Regavim won a court case to demolish an EU funded West Bank building. So the EU sanctioned them as "extremists."

The European Union sanctioned four individuals and three organizations under its Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime, calling them "extremist Israeli settlers and organisations which support them" and declaring that they "are responsible for serious and systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank." I cannot vouch for every name on the list. I do know one of them well. Regavim is an Israeli legal-advocacy NGO that takes pains to operate within international and local law, and documents its research and litigation in the open. So I read the EU's statement of reasons to learn what serious and systematic human rights abuse Regavim had committed.

The EU says that Regavim "institutes legal proceedings and lobbies for the demolition of Palestinian property." It is "responsible for multiple court proceedings." It "lobbied for the demolition of a Palestinian primary school." The human rights abuse the EU condemns, in the EU's own words, is using Israel's court system and lobbying its government. The regulation then performs its sleight of hand, asserting that "through its activities" Regavim "plays an instrumental role in facilitating and encouraging coercive acts that aim to destroy Palestinian property." Regavim files petitions; a court decides; the state enforces. The "coercive acts" are court rulings and demolition orders issued by the State of Israel. The EU sanctions the petitioner for the verdict. If the EU is stating that Israel's respected High Court is really an extremist settler organization, it should sanction it. 

The "extremist" label deserves the same scrutiny as the charges, because I have watched Regavim work in a different context.  In 2013 the organization took me through the Negev, where it documents the same illegal-construction problem among Bedouin communities, and I filmed what they showed me. What I heard from them was not bigotry. Regavim acknowledged that the Bedouin had been treated badly by Israel in the decades after 1948, insisted that any solution had to give them a fair alternative, and argued that the state would have to spend serious money to provide it. Regavim's actual position is that the law should apply evenly and that the people affected by it deserve a just result. This is not how an extremist settler group would act. The EU is painting them as anti-Arab fanatics; the truth is quite the opposite. 

The regulation singles out  one case. Regavim petitioned over an EU-funded school at Jubbet adh-Dhib, near Bethlehem. An Israeli court found the structure had been built without a permit and posed a safety hazard to the children inside it, and COGAT imposed a deadline to vacate following the court's order. Regavim's role began and ended with the petition. The party that built without a permit was the European Union, and the party that ruled the construction unlawful was an Israeli court applying Israeli planning law. The EU has sanctioned the organization that brought the violation to the court's attention, while describing its own unpermitted construction as the injured party. Regavim's spokeswoman Naomi Linder Kahn put it precisely: the group's crime "involves petitioning to the courts against a dangerous, illegal, EU-funded school built on Israeli state land in a national historic site."

Strip out the rhetoric, and the only problem the EU has with Regavim is that it disagrees with its political opinions and legal advocacy. The EU has apparently forgotten its own Charter of Fundamental Rights, which guarantees everyone "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority." Sanctions are interference by public authority, and the EU has imposed them on an organization for its opinions and its lawful actions. If anyone is violating fundamental rights in this case, it is the EU, which has frozen a group's assets and barred its director from travel because it disagrees with the group's politics. The list of charges contains nothing illegal, because there is nothing illegal to charge. Regavim holds the position that Jews have a right to their ancestral land and that the law should be upheld to that end, and it has defended existing Israeli law in Israeli courts.

And guess where that law came from?

The entire international case against Israeli construction in Area C rests on a single foundation: that Israel is the belligerent occupier in the West Bank. Israel considers the territory disputed, but it agrees to adhere to the human rights portions of the laws of occupation in its administration of Area C. The law of occupation in the Hague Regulations Article 43 obligates the occupant to respect "the laws in force in the country" unless absolutely prevented. The occupier administers the territory under the legal order it inherited. In Area C, that order is the planning regime the EU's own allies describe in detail: under the 1966 Jordanian Planning Law, still in force in the West Bank, virtually any construction requires a permit issued in line with an approved scheme, and that scheme descends from Regional Outline Plans the British Mandate approved in the 1940s. When Israel took the territory in 1967, it took over the planning powers that the Jordanian law already conferred. Enforcing a permit requirement that predates the occupation by decades is the occupier doing exactly what Article 43 commands. This is international law.

The EU knows this regime applies to its own projects, because the UN says so plainly. Any Area C construction — and OCHA's enumeration names "a private home, an animal shelter or a donor-funded infrastructure project" — still requires approval from the Israeli Civil Administration, because the planning transfer to the Palestinian Authority that the Interim Agreement envisioned was never carried out. The EU builds anyway, without the permits the law in force requires, and then declares the result legal. A structure erected without a permit is unlawful under the precise legal order that occupation status keeps alive. The EU cannot invoke "this is occupied territory" to delegitimize one population's building and then fund the other population's building in open defiance of the planning law that occupation status itself preserves.

There is room for honest argument about how Israel applies the law, hardly ever approving Arab construction in Area C. But that is a problem with the application of the law, not the law itself.  The permit requirement itself is inherited law, not Israeli invention, and a building put up without a permit is illegal by the standard the EU insists governs the land. The EU's quarrel is not that Israel enforces a foreign legal order; it is that Israel enforces it against construction the EU paid for.

The low approval rate also reflects what Area C was built to be. Oslo II sorted the dense Palestinian population into Areas A and B, the urban and village zones where roughly 95 percent of West Bank Palestinians live, and left Area C as the strategic remainder: the settlements, the main roads, the Jordan Valley, the open land whose disposition the parties deferred to final-status talks. A zone defined in 1995 as the sparsely populated reserve, explicitly not the place where the Palestinian population was settled, will naturally generate a high rejection rate when permits are sought to build into it. Both sides understand the stakes. PASSIA states openly that Israel's aim in Area C is to push Palestinians toward A and B, and INSS records that Palestinians have run an organized legal campaign that has won authorization for 113 previously unauthorized villages — a build-first, litigate-later strategy rather than scattered individual need. Area C is contested strategic space whose population balance is being fought over before any negotiation, which is precisely the contest the EU funds on one side and sanctions on the other. The burden is not Palestinian alone: Jewish residents face their own thicket of permitting and legal review for construction and expansion, which is what one would expect of a planning regime applied across a disputed zone rather than one rigged in their favor.

The hypocrisy is stark. Regavim, Amana, and Nachala are accused, in the EU regulation's own language, of building or facilitating outposts "to create facts on the ground," of working to alter the territorial and demographic reality before any final-status agreement, of making it harder for the rival population to remain. This is exactly what the EU is doing on the other side! I took a tour with Regavim a decade ago and saw the EU's own program with my own eyes: clusters of structures thrown up across Area C without permits, flying the EU flag and bearing the words "Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection," positioned in deliberate lines across valleys to block Jewish communities from forming, like stones in a game of Go. Residents were brought in from Areas A and B to populate villages where none had stood. I saw hoses running off to steal water from neighboring Israeli towns. That was ten years ago, and the trajectory was already unmistakable; the structures have only multiplied since, because the program is continuous and the EU has never hidden it. Brussels funds the building, brands it, and describes its purpose in the same terms the regulation now treats as a human rights crime when the builders are Jewish.

The conduct the EU finances and the conduct the EU condemns are the same conduct: unpermitted construction in Area C, undertaken to win the territorial contest before negotiations, by moving a population in. The EU has drafted a definition of the offense that indicts its own program word for word. The only variable that decides whether Brussels calls it "humanitarian aid" or "serious human rights abuse" is which population holds the trowel. A standard that condemns one party while the accuser performs the identical act is not a legal standard; it is a pervasion of the entire concept of equal standing under the law.

The EU's fallback is that this construction qualifies as humanitarian assistance that an occupied population may receive regardless of domestic permit law. The argument fails on the EU's own evidence. Humanitarian assistance under international humanitarian law is relief for a population in need, not permanent construction engineered to alter territorial control. The EU's description of the Israeli mirror-conduct — facts on the ground, contiguity, frustrating the other side's claims — is an admission that the purpose of such building is political and territorial rather than humanitarian. Brussels has characterized the activity accurately when Jews do it and mislabeled the same activity when it does it.

Return now to the principle the EU claims to live by, because the contradiction is not abstract. The EU describes human rights defenders — and its own list of them names "members of human rights NGOs, academics, lawyers" — as "natural and indispensable allies," and its Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders commit EU missions worldwide to oppose exactly the tools the EU has now reached for: "administrative and judicial harassment," "smear campaigns, travel bans, criminalisation, stigmatisation." When a foreign government freezes the assets of a research-and-litigation NGO and bans its director from travel because it dislikes the NGO's cause, the EU calls that repression and sends a démarche. When the EU does it to an Israeli NGO, it calls it a human rights sanction. The behavior the EU condemns abroad is the behavior it has adopted here, against an organization whose work — researching land use, publishing findings, filing petitions in a democratic state's courts — is the textbook profile of the defenders the EU vows to protect everywhere else.

Underneath the legal packaging lies a claim with no source in law: that Area C is already Palestinian sovereign territory, so that Israel's permit regime is a foreign imposition and EU construction needs no one's permission. The status of Area C is the question the Oslo framework deferred to final-status negotiations, and no treaty, ruling, or resolution has settled it. There is no moment in history where control of Area C was legally (or otherwise) transferred to the Palestinian Authority. The EU has decided the question by assertion, and then by funding the facts and punishing the litigants who challenged them in court.  

A European Union that built its identity on the promise that lawful opinion is beyond the reach of state punishment has now demonstrated, in a binding legal act, the precise conditions under which it will break that promise: when the opinion is inconvenient and the person holding it is Israeli.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/03 Links Pt2: The Jew-hating Democratic party is a monster created by Barack Obama; Israel’s fairweather friends are fuelling anti-Semitism; The Barghouti Myth

From Ian:

Behind today’s radical, Jew-hating Democratic party is a monster created by Barack Obama

Two hundred and ten years ago this summer, a 19-year-old woman named Mary Shelley, bored one stormy afternoon, decided to write the scariest story ever told.

It was a tale of a brilliant and arrogant man who wanted to change the world but ended up creating a monster. She named him Barack Obama.

All right, she named him Dr. Frankenstein. But had the great author been around to witness Adam Hamawy win the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, she would’ve understood right away that she was looking at a familiar tale of hubris, malice and ghouls on the loose.

Like Shelley’s mad physician, Barack Obama, too, had an appetite for re-ordering the natural world. He took Bill Clinton’s party — one that allowed candidates in some parts of the country to be pro-gun and pro-life and still consider themselves Democrats in good standing — strapped it to the slab and shocked it with a lightning bolt of radicalism.

The creature that emerged from the experiment no longer talked about fiscal responsibility and government reform. It howled instead about opening our borders, legalizing gay marriage and redefining politics as the pursuit of identity by other means.

Antisemitic alliance
Under Obama, the Democrats became a gorgeous mosaic of victimized minorities, encouraged to seek retribution for wrongs real or perceived by grabbing a pitchfork and going out in search of a conservative to blame.

For a while, it all went swimmingly. Obama built a forever campaign that encouraged everyone to give to the party — not only their money but also their loyalty. Endless chatter about “the right side of history” was designed to make it clear that unless you wholeheartedly supported whatever the president and his aides told you was proper, good and desired, you’d be transgressing against history itself.

Tech companies, universities and other institutions soon fell in line, giving us execrable phenomena like cancel culture.

We all saw the might of Obama’s creation during Donald Trump’s disastrous first term in office: At the push of a button, a democratically elected president was made to appear to be the second coming of Mussolini.

And we saw it even more clearly during Obama’s third term, conducted via another Frankenstein-like creation, the brain-dead Joe Biden.

But as every reader of Mary Shelley’s knows, eventually the monster gets loose, grows mad and wreaks havoc. Welcome to the Democratic Party of 2026.

Israel’s fairweather friends are fuelling anti-Semitism

However, in the midst of a Democratic Party where support for Israel is now a political death wish, Emanuel has had a Damascene conversion. He recently advanced the unsubstantiated and largely debunked charge that laid blame on Israel for Palestinian starvation during the Gaza War. On American television, he recently said: ‘The days of taxpayers subsidising Israel militarily, that’s over. No more financial aid.’ And referencing the current war in Iran, he said: ‘The US should never spill any blood for the state of Israel’s security.’ At one time, an interpretation of events like that would have been unimaginable coming from Emanuel.

His counterpart in the UK is Zack Polanski, leader of the surging Green Party of England and Wales, a feature of which is barely concealed contempt for Israel and Jews. In a fawning interview in the Guardian (where else?) last year, Polanski said he grew up in ‘a very Zionist household, raised to really believe that Israel was the centre of everything and must be defended at all costs’. He unabashedly admits that this is ‘very different to my politics now’.

That is an understatement, to say the least. Polanski has excoriated Israel for its response to the 7 October massacre, including accusing it of genocide. Asked by a journalist in April over the escalating, and in some cases lethal, attacks on Jews in England, Polanski delivered an equivocating response: ‘There’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither is acceptable.’ While the public anticipates that conversation, the fortunes of the Green Party continue to rise.

The ostensible reason that Emanuel and Polanski give for their new pandering is that ‘Israel has changed’ since 1948. This is hardly a revelation on the order of the discovery of gravity or the introduction of quantum mechanics. Of course Israel has changed; what country has not changed over the past eight decades? The question neither of these political creatures has asked is why Israel has changed.

The military threat from Iran and its proxies is exponentially greater than ever before, and the insidious international propaganda campaign is even more intense – abetted by former supporters like the United Nations. Israel has been forced to respond in ways not always laudable, but rather than acknowledge this and the fact that Israel remains a beacon of moral leadership and a defender of the values the West was built on, Emanuel and Polanski have committed to cutting the cloth of their beliefs to the odious fashions of the day.

So who is worse, genuine anti-Semites, or these sycophantic poseurs looking to advance their political standing?

At least you know where you stand with real anti-Semites. Some may be cunning, some may be fools and many may just enjoy Nazi cosplaying, but the dangerous ones usually make their intentions known in word, if not in deed.

Political fakirs like Emanuel and Polanski come off as more acceptable, but do not doubt the lasting damage they can do by legitimising anti-Semitism in the larger polity. Emanuel will almost certainly never become president of the United States, but he lends credibility to the expanding anti-Semitic wing of the Democratic Party and to some extent the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party. Polanski has a similarly slim chance of becoming prime minister of the UK, but he gives a faint whiff of respectability to the Islamo-fascist wing of the Green Party.

The real anti-Semites deserve all the contempt the world can muster. But craven opportunists like Zack Polanski and Rahm Emanuel are also beneath contempt. History will not be kind to them for breathing life into this foul bigotry, however they might try to justify it.

From Anne Frank to anti-Jewish Sanctioning: The Netherlands' Betrayal of Israel

What was once known as the "Country of Anne Frank," a nation that had learned from its own role in the Holocaust... and quietly delivered critical military aid during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, now leads the charge at the EU in Brussels to punish the Jewish state for the apparent crime of Jewish survival....

The Jetten government coalition... has now also taken the lead in pushing sanctions against Israel....

The Dutch pro-Israel parties -- Geert Wilders' PVV, BBB, JA21, ChristenUnie, and the Christian-Zionist SGP -- were deliberately excluded from the governing coalition.

The Jetten minority government therefore governs on parliamentary life support from the very parties that despise Israel.

The Dutch betrayal mirrors a broader European sickness. Mass immigration from Muslim countries has imported a virulent strain of antisemitism that now crosses all political boundaries. Politicians realize only the electoral ramifications: Jewish populations are dwindling and Muslim populations are exploding. Post-Holocaust guilt, once a brake on Jew-hatred, has been inverted: many of the descendants of the perpetrators and bystanders now project their unresolved shame onto the surviving Jews and their state. The "oppressed" Palestinian has replaced the oppressed Jew as the object of European moral narcissism. The Europeans, who never forgave the Jews for Auschwitz, are finally free of guilt.

Europe, which cannot, or does not wish to, protect its own Jewish communities from daily harassment and assault, now presumes to dictate to Jews where they may and may not live in the Land of Israel.

The hypocrisy and moral rot are bottomless. It was Europeans who exiled the Jews from their heritage and cradle of civilization. It was Europeans who subjected "their" Jews to more than a millennium of discrimination, expulsions, mass deportations, and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. It was Europeans as well, who, at the Evian Conference of 1938, refused to open their doors to Jews fleeing Hitler. It was the British who issued the 1939 White Paper without a single protest from the other European democracies, and thereby slamming shut the gates of Palestine as a place of refuge as the extermination of the Jews began. It was Europeans (Polish, British, and Dutch) who devised the "Madagascar Plan" to deport Europe's Jews to a remote and uninhabitable island where they would surely perish.

Yet the Jews do not forget where they came from. Jews have lived in the Land of Israel continuously for millennia; and many of the descendants who had been forcibly dispersed, returned.

It is precisely this return that triggers such fury. Dutch authorities and many Dutch politicians now eagerly repeat the modern blood libel of "settler violence," -- all while ignoring the unrelenting terrorism committed by Arabs against the Jews of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel for more than a century until today.

Established and thriving Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods, and infrastructure exist in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Golan. These "facts on the ground" will most certainly remain in the future and likely grow into a home for hundreds of thousands of Jews now planning to leave a Europe that is collapsing as we speak. Israel will celebrate its restoration in the Land of Israel long after the Netherlands will have been destroyed by the Muslim and African invasions it invited in, and the remnants of what was once a great and moral country have returned to their natural state: a swamp.

Amsterdam Holocaust Museum cancels antisemitism conference

The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam has canceled a scheduled conference on antisemitism at universities, which was to be held at the museum.

The event, organized by a conservative Dutch politician and member of the European Parliament, was moved to another location last week and took place at a church instead.

“A Holocaust museum is the best place to speak about antisemitism, so I was surprised by the cancellation,” MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen of the Reformed Political Party (SGP) told JNS on Tuesday. “That’s the place to be.”

He said he was informed by the museum’s director that a demonstration was planned in front of the museum against the event and that the director did not want graffiti on the walls shortly before a visit by the Dutch King and the German president.

The staunchly pro-Israel lawmaker who initiated the conference said that about 100 participants ended up attending the advertised event, which the anti-Israel activists had condemned and sought to disrupt.

The Holocaust museum said Wednesday that the antisemitism conference was canceled at its premises because it had become politicized.

“We will not allow the National Holocaust Museum to become the focal point of a political dispute in the context of a rental event,” the Museum’s general director Emile Schrijver said in a written statement. “Protecting the integrity of the National Holocaust Museum should not be a political position; it is our core mandate and one we take seriously.”

The museum’s decision was strongly condemned by the European office of the Israel Allies Foundation, which spearheads faith-based diplomacy around the globe.

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06/03 Links Pt1: U.S. Military ‘Aid’ to Israel Is Over. Will Anyone Notice?; Trump delivered a military victory over Iran. Now he’s negotiating it away

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: U.S. Military ‘Aid’ to Israel Is Over. Will Anyone Notice?

In reality, Israel was buying the weapons and other supplies it needed, so this argument was always disingenuous. But it enabled some lawmakers to argue that they were not against Israel’s right to exist or to defend itself while also calling for a break in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This is in contrast to folks like outgoing Republican Rep. Tom Massie, who makes wild insinuations about Americans subsidizing Israeli abortions, and Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib and other members of the “Squad,” who simply yell about the Jewish state’s supposed bloodthirst. Meanwhile, the long-debunked “genocide” lie has gone mainstream in Democratic circles, furthering a trend that could make it virtually impossible for a future Democratic administration to rework the U.S.-Israel relationship in any remotely productive way.

Figures like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene continue to dishonestly frame the aid issue as a cudgel against Israel and against Trump. Eliminating this talking point without eliminating the aid, then, has given Trump reason to pursue a restructuring under his own watch.

Netanyahu has long felt similarly, but he also has supported restructuring the aid in a way that doesn’t hamstring Israeli leaders during wartime or stifle domestic Israeli production at a time when the state needs a larger degree of independence from the whims of Western politicians easily bullied by Hamasnik constituents armed with Iranian talking points. As Netanyahu told CBS last month, “let’s start now and do it over the next decade, over the next 10 years, but I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.”

And it starts now, with Stutzman’s resolution. The details will come later, but the general framework will put more emphasis on trade and mutual cooperation on various projects. That will also likely insulate much of it from sabotage by anti-Israel members of Congress at a time when Democrats are nominating the most extreme anti-Zionist crop of candidates in memory.

The question now becomes: Will this satisfy all those who claim that American subsidy is the problem with Israel aid? Or will they find other reasons to bash the plan and move the goalposts in their continuing quest to undo America’s alliances?

David Harsanyi: Trump delivered a military victory over Iran. Now he’s negotiating it away

For weeks now, we’ve been hearing that the United States and Iran are on the verge of a deal in which the clerics will agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire continuation that would allow for more negotiations over the fate of nuclear weapons.

We’ve now been negotiating over the parameters of more negotiations longer than the entire military operation lasted.

The question is, why is the U.S., after delivering an unprecedented military victory against the regime, allowing the mullahs to make demands as if they were on equal footing? And why does President Donald Trump keep giving in to those demands?

We don’t need a deal with Iran. We need the regime to surrender or collapse. If the president isn’t willing to accomplish that goal, walking away would be far preferable to striking another Barack Obama-esque deal, which seems to be where we’re headed. Not only would such a deal end up empowering clerics to restart their nuclear weapons program, retrench, and rearm, but it would restrain Israel and the Gulf States from acting.

The fact that Democrats and isolationists have successfully demoralized the American public doesn’t change the fact that U.S. and Israel decapitated leadership and institutional knowledge within the Islamic regime, set back its nuclear program, vastly degraded its ballistic missile capabilities, and stunted its ability to prop up proxy militias.

Iran will never be in a weaker position. We will never have more leverage. If clerics refuse to strike a suitable deal while their economy is being pounded by a U.S. blockade, what in the history of the regime makes anyone believe they’ll be more amenable when given an economic lifeline?

Though you never know what our mercurial president will do tomorrow, right now it feels like he’s being hoodwinked. The Iranian strategy for survival has always been clear. They’ve employed the same delaying tactics through four administrations.

In the long term, clerics believe they can eke out survival until a Democrat or “non-interventionist” Republican becomes president in 2028.

In the short term, they’re counting on the president not having the courage to resume widespread military engagement. Iran understands that American domestic patience is negatively correlated to high gas prices. They understand that Trump is under political pressure with the midterm elections coming.

This is the reason Iran keeps insisting that a narco-terrorist army in a third country be protected under any ceasefire agreement. Every time the sides are allegedly approaching an agreement, Iran instructs its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to launch missiles and drones at Israel. When Israel inevitably responds, as any nation would, the clerics break off negotiations temporarily to stretch the timeline even further.

Worse, on Monday, Trump announced that after a “very good” call with Hezbollah, a Justice Department-designated terrorist group that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, he’d convinced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off planned strikes in Beirut.

In other words, the president saved Hezbollah to placate the mullahs. So much for Netanyahu controlling the U.S. Indeed, Israel is the only country on the planet compelled by its friends to live with non-state terrorist armies on its borders.

Do the president and his advisers really believe this capitulation is going to be construed by the Revolutionary Guard as a good-faith effort? No, it will be seen as a sign of weakness and embolden it.

From Victory to Drift By Abe Greenwald

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The overarching mistake here is engaging diplomatically with Iran at all. This would be true even if the U.S. were speaking with the “right people.” Under the best circumstances, the regime sees diplomacy as an opportunity to con its interlocutors. Iran will always “talk.” Not because the regime is interested in coming to an understanding with America but because talks will, at the least, give Iran time to stave off potential U.S. action and, at best, rope American negotiators into a “deal” whose terms the regime will brazenly violate. Any announcement of “Iran talks”—ever—should be understood as “advantage, Iran.”

But, yes, it’s worse than that. Considering that the regime is aware of all the speculation about the U.S. running dangerously low on both defensive munitions and Arab support, such talks are even more perilous. Iranian leaders (wrongly or rightly) fear nothing in the way of American military strikes. They’ve decided that they can abandon even the pretense of compromise. They’re calling the shots and loving it.

I still think that Trump means it when he says that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. I just don’t know whether, going forward, he’s going to make the hard decisions necessary to win the war. I’m talking about the decision to endure the market spikes and ceaseless criticisms that would come with a long, serious, and unrelenting U.S. blockade on Iranian and Iran-related oil shipments in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. And I’m talking about what has become unthinkable in the mind of the American public: the deployment of U.S. ground troops. With each passing day, both seem less likely.

Do I still maintain that Trump did the civilized world a tremendous favor by leveling Iran’s nuclear program? Absolutely. But it must now be acknowledged that his dithering, if it continues, will introduce a whole new danger. If the only American president who’s been willing to confront Iran proves unable to finish the job, it’s party time not only for Iran but for bad actors in every corner of the globe.

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Mark Carney's awful speech might make antisemitism worse

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked into a Toronto synagogue with the worst antisemitism numbers in Canada's postwar history behind him, and he walked out having given a speech that manages the remarkable feat of making things worse.

He did say that more than two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada last year were aimed at a community that is one percent of the population. He did mention bullets fired at Jewish schools, firebombs at synagogues, Jewish patients harassed in hospitals, Jewish students chased out of campus common spaces, Holocaust memorials desecrated, parents weighing whether a Jewish day school is safe and observant Jews thinking twice about a kippah on the subway. This is to his credit.

Then he spent the rest of the speech making sure none of it would change.

Listen to the whole address and you will learn that Canada has an antisemitism problem without ever learning where it comes from. The hate, in Carney's telling, simply materialized. There is no October 7th in this speech. There is no anti-Zionism, no campus encampment, no "globalize the intifada," no marching mob outside a Jewish neighborhood, no name attached to a single one of the people firing the bullets and throwing the firebombs. The antisemites are like the weather — they arrive like a cold front, and the job of government is to hand out umbrellas. So that is what he offered: more money for guards and barriers, all of it already announced, plus a brand-new council whose marching orders are to study, research, collect data, and measure. 

The community has been living the data for two and a half years at its own front doors. It does not need a federal body to assess the scale of the problem. It needs the problem stopped, and on that subject Carney had nothing — no zero-tolerance standard for campuses, no commitment to prosecute, none of the 22 recommendations the Senate's own committee handed him this spring. The council that is supposed to fix this replaced the antisemitism envoy positions his government eliminated in February, contains exactly one Jewish member, and seats among its membership the lawyer who sued the University of Alberta for daring to clear an encampment. This is the body asked to defend Jews from antisemitism.

The part that should make every Zionist's stomach turn is the way he handled Israel, which is to say the way he refused to. No one can seriously deny that anti-Zionism is what fuels most of today's antisemitism. Yet Israel earned exactly one sentence in the prepared text — a note that the antisemitism guidelines still permit criticism of the Jewish state. Yay. Compare that to Justin Trudeau a year earlier, who at least said the words "no one in Canada should ever be afraid to call themselves a Zionist. I am a Zionist." Carney could not bring himself to defend Israel even once.

What he did instead is worse than silence. The civic principle at the heart of the speech is that "no Canadian going about their daily life should be held responsible for the actions of any government, wherever they may be."  To ask that Jews not be blamed for Israel's actions is to say that Israel's actions are blameworthy, and that the only mistake the mob is making is sending the bill to the wrong address. He did not defend the Jewish state against the libel. He accepted the libel and pleaded for Canadian Jews to be spared the consequences. 

The same surrender runs through his theory of where the hatred came from. Antisemitism, he suggested, is a foreign quarrel that immigrants must leave behind at the dock — "you leave behind your wars and your animosities" — and the covenant "requires that we do not transpose foreign conflicts onto each other." So the problem is not the ideology that teaches that the Jewish state is a colonial crime to be resisted by any means. The problem is that some people brought a faraway argument to Canada, and the solution is for everyone to calm down about a distant war. That diagnosis lands as squarely on the Jew who loves Israel as on the Arab who hates it. 

This is what it looks like when a leader seems to say every right word and means none of the consequences. Carney named the wounds and protected the people inflicting them by refusing to name them. He promised Jews safety and built it on the demand that they distance themselves from the one country on earth that exists to keep them safe. 

How, in the end, are Jews any safer? Outside of more security in some Jewish spaces, there was nothing said to fight antisemitism to begin with. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/02 Links Pt2: Cities Without Jews; EU Sanctions Israel, Welcomes Taliban; SJP praised last year’s antisemitic firebombing

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Cities Without Jews

Once, while researching the development of Israel’s economy, I came across an incredible statistic. Between the late 1980s and 1996, during which somewhere around 800,000 Soviet and Russian Jews came to Israel, the Jewish state’s unemployment rate actually dropped. That is, Israel absorbed an immigration explosion that increased its population by about 15 percent so smoothly that unemployment actually went down.

How? Well, broad economic trends tend to be driven by multiple factors, but one of them surely was that Israel benefited greatly from Russia’s Jewish brain drain. (It turns out the real “Jewish Problem” is not having enough Jews.)

It is the intangible part of population shifts, as Americans—also citizens of a country blessed by immigration waves—well know.

This is what came to mind when I read the story in the Montreal Gazette about one of Canada’s leading doctors leaving the country for the U.S., largely over anti-Semitism, and decamping to Atlanta. Dr. Emmanuel Moss is the chief of cardiac surgery at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is also, according to the website of McGill University, where Moss directs the cardiac surgery residency training program, “one of the only surgeons in Canada routinely performing both robotic mitral valve and coronary bypass surgeries.” The president of Quebec’s association of cardiothoracic surgeons said that Moss is “ultra-specialized in robotic surgery” and “in the prime of his career.”

Canada’s loss, our gain.

There’s more to the significance of this than one man’s life-saving talent, of course. And to be fair, anti-Semitism isn’t the only reason Moss was reportedly unhappy. He has been warning of the hospital system’s staffing and equipment shortfalls. But, as noted in the piece, those aren’t new problems. Anti-Semitism, as one source put it, has reached a tipping point: “The problems with the health system have existed for years, and [Moss] could have left at any time before. So what it comes down to is the antisemitism and the feeling that this (city) has become an increasingly dangerous or unrecognizable place to live.”

We can zoom out several ways here. First, I’ve written here at length about Canada’s anti-Semitism problem and the lack of initiative being taken to stop it. So it isn’t all that surprising that a certain number of Jews would leave as long as the status quo remained or worsened. What’s worth adding here is that this is Canada, our neighbor to the north, and not some far-flung post-Soviet province.

The Joyless Art of Jew-Hatred By Abe Greenwald

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Regarding the “moral” satisfaction of Jew-hating, he writes: “The antisemite does not feel like a bully. His experience is one of courage. He is exposing hidden power. Defending society. Cruelty becomes public service.”

Here’s a disturbing recent social media clip that’s especially helpful on this point. It shows a musclebound white nationalist harassing a Jewish man in Nashville a few weeks ago. He says things such as “You’re so Jewish and disgusting looking. You’re so Jewish it’s hideous” and “You’re Jewish scum. You got Israel. Go to Israel…you cross eyed Jew…look at this dysgenic Jew.” He’s not exposing or defending anything. There is no sense of public service. What you see is bullying distilled down to its very essence, the high-school locker room in the public square. The unsalvable personal insecurity of the harasser is visceral. Like all bullies, he just wants to make someone else feel as worthless as he feels about himself. To his target’s credit, it didn’t work.

As for the “entertainment” factor, Pittinsky writes, “These pleasures—revelation, belonging, moral certainty—are not merely felt. They are performed. Antisemitism has always understood spectacle. During Crusader massacres along the Rhine, mobs formed through religious processions full of hymns, banners, and ecstatic collective emotion. Later centuries would perfect the form with burning Judas effigies, parades, costumes, cheering crowds. Antisemitism survives not merely as doctrine but as collective entertainment.”

I fear Pittinsky is mistaking frenzy for entertainment. Mobs of the like-minded—whether hateful or religious or merely delinquent—feed on group hysteria to give their pursuits a kind of cheap transcendence. The spectacle isn’t entertainment. It’s a frantic attempt at manufacturing enthusiasm.

Anti-Semites hate Jews not because it’s joyful to hate Jews. They hate Jews because their own lives are joyless. And this is important for Jews to remember because it accounts for the depths of the anti-Semite’s depravity. They’re not celebrating anything, and we shouldn’t view their obsession as a dark party theme. They’re taking out their assorted failures on us. As I’ve said before, anti-Semitism is chicken soup for losers. So long as we recognize that, anti-Semites will never win.

Gerald M. Steinberg: Doctors Without Borders: Promoting Hate Through Medicine

[L]ike other powerful groups in the NGO industry, MSF has become a major platform for political and ideological propaganda campaigns that often accompany wars and terror atrocities.

A major new report by the NGO Monitor research institute... documents how MSF has been transformed from a medical humanitarian organization into one of the most aggressive institutional promoters of anti-Israel messaging, most notably the canard that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

This is far from the only example of MSF's participation in demonization campaigns that are entirely inconsistent with the humanitarian agenda.

On October 7, while Hamas terrorists were still murdering and raping civilians in Israel, dragging hostages into Gaza, and live-streaming their "conquests," MSF officials were accusing Israel of war crimes.

Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, an MSF-affiliated anti-Israel activist, participated in a grotesque press conference organized by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, to promote the libel.

In a massive understatement, the text acknowledged that MSF lacked the legal expertise to determine genocidal intent – the central element of the crime under international law. But that disclaimer did not stop the organization from running with the libel. At least 272 times.

In parallel, MSF was deafeningly silent on Hamas' real war crimes: embedding of military (terrorist) infrastructure in hospitals (documented by NGO Monitor), schools, and civilian neighborhoods; the theft of humanitarian aid; and the continued holding of Israeli civilian hostages. Across MSF's international social media feeds, hostages were scarcely mentioned – appearing as the primary subject of only three posts out of hundreds.

By embracing false and defamatory accusations, Doctors Without Borders and all who are associated with this NGO have undermined fundamental moral and humanitarian values. They have traded white coats and medical missions for hate slogans and lies.

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06/02 Links Pt1: Israel is fighting for its survival in Lebanon; If It’s Genocide, Why Can It Wait Until 2029?; Iran targets Kuwait and Bahrain as US strikes island in Hormuz

From Ian:

Michael Doran: This Is How the Iran War Ends

In the optimistic scenario, both stages of the plan come to fruition. An extendable MOU is signed in the coming days, reopening the Strait of Hormuz under international monitoring, easing immediate military tensions and allowing oil to flow normally through the Gulf. Iran receives limited, reversible economic relief. Economic desperation proves decisive. The IRGC concludes that partial accommodation is preferable to prolonged isolation and the risk of renewed American strikes. Serious negotiations follow on the nuclear file. Iran makes meaningful concessions on removing the “nuclear dust.”

The odds of this happening are slim. All available information suggests that the men now running Iran are less flexible than even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was. But the odds are not zero. The senior administration official told me that the Iranian regime is “fractured and broken.” The current emergency footing allows the IRGC to avoid responsibility for the mess it has made. Some administration officials hope the MOU will bring the regime to “the point at which they have to govern this broken country,” intensifying domestic pressure over inflation, corruption, and stagnation.

At the same time, officials remain clear-eyed that the IRGC may continue to ride roughshod over the Iranian people and refuse to budge on the nuclear program. Under those conditions, regional alignment against Tehran would deepen further.

In the pessimistic scenario, the first-stage MOU moves forward and the Strait of Hormuz reopens, but the second-stage negotiations over the nuclear remnants quickly bog down. Delay, mistrust, and tactical maneuvering place the negotiations on a road to nowhere, consistent with the pattern of all previous U.S.-Iran nuclear talks.

Even in this outcome, the United States would still achieve a significant strategic gain. The more relevant historical comparison is the post-1991 containment of Saddam Hussein. A weakened, sanctioned regime remained in prolonged friction with a U.S.-led coalition that retained escalation dominance and overwhelming military superiority. The military campaign would give way to a prolonged contest of pressure, deterrence, and attrition. But Iran now is substantially poorer, more isolated, and further from a nuclear breakout than before the war began. The U.S. and Israel will maintain close monitoring of any remaining nuclear activity and ballistic missile production, ready to react to any alarming developments.

The pessimistic scenario is not the administration’s goal but remains, in my view, the more likely outcome. Republican hawks will have far more influence over this process if they work within the president’s framework rather than reflexively opposing it.

Trump has already demonstrated, through action rather than rhetoric, that he is not Barack Obama. He introduced into these negotiations the element most absent from the Obama years: a credible and demonstrated willingness to use overwhelming military force against the Iranian regime.

His allies, therefore, will strengthen their position by holding the administration to its own calibrated “no dust, no dollars” standard. Three demands immediately come to the fore.

First, significant sanctions relief or direct economic benefits for Tehran must come only in exchange for concrete, verifiable concessions, not merely for participating in a diplomatic process. The administration’s leverage derives from economic pressure backed by military dominance. Dealing away that leverage prematurely would indeed repeat a core error of the Obama approach.

Second, the administration must detach Hezbollah and Lebanon from the nuclear negotiations. Tehran will seek to transform every regional file into a bargaining chip in order to preserve and legitimize its network of proxies. Washington gains nothing by reinforcing the link between the Iranian nuclear file and Hezbollah’s position inside Lebanon.

Third, the military threat must remain visible and credible throughout the negotiations. Tehran entered these talks only after suffering severe military and economic blows. The regime’s negotiating position will harden immediately if it concludes that diplomacy has neutralized the possibility of renewed force. Escalation dominance, not goodwill, remains the foundation of American leverage.

In the coming phase of the conflict, time favors the side that maintains pressure. By emphasizing leverage, verification, and long-term containment rather than maximalist demands for unconditional victory, supporters of the administration can strengthen the president’s hand while preserving the strategic gains achieved by the war.

Iran Embraces a Forever War

One reason why Iran won't make real peace is that it has concluded that conflict is preferable to diplomacy. The war, after all, seems to be helping Tehran increase its international power. By striking Arab states that host American bases, Iran has succeeded in driving a wedge between U.S. officials and their Persian Gulf partners, who desperately want a lasting settlement. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, it has forced countries around the planet to acknowledge its power and negotiate over the fate of their ships.

The Islamic Republic's strategy, then, is not merely to survive and outlast the U.S. It is not even really trying to resolve its disputes with Washington. Instead, it wants to fundamentally alter how Tehran is dealt with by the U.S., its allies, and the wider world. It aspires to be a pole in a multipolar order, and it believes the war is helping it achieve that goal.

The Islamic Republic has quickly gained leverage. Arab countries, fearing economic calamity, have pushed the U.S. to seek peace. Asian countries, in desperate need of Persian Gulf oil and gas, have pleaded with Iran to offer their ships safe passage.

Even European leaders have struck a more accommodating tone. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz - who previously praised Israel for doing "our dirty work" against Iran - has stated that Tehran has "humiliated" Washington. Multiple European officials have opened channels with their Iranian counterparts. Norway's deputy foreign minister even visited Tehran.

The Islamic Republic also sees the war as helpful because, in its view, the conflict will force Washington to reconsider its assumption that Tehran is weak. Iran has concluded that neither Israel nor the U.S. can defeat it on the battlefield. Prolonging the war, then, is a way to prove that Washington's earlier assessment - that Iran's military was hollowed out and that the regime was on the brink - was wrong. In fact, they believe that compromise will only imperil Iran further.

The Islamic Republic's leadership is using negotiations as a tool for managing warfare. It engages in talks mostly to demonstrate to other states that it is serious about diplomacy, thereby lowering international pressure, and it does so to control the tempo of conflict. It refuses, however, to make offerings that would diminish its leverage or signal vulnerability. The regime believes that confrontation strengthens its hand. It is happy to withstand economic pain if it can control the Strait of Hormuz.

Hamas Fears a U.S.-Iran Agreement Could Leave Gaza Facing Israel Alone

Senior Hamas officials are increasingly concerned about Israel's new policy of gradually eroding the "yellow line" separating Israel and Hamas in Gaza and expanding its campaign of targeted killings of senior military operatives, allegedly with American backing.

They also express concern over the prospect that any future U.S.-Iran agreement will exclude Gaza entirely, leaving it vulnerable to Israeli actions. This could let Israel use its full military power in Gaza without fear of triggering broader escalation.

Senior Israeli security officials say Hamas's main concern is that a U.S.-Iran agreement would relieve Israel of many strategic pressures.

If tensions with Iran subside, Israel could devote substantially greater resources to the campaign in Gaza, intensifying military operations to try to achieve a more decisive outcome against Hamas.

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What online Jew-hate taught me about myself (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

As someone who studies psychology and influence, I have recognized in myself an interesting progression of reactions to the behavior I am seeing online.

Recently, I have experienced a deluge of hate on my posts unlike anything I had encountered before. In the past, almost all my online interactions were pleasant. Even people who disagreed with me or did not understand me were, for the most part, polite.

At first, I was startled by the amount and intensity of the hate. Why me? Why now? My content is written in the same style and tone it always has been. What changed?

Then I began to feel a little bit afraid.

We know that online interactions influence offline behavior. Incitement on the internet has led to real-world violence. Actual terror attacks. On the other end of hateful words and images, people have died. Others have been maimed for life.

I don’t believe that there is more Jew hate in the world than there was previously. I believe that following October 7^th it has again become socially acceptable to express it publicly. The success of the Gaza invasion awakened the darkness in the hearts of men, reigniting the hope that now, this time, the Jews could be stamped out of existence. Hope ignited the hate - stoked and honed by Qatari and Iranian propaganda that gave words and excuses to justify it.

And woke culture excitedly adopted the hate because destroying the Jews, the source of the ideas on which Western civilization was founded, makes it possible to destroy the West.

The hatred is everywhere, and it is often so intense and extreme that it becomes difficult to see the support, love, admiration, and compassion that also exist. Admittedly, I have pulled back from reading responses to my content because there is so much nastiness that it feels like wading through sewage. Why make myself dirty?

My emotions had progressed from startled to fearful to feeling defiled and disgusted.

It took me some time to decide what I actually thought about the hate I was seeing. My initial response was instinctive and emotional. Feeling rather than thinking.

What should I think about people who do not know me and yet feel entitled to send vile messages simply because I am a Jew, a Zionist, or an Israeli?

After some reflection, I reframed what I was seeing: bullies. Why should I be afraid of keyboard bullies who want to weaken my spirit?

There are actual people who want to kill me because I am Jewish and breathing. Iran. Hezbollah. Hamas. Real people with real weapons, real intent, and real capability.

Those are genuine threats.

Keyboard bullies are just that—bullies. And bullies are, at their core, cowards.

I have always despised bullies. Why should I help these bullies achieve what they want? Who are they to weaken my spirit?

Now I see these people differently.

Many of those expressing hate online strike me as reflections of poor education and poor upbringing. Some appear unable to comprehend the content they are responding to. Their comments bear little relation to what was actually written, like a student answering a completely different question than the one on the test.

Reading comprehension is such a basic skill... Life must be very difficult for those with such poor capabilities...

Others, with great pomposity, spout “facts” proving that, in addition to a poor grasp of the meaning of words (like indigenous), they have an astonishing ignorance of history, geography, religion, culture, or archaeology.

Sometimes the behavior is simply childish. One individual thought it brilliant to post the same curse dozens of times on a single post. I eventually deleted most of the comments, but not before taking a screenshot of some of them.

Many responses are rude and vulgar.

I find myself wondering: would this person's mother be proud of the way they communicate? Is this how they were raised?

I was taught to be polite. I was taught that if I have nothing nice to say, I should say nothing at all.

Why do these people think it’s their business to respond with something nasty, for example, in response to the death of a soldier? On my post, on my feed?

Would they walk into my home and say the same nasty thing to my face? What makes them respond rather than simply keep scrolling to something more to their taste?

I find this behavior bizarre.

Empty-headed people with no manners and no understanding of what shaped the world they live in, where their freedoms came from, or why these things matter.

Pathetic, weak-minded tools in the hands of terrorists much smarter than them…

I feel sorry for them. If they recognized themselves for what they are, could they live with themselves? I couldn’t.

I belong to the greatest love story humanity has ever seen, much bigger than my individual self. Much more important and influential than any one person. My existence in my ancestral homeland is the fulfillment of 2000 years of faith and dedication, dreaming, yearning, striving, teaching, sheer stubbornness, and never ever giving up.

And that is without me actually doing anything.

No wonder so many people hate us for being Jewish and alive. By simply breathing, we have already achieved more than they ever will. 

 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Amnesty fabricates charges against Israel that are unmoored from facts

Amnesty International announced a February report on the suffering of elderly Gazans, quoting the work of a humanitarian NGO called HelpAge International. 

In its religious zeal to demonize Israel, Amnesty claims the report says things it doesn't say.

The report, Pushed Beyond Their Limits: The survival of older people in Gaza, is a survey of 416 people aged 60 and above, conducted in November 2025 after the October ceasefire. It documents real hardship: chronic disease going unmanaged, medicines rationed, weight lost, families surviving on a single charity-kitchen meal a day.

Like virtually all NGO reports out of Gaza, HelpAge has some severe methodological problems. It built its sample by purposive selection — its own term — going to "neighbourhoods with a high concentration of displaced families" and to community centers where older people were most likely to be found, then applying convenience sampling on top of that. The methodology section concedes, on page 26, that "the findings may not be fully representative of all older people in Gaza" and that much of the data is self-reported, with the recall problems that come from asking traumatized people to remember conditions across two years of war. These are honest admissions. They are also fatal to any population-level reading of the numbers, because a survey that seeks out displaced families and then reports that 79 percent of respondents were displaced three or more times has partly measured its own recruitment strategy. The 76 percent living in tents is the same kind of figure — true of the sample, undefined for the population, because the sampling went looking for people living in tents. 

That's bad methodology, but at least the NGO admits it. It is ordinary advocacy-research drift, the sort of thing one expects and discounts. 

Amnesty's press release is a whole other story. 

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty's senior director of research, says "HelpAge International’s survey reveals how Israel’s ongoing unlawful, cruel and inhumane restrictions on the entry of life-saving aid have impacted older people’s ability to access critical healthcare and medications and has limited their access to nutritious food and to adequate shelter. "

HelpAge's report does not say any of this. This is Amnesty's fabrication. 

Some older Gazans said they had problems accessing medicines, but the reasons could be because of distribution problems, or Hamas and other armed gangs stealing aid to resell them, or transportation problems, or refrigeration issues, or infrastructure damage Israel strenuously denies blocking medical aid and provides documentation of how much aid enters Gaza. UN tracking data showed that the vast majority of aid trucks collected for distribution in mid-2025 never arrived at their destinations, recorded instead as intercepted or looted along the way.

Amnesty doesn't care. It is heavily invested in the "genocide" libel and it will make up facts to support it, even if it means claiming that an NGO report says things it does not say. 

Similarly, while HelpAge admits that its sampling methodology is not representative of all seniors in Gaza, Amnesty ignores that caveat, and says flatly "79% [of seniors]  have been displaced more than three times since October 2023" even though HelpAge says it was looking for people who were displaced, choosing "neighbourhoods with a high concentration of displaced families." 

This is Amnesty. Condemning Israel is the imperative; everything else must support that goal, facts be damned.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/01 Links Pt2: The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed; Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul; How Palestinianism wages war on Zionism and Jewish history

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed

It’s not that I don’t understand what is happening. Having watched a similar process take place within the GOP, the entire political world knows exactly what it’s seeing: The base sees every character flaw in a candidate as a feature not a bug; defeating the other party becomes a matter of life and death and therefore justifies any behavior; the party’s institutions get in line.

All of it is inexcusable but uncomplicated to decode.

And so progressives have made Platner the hero of the hour, a living idol and a human litmus test. Je suis Platner, they seem desperate to cry out. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ floor leader in the upper chamber, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jointly announced they’ll ensure Platner has all necessary resources to bring his Totenkopf to the halls of the Senate. And professional ex-Republicans fall all over themselves to prove their loyalty to their new party by saturating the punditry with anti-anti-Platnerism whose irony is apparently lost on them.

But the truly wild part of all of this is that rejecting Platner was supposed to be the absolute least that was expected of them. Platner wasn’t supposed to be the “country over party” test because it was too easy to mean anything. You weren’t supposed to deserve credit for rejecting Nazi iconography.

This weekend’s latest additions to Platner’s long list of scandals is that he was sexting up to a dozen women while married and had an active account on a singles’ site with a reported reputation for lax age-limit gatekeeping.

To add this to what we already know—the Nazi tattoo, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the racist postings, the cheering of the killing of U.S. soldiers, the fascination with violence, and all of the dishonesty about it—is to realize just how insane the conversation has become. Ideally, a person who criticizes Platner would prove nothing except that they are still human. Yet somehow we got to a point at which Platner’s denunciators truly do deserve praise because Democrats seek the political destruction of these dissenters. When Rep. Jake Auchincloss had the temerity to say the Nazi stuff was disqualifying, it was Auchincloss who was put on the defensive and made to explain himself.

Democrats have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Republican abuse of power, but it turns out they are far more afraid of what the progressive left is capable of once in power. That, at least, is the clear message they are broadcasting.

And so we are left begging for crumbs of decency. Yes, we say, it is brave to denounce Platner. And it is—because his party has made it so.

Nothing Is Disqualifying By Abe Greenwald

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If a Democrat has a shot at winning, he can do no wrong. Adam Hamawy volunteered with an al-Qaeda front group in Bosnia and was an associate of “the Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Today, Hamawy is in the lead for a New Jersey congressional seat and has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the newest neo-Squadnik, Ro Khanna.

Abdul El-Sayed is a strong contender in a Michigan Democratic primary battle despite his voicing sympathy for the mourners of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragging about smashing a bottle in a liquor store, struggling with Israel’s right to exist, and various disconcerting escapades.

Of course, the exemplar here is Zohran Mamdani. In his successful run for mayor of New York City, he showed that support for terrorist causes, involvement in anti-American activism, and staunch socialist zeal were more than acceptable in Democratic politics.

Platner represents something different from all these. His deficiencies aren’t foremost ideological or political. They’re deeply intrinsic to his character. He’s a messy amalgam of glowing red flags that, in everyday life, would signal, well, human garbage.

Like Nick Fuentes, Platner is at once a Nazi admirer and Communist sympathizer. He’s on record mocking a wounded U.S. soldier as a “Dumb motherf-----” who “didn't deserve to live.” Platner has said that women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f***ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” And he was most recently exposed for sexting with women on a hook-up app while married to his current wife.

With a guy like this, it’s a safe bet that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

It wasn’t long ago that a large majority of Democrats would simply recognize Platner as unfit to serve in the janitorial staff of the U.S. Senate, let alone as a senator.

Brendan O'Neill: Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul

That flag is so omnipresent that it feels like Ireland has been colonised again – not by the Brits this time but by that Euro-fervour of anti-Zionism. All of the most Guardian-approved, Shoreditch-thrilling Irish artists – Sally Rooney, Kneecap, the Mary Wallopers – bow obsequiously at the altar of Israelophobia.

It stinks up the political class, too. Indeed, just last week, Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, returned from one of those thwarted flotilla jollies to Gaza that the hyper-smug love to engage in. She said Israel behaves like a ‘Nazi state’. She described her brief detention in Israel as being akin to a ‘concentration camp’. She said she and her fellow seafaring narcissists ‘got a feeling of what the Jews felt like during the Second World War’. Comparing the two-day detainment of posh, well-fed mugs with the incarceration and burning to death of millions of Jews? There’s repugnant, then there’s that. Stay classy, Israel-haters.

Defamations against Israel fall from the mouth of every influencer here. Even a sports presenter, following the game with Qatar, could casually say on air that Israel is waging a ‘genocidal campaign’ in Gaza. Nothing to say about Qatar? The team we just played? Which funded the army of anti-Semites that killed more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis? Of course not. Israel is the all-consuming devil that stalks the fever dreams of Ireland’s pious. It is a substitute Satan in a post-Catholic land. You can’t even watch the footie here without being subjected to self-righteous homilies about the uniquely wicked nature of this far-off nation. It is relentless. It is exhausting.

And get this – the Irish men’s cricket team is due to play Afghanistan in Belfast in August. Do the sanctimonious of Dublin 4 long to stop that game too, in protest against the Afghan government’s violent gutting of women’s rights, its theft from women not only of the right to play sport but also of the right to show their faces in public, speak in public and attend schools and universities? Nope. There have been a few expressions of ‘moral discomfort’ about hosting the Afghanis but nothing like the orgy of moral inebriation that greeted the news that the Irish football team would play Israel. As I say, moral circuit boards fried, all over this isle.

Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul. The Irish establishment’s frothing animus for the Jewish state is an embarrassment to us Irish who refuse to convert to the cult of Israel-hate. It is disproportionate, hysterical, and so obviously driven by bigotry, meaning these people will go mental over a sports fixture against the Jewish nation but say nada about a sports fixture against an Islamist nation ruled by violent men who treat women like cattle. Let Ireland be a lesson – when you drink too heartily from the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, you lose your reason and decency. You become so consumed by hatred for a tiny foreign state that you let your own state go to moral rack and ruin.

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