming the major regional opponent—and by far the most effective one—of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has, since its inception in 1979, threatened America’s allies and interests in the Middle East. Indeed, Israel qualifies as the most valuable ally of the United States in the sense that, unlike America’s many other allies, it has actually fought and won wars against the adversaries of the United States and has done so while not asking or expecting American troops to fight alongside Israelis for this purpose. The joint attack on Iran launched on February 28 demonstrated anew Israel’s high strategic value to the United States.

The American public and, for the most part, the American government have understood and appreciated this, which accounts for the generally pro-Israel tilt of American foreign policy. Both what Israel is and what it has done, and not the supposed machinations of the groups lobbying on its behalf, have inclined Americans to be favorably disposed to the Jewish state. Because of this positive disposition, policies favorable to Israel followed. That is how democracy works.

Still, the critics of the pro-Israel lobby who assert that it differs from other interest groups are correct in one way—although not in the way that they believe. The other such groups have consisted mainly of people with ethnic ties to the country whose interests they were attempting to promote. Similarly, one of the principal pro-Israel organizations, the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is composed mainly of Jews. By far the largest pro-Israel group in the United States, however, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), has a largely non-Jewish, Christian membership. CUFI has supported the Jewish state for reasons related to their Christian faith. A reported 6 million people belong to AIPAC. The comparable number for CUFI is 10 million. In this one respect, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which in every other way is similar to every other ethnic group seeking to influence American foreign policy, and like them a pure product of American democracy, is unique.

The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard

Contrast this to Palestinian Arab identity, which crystallized only in the 1960s. The first formal claim of Palestinian national identity came in 1964, with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization—after Israel’s founding in 1948 but before its territorial expansion in 1967.

The timing raises eyebrows and further questions, some uncomfortable. What makes a person in or around the historic territory of Palestine a Palestinian? Jews, Jordanians, and Israeli Arabs are not Palestinians. The term does not refer to persons descended from people who lived in British Mandate Palestine; if it did, the necessary conclusion would be that there already is a Palestinian state—called Israel. It is not defined as a lack of Israeli citizenship; otherwise Jordanian Arabs would be Palestinians, too. Nor does it mean an Arab living in the territory once called Palestine; Israeli Arabs don’t count. Nor can it have anything to do with living in the territories Israel conquered from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967, since the term was invented before then and is used to demand a “right of return” for Arabs displaced in 1948-49 from present-day Israel.

What is it to be Palestinian, then? It is, as its early popularizers were happy to explain, an Arab whose identity is defined by wanting to destroy Israel. It is the ethno-political fusion of non-Jewish Levantine ancestry with anti-Zionism.

The Egyptian-American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has been one of few scholars willing to state this conclusion plainly. That it takes an Arab to articulate what is clear to see is unsurprising. Polite Westerners and Jews consider the notion of discussing constitutive elements of foreign national identities daunting and rarely worth the payoff. Doing so to legitimize Jewish civil rights while eschewing the universalist mentality of protection for all, further, is quite distasteful. It appears to be a violation of profound liberal commitments, including the equal treatment of all people before law. But it appears that way, as Mansour deftly explains, only because the concept of “identity” obscures crucial differences between the Jewish connection to Zion and the Palestinian connection to Palestine. “The most central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he writes, is that “the absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary, [i]s the central ideological content of the Palestinian identity and its symbols.”

There is a stark asymmetry between Zionism and anti-Zionism. Zionism holds that a Jewish state should exist in the Levant, though not to the exclusion of a non-Jewish state—clearly. It is minimalist and rooted in shlilat ha–golah, negating the exile, by granting Jews self-determination within their ancestral lands. Anti-Zionism, by contrast, is definitionally opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. It is maximalist and rooted in reversing the Nakba, the failed Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1948. This is why Jewish Israelis continue to offer two-state solutions and peace plans, and why Palestinians cannot accept them. And it is precisely that honest assessment that APR seeks to prohibit.

Yet it is neither compassionate nor intellectually honest to give APR an inch. Rather, as Mansour argues, “perhaps the most merciful and responsible course is for the Palestinian identity—as a state-bound ambition—to be gently laid to rest.… The cost of perpetuating a vision that repeatedly descends into cruelty is too high.” It does so not out of boiling frustration or the inequities of uneven Western civil rights regimes, but because it is an identity “written in blood,” as the old PFLP slogan goes. Those who “genuinely care about the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and their neighbors,” writes Mansour, should let Palestinians be Arabs again: “Walk away from the fantasy of ‘Palestine’ and offer every real opportunity for inclusion and a dignified future elsewhere.”

The inapt comparison between IHRA and APR reveals an even greater irony: While Zionism is called a political movement and Palestinianism an ethnic heritage, the opposite is closer to the case. The Jewish relation to the Holy Land is essential and ethno-religious; the ethnic story of the Jews makes no sense without the land. Palestinians’ relationship to the land is essentially political; what makes them Palestinian is that they need all the land. Perhaps that is why APR advocates describe what they seek to prohibit as anything that “defames…Palestinians or their narratives” or even their “allies.” They are trying to erect a force field around a political view—the very accusation they level against Zionists—that just so happens to have ethnic bigotry at its core.

We may wish there were a rough parallelism rooted in “nobody’s perfect” that leaves room for moderation and outward signs of empathy. But the truth is that, in this conflict, there are not two equivalent sides. There are two people with claims to the land; one has control, right of first possession, and has been willing to compromise nonetheless. The other has neither the right of might nor the might of right, yet defines itself by its very identity as eliminationist.

The charade of false equivalence helps no one and nothing except the Western liberal conscience, the terrorists waging a long war against the Jewish state, and sham NGOs that exploit the former to support the latter. And the growing specter of APR, the evil approaching stealthily from the north, makes explicating the charade an urgent and unavoidable task.

Irina Velitskaya: One day, everyone will have this book at the back of their closet

Novelist Omar El Akkad’s new nonfiction book about the Gaza conflict, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” which recently won the 2025 US National Book Award, encapsulates everything that is wrong with the state of political discourse, intellectual culture, and Western elites who favor feeling good about themselves over civilizational survival.

The book was first published one year ago this month. Why write about it now? Because it is still, to this day, the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the category “Middle Eastern Politics,” and #3 in the category of “Democracy.”

So what’s wrong with El Akkad’s heartfelt memoir? Let’s begin with the title itself. It is a naked appeal to peer pressure: If you are not part of the “pro”-Palestine movement now, you inevitably will be some day, and if that glorious day of dawning, God forbid, never comes — if, in other words, you continue to hold out stubbornly for the right of one tiny Jewish state to exist in a world of 56 Muslim-majority states, many of them actual “settler colonial ethnostates” — then you are on “the wrong side of history,” as the balaclava-clad mobs tirelessly proclaim. “Shame on you,” they bellow at their antisemitic demonstrations, those who themselves in their naked hatred feel no shame at all, nor any self-awareness that their actions, which they proclaim with proud self-absorption place them on “the right side of history” are in actuality indistinguishable from that of the average Berliner or Viennese Durchschnittsmensch in 1938.

(Incidentally, the prefix “pro” is in quotes because the recent ceasefire agreement, conspicuously uncelebrated by the demonstrators, and the subsequent murders of Palestinian dissidents by Hamas, also ignored, proved that the protesters were never “pro” Palestine at all.)

The title is, in other words, a form of shaming. It also is incredibly presumptuous, a classic example of the logical fallacy of “begging the question,” or assuming the truth of a conclusion in the premise of an argument. The conclusion, of course, is that “this” — which is to say Israel’s defensive and preventative war against Hamas and jihadist terror — is something that one must be ashamed of before, or perhaps instead of, even considering the arguments that support this assertion.

To be clear, the pivotal “this” in the title is not the barbaric October 7 massacre, nor the attempts by naive or hateful Westerners to justify it or deny it, nor the 18 years of rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli communities that preceded it, nor the stabbings and car rammings and bus bombings of the First and Second Intifadas, nor the massacres of Persians, Christians, Hindus, Druze, Yazidi, Alawites, Jews, African animists, and other minorities by radical Islamist groups currently taking place worldwide.

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03/17 Links Pt1: Pres. Herzog: Europe Should Back Effort to Eradicate Hizbullah; Ali Larijani’s elimination signals a turning point in Iran; Iranian attack kills man and woman in Ramat Gan; Joe Kent Was a Problem of Trump’s Own Making

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03/15 Links: Eli Lake: One American-Israeli Battle After Another; Carlson claims CIA is ‘framing’ him as an Iranian agent; Israel rejects South Africa’s ‘blood libel’ genocide case

From Ian:

Eli Lake: One American-Israeli Battle After Another

The greatest irony of recent Israeli history is that, for all of its brilliance in penetrating and sabotaging Iran, Israeli intelligence failed to pick up the signs before October 7 that the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust was in the offing. But that failure quickly led to profound changes in the scope of the mission against Iran. The senior Israeli war planner to whom I spoke put it like this: “We began rethinking the war plan in early 2023, but after October 7 we focused on a broader war against Iran, not just its nuclear program or missiles.” This represented at least a partial vindication of Dagan’s ideas a decade earlier.

And that is where things stand today. As Israel and America take out Iran’s missiles, nuclear facilities, defense industries, and its political and military leadership from the air, the hope is that after the dust settles, the remaining regime leadership will either surrender or agree to end the Islamic Republic’s war on the Great and Little Satan. As I write at the beginning of March, that may seem like a long shot, and one that invites intolerable risks. After all, without boots on the ground, neither the U.S. nor Israel will have the ability to shape the inevitable chaos that will result after the bombing stops. On the other hand, Israel has proven over the past eight months that it has eyes and ears everywhere in Iran. I wouldn’t be shocked if the Mossad has a plan for what comes next.

Here at home, what is going to come next for those who decided to blame this just American war on the little Jewish state they seem to hate so much? The populists seething about Trump’s war to Make Iran Great Again have shown that they misunderstand recent history and that their audiences are fools to listen to them. Over the past 30 years, Israel has built a capability that is on the precipice of removing a blood enemy of America. It has located and eliminated the clerics and generals responsible for 47 years of terror against our country and her allies.

Trump has not launched a war for Israel. Rather he has joined a war with Israel—a war Israel may have won even before the bombs started dropping.

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump challenged 50 years of Iran fears — and revealed the rotten, decaying truth

So here we are in 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade façade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.

The regime has no military ability to ensure its survival.

All it has is a rope-a-dope strategy that assumes a White House attuned to domestic criticism, the looming midterms, the price of gas, and pressure from allies to end the war before the global economy sinks into recession.

We are left somewhat confused.

Why did prior presidents not hold Iran accountable for its killing, thus nourishing the myth of Iranian invincibility?

Why did Israel not respond earlier to Iran itself, rather than just its terrorist clients?

And what now are the remaining theocrats thinking? What is their strategy of survival?

They intend to ride out the bombings and, at some point in extremis, expect an armistice via “negotiations.”

They plan to wait out the tenures of both Trump and Netanyahu and hope for a sympathetic president like Obama, or a non compos mentis Biden, or someone ideologically akin to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

With Trump and Netanyahu out of office, they dream of using their oil to re-arm and resume their role as Chinese and Russian proxies, eventually getting the bomb — and this time perhaps using it.

Theocratic Iran, in its fantasies, still believes that if it ever destroyed Israel, the world, especially given the recrudescence of Western antisemitism, would be appalled — for a day or two.

Then it would resume business as usual.

And with a dozen or so deterrent nuclear-tipped missiles at their backs, the Iranian ritual boilerplate of crazed pronouncements would follow.

Thus, we would go full circle back again to a “crazy” Iran, its murderous clients and its unhinged — but effective — threats.

John Podhoretz: They Should Have Listened to My Dad

Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu saw how an Iranian proxy in Gaza had set into motion a plan on October 7, 2023, with the purpose of bringing about an apocalyptic multifront assault on Israel’s existence—the very thing Ahmadinejad had said he had been seeking 18 years earlier. Iran hit Israel with ballistic missiles in 2024. Trump and Israel struck back with unprecedented force in 2025. And when they were done with the 12-day war, Trump said in no uncertain terms that he would go back to the skies if there were indications Iran was working to re-nuclearize. The Iranians had every chance during this time, and every rational reason, to stand down. They could have sued for peace after the 12-day war destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility and Iran’s air-defense system. They could have made a deal after Trump sent a gigantic armada to the waters near Iran and sent his negotiators to Geneva to talk to the Iranians. After all, they had seen Trump do what no other president would do, even though the four presidents who preceded him in office after the Soviet Union’s fall had all said Iran could not be allowed to go nuclear. The Iranians saw him go into Venezuela and extract its dictator, maybe their closest ally, like a dentist extracting a rotted tooth. But the Iranians did not stand down. Instead, they bragged to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that they possessed enough nuclear materiel for 11 bombs. Trump had watched the Iranian people rise up and had seen the Iranian leaders shoot them down. He tried to talk and in response they boasted of their capabilities to do evil. The Israelis had told him they knew the ayatollah and his team were going to be meeting on a Saturday morning all together in one place. Trump said go. Israel went. And then America struck.

In 2007, the Iranian nuclear program was nascent and notional. But we already knew where they had located it and what they were trying to get going. Had we bombed those sites then, as Israel had bombed Iraq’s reactor in 1981, a precedent would have been established. A simple precedent. Stop. Do it again, and we will hit you again. So don’t do it.

But we didn’t. And Barack Obama tried to buy them off. Donald Trump, in his first term, tried to put the Iranians in a cage with maximum pressure. And Joe Biden, well, who knows what Joe Biden did—but he certainly didn’t scare the Iranians. Donald Trump did hit them. And they didn’t stop.

Now they will. But we needn’t have gotten to this point. One strong strike in 2007 and the world would have looked very different. Bush should have listened to my dad.

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