10/25 Links: The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left; There is always an idiot in the room; Nas Daily: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

From Ian:

Welcome to the era of champagne jihadism

Forget champagne socialism, we are now in the era of champagne jihadism.

The GQ poster boy of this movement is multimillionaire Hasan Piker, who has proclaimed that America deserved 9/11, that his favourite flag is Hezbollah’s and that he would ‘vote for Hamas over Israel’. Awkwardly, if he lived under Hamas, he wouldn’t be able to vote for anyone.

Champagne jihadis needn’t actually believe in God, let alone Islam. They simply need an unshakeable conviction that the West (aka the Great Satan) is the root of all evil, and that anyone fighting it must therefore be on the side of good, no matter their methods.

You can find champagne jihadis speaking from positions of privilege throughout the West. They can be found cosplaying holy war by cheering on the ‘Glorious Martyrs’ of 7 October from the comfortable surrounds of £10,000-a-year Glasgow University, where they’re probably studying queer theory – sadly not on the syllabus at schools in Gaza. Or they can be seen in New York shouting ‘long live Hamas’ during a vigil organised by Israelis for Peace to remember the Israelis and Palestinians killed since 7 October.

More recently, as rioters destroyed French businesses and historic buildings, the champagne jihadis were seen bravely manning the barricades of their verified social-media accounts. ‘Capitalism doesn’t need your grief’, commented actress and sometime Dior model Christina Ricci beneath a post lamenting the looting of a Dior store in Paris. The champagne jihadi is, in fact, the ultimate capitalist, capable of commodifying absolutely anything, including the destruction of capitalism itself. No doubt Ricci’s next Dior campaign will feature her throwing a Dior J’adore Molotov cocktail at a cop car in a $710 DIO(R)EVOLUTION t-shirt.

But the rioters are not destroying capitalism – one Bangladeshi phone shop at a time – for the love of la patrie. They’re doing it for Palestine, the flag of which has largely replaced the tricolore during the riots. I support a free Palestine, but I’m not sure how destroying a North African man’s shop in the French capital helps achieve that. Whether it’s the suffering of ordinary Gazans under Hamas or the destruction of an immigrant’s livelihood in Paris, the revolution demands sacrifice. Preferably someone else’s.

Julie Burchill: The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left

The concept of ‘suicidal empathy’ is having a moment right now. Coined by Gad Saad in his book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, it’s defined by Wikipedia as ‘a purported phenomenon in which excessive, misdirected and pathological forms of empathy are destructive for the party that exhibits them’. We see it in Western countries, whose leaders tell their shivering populations that they’re not allowed to have cheap fossil fuels because of the polar bears. We see it in young liberal women, who would have a fit if a white man whistled at them, but bend over backwards to make men from rabidly misogynistic cultures welcome in their countries – and this despite the fact that we certainly don’t need to import sex offenders when we have enough of the homegrown kind.

In extreme cases of this lunacy, we see alleged feminists voluntarily donning the hijab – the living shroud that so many brave Muslim-born women have been tortured and killed for trying to cast off. There was a shocking example of this in 2017 when Sweden’s self-proclaimed ‘first feminist government in the world’ donned hijabs and chadors on a trade visit to Tehran, in order to make themselves fit to be seen by the righteous Muslims of the Islamic Republic. They did this shortly after promising to promote a ‘gender-equality perspective’ internationally and adopt a ‘feminist foreign policy’, while ignoring the appeal by the Persian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, who had specifically asked European female politicians to defy the hijab demands when visiting Iran. Also in 2017 there was the Washington ‘Women’s March’, which involved the grotesque spectacle of many non-Muslim women voluntarily hijabing-up.

We certainly see a massive dose of suicidal empathy among the Islamo-left, from Queers for Palestine – often mocked as Turkeys for Christmas – to Owen Jones. Jones probably thinks that he’s so unique that he could sprout wings and fly if he got thrown off a Gazan roof by the local gay-haters. Do these fools honestly believe that the facts about Hamas hating homosexuals are Israeli propaganda? Or are they so bound up in The Wonder Of Me, so convinced of their exceptionalism, that they are as deluded as that strange girl on TikTok, who mused on how she would be treated if taken hostage by Hamas: ‘They would probably comfort me, make sure I had medical attention, make sure I was doing okay…’

The message is loud, clear and strikingly ignorant. Other women / gays / infidels may get raped and / or murdered, but those big angry men would see me as special. We assume that such people are simply thick, or perhaps suffering from extreme narcissistic exceptionalism. A lot of them are mad at their parents and are acting up or acting out. Is it performative social masochism, in which liberal young white folk seek to outdo each other as if in some silly and sinister sport?

David Collier: There is always an idiot in the room

Brichto says he cares about every life. Yet when Jewish people gathered to discuss the hatred threatening theirs, he promoted a film demonising Israel, mocked those who had not seen it, and questioned their concern for others.

He could have listened. Instead, he made himself out to be morally superior to the others in the room.

This from a man who has campaigned with Zack Polanski, whose Green Party has now declared that ‘Zionism is Racism’.

And having watched Naza myself, my suggestion to those in the room would be: don’t bother.

Watch October 7 footage instead. That will tell you far more about the Jewish position in today’s world and the need for a strong and secure homeland.

In the meantime, Jewish families do not have to pass Adam Brichto’s test before their fears deserve to be heard.

Perhaps Brichto should spend less time mocking those who think differently from him and more time watching October 7 footage himself.

Maybe it would make him a little less of an idiot.

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Muslims massacre Christians at a church in Jordan? British-Palestinian scammer "scholar" blames the Jews!

Three gunmen killed eight churchgoers an injured dozens more during a funeral at a church in Karak, Jordan on Friday.

The terrorists have not been caught, so the motives are not yet known, although ISIS and Al Qaeda have both been blamed for other attacks on Christians in the past couple of decades.

Bu one British Palestinian writer who regards himself as a particularly clear thinker knows who is really behind it.

Professor. Dr. Makram Khoury-Machool, himself a Christian, writes in Rai Al Youm about "The Karak Church Massacre and the Geopolitical Plot!"

As a son of the Arab nation (and one who chooses to intervene politically on selected topics), I observe what is happening from a distance that sometimes allows me to be close and sometimes keeps me far enough to remain clear-headed, using my cold scientific tools and presenting my analysis according to the occasion and the form of the piece....

As scholars of radical extremism, fanaticism, and terrorism, we do not need a “source” to supply us with “information” confirming the involvement of the intelligence services of a neighboring state (or more) in this savage attack that targeted Jordan as a whole. Even if such a source agreed with what we are saying, it would not announce it, so as not to open a diplomatic crisis.

It is true that the massacre directly targeted Arab Christian mourners, but it is broader than that and falls within the geopolitical scheme that aims to empty the Mashriq of its indigenous Eastern Arab Christian component, so that the criminal Netanyahu can more easily portray the conflict as a religious one between “civilized Judaism” and “backward and violent Islam.”

The massacre falls within a project aimed at destabilizing Jordan, as previously happened in Karak in 2016 when ISIS claimed an attack there.

Just as happened in Iraq and Syria over the past two decades, where Christians were killed and displaced according to a broader scheme—this applies to Jordan today. The massacre in Jordan is one of the drawers in the plunderous settlement schemes in Hebron Governorate.

A savage crime of this type cannot be committed without being part of a “Zionist-ISIS” project or a specific, broader external direction.

Who is this clown?

Well, besides describing himself as possessing amazing scientific tools, he also emphasizes on his X and LinkedIn profiles that he is a "PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL." 

Anyone who needs to tell people that they are an intellectual is not confident enough in their writings to think that people would come to that conclusion themselves.

Of course, Khoury-Machool described October 7 as "heroic."  And it only took him two days to describe Israel's response as "genocide." 

Khoury-Machool is also the founder of the Cambridge Center for Palestine Studies. This gets really interesting.

The CCPS is not associated with Cambridge University. It was established in 2015 yet its webpage lists no papers, no research, no journal, nothing. Its list of activities is a list of things it plans to do, nothing that it did. It lists 28 "research clusters," all of which are empty. The entry for its "Library" says that researchers have (partial!) access to the library at Cambridge University.

However, it has a lot of boards! A Board of Patrons, Distinguished Diplomatic Board, Senior Academic Advisory Board, Academic Advisory Board, Senior Board of Practitioners, Board of Practitioners. Many prominent names there, including Richard Falk, Hanan Ashrawi and Joseph Massad.

So here's the scam: Khoury-Machool offers to these people a board set at the prestigious sounding Cambridge Center for Palestine Studies. They ask, what do they have to do? How often do they meet? What are their responsibilities? He answers, "Nothing at all! Just let me use your name and you can use the position title in your bio!" 

Every once in a while the CPS organizes a lecture in a room at some university, and pretends that this means it is associated with the university. (By that logic, I am associated with Yeshiva University and Bar-Ilan University because I've given speeches at both places when students got me a room.) 

In other words, this "public intellectual" is a scammer, raising funds for a research center that has done no published research in the decade of its existence.

I wonder how many other "research centers" are similar scams.

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10/24 Links: Realignment and the Realities of the Middle East; Inside Israel, I see how little haters worldwide understand this election; Ireland, You're Not the Hero You Think You Are

From Ian:

Realignment and the Realities of the Middle East

Most diplomats are judged by their ability to stay out of the news, but Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack made headlines this week. Speaking at the Global Security Forum in Doha, he said, "America as the guarantor to the world, for the last 80 years, it is no longer there." Accordingly, the United States is changing its posture in the Middle East. The old arrangement, under which Americans provided security for the region's oil exports, is being restructured. "What's happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It's a message for realignment."

Barrack did not announce a change in policy so much as describe a shift that many Americans have hoped would occur for decades. The U.S. military has enabled its regional allies to break Iran's chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, but if the allies themselves could keep the Middle East relatively tranquil and allow the oil to flow freely, it would relieve a massive headache for Washington. Saudi Arabia's attempt to stop the Houthis from menacing its territory and the Red Sea shipping lanes shows how difficult this will be to accomplish without first defeating Iran.

The Doha remarks did not announce an immediate withdrawal, and the United States is still very active in the region: The military continues to protect ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, a third aircraft-carrier strike group and another Marine expeditionary unit are on their way there as rumors swirl of intense American and Israeli preparations for a post-midterm strike on the Islamic Republic.

American military might is upsetting Iran's strategy of impoverishing the world by bottling up the Gulf's resources. Thanks to the courage and skill of our service members, and the technical wizards who have found ways to bypass the Strait, more oil is leaving the Gulf now than before the war with Iran began. Gas prices remain high, but the extra output should help drive that down.

America's regional allies are still growing increasingly concerned about our steadfastness. It is not easy to draw a straight line between the foreign policies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. And as the danger from Iran has grown, princes and presidents have tried to reduce the risk of abandonment. Trump is far more willing to confront Iran than any of his predecessors, but his successors will likely be more cautious, particularly if the political cost to this administration is high.

For most of the last decade, numerous allies have tried to tie themselves more closely to the American-led regional order. Most have sought firmer security guarantees. Last year, President Trump designated Saudi Arabia as a major non-NATO ally and stated in an executive order that the United States would defend Qatar if it is attacked. Many of the Abraham Accords nations began coordinating more openly with Israel on defense issues.

The Netherlands confronts Israel while hiding from its own Jewish history

On September 22 the Netherlands began enforcing a decree that makes it a crime, punishable by up to six years in prison, to buy or sell Israeli goods produced beyond the 1967 armistice line. Customs officers at Schiphol Airport are reportedly searching luggage from Tel Aviv for wine and dates. The government says it is meeting its obligations under international law.

No Dutch decree threatens prison for a bottle of Turkish wine from occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan phosphate from Western Sahara, or a cotton shirt from Xinjiang. China, Turkey, Morocco, and many other governments with disputed territory can sell freely in Amsterdam. Of all the countries in the world, the Netherlands wrote a criminal statute for exactly one, and it is the Jewish state.

From most European countries that would be ordinary bias or hypocrisy. From the Netherlands, it is something else. To explain why, we are compelled to share our own families' experience in the country we grew up in, and about what Anne Frank's diary left out.

Many know the Dutch from cheese, herring and Anne Frank. Two of those are accurate. The diary gave the world an image of ordinary Dutch people risking everything to hide a Jewish family. That story is true, but as a portrait of the nation it is almost exactly backwards. The helpers were real, but they were rare. The diary turned these singular saviors into the whole country, and the Dutch were happy to let that be the narrative.

Here is the rest. The Dutch Nazi party had over 75,000 active members during World War 2, several times the few tens of thousands who ever joined the resistance. After the war, 425,000 Dutch individuals were accused of active collaboration with the Nazis, which is nearly 5% of the wartime population.

The machinery of persecution in the Netherlands was Dutch
The Germans did not even bother with a military administration. Unlike France or Belgium, the Netherlands got a civilian one, and the machinery of persecution was Dutch. The municipal registry handed over every Jewish address. Local police carried out the raids. The Amsterdam tram company drove Jews to the collection points and billed the occupier for the fare. In 1943, Dutch civilians formed a unit to collect a German bounty for every Jew in hiding they turned in. The Frank family was discovered, likely on a Dutch tip, and sent through that machinery to Westerbork and then east.

Of about 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, roughly 102,000 were murdered, three in four, the highest rate in Western Europe. Dutch authorities often implemented the anti-Jewish orders with zeal. Fortunately for our families, that was not the whole population: thousands of Dutch citizens disobeyed their authorities and risked their lives for their Jewish neighbors. But they were the exception. Survivors, our grandparents among them, came home to find neighbors occupying their houses, and in 1946 the city sent them back tax bills covering the years they had spent in concentration camps. Amsterdam's tram company was still chasing the German government in 1947 for payment on its final deportation run. The Dutch government did not apologize for the treatment of its Jews until 2020.

None of this obliges the Dutch to admire Israel's government or policies towards the Palestinians, and we don't doubt that the images from the war in Gaza produced real revulsion. But something else happened underneath it. The Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once put it in a sentence: the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. If the Jewish state can be cast as the perpetrator of the age, then the descendants of the people it was built for are owed nothing, and the tax bills and the tram fares and the bounties are finally paid off. The Dutch found a way to liberate themselves from feeling guilty.

When NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, began describing Israel's conduct as "genocidal violence," following a report about Gazan casualties that turned out to be incorrect, leaked emails published online showed the editor-in-chief applauding the decision and justifying it by the lack of complaint emails it received. True, there aren't many Dutch Jews left to write them.

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10/23 Links Pt2: Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history; Douglas Murray: France is a warning – our civilisation is not immortal

From Ian:

Barack Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history

Never mind 3,000 years of Jewish history, two Temples in Jerusalem, or centuries of Jewish longing for Zion. In Obama’s telling, the Jews somehow became interlopers in their own land.
MORE DISTURBING still was Obama’s treatment of Palestinian violence.

Speaking about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Obama declared that “you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”

Think about that.

When terrorists murder approximately 1,200 people and kidnap 251, the principal issue is not whether their actions will produce meaningful political change. It is that they committed an act of unimaginable barbarity.

By discussing the massacre in terms of its political effectiveness, Obama risks reducing a moral atrocity to a tactical mistake. Would the slaughter have been any less reprehensible had Hamas managed to advance its political objectives?

Indeed, no political claim, no matter how loudly asserted, confers a license to murder families in their homes or drag hostages into Gaza.

And terrorism did not begin with Israel’s founding, let alone the 1967 war. In 1929, Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in Hebron, destroying an ancient Jewish community nearly two decades before independence.

WHAT OBAMA did in Belfast was more than distort Israel’s history. He turned the descendants of ancient Israel into trespassers in their own homeland, while treating the massacre of Jews as a failed political strategy.

Obama is, of course, entitled to his own opinions. But he is not entitled to his own version of history.

The Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel long before Barack Obama entered the world stage. And they will still be there long after his shameful revisionism has been forgotten.

The Fraud Squad By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
There’s a whole lot more to the curious case of Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a.k.a. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, but it’s best to let the feds sort all that out. The point is, she’s a phony, and she’s made a career of pointing at Israel, AIPAC, the Jews, and the United States to draw attention away from her own fishy shenanigans.

On to Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed describes himself as a doctor and physician, yet he’s never held a license to practice medicine. Lately, he’s been playing up his all-American roots, but he’s also claimed to be an Egyptian citizen. El-Sayed portrays himself as a humble Michigander in a Senate race against fat cat Mike Rogers, who owns a yacht in Florida. But El-Sayed is also rich. He and his wife own properties around the world, including a place in Dubai. When asked about his family’s documented links to the Muslim Brotherhood, he simply lies. So, once again, a con artist.

And, once again, an Israel-hater and terrorist sympathizer. Like Omar, he attacks Israel and AIPAC to cast himself as a saint who wants to ensure that American resources go to Americans in need.

All the flimflam artists are on the same page these days, and it doesn’t matter if they’re associated with the “left” or “right.” Rich-kid socialists think that screaming “intifada” loud enough can drown out those calling them hypocrites. Democrats and liberal journalists regularly stage run-ins with Jews in Judea and Samaria to boost their resistance credibility. Hasan Piker—the Maoist with the $200,000 Porsche—says Israel is worse than Hamas. Tucker Carlson—who claims to have physically wrestled with demons in his bed—peddles Putin propaganda, nicotine pouches, and Jew-hatred. When Nick Fuentes inadvertently streamed himself watching gay porn, he blamed it on Zionist saboteurs.

At least these charlatans and imposters are getting something out of the anti-Semitism racket. Their earnest supporters and fans are just dupes.

Jonathan Tobin: Amanpour leaves ‘CNN,’ but a legacy of anti-Israel media bias remains

Amanpour may like to claim that she was “fiercely independent” and devoted to the facts, though that has never been true of her work. And there is no better illustration than the way she has used her influential perch to skew coverage against the State of Israel, and to depict it and its people as uniquely evil and almost always in the wrong.

Her bosses at CNN and elsewhere have not only tolerated her bias but encouraged it. Indeed, if she’s a role model for the rising generation of the press, it’s because she has practiced a form of journalism and reporting the news from her own biased perspective. From the time she first became a star during the First Gulf War to the present, Amanpour turned the skewing of stories into an art form. She always managed to make whatever she reported conform to her pre-existing ideas about the good guys to be extolled and the bad guys to be vilified.

Coverage of Israel and its ongoing battle for survival against Arab and Muslim opponents who want to destroy it demonstrated this regularly.

The list of outrageous examples of her anti-Israel bias is too long to relate here. Those who want to take a deep dive into the extensive catalogue of her journalistic malpractice can visit the CAMERA media monitoring organization’s website page devoted to her for a taste of the consistent way in which she misrepresented the truth when it came to anything about the Jewish state.

Some of the highlights include incidents such as when she said on air on Oct. 25, 2025 that the Israeli hostages held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, who were tortured, raped and starved by the terrorists, “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” Never mind that some of the hostages were actually being abused while held captive by “average Gazans.” While she was later forced to retract that lie, it was in line with the way she and others in corporate media became stenographers for Hamas, accepting every false claim the terrorist organization made, while treating anything coming from Israel with the deepest skepticism.

In 2024, she compared Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, currently serving a life sentence for five murders, to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years until he was freed and eventually became that country’s first black president.

Her toying with the truth didn’t begin on Oct. 7.

Six months earlier, during Passover, she described a terror attack in Judea and Samaria of a Jewish family in which the wife and two daughters of Rabbi Leo Dee—Lucy Dee, and daughters Maia and Rina—who were ambushed and shot and killed while driving in their car as being a “shootout.” She apologized for this, but the instances in which she “misspoke” (most of which never generated retractions) almost always demonstrated outrageous bias against Jews.

Years before that, she provoked justified anger from the pro-Israel community for her 2007 CNN documentary series “God’s Jewish Warriors.” It depicted all Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria, as well as their supporters, as mad fanatics. The series never acknowledges the Islamist extremism that defines mainstream Palestinian Arab opinion and that has impelled them to reject every attempt at compromise for a century.

Amanpour never hesitated to demonize Israelis. She also played fast and loose with Jewish history. In 2020, she compared President Donald Trump to German Nazis who perpetrated the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, a year before the start of World War II. Under pressure, she again apologized, though later retracted the apology.

In this, Amanpour was a forerunner for what would eventually become standard practice at liberal outlets like CNN or The New York Times. It’s an era in which a new generation of journalists considers it to be their obligation to promote their conception of woke truth, regardless of the facts, and dismiss efforts at objectivity and reporting both sides of a story as the “neutrality” she disdains.

And that’s why she fears any effort to return CNN or any other outlet to upholding honest journalism by Weiss and Ellison.

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10/23 Links Pt1: Two IDF soldiers killed in terrorist shooting near Hebron; Israel’s democracy is strong, even though extremists want to test it; The Daily Caller’s “Jewish Influence” Problem

From Ian:

Danny Danon: Israel’s democracy is strong, even though extremists want to test it

The coming Israeli elections must be understood in this broader context. Extremist forces seek to intimidate voters, spread disinformation, provoke a security crisis and exploit divisions within society. Their objective is to weaken democratic institutions and convince citizens that they cannot determine their own future.

Israel’s response must be clear: Our democratic process will continue, and our citizens will make their choices freely. We will defend our security without surrendering our democratic character.

There is also an important contrast closer to home.

The Palestinian Authority recently announced another postponement of its elections. Its nearly 91-year-old leader, Mahmoud Abbas, will continue the four-year term that began in 2005. The last Palestinian legislative elections, held in 2006, resulted in a Hamas victory in Gaza, when the terrorist organization took over the Strip. The P.A. has not held national elections since.

Even though the P.A. tries to blame the delay on Israel, the real reason is clear: It is afraid that Hamas could win again. Indeed, the P.A. understands that Hamas’s radical ideology is taught in its own schools.

Palestinian children should not be taught that Israel has no right to exist or that terrorism offers a path to victory. The P.A. cannot credibly claim to promote peace while rewarding those who murder Israeli civilians.

Postponing elections does not eliminate extremism. Avoiding a confrontation with radical ideology does not make it disappear. It only allows the problem to grow.

Israel offers a different example. Elections are not a sign that we are free of political divisions or security threats. They demonstrate that even under extraordinary pressure, democratic institutions remain standing. The ability to disagree, campaign and choose new leadership is a source of national strength.

That is the future the Middle East needs more of, not less.

The Abraham Accords have shown that cooperation between Israel and regional partners, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, is possible. These agreements offer an alternative to the extremists’ vision: a region where countries pursue shared interests, economic opportunity and stability, rather than permanent conflict.

The choice facing the region is stark. We can confront radicalization, strengthen democratic institutions and build partnerships that create a better future. Or we can allow extremists to dictate the terms of our lives.

As Israel approaches its elections, our message to Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and every other extremist force is unequivocal: You will not decide Israel’s future. That decision belongs to the Israeli people.

Our message to the international community is just as clear: Defending democracy requires more than praising it in speeches. It requires confronting those who threaten it, refusing to normalize terrorism and demanding accountability from leaders who deny their people the right to choose.

Israel will continue to defend its citizens, protect its democracy and pursue peace with those willing to build it. The radicals may try to test our resolve. They will not be allowed to determine our future.

Fueled by a life's mission, Netanyahu asks Israelis for more time to 'finish the job' against Iran It was 2:14 a.m., and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to know whether we were tired.

He had just turned 77. Members of his staff were dozing on couches and chairs. Netanyahu was alert, focused, and apparently in no hurry to end the night. We admitted that we were probably more tired than he was.

“You’re not the first to say that.”

A little earlier, his staff had surprised him with a birthday celebration: krembos, the chocolate-covered marshmallow treats; along with chocolates and gummies; and an individual tiramisu for the prime minister. He ate it with evident enjoyment.

Outside, aides had been searching for “the chair,” the one he preferred sitting in. Even at this hour, the small machinery of looking after a prime minister kept turning.

Some of those around him had spent years at his side. They brought drinks, attended to him, and spoke with the conviction that he would win again. They believed Israel needed him. Netanyahu himself would give us a less comfortable assessment of the race.

How did it feel to be 77? “Feels fine. If you know what you’re about, and you have good health and a lot of energy, and a purpose.”

That word, “purpose,” came up repeatedly during the next half-hour. So did Iran, US President Donald Trump, and the danger Netanyahu saw in handing the country to someone else. With the October 27 election approaching, he was asking voters to let him finish work that he regards as the reason for his political life.

His partnership with Trump was central to that request. We wanted to know how his case would hold up when the American president was someone else.

Netanyahu: Iran does not want me elected
Could Iran attack before the election? Could Israel strike first?

Netanyahu said military intelligence and the Mossad had delivered “clear warnings” that Iran and its proxies were considering ways to influence the vote.

“They don’t want me elected.”

He suggested rockets or drones could be used to puncture Israelis’ confidence in the military campaign’s achievements. “If they do, it’ll be a big mistake because we’ll respond with force and might they cannot even imagine.”

People on his team, speaking on background, separately told us that current senior defense officials had contacted Netanyahu to say he needed to win because Israel’s enemies would see his defeat as their success. They also described serious security threats in the near future. That account of private conversations has not been independently verified.

Netanyahu moved quickly through the destruction of enemy capabilities and the killing of their leaders. October 7 was the starting point of his account of Israel’s recovery; the failures that permitted the attack under his government received little attention.

Iran still had capabilities, we pointed out. He acknowledged that it did. For as long as its present leadership survived, he argued, it would try to rebuild its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

“My purpose is to break Iran’s murderous regime, remove the threat from our heads, and have multiple peace treaties.”

Finishing the job, by that definition, would require an outcome extending far beyond another successful strike.

October 7 victims’ families sue Meta for streaming footage of murders and abductions

Families of people killed or abducted in the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, are suing Meta for over $1 billion for letting footage of the attacks play live on social media and then failing to remove it immediately.

Some of the terrorists who stormed southern Israel streamed the footage via victims’ phones onto the victims’ social media pages. The hours that passed until the footage was removed allowed it to be widely distributed.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says it takes down content that praises Hamas or October 7, and that “following the attacks, designated teams worked around the clock in real time to remove content that violates our policy.”

The Tel Aviv District Court on Monday held a preliminary hearing on the class action lawsuit that was filed in August last year, and proposed the sides pursue mediation, according to Israel Hayom.

One of the plaintiffs, Mor Bayder, said in an interview broadcast by Channel 12 Thursday that she watched in real time on Facebook as her 74-year-old grandmother Bracha Levinson was murdered in her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.

It took Meta several hours to block Levinson’s Facebook page, where the video played, and an entire day to remove the footage altogether, according to Channel 12.

“This isn’t some horror show. It’s not some movie. It’s my grandmother — my grandmother who’s being murdered,” Bayder told the network. “My grandmother can’t be brought back. Her case can’t be changed anymore… but going forward they should draw conclusions, learn, upgrade, admit responsibility and apply it to all users.”

Other plaintiffs include the family of Tsachi Idan, who was killed in captivity after terrorists stormed his Kibbutz Nahal Oz home and murdered his daughter Maayan while livestreaming the attack on his wife’s Facebook account; and Stav Arava, who watched on his mother Dikla’s Facebook page as she, his brother Tomer and Dikla’s partner Noam Elyakim were murdered and Noam’s young daughters Dafna and Ela were abducted, also in Nahal Oz.

The plaintiffs also include hostages and their families whose identities are sealed, as well as Israeli social media users who were exposed to the livestreams.

Plaintiffs demand Meta pay NIS 200,000 ($64,335) to every relative or close friend exposed to a livestream of a victim’s death, and NIS 20,000 for every Israeli social media user exposed to such content on Meta’s platforms.

Dana Shahar Yanai, who is representing the class of Israeli social media users in the lawsuit, told Israel Hayom this week that Meta not only failed to prevent the livestreams, “it even made a profit from the traffic that day.”

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Terrorists love Navi Pillay

The Jerusalem Post reported October 13:

Hamas praised the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay in a statement issued on Friday, citing her role in advancing accusations of genocide against Israel and calling for international legal action against Israeli officials.

In its statement, Hamas described the award as "an important step toward international justice," praising Pillay's involvement in investigating Israel's military operations in Gaza and calling for further international legal action against Israeli officials.

Even more interesting is how the Islamic Jihad news site Palestine Today honored her: with a dedicated infographic praising her.

This is shown on their front page, along with praise for today's terrorist attack in Hebron:

As well as another infographic celebrating the terror organization's 39th anniversary of "jihad and resistance:"

She has good company.

 

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10/22 Links Pt2: The anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust is all around us; The delusional vanity of the Sally Rooney cult; Bank of Israel projects 5.6% GDP growth in 2026, 7.5% next year

From Ian:

The anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust is all around us

As Marian Turski, a survivor and historian, said: “Auschwitz did not fall suddenly from the sky.” And the anti-Semitism that fuelled these atrocities sadly does not belong to the past. It is a virus that may lay dormant for a while but is so easily activated, as it has been in recent years.

Is it any surprise that a report by the former Ofsted chief inspector Sir David Bell has found anti-Semitism on the rise in schools, with three in five Jewish pupils saying they have experienced it. Mostly it goes unreported. Anti-Semitism has become an everyday quasi-acceptable form of racism that has been ignored for too long. This predates the current Israel-Gaza situation though of course has been exacerbated by it.

For years many have simply shut their eyes. Once, when my middle daughter was rude to teachers at our local state school, her punishment was to be excluded from Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. Yes, really. That day had low attendance anyway because many Muslim parents did not send their kids in.

Some teachers would turn the day into lessons about the Rwandan genocide. This has become fashionable; we talk of genocides in plural to deny the specificity of what happened to Jews in Europe. There is an effort to make the suffering equitable somehow. There can never be anything special about Jews or what happened to them. Or why it happened or the way it happened: the industrialised slaughter, the chimneys ever burning, the mothers running into the electric fences after their children had been taken away to be experimented on.

The shame is that at the time so many looked away. Years before anyone got to Auschwitz, Jews had been rounded up, walled into ghettos, deported, dehumanised. This was not secret.

To begin to understand how this happened, we only have to look around us, to the barricaded synagogues of most European cities, to the 24-hour security protecting schools here, to recent attacks. Many Jewish people are horrified by what the current Israeli government is doing but are somehow held responsible for it unless they entirely disassociate themselves from Israel. Where is their right to exist as complex individuals? The Nazis remember, whenever they found a Jew with a non-Jewish name, added Israel into that name. This precedes 1948.

There has thankfully been widespread abhorrence at the Greens’ “Zionism is Racism” motion but surely, even a few years ago, such an idea would have held no sway at all. When you look back in history at the junctures at which anti-Semitism rises and compare them to the recent past, the signs are unmistakable – even if there has been widespread denial of this, because… Gaza.

The shock of Auschwitz is that it is all so ordered, that it forces you to think of what happened before anyone arrived there and who turned a blind eye to what was happening. It is not just children who need to be taught this but their teachers, who in their anti-racist zeal are somehow teaching “the Nazis” while themselves denying, ignoring or even encouraging the hatred that the Nazis fed on.

None of this is about turning Jews into eternal victims, it is about being alert to the conditions in which anti-Semitism thrives.

One doesn’t have to go to Auschwitz to see this, but every survivor tells us to look for the signs of indifference and exclusion that led to the death camps.

The least we can do is to understand that those signs are all around us.

The Beginning of the End of the Lies By Abe Greenwald

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All sorts of pivotal truths have recently been coming to light. On the third anniversary of October 7, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outed himself as an undeniable anti-Semite with a social media screed attacking Israel for supposed war crimes. Jews, liberals, and even friendly media noticed.

The next day, Ukraine launched drone strikes that significantly damaged three Yandex data centers in Russia. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted days later. “There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” The hate and division have probably returned already, but the successful strikes offered a small hint at how much online propaganda is a function of foreign influence. On X, there has since emerged a viral “I’m a Zionist” trend, and it’s still going strong.

Roughly a week ago, France began to unravel as rioters looted and burned city after city. The country, whose leaders promote Palestinianism, anti-Americanism, and Islamist Jew-hatred, was exposed as a demographic and economic basket case. One could see above the scenes of charred wreckage the official symbol of indiscriminate upheaval, the Palestinian flag. Before the Lebanese Civil War, people liked to call Beirut “the Paris of the East.” Since then, Paris has become the Beirut of the West. The only question now is which European city turns into its Damascus or Jenin.

The truth is often disturbing but always necessary. Its revelation brings reality back into focus. I appreciate such moments. When Hunter Biden’s laptop was found to be legitimate; when Russiagate was discredited; when it became clear that Joe Biden was cognitively unfit for office; when Graham Platner was exposed as a creep; when Anthony Fauci was shown to have buried the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins; when Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, was uncovered as a sexual predator attacking Israel as a distraction—truth bombs with the potential to right wrongs.

Of course, the usual parties are still doing their best to contain explosive truths from detonating. The media decided that the French riots were mostly peaceful student protests. Last night, Chris Hayes tried his best to portray Omar as the victim of crazy bigots, and this morning, ABC News claimed that there’s no evidence of El-Sayed’s ties to Islamic extremists. That’s okay. The propagandists played this game with Biden, Fauci, and Platner, too, and then they were unmasked along with their wards.

I’m even going to allow myself some modest expectation of truth about Israel. Hamas’s October 7 attack inaugurated a dark age of sinister lies about the Jewish state and flattering lies about its enemies. The latter are nearing a kind of reckoning. With a little luck, that just might begin to expose the former.

Douglas Murray: If countries like France don't confront and remove those who hate them, there will be nothing left of them but a beautiful name

When I say it does not take a historian to understand what is going on this month, I mean that identifying what is fuelling these protests requires nothing more than having eyes. Yes, there are students involved. But hardened adult rioters have moved in and stoked unrest to its current level of conflagration. The result has been apocalyptic scenes, including the burning down of the historic town hall in Limoges and the ransacking of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

Those responsible are not students demanding better mathematics instruction. They are far-Left activists, anti-capitalists, green activists and Palestine fetishists.

Importing generations of people who have no loyalty to or love for the country, many of whom desire to burn it down, has contributed to France’s climate of disorder. The snarky, Schadenfreude-filled nature of much of the international commentary is itself sickening.

‘The French voted for this,’ many online warriors have said as they watched tearful French shopkeepers trying to stop mobs from destroying their livelihoods.

But that is not true. The French public never voted for this. Like their counterparts across Europe, in Britain and in America, the public has consistently voted for governments that promised to secure the nation’s borders, maintain order on the streets, and prevent the civil-war scenarios so many people, inside and outside the country, have warned about.

Their leaders simply never heeded them, or failed trying.

And gosh, have there been warnings. In 2021, dozens of retired generals and high-ranking officers from the French army signed a letter warning that, unless the French government got control of the immigration and integration failures that had roiled their country, civil war was a possibility.

The government and media might have considered that these men had a point. But the French authorities took the other option, the same one chosen by governments across Europe – they shot the messengers. Not literally. They merely hounded the signatories, stripped many of their pensions, slandered them and more. This is the modern equivalent of carrying out a punishment beating pour encourager les autres.

If France cannot protect its Jews, European order may soon fall alongside it

France protects Jewish rights with armed guards
Edmund Burke, watching the Revolution from across the Channel, warned that "rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years." France crossed that line this weekend, in Limoges and elsewhere.

For French Jews, this is not abstract. In 1791, France became the first country in Europe to grant Jews full civil rights. It was the Revolution's noblest promise. Today that promise is guarded by soldiers. The interior ministry recorded 1,320 antisemitic incidents last year, more than half of all anti-religious acts in the country. Armed guards outside Jewish schools have become as ordinary as bus stops. France deserves credit for providing that protection. But a guard at a school gate is a symptom, not a cure. A community that can only pray under protection is not fully free.

The political climate has not helped. Debate about Israel in France has too often slid from criticism into something cruder, and the line between opposing a foreign government and resenting one's Jewish neighbors has blurred. When the street becomes the arena of politics, those already marked as targets are the first to feel it.

We have seen this before. In 1819, the Hep-Hep riots swept the German states, and mobs angry at Jewish emancipation attacked Jewish homes and shops. France in 2026 is not Germany in 1819. But the lesson holds: when the authorities lose the street, minorities lose their safety first, and everyone else loses it soon after.

If France cannot keep the peace, Europe may follow behind it
That is why my concern is not only for Jews. France is the keystone of Europe's political and economic order. If Paris cannot keep the peace, Europe's confidence in its own institutions will crack with it. Order is not the enemy of liberty. It is the condition for it.

Three things must follow. Those who burned and looted must face justice, swiftly and visibly. The ransacking at Ohalei Yaakov must be fully investigated, whatever the motive turns out to be. And French leaders across the spectrum must stop treating the street as a legitimate extension of parliament.

France gave Europe the Rights of Man. It must now prove it can guarantee them on an ordinary Saturday night.

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10/22 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: The war against the Jews in Judea and Samaria; Who made Gaza hospitals and homes targets?; Hamas threatens another Oct. 7-style attack

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The war against the Jews in Judea and Samaria

Every year, the olive harvest attracts activists to “help the Palestinians pick their olives,” and every year there are confrontations.

Naomi Linder Kahn, director of the international division at the Judea and Samaria monitoring group Regavim, says some foreign-funded groups use the olive harvest to provoke confrontations.

“They don’t give activists buckets for harvesting olives,” she said. “What they give them is video cameras, and they give them lessons in social media and … how to provoke a confrontation, how to present yourself when you’re trying to get into Israel, to misrepresent what you’re coming for and where you’re going to be.”

Brad Lander, the Democratic nominee for a congressional seat in New York, was among a group of around 80 Americans and others detained for some hours by the IDF this week after the group arrived “to harvest olives” alongside Arab farmers without requesting Israeli permission.

“The plot in question requires only a small number of harvesters to collect its produce,” an Israeli military official told JNS. “The security establishment views the arrival of dozens of activists as an act intended solely to provoke, which undermines the harvesting process.”

Lander is Jewish, but he is no friend of Israel. He has accused the country of “genocide” and has called Israel’s occupation of the West Bank “a crime under international law.” These claims are lies designed to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state in the eyes of the world.

Earlier this week, Lander said he was visiting to help Arab farmers harvest olives “in the face of state-sanctioned settler terrorism” and to “shed a light on the reality of the occupation.” If anyone thinks this group wasn’t there to foment trouble for the Israelis, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

It’s difficult to discover what truly happens in many of these incidents, so an open mind is necessary. There is indeed a problem of Jewish attacks on Arabs that have not been stopped; they are disgraceful, and the Israelis need to shut them down.

But there can be no justification for Western media and politicians failing to acknowledge this Arab terrorist war being waged against Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria. Such radically skewed reporting has turned half a million overwhelmingly upstanding and besieged Jews into enemies of humanity—just as Israel has been treated in its war against Iran.

However, in addition to failing to deal adequately with the problem of delinquent “hilltop youth” or the provocateurs, the Israelis themselves hardly ever mention this Arab onslaught in Judea and Samaria.

There are various possible reasons for this. First, the degree of truth in the “settler violence” claims puts them on the back foot.

Second, they are under huge pressure over this from the Trump administration and don’t want to irritate it further by introducing the inconvenient complexity of Jewish victimization.

Third, among the Israeli top brass, there are some who even now hanker for a “two-state solution” and view the settlers as the obstacle.

Last, but not least, the Israelis want to brush this issue away as of no real consequence. As ever, they dismiss Western public opinion as irredeemably hateful toward the Jewish people and so think myopically that trying to appease it is a waste of time.

They believe that they have more urgent issues to deal with, including the renewed threats from Iran, Gaza and Lebanon. They also fear that a third and even more terrible intifada is being plotted by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, along with the Palestinian Authority’s force of 60,000 armed men.

If that fearsome threat were to be realized, the combination of Western malice toward the “settlers” and Israel’s negligence in how it presents itself to the world means that once again, the Jews of Israel would be blamed for their own destruction.

Michael Doran: Is There an Effective ‘America First’ Position on Israel?

That is the danger posed by the groypers. They do not merely question American policy toward Israel. They portray Jewish Americans as members of an alien interest group whose participation in national affairs is inherently suspect. Their conspiracy theories transform disagreements over policy into accusations of divided loyalty.

The American constitutional inheritance supplies a different principle. Religious, ethnic, and cultural communities are indispensable parts of American life. They have every right to preserve their traditions, organize their institutions, and pursue their interests. But none owns the republic. The state belongs to citizens as citizens, not to Christians, Jews, whites, Blacks, or any other group.

This is also where national conservatism’s intellectual project becomes relevant. Hazony has spent years challenging interpretations of the founding that emphasize John Locke and liberal political philosophy, preferring an account rooted in biblical political thought, English constitutional tradition, and Edmund Burke. Other postliberal thinkers, including Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, advance different but overlapping critiques of liberalism.

These disagreements need not be settled here. The question is not whether Locke or Burke deserves more credit for the American founding, nor whether Christianity contributed profoundly to American civilization. Of course it did. The real question is this: What do national conservatives intend to conserve? The Declaration, the Constitution, and Washington’s understanding of citizenship are the crown jewels of the American inheritance. Their principles make possible a political community whose members need not agree about theology, ancestry, or philosophy to belong to the same nation.

The groyper movement offers not an escape from progressive identity politics, but a rival version of it. Where progressives organize political claims around groups they regard as historically disadvantaged, the groypers define the nation through an exclusionary conception of its traditional majority. The identities change, but the underlying contest remains: Which ethnic and religious groups possess the greatest claims to political authority? The founding offers a different answer. Political rights do not belong to a religious or ethnic faction. They belong to citizens.

This brings us back to the disagreement between Trump and Vance. Trump’s understanding of America First, as expressed in his defense of the Israeli partnership, begins with a calculation of American power and interests. Israel’s military capabilities, intelligence, technology, and willingness to fight are strategic assets. Their value does not depend on the religion of the Americans who defend the alliance.

The conspiracy theory promoted by Carlson and Fuentes substitutes a different test. It asks whose influence lies behind American policy, assigning sinister significance to Jewish identity. In doing so, it corrupts strategic judgment while undermining the common citizenship on which a broad American political coalition depends.

Vance’s continued relationship with Carlson, and the efforts of Roberts and Hazony to maintain connections across the nationalist movement bring these competing approaches into serious tension. We have no reason to doubt their stated opposition to antisemitism. But their political and intellectual commitments provide them with no potent ideological ammunition with which to fight it.

Washington supplied that ammunition two centuries ago. He did not address the Jews of Newport as a tolerated minority living under the indulgence of a Christian nation. He addressed them as fellow citizens possessing the same rights as their neighbors. That distinction remains decisive. A capable ally strengthens the United States. The religion of American citizens does not diminish their standing at home. A conservatism that defends neither allies nor the full rights of all citizens will fail to conserve the American inheritance. It will merely manage its replacement.

The Fighting Jews

The best museum in Israel—or at least the best-kept secret—isn’t in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. It’s in Latrun, roughly halfway between the country’s two largest cities. To get to it, you have to exit the highway, circle through a gas station, and dart down a dusty one-lane road until you see a large gate. Honk, and ask the armed guard to open up: You’re about to enter an Israel Defense Forces base. Once inside, park the car, behold the gorgeous and meticulously planned landscaping, and exhale: You’ve arrived at the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II.

Inside, interactive displays tell the story of the 1.5 million Jewish men and women from all over the world who fought to defeat the Nazis. Using state-of-the-art technology to build gorgeous and immersive galleries, the museum allows visitors to marvel at the scope of the global Jewish community’s sacrifice and follow the touching stories of individuals who risked all for freedom. Here, for example, is a dashing young man with an Errol Flynn mustache, a coy smile, and a white tie. Touch his picture, and you’ll learn that when the war broke out, the young man suspended his studies at the University of Cambridge, reported to the Mons Officer Cadet School, and completed his training as an intelligence officer. He spent most of the war interrogating German prisoners, including Heinrich Himmler. When the war ended, he moved to Israel, helped set up the IDF’s intelligence branch, and eventually became the nation’s sixth president.

But while Chaim Herzog and his story are celebrated—the museum, indeed, is named after him—other stories on tap are less known and just as invigorating. One display, for example, is dedicated to the Aboulker family. On Nov. 7, 1942, this prominent Algerian Jewish family recruited a force of 377 resistance fighters, of whom 315 were Jewish. Wearing fake uniforms and flashing fake orders, they marched right up to the Vichy military command and demanded its immediate surrender. The ruse was successful: The Aboulkers captured the police station, the radio station, and all other strategic assets, then radioed the Allies and informed them it was safe to enter. As a result, Algiers was liberated overnight.

Walk through the museum, and it won’t take long before a radically different emotion takes over: pride, even joy, for being brave, for being right, for winning.

Each of these stories is moving, and you could easily spend a day at the museum swiping from one to the next. But take a step back, and the scope of Jewish bravery is revealed. Let’s say, based on a crude calculation, there were 18 million Jews in the world when the war started. If 6 million were murdered by the Nazis, and if you don’t count the elderly and the underage, you end up with something like 4 million Jews. Which means that nearly a third of all capable Jews alive in the world in the late 1930s and early 1940s put their lives on hold and joined the fight; more, by far, than any other group anywhere in the world.

Sharing this statistic still makes Zvi Kantor’s eyes misty. A lifelong soldier—he retired from the IDF as a brigadier general in 1999—Kantor was drawn to starting and running the museum, he says, out of sheer ignorance.

“As a sabra, an Israeli-born kid who came of age with the state, I was brought up to believe that us Israelis were the main attraction, and everyone else was secondary,” Kantor said. “For us, the story of Jews in World War II was the story of the Holocaust. And if we thought about Jewish resistance, we thought about the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion, Hannah Szenes parachuting into enemy territory, the Partisans, and the Jewish Brigade of volunteers. That’s it.”

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Style Reminder: Please Use 'Settler' For Jews, 'Immigrant' For Anyone Else (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Style Reminder: Please Use 'Settler' For Jews, 'Immigrant' For Anyone Else

By the Standards Editor, The Guardian

London, 22 October - It has come to the Editorial Board's attention that some writers employ terminology that runs afoul of the standards this publication demands for purposes of journalistic objectivity - with a specific lapse in the proper application of "settler" as referring only to Jews or Israelis, and "migrant" or "immigrant" as referring to others.

Going forward, we expect strict adherence to this policy. Any writer who fails to use the neutral "migrant" or sympathetic "immigrant" when discussing those who come to Western countries - even if representatives of those migrants explicitly call their movements "conquest" - will face disciplinary measures. While only applicable in a relatively small number of cases, we will also accept "asylum seeker" as the default description of non-Europeans moving to Europe.

This does not hold true in the slightest when writing about Jews who live in the ancestral Jewish homeland, and certainly not about the Jews who moved to, or were raised in, the parts of that homeland that Jordan, Egypt, or Syria conquered in 1948. The only acceptable descriptor for such people remains "settler," regardless of the background of their presence in that territory. Arabs who moved to that territory any time before June 1967, whether under Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, British, or Ottoman rule, will under no circumstances be called "settlers," while Jews who moved there, no matter when, were and will always be "settlers."

Please also refrain from referring to Jews who, just before, during, and right after the Holocaust, had nowhere safe to go because no country would admit them - including the British who controlled Palestine at the time - as "refugees." Such sympathetic terminology violates the neutral objectivity incumbent on a Guardian journalist.

On the other hand, Arabs who fled Palestine when Israel was established, and their descendants in perpetuity, will continue to carry the designation "refugee," even while refugees from other conflicts cannot, under international conventions, bequeath refugee status to offspring who are not, themselves, fleeing the conflict.

For the avoidance of doubt, the same discipline applies to historical framing. European-descended populations in the Americas, Australia, or New Zealand may still be described as settlers where the established literature does so. No equivalent latitude exists for Jews in the places of documented Jewish continuity. Attempts to align the vocabulary across these cases will be treated as a failure of objectivity. Copy that observes the distinction as drawn will proceed; copy that does not will be returned. These rules exist to protect the clarity and impartiality our readers expect.

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The Friends and Foes Test: A question every national candidate should have to answer

Yesterday, Congressional candidate Brad Lander was briefly detained during a visit to the Palestinian territories ostensibly to help Palestinians pick olives. He used this incident, two weeks before the election,  as a reason to vote for him in New York, slamming the Israelis for their conduct. 

Clearly Lander seems to prioritize support for Palestinians as one of his most important and distinguishing features. 

The question that is rarely asked of candidates, either pro- or  anti-Israel, is how they compare Israel to any other country in their foreign policy. 

Israel's actions are routinely condemned, its morality questioned, its relationship with the United States challenged. Or we hear statements about special the relationship is between the US and Israel. But compared to whom? The implicit assumption is often that Israel is uniquely evil, or uniquely undeserving of American support, or on the other hand uniquely important. Yet nobody seems particularly interested in establishing a baseline.

Here's a simple proposal. Every candidate for national political office should be asked to answer one question:

Rank the following countries and political entities from most to least deserving of America's friendship and support:

• Brazil

• Canada

• China

• Iran

• Israel

• Palestinian territories/Palestine 

• Russia

• Saudi Arabia

• South Africa

• Taiwan

• Turkey

• Ukraine

• United Kingdom

No ties allowed. And you must explain your reasoning.

This isn't a question about which countries have governments you like. It isn't a question about which countries have perfect human rights records. It is about how America should prioritize its relationships with others, taking into account shared values, strategic interests, reliability, economic cooperation and whatever else a candidate believes should matter.

This isn't a gotcha question for during a debate. This is a question that requires careful thinking and a thoughtful, essay-sized answer.

The answers should be fascinating.

Some candidates would prioritize democracies. Others might emphasize strategic alliances or economic relationships. Still others might reveal that their foreign policy judgments are driven primarily by ideological sympathies or antipathies. And many would avoid answering the question altogether, which is also a useful answer.

And that's precisely the point.

It is easy to attack Israel in isolation. It is much harder to explain why Israel deserves less American support that countries with proven records of repression, aggression, human rights violations or antipathy towards the US.

The inclusion of places like Taiwan, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa and Palestinian territories makes the question especially interesting. They represent very different kinds of relationships with the United States. A candidate who criticizes Israel over human rights, for example, would have to explain how those same standards apply to Turkey or Saudi Arabia. A candidate who emphasizes shared democratic values would have to explain how those values weigh against economic or strategic considerations. And a candidate who places Palestine high on the list would have to explain whether that reflects support for Palestinian self-determination, approval of Palestinian political leadership, or some other principle.

Anti-Israel activists should in theory love this question, too. After all, some of them routinely accuse Israel's supporters, especially Jewish supporters, of being "Israel-firsters" who supposedly put Israel's interests ahead of America's. What better way to test that accusation than to ask everyone, including those making it, to rank Israel alongside other countries, including staunch allies?

Surely they would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate that their own foreign policy judgments are based on consistent principles rather than a particular obsession with Israel.

There are no objectively correct answers to every comparison. Reasonable people can disagree about the relative importance of shared values, common interests and dependable alliances. But they should be able to articulate their criteria, apply them consistently and defend them, rather than hide behind slogans and sound bites.

That is what makes the exercise valuable. It forces candidates to make comparisons they usually avoid, and exposes the assumptions behind their positions. 

I suspect we would learn far more from this one question than from a dozen carefully rehearsed answers about Netanyahu, Gaza and the settlements.

Don't just tell me what you think of Israel. Tell me what you think of Israel compared to everyone else.

And if you refuse to answer, explain why you think the question is not valid.

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10/21 Links Pt2: Why the Green Party’s argument about Zionism destroys itself; The rank hypocrisy of the ‘Palestine poppy’; Dustin Hoffman and other stars celebrate the Jewish connection to Israel

From Ian:

Why the Green Party’s argument about Zionism destroys itself

However, in the Soviet Union, the “anti-Zionism” was conducted with a level of unparalleled cynicism. Officially, antisemitism was a crime. In reality, the USSR, under the pretext of anti-Zionism, conducted a policy of institutional antisemitism. Jews were barred from a variety of professions and largely prevented from studying at prestigious universities, as well as being rejected from travel, even internally within the Eastern Bloc. Jews living in the USSR had “Yevrey” stamped in their passports and official documents on the “nationality” line – they may have lived in Moscow, Kyiv or Chisinau, but they were not considered “Russian”, or “Ukrainian” or “Moldovan” . A notorious 1970s Soviet propaganda film about the evils of Zionism, Secret and Explicit, literally re-used footage from a 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).

But it is in various Arab nations that the conflation between Judaism and Zionism was made so unambiguous. The ethnic cleansing of three quarters of a million Jews from Arab lands is an inconvenient truth for much of the far left, so much so that they have had to resort to increasingly desperate attempts to try and explain it away by alleging some vast Zionist conspiracy designed to inculcate fear into local Jewish populations in order to convince them to flee to Israel. Of course, to believe that you would also have to believe that “the Zionists” managed to infiltrate the governments of all Arab states which instituted sweeping campaigns of repression against Jewish communities, confiscating their homes and possessions and stripping them of their citizenship. You would also have to believe that the fledgling state of Israel wanted nothing more than having to deal with a mass humanitarian situation, year-after-year, in which hundreds of thousands of people with little more than the clothes on their backs were arriving in the country. But once you have convinced yourself, as so many Green party members apparently have, that Zionism is the ultimate evil, it is only a short onward step to entering a fantasy land where Zionism is not only capable of, but likely to have conducted, any evil you can imagine.

But we do not have to look so far afield, of course, for a prime example of an anti-Zionist policy leading to antisemitism. After the passing of the UN’s infamous “Zionism is Racism’ motion in the mid-70s, which was pushed by the Soviet Bloc and the Arab League, various far left groups in the UK attempted to use it at universities to shut down campus Jewish Societies. Not Israel Societies, not Zionist Societies; Jewish Societies. The “argument” made at the time was that such groups had links to Israel, or to Zionism. That argument was precisely the one which the Green Party had the opportunity to separate itself from earlier this month, when an amendment proposed that the party make it clear that Jewish people who attended Synagogues seen as “Zionist” would not be targeted. Members at Green party conference resoundingly rejected this amendment.

So if we are indeed to judge an ideology solely by its real-world manifestation, as the Green party would have us do, then anti-Zionism is unambiguously antisemitic, even if many of its ‘anti-racist’ adherents might be horrified by that notion. So I would respectfully suggest that if they are going to continue to defend the indefensible, they’re going to need a better argument.

Nicole Lampert: The rank hypocrisy of the ‘Palestine poppy’

There is a woman who likes to stand outside the Houses of Parliament holding up pro-Palestine placards. She wears a striped outfit and hat to make her look like a prisoner in Auschwitz. A Holocaust survivor.

A yellow symbol – the crescent moon and star of Islam – is sewn onto her clothes to add to the offensive appropriation of one of the great crimes of human history.

She’s been arrested several times but still she continues to do it because, presumably, she enjoys the horror she invokes. She’s never been charged because Holocaust inversion isn’t a crime, just a moral obscenity.

The cult of Palestinianism is built on such things. So it is no surprise that the same people who tramp on war memorials and graffiti statues of Winston Churchill in red paint saying “Globalise the intifada” are now brandishing their own version of the Remembrance Day poppy, which symbolises the brave men and women of our armed forces who fought against tyranny. This is how they do things.

Ironically, many of the activists who engage in the appropriation typical of the pro-Palestinian movement view “cultural appropriation” as a grave sin.

Palestinianism is an empty vessel into which real history, real values, are poured into and poisoned. It tarnishes all that we hold dear, upends history and sometimes makes us question the sanity of the world we live in. That is also its intention.

Cults offer simple answers to complex problems, which is why Palestinianism appeals. But they also need more: icons, history, ideology. But because Palestinianism was created only in opposition to something – the Jewish state – and its only contribution to world history is popularising plane hijackings, there isn’t much there.

Even its flag came from a design invented by the Brit Sir Mark Sykes to unify the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire to rebel on our side. Even the keffiyeh – which isn’t really worn inside the Palestinian territories – came from Iraq.

Palestinianism has put surprisingly little effort into creating its own symbols, preferring to appropriate others. It steals them and it takes joy in knowing how much people get upset by that.

The key people they embezzle from are, of course, the Jews. Thus Jewish history in the land is overturned and ignored. They tell us only Palestinians were native, indigenous to the land, even though Arabs arrived there eight centuries after Jews had been thrown out by the Romans.

And because Jewish history in the land is undeniable – from the history, the archaeological finds – they seek to subvert it.

Twenty-Four Mentions of ‘Jew’ and The New York Times Used Zero

Imagine reading an article about a virulently homophobic or racist professor who sent threatening messages to a gay or African-American colleague. The messages and conduct were so egregious that the professor was indicted for cyberstalking, but none of the quoted threats in the article had anything to do with the professor being gay or African-American.

You probably cannot imagine it because it is nonsensical.

But replace homophobic or racist with antisemitic, and replace gay or African-American with Jewish, and it’s not just imaginable – it happened. On Oct. 7, 2026, The New York Times removed the “Jew” from the Jew-hatred.

In Vimal Patel and Yair Rosenberg’s “Religion Professor Accused of Harassing Colleague with Antisemitic Posts,” the authors reported on Haverford College religion professor Guangtian Ha’s indictment for felony cyberstalking of a Jewish colleague. In doing so, The Times omitted the vilest of Ha’s threats and simultaneously failed to convey the sheer volume of them. Of course, The Times could not be expected to list all of the threats, but that did not explain The Times’ egregious and total whitewashing of Ha’s alleged conduct when it omitted the word “Jew” or “Jewish” from each of the few threats it either quoted or directly referenced in the article.

For example, the indictment included the following threat: “The goyim have woken up, jew [sic]. Run. Flee. Leave. Blurring your home on google map and installing a security camera next to your mailbox won’t help.” The Times edited out the first sentence, beginning its quote with the word “Run.” No Jew-hatred to be seen here.

Vimal and Rosenberg also excised the words “Jew” and “Jews” (which Ha did not capitalize) when it quoted the professor’s threat as saying, “Remember this. You scums have had it too easy.” The Times left out the rest of the threat, which was “LM [Lower Merion] jews are going to have it big time, jew [sic].”

And when describing how Ha threatened to post the victim’s home address, infant child’s name and a photograph of the family’s mailbox, rather than use the quote from the indictment: “Jew, watch your [child’s name]. There will be a sign,” the paper of record described the threat, but made no mention of Ha’s reference to the colleague being Jewish.

With regard to the sheer volume of antisemitic threats that was simply not conveyed by the article, the paper of record ignored an additional 20 instances of Ha using the word “Jew” or “Jewish” in the alleged threats set forth in the indictment. The number increases to 22 if one includes “Israeli” and “Zio.” Rather than give readers a taste of some of the monstrous antisemitism contained in the threats, the authors instead reported that there were “countless antisemitic slurs and threats.”

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10/21 Links Pt1: Dems betrayal of Israel fueled by Obama’s wrath toward the Jewish state; Postponed Palestinian elections expose blunder of “statehood” recognition

From Ian:

Dems betrayal of Israel fueled by Obama’s wrath toward the Jewish state

When Barack Obama was president and feuding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while apologizing to Arab potentates about America’s history in the region, a friend offered an observation.

To wit, that Obama was proving the truth of a deep suspicion among American conservatives that Democrats love Jews but ­secretly hate Israel.

Time and milestone events have passed since then, but the evidence that my friend was onto something important continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Acceptable
So much so that the Dems’ hard turn against Israel is now dangerously close to a fundamental party doctrine.

And a reasonable explanation is that Obama made it acceptable and even a requirement for officials and candidates to condemn the Jewish state.

His animus ran deep when he was in the White House, but didn’t stop when he left office a decade ago.

Even now, the former president continues to stir the pot of hatred, as demonstrated by comments he made last week.

Accepting an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, Obama said, in reference to the creation of the state of Israel, that Jews “took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’ ”

By ignoring the fact that Jews were indigenous throughout the Middle East for thousands of years before the state of Israel was created by the United Nations partition in 1947, Obama comes off as willfully ignorant.

All the more so when he insists that “the attitude of Israel is, now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone.”

He twisted the knife by saying that Israel has conceded the “moral high ground.”

He’s one of those lefties who likes Israel when it’s a victim, but hates it when it hits back and wins.

He also avoids any mention of the historic Abraham Accords, because that would mean giving President Trump credit and ­admitting that not all Muslims and Arabs hate Israel.

Bam-Mam link
His biased distortions recall the hateful ignorance that Mayor Mamdani often spews about Israel being an occupier and running an apartheid state.

It’s not a coincidence that Obama has become a Mamdani pal and adviser.

Netanyahu responded to Obama by noting that the former president’s argument is contrary to long-established facts.

“Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland; it’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years,” the prime minister said.

A more thorough and devastating response to Obama came in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, where Elisha Wiesel asks and answers the critical questions the former president conveniently ignores.

“Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state, an occupation or a West Bank settlement to blame?” Wiesel writes.

He goes on to ask, “Was it excessive for Jews to accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005?

“Is it excessive to want to live in peace?”

The writer’s authority on the subject is unassailable.

Dr. Brian Cox: Postponed Palestinian elections expose blunder of “statehood” recognition

This latest statehood recognition fiasco illustrates in near real-time the utter foolishness of what I have previously referred to as “fairytale foreign policy” so often practiced by the political left.

This approach is marked by repeated attempts to achieve significant strategic objectives by simply wishing them into existence. But as we often say in the military, especially in combat arms professions, “Hope is not a COA” (course of action).

All the statements from leftist governments recognizing the “state” of Palestine last fall expressed the desire then for free and fair elections, yet none of them included this—or any other development — as a precondition for recognition.

They all espouse belief in a viable two-state solution, and recognizing Palestine is, in colloquial terms, essentially an attempt to press the “easy button” to make it happen. The announcement last week postponing said elections until next fall demonstrates precisely why hope is not a COA.

In any event, Palestine has never met the conditions for statehood described in the Montevideo Convention since it was declared an independent country in November 1988. These criteria are widely considered to be an expression of customary law, yet the “state” of Palestine has no unified system of government and lacks the capacity to authoritatively enter into relations with other states

Simply recognizing Palestinian statehood, or clicking one’s heels three times and wishing that it were so, does not magically create the conditions necessary for it to be an actual state.

Far-left progressive activists like Canadian professor Mark Kersten and D.C. social welfare organization J Street are fond of rejecting the claim that recognizing Palestinian statehood is merely a reward for terrorism. The trouble is, terrorists tend to disagree with them.

Indeed, Hamas hailed announcements, all from leftist governments, recognizing the “state” of Palestine last fall as a “deserving outcome of our people’s struggle.” And when news broke that several Western governments were considering the move, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad celebrated prospective recognition as the “fruits of October 7.”

Governments like Australia, Canada, France, and the UK rewarded terrorism — according to the terrorists they rewarded — by recognizing Palestinian statehood last fall. It should come as no surprise now these governments complained in a joint statement last week that they “deeply regret” the decision to postpone Palestinian elections.

These liberal governments should take a page from President Trump’s business playbook.

They failed to secure the downside when they recognized Palestinian “statehood.” Now the upside — such as realization of free and fair elections in Palestine — is, rather predictably, not taking care of itself.

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