Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 25, 2025

04/25 Links Pt2: Harvard Is an Islamist Outpost; The age-old link between antisemitism and misogyny; Ireland’s anti-Semitism laces ignorance with self-righteousness

From Ian:

Ruth Wisse: Harvard Is an Islamist Outpost

The most useful of many political functions of anti-Zionism—as with antisemitism before Jews returned to their homeland—is building coalitions of grievance and blame against a small nation with a universally inflated and mostly negative image. This galvanizing enmity has united the pan-Arab and Islamist alliance against Israel since 1948. It powered the red-green coalition at the United Nations and seeds anti-Israel campus coalitions that are anti-American in all but name. Attacking only the Jews—now only Israel—is its key to becoming the world’s most powerful antidemocratic ideology.

The goal of destroying Israel remains central to Arab and Islamist identity and was admitted to Harvard along with some foreign students and investors. The Education Department reports the university received more than $100 million from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bangladesh between January 2020 and October 2024.

In 2007 I began warning successive presidents and deans that academic standards were being violated by the substitution of anti-Israel propaganda for a comprehensive program in the Center for Middle East Studies. They acknowledged the problem but refused to address it. As long as other institutions took Muslim money and ignored the war against the Jews, why should Harvard be holier than the pope?

Oct. 7, like Kristallnacht in 1938, forced some people to confront what they had tried to ignore. Students and faculty celebrating the atrocities against Israel could have been perpetrating them, given the chance. A committee of the new Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance investigated the campus “hatred” and found it “worse than we had anticipated.” Ideological anti-Zionism governed not only the Center for Middle East Studies but also the School of Public Health and the Divinity School and figured in departments ranging alphabetically from anthropology and African American Studies to the Weatherhead Institute of International Affairs, and academically from music to the medical school. Harvard undertook a similar review only under pressure from Congress.

The university had taken steps to prevent campus unrest—by curtailing the Jewish and Christian presence. The Semitic Museum, established by Jacob Schiff in 1907 to make the same point as the Abraham Accords about the common sources of the three religions, was renamed the Museum of the Ancient Near East. The only vestige of Schiff’s intention remains in carved stone above the entrance. Archeological projects in Israel were discontinued and museum collections that once centered on the Bible and Jerusalem were refocused on the pyramids. The Harvard Divinity School restructured its curriculum to reflect that it was no longer a Christian or Unitarian seminary but a “pluralistic” religious-studies program.

Just when Harvard’s proud heritage should have been strengthened, biblical studies were degraded, and its traditions put on the defensive—Christianity even more than Judaism. Islamism was on the rise against America in decline.

There are still good people and programs at Harvard, and I am grateful for my time there. In an ideal world the government wouldn’t micromanage universities. But if Harvard shirks its responsibility to shore up the foundations of America and allows itself to be hijacked by an Islamist-inspired grievance coalition, why would it expect any support from the government?

The age-old link between antisemitism and misogyny

Whether this is what most trans people want is an open question. We only hear the loudest, most extreme advocates of a cohort whose national numbers are unclear, and whose consensus view is thus unknowable. How many trans people are more concerned with, say, the lack of tailored healthcare, but have very good reasons not to put themselves in the issue’s white hot spotlight, we can only guess.

It’s worth noting that trans rights are not inherently incompatible with the interests of women. To navigate a way forward between the sex-based rights of women and the equally valid civil rights of trans people is possible. But not when one side forever rejects – furiously, implacably, intractably – any hint of such an accommodation. If that sounds familiar to any Jewish person who supports a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and despairs at just who Israel is supposed to negotiate with towards such a goal, then well it might.

This is what happens when an initially legitimate cause becomes a quasi-religious hybrid of a fandom and a cult. Thus does Hamas’ butchery of Jews and cruel oppression of its own people become “legitimate resistance”; thus does misgendering a rapist in a blond wig become a more grievous offence than the predator’s own. The welfare, the real lives, of the people involved are sidelined in favour of what gratifies their self-selecting advocates: the thrill of absolutism; the utter absence of doubt or self-reflection; the gleeful, self-valorising flights of grandiose rhetoric; the cosplay; above all, the joy of lighting upon an enemy for whom one’s exultant hatred far surpasses one’s advertised compassion for those one champions.

It is revealing that at the apex of The Good People™’s demonology stand the twin evils: Zionist and Terf. Jews and women. Jack Holland’s 2006 book Misogyny, which bears the subtitle The World’s Oldest Prejudice, details the frequent historical conjunction with the second-oldest. This unholy alliance offers a perfect example of what The Good People™ would call intersectionality; one to which their cognitive dissonance blinds them, given their camp’s delight in directing vitriolic abuse towards insubordinate Jewish women in particular. Antisemitism and misogyny: hand in glove down the ages, long before the state of Israel was ever dreamt of, long before gender identity was conceptualised. There is perhaps no vanity more risible than the unblinking conviction of The Good People™ that they are “on the right side of history” as they refashion for the 21st century its two most archaic wrongs.

Seth Mandel: Zoning Out the Jews

It’s not difficult to suss out town officials’ motives. Last year, Mayor Derek Armstead was recorded telling school officials that hiring practices should be in accord with “what has to happen in order to keep our community being taken over by guys with big hats and curls.”

Landa wondered why towns keep doing this to themselves: Clifton, Toms River, and Jackson (towns near where I was born and raised) all tried zoning discrimination and eventually all lost lawsuits.

But there’s another aspect to this that has always bothered me. Having reported on land-use law and property disputes in New Jersey early in my career, one theme was hammered home: Residents wanted construction that wouldn’t add school-aged children to the town’s population, because that would cost the public-school system more money and that, in turn, would necessitate higher property taxes.

What happens when a large group of Orthodox Jews moves into town? It’s a municipal dream come true: They don’t put kids in the school system, so their taxes essentially subsidize the existing student population, and because of holidays and other observances they spend less time on roads and using other public services.

Orthodox Jews tend to be a massive gift to a town’s finances, paying into services they don’t use and driving up property values. The only reason to work so hard to prevent them from living in your town is if you hate Jews more than you like the town you claim to serve. Anti-Semitism is self-defeating, rarely more so than for a municipal official.

And that’s the truly disturbing thing about the rise in anti-Semitism in America. Jew-hatred trumps every other concern. It is irrational, and much of the time its purveyors cannot be reasoned with. In Jersey City in 2019, it ended in a mass shooting of Jewish establishments.

And as always, the supposed provocation is Jews merely living somewhere. A chunk of America is trying to drag the country back to where it was 100 years ago regarding its treatment of Jews. And some of the worst cases barely make headlines outside of local news.

04/25 Links Pt1: Trump administration strips UNRWA of legal immunity; Biden team eyed Netanyahu’s ouster early in Gaza war; HonestReporting Interactive Map of Gaza Tunnels

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Groundhog day with Iran

President Trump’s attitude towards Iran is causing many to scratch their heads.

He has threatened the Iranian regime that unless it verifiably dismantles its nuclear programme, America and Israel will destroy it.

He has backed this up by moving more US warships to the region and deploying around one third of America’s B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia.

Trump’s commitment to safeguard Israel is not in doubt. He’s also the man who, in his first term, took America out of the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama and imposed instead a punishing sanctions regime to weaken Iran.

Yet now the US is negotiating with the regime over its nuclear programme, and both sides say this is going well. On Truth Social, Trump said he would much prefer a negotiated agreement to military action.

But the regime is run by religious fanatics of the Shia “Twelver” sect, who believe that an apocalypse will bring to earth the “Twelfth Imam” or Shia messiah. And as the regime repeatedly tells us, it intends to destroy first Israel and then America and the West.

There can be no meaningful negotiation with a regime that has such a non-negotiable and apocalyptic agenda. When Iran says the current negotiations are “positive,” that means it’s confident it has the upper hand.

The Iranians are the most skilful and manipulative negotiators in the world. They play multi-dimensional chess in which they identify the weaknesses of their opponents and then mercilessly play on them.

Dismayingly, Trump’s chief negotiator Steven Witkoff seems to have fallen for the Iranians’ wiles. In an interview with the podcaster and Trump “whisperer” Tucker Carlson, Witkoff said the conflict over Tehran's nuclear programme had “a real possibility of being solved diplomatically, not because I’ve talked to anybody in Iran but because logically, it makes sense…I think anything can be solved with dialogue by clearing up misconception and miscommunication and disconnects between people”.

But this isn’t an argument involving muddled messages. This is a crisis in which the world’s most aggressive terrorist state and declared enemy of Israel and the west is poised to arm itself with nuclear weapons.

Trump has now dialled down his aim from destroying Iran’s nuclear programme to ensuring that it isn’t used to produce nuclear weapons.

This was precisely the formula arrived at in the 2015 Obama deal, and it’s as worthless now as it was then. For it would enable Iran to retain a substantial nuclear infrastructure, which it could ramp up to weaponisation at any time.

Witkoff appears to be placing all his faith in “verification” that Iran would keep its side of the bargain. But given that the regime ran rings round the inspection programme under the 2015 deal, the idea of verifying any commitment it makes is for the birds.

Iran has been militarily very much weakened by Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah and its neutralisation of Iranian air defences. This is therefore the opportunity to strike.

Trump Says He'll 'Very Willingly' Attack Iran Should Nuclear Talks Fail: 'If We Don't Make a Deal, I'll Be Leading the Pack'

The United States will "willingly" join Israel in launching a military operation against Iran if negotiations to dismantle Tehran's nuclear program collapse, President Donald Trump said in an interview this week.

"Are you worried Netanyahu will drag you into a war?" Time's Eric Cortellessa and Sam Jacobs asked Trump during a wide-ranging interview on his first 100 days back in office.

"No," Trump said. "By the way, he may go into a war. But we're not getting dragged in."

"The U.S. will stay out of it if Israel goes into it?" Cortellessa and Jacobs asked.

"No, I didn't say that," Trump responded. "You asked if he'd drag me in, like I'd go in unwillingly. No, I may go in very willingly if we can't get a deal. If we don't make a deal, I'll be leading the pack."

"I think we can make a deal without the attack," Trump added. "I hope we can."

The comments come as Trump ramps up his "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran to freeze its nuclear program. In late March, Trump also threatened the Islamic Republic with military action after Tehran rejected direct negotiations with Washington. "If they don't make a deal, there will be bombing," Trump said at the time. "It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before."

Administration taps State Department’s Michael Anton as technical lead for Iran talks

The Trump administration tapped Michael Anton, the State Department’s director of policy planning, to lead a team of technical experts in negotiations with the Iranian regime about its nuclear program.

According to Politico, Anton will lead a team of around 12 mostly career officials in discussions set to begin this weekend.

Anton is a conservative essayist and speechwriter who served in the first Trump administration as a deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council. He was subsequently a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

In a 2020 Fox News interview, Anton said that the original Iran deal was flawed in part because it provided significant up-front financial benefits to Iran before the provisions more favorable to the U.S. took effect, which Iran used to fuel terrorism. He said Trump was “right to object to that” and reimpose sanctions. He said that cutting off Iranian resources would de-escalate, rather than escalate conflict.

He also supported the U.S. strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Anton said on Fox and in a 2019 interview with NPR that he views Iran as generally cautious, retreating if it faces strong resistance.

“When and where Iran sees either weakness and/or a lack of vigilance — America not paying attention — it tends to try to exploit what it sees as gaps,” Anton said. “When it sees that we are being strong, that we are being vigilant, that we’re not leaving them opportunities to harm our interests, it tends to back down and turn its attentions elsewhere.”

He said that the U.S. and its allies can deter Iranian aggression by presenting a strong and united front. He also emphasized that all administration officials should ultimately defer to the president’s judgement on any issues to do with Iran or be fired.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Bret Stephens says, "Antisemitism is not merely a form of hatred. It is a conspiracy theory about how the world works."

He is not the only one to frame antisemitism this way. Deborah Lipstadt has echoed similar ideas, describing antisemitism as a “conspiracy theory that blames Jews for every problem under the sun.” In her book Antisemitism: Here and Now, she emphasizes that this form of hate is unique in its persistence and in its insistence that Jews are not merely wrong, but secretly powerful and malicious. This framing, she argues, makes antisemitism self-reinforcing and impervious to logic. Historian David Nirenberg has likewise suggested that antisemitism functions as a kind of moral or explanatory engine: when things go wrong, the Jew is cast as the hidden cause.

At first glance, this is an appealing explanation. It seems to unite many divergent forms of antisemitism under a single intellectual umbrella: the belief that Jews operate in secret, behind the scenes, manipulating events for their benefit and others’ ruin. And across the ideological spectrum, this indeed shows up again and again.

The Nazi obsession with blaming Jewish financiers controlling the First World War. Islamist narratives about Jews as breakers of covenants and corrupting the Torah. Progressive suspicions that Jews serve as hidden faces of capitalism, whiteness, or settler colonialism. Far-right theories about Jews bringing in immigrants, controlling Hollywood and the government.

These conspiracies differ in content, but share one thing: they give the hater a moral story that makes their hatred feel justified. Even Nazi ideology, which felt that subhuman Jews would eventually become extinct under social Darwinism, embraced Elders of Zion conspiracies to explain why Jews survived.

But are antisemitic philosophies conspiracy theories themselves, or are conspiracy theories an aspect of antisemitic philosophies?

I started this series with an article called A Unified Field Theory of Antisemitism. As I explored and analyzed all the major types of antisemitism, I saw that my initial theory was not quite right.

I identified several aspects that antisemitic groups have in common. They are all eliminationist, wanting to see Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state disappear. They all have a hate for Jews that is far deeper than the feelings normal people have towards their perceived enemies. They all have extremist and absolutist beliefs.

What dimension does the fact that they all resort to conspiracy theories add to the conversation?

It helps prove that all of these philosophies hate Jews because they regard Jews as an existential threat - to themselves.

Across cultures and ideologies, Jews have often represented something both enduring and distinct. That distinctiveness, especially when Jews are successful, moral, or intellectually visible, creates a psychological problem for absolutist belief systems.

Christianity promised to replace the Jews. But Jews kept existing.

Islam declared itself the final truth. But Jews wouldn’t submit.

Marxists envisioned class liberation. But Jews didn’t fit in their classes.

Progressives advocate for the oppressed. But the most oppressed people on Earth built a nation out of the ashes.

People avoid normal threats. But they only want to eradicate threats that they believe makes their entire lives meaningless.

For these and other antisemites, conspiracy theory is not the reason for the hate, but a consequence of it. It is a coping mechanism - a psychological defense to explain why the Jew has not disappeared, and why their very presence feels like a threat to their own self-definition. It is a result of cognitive dissonance.

This exposes something deeper: antisemitic ideologies are not defined by conspiracy theory, but by an inability to tolerate the Jew. The conspiracy theory is merely the justification they create to preserve their worldview. the philosophies that end up antisemitic are the ones that cannot tolerate the continued existence of the Jew. And more importantly, they are the ones that require conspiracy thinking to resolve their own internal contradictions and reduce their cognitive dissonance. If Jews should not exist in their philosophies, yet they not only exist but thrive, the Jews must have cheated somehow - which is the justification for their destruction.

Other moral and philosophical systems do not need to explain away Jewish persistence. They do not feel threatened by Jewish moral or national distinctiveness. They can tolerate, or even embrace, Jewish survival, visibility, and sovereignty. For example:

Utilitarianism seeks outcomes, not targets. It has no built-in reason to resent Jews.
Kantian ethics values moral autonomy and duty. Jews fit that model.
Classical liberalism cherishes pluralism. Jews thrive within it.
Moral relativism, despite its flaws, does not centrally oppose any one tradition.
Buddhism, Stoicism, and Confucianism show no historical pattern of anti-Jewish sentiment.

None of these frameworks are perfect. Elsewhere we have criticized some of them. But none feel compelled to invent a moral explanation for why the Jew exists. That burden belongs to broken systems.

So while Stephens and Lipstadt are right to identify conspiracy theory as a hallmark of antisemitism, their analysis stops short of the root cause. The conspiracy theory is not the root. It is a tool used by philosophies who consider the Jew’s existence a refutation of their beliefs.

The Jew is not just a scapegoat in these systems, but intolerance of the Jew is a metric that shows the philosophy is not only dangerous, but failing.

If we are going to fight antisemitism, it is critical that we know exactly what it is and why the practitioners hate Jews so much. Exposing the conspiracy theory alone is not enough, since those theories of evil Jewish power is just a symptom of the problem.

This also explains the so-called horseshoe theory, why radically opposed ideologies - like Marxism and Islamism, or progressive anti-racism and white nationalism - all converge on antisemitic narratives. They share a psychological need to explain why the Jew, who should not exist in their systems, continues to succeed. The conspiracy a necessity to allay their internal contradiction. We must understand the moral discomfort that precedes the hate - the loathing oft Jews is a kind of moral check, a mirror that reflects back the flaws of the system.

That’s why Jewish ethics isn’t just a counter-narrative. It’s a diagnostic tool. It reveals exactly how and where a system can’t handle contradiction, humility, or difference - and how quickly that failure metastasizes into hatred.

This isn’t just a rhetorical point. It’s the key to understanding why antisemitism outlives every ideology it infects.

The conspiracy theories will never stop as long as people teach and learn philosophies that cannot explain why the Jews are still alive.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Hamas issued a press statement:

The Government Media Office in Gaza renewed its warning on Friday of the continuing and alarming deterioration of the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. This comes as the occupation continues to impose a stifling blockade, deliberately closing the crossings completely, and preventing the entry of food and humanitarian aid for 55 days, leading to a wider famine.

The government media official said that famine today is no longer just a threat, but has become a bitter reality, as 52 deaths due to hunger and malnutrition have been recorded, including 50 children, in one of the most horrific forms of slow mass killing. At a time when more than 60,000 children suffer from severe malnutrition, while more than a million children complain of daily hunger that has caused emaciation and poor physical structure, and they have become a focus of danger, while thousands of Palestinian families have been forced to face death by starvation after being unable to provide a single meal for their children.

52 deaths for a population of 2.1 million means 2.48 per 100,000 people, over 18 months.

In the United States, 20,500 people died of malnutrition in 2022, according to the CDC. That comes out to a rate of 6.19 deaths per 100,000 people, over 12 months. Over 18 months the numbers could be assumed to be about 9 deaths per 100,000.

Which means that even during wartime, even with hundreds of thousands of people displaced, even with severe disruptions in the food supply, the chances for a Gazan dying of malnutrition is less than one third that of an American during peacetime - according to Hamas' own statistics.

Statistics without context are propaganda. And Hamas has every reason to exaggerate the situation because it relies on stealing humanitarian aid to fund its own activities.

This also points to the uncomfortable fact that US media publishes orders of magnitude more articles about starvation in Gaza than about the far worse problems of malnutrition at home.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Palestinian Muslim attacks on Christians in the 1850s and echoes of today

The American Israelite, April 2, 1858, describes an annual report written by the Bishop of Jerusalem as to the activities of the Christian missionaries in Palestine.

The letter describes the strenuous (and mostly wasted) efforts to convert Jews, which was a primary aim of Western Christians in the Middle East throughout the century.

But he also adds a section of the failed attempts to convert Muslims, and how violent the Muslims were towards Christians:

The 1856 incident in Nablus was an Arab riot against Christians, sparked by a missionary killing a local Muslim but also by the Ottoman Empire working towards equal treatment of minorities and, specifically, a church bell that had been installed in Nablus. Christian homes were attacked.

Since then, academics have been trying to "understand" the riots, reframing attacks on Christian civilians as "acts of resistance."

It is undoubtedly true that British and American media in the 1850s looked at events in Palestine through a colonialist lens and tended to stereotype Muslims as fanatic extremists. But the desire by today's progressives to romanticize Palestinian Muslim attacks on Jewish and Christian civilians as "resistance" is no less "Orientalist" than the people they accuse of that supposed crime.

Whatever happened to the truth?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/24 Links Pt2: The Jews Who Saw Around History’s Darkest Corner; Objectively Pro-Hamas; Hamas threatened to kill hostage in call to his freed wife

From Ian:

Haviv Rettig Gur: The Jews Who Saw Around History’s Darkest Corner

In their conversation, Ben-Gurion told his Arab interlocutors that he expected six to eight million Jews to ultimately populate the forthcoming Jewish state, because Jews were imperiled in Europe. Arslan and al-Jabri, despite agreeing to strict confidentiality and telling Ben-Gurion their conversation was informal and off the record, published his comments with mocking derision in the November 1934 edition of their journal La Nation Arabe. A frustrated Ben-Gurion would not meet prominent Arabs again for a year and a half.

What did Ben-Gurion know? What was he trying to say? And what were his Arab interlocutors failing to hear?

In October 1938, a month after Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and before most people dared to even imagine anything so insane, Ben-Gurion was already warning of a coming annihilation of the Jews, as Tuvia Friling writes in his brilliant two-volume book, Arrows in the Dark.

“The outbreak of a world war—which the Arabs are so vehemently in favor of—will place us once again in danger of abandonment and absolute siege. . . . Hitler is not only the enemy and annihilator of the Jews of Germany. His sadistic and jealous desire is to annihilate the whole of world Jewry,” Ben-Gurion said.

This dire foreboding was the logic behind the Zionist willingness to negotiate with the Nazis for the rescue of Jews, as in the Haavara agreement. This was an agreement in 1933 between the Zionist leadership and the Nazi regime to allow Jews to leave Germany with some of their property. (Nazi Germany did not allow Jews to take their property with them when they fled, causing many to stay behind in hopes of surviving the new regime and rebuilding their old lives.)

Many diaspora Jewish leaders, especially in America, were angered by the agreement, which they felt legitimized dealing with the Nazis just when they were trying to push for a global boycott of Germany. But the Zionists insisted on the policy, not because they downplayed Nazi intentions, but because they believed the Nazis were infinitely worse than Jews in the diaspora really understood. These Zionists understood (not all of them, but enough of the ones who mattered) that every Jew who could be convinced to leave Germany early through the Haavara agreement, some 60,000 by 1939, would be literally saved by it.

In December 1938, just a few weeks after Kristallnacht, Ben-Gurion again offered an explicit, public prediction of extermination. “The Nazi pogrom of last November,” he said at a conference in Jerusalem, “is a signal for the destruction of the Jews of the world. I hope I will prove wrong. But I suspect that this German pogrom is but the beginning. It started in Germany. Who knows what will happen tomorrow in Czechoslovakia. . . in Poland, in Romania, and other countries? Until now even Satan did not dare to carry out such a plan. Now everything is permissible. Our blood, our honor, our property. . . . There are no limits as to what can be done to the Jews.”

And in June 1939, three months before the outbreak of war: “Hitler is a fact and he can be relied upon in this regard. If there is a world war and he takes control of Europe, he will carry out this thing; first of all, he will annihilate the Jews of Europe.”

The Zionists, almost entirely alone, saw it coming.

And so on Yom HaShoah we remember not only the dead, though we spend most of the day recalling their names and lives and stories and the whole lost civilization of European Jews. We remember not only what we have lost, but also that it was by our own initiative and wisdom that the survivors came out of that great death and into a new day, a new/old Jewishness, an unapologetic survival and flourishing.

So let the antisemites rage, let them build their moral worlds on our story in thick layers of hatred, conspiracy, and righteous pretense, offering us, as ever, the most reliable signal of their dysfunction and decline. There’s nothing new in that.

What is new is us—our clarity and purpose, a Jewish collective shorn of the blindnesses and vulnerabilities of the past.

This Yom HaShoah in Jerusalem, I will think about what we might have been able to do for our brethren if we’d been established and strong just a decade sooner. I will think about our strength as much as our weakness, about the ever-present, unfulfillable duty to rebuild what was destroyed. I will reflect on the evil stories told of us that never really go away, but that don’t, in the end, matter anymore. Because those who could see around history’s dark and dangerous corners finally freed us from their grip.

Seth Mandel: Heroism and the Holocaust

UnBroken is an unusual Holocaust documentary. The film, now streaming on Netflix, tells the story of seven siblings, the Webers, who survived the war together—the only known group of siblings of that size to do so.

That statistic is obscure but evocative: Large families simply didn’t stay together and survive, if they survived at all. Amazingly, the Weber siblings weren’t broken up until they got to America and put in separate foster homes.

That doesn’t mean their family was intact, however. Their parents’ fate follows the opposite trajectory from that of the kids: For Lina and Alexander, it is a love story that becomes a tragedy.

Alexander was a German traveling salesman who met Lina Banda in Hungary and fell in love with her. Alexander was Catholic, however, and Lina’s father was an Orthodox rabbi. So Alexander converted and the two married. To start anew, they moved to Berlin with two children in tow. They had five more together in Berlin before Alexander was arrested in 1933, likely for the crime of being married to a Jew. He left prison a beaten and broken man.

Lina, meanwhile, had begun working to help Jews escape Germany, sometimes even hiding them in her family home. This further fractured the marriage, as Alexander repeatedly warned her she’d get caught. She did get caught and was eventually killed in Auschwitz.

The children—Alfons, Ruth, Senta, Gertrude, Renee, Judith, and Bela—were then arrested as well and housed in a local hospital. When they were temporarily sent home, a farmer named Arthur Schmidt, who was a friend of the family, smuggled them out of Berlin and to his and his wife Paula’s farm in Worin. The mayor of Worin was the only one besides the Schmidts who knew of the Webers’ presence in town, and he helped forge ration tickets to make sure the kids had enough to eat.

The Weber children repeatedly found themselves saved by righteous gentiles. At one point they were cared for by the famous Catholic social worker Margarete Sommer (although the film misses an opportunity to talk about Sommer’s work); later, the Berlin house they were hiding out in was bombed and they were trapped underground until Schmidt, who was in the house next door, dug them out. Eventually the family made it into the care of the Joint Distribution Committee and out of Europe—but without their father. They were only permitted to emigrate by claiming to be orphans. Alexander survived by renouncing his conversion to Judaism, though he too eventually made it out of Germany.

The siblings weren’t all reunited until 1986. Ten years later, at a family gathering, Alfons presented his siblings and their families with a brief written memoir of their story, which later became the backbone for the documentary, helmed by Beth Lane, daughter of the youngest Weber sibling.

Yet the movie has nothing resembling the triumphant tone of the usual stories of survival, and in that sense it’s likely a preview of the Holocaust documentaries to come. The amount of time that has passed means that even when we meet the survivors themselves on-screen, we won’t be meeting any more heroes who saved them. (There is only one living recognized member of the Righteous Among the Nations residing in Israel, the 90-year-old Jarosława Lewicka.) The Schmidts died a decade after the war and a good half-century before they were added to the Yad Vashem registry of righteous gentiles. The mayor of Worin, Rudolph Fehrmann, died soon after the war. We see his grandson meet Lane in the film.

Gil Troy: Hmm... maybe anti-Zionism really is antisemitic

You don't need to like Trump to recognize his efforts to combat antisemitism
True, it is confusing. US President Donald Trump is polarizing. His sledgehammer approach to genuine problems like campus Jew-hatred risks backfiring. Universities are justifiably mobilizing to defend their autonomy from presidential bullying and to protect critical scientific research from governmental blackmail. But universities seem far more passionate about defending their prerogatives than defending their Jewish students after letting Jew-hatred fester for years.

As anti-Trump Jews reject the boldest governmental assault against Jew-hatred in American history, they should instead become (F. Scott) Fitzgeraldian Zionists, holding “two opposing ideas in mind at the same time” while still retaining “the ability to function.”

Liberals should join conservatives in thanking President Trump for getting universities to do more against Jew-hatred in a few weeks than they did for years. And all must admit that anti-Zionist antisemitism has become so central to modern progressivism that you can’t really fight campus Jew-hatred without bold, systematic campus reform.

Read Trump’s statements carefully. It’s good to ban masks, penalize protesters’ crimes swiftly, hire based on merit, admit based on merit, and foster an open-minded, liberal campus culture that welcomes diverse viewpoints backed by thoughtful, substantive scholarship. But that’s not the government’s job. Universities should have developed such initiatives internally, not been force-fed them externally.

Simultaneously, it’s also true: Universities double down when assaulted by outsiders, especially by unpopular presidents, and most especially by Donald Trump. So, it’s possible to condemn Trump’s tactics while applauding much of his vision and – trigger warning – thanking him for showing the way, even for critics repudiating other aspects of his agenda.

And to my seemingly bold but sniveling Jewish colleagues joining this long chain of un-Jews betraying their people in the pathetic quest to be popular among our enemies, I offer a simple definition: Jew-hatred is an obsessive hatred that exaggerates the centrality and supposed wickedness of Jews and anything Jewish – the Jewish people, Jewish traditions and values, Jewish institutions, and Israel, the Jewish state.

This disproportionate hatred is often expressed in demonization, delegitimization, and double standards – Natan Sharansky’s “3 Ds.”

Be honest. Most protesters share that obsessive hatred. And you’re legitimizing it.

04/24 Links Pt1: King Abdullah and the Islamists; ICC appeal judges: Court should consider Israel’s jurisdictional challenges; Egypt Is Demanding that Hamas Disarm

From Ian:

Rubio torpedoes the left’s anti-Israel stronghold inside the State Department

How rogue elements ruled
The answer to that question is fairly simple. Until now, no one in the White House or at the head of the State Department has tried to rein in what Rubio rightly termed “rogue” elements within the government.

They have operated with the impunity that comes with civil-service protections and the fact that past administrations either lacked the will or ability to restrain a powerful bureaucracy. As is true in almost all governmental departments and agencies, the permanent employees lean hard to the left. They also have managed to fend off any efforts to control them by manipulating the political appointees, who are supposed to be their bosses, treating them as incompetent amateurs who know little about how the government works in much the same manner as the characters in the classic British political comedy “Yes, Minister.”

It’s also true that, at least in principle, both the Obama and Biden administrations had no problem with this “human rights” lobby inside the State Department because they largely agreed with them.

Yet the inherent problem of having a portion of the government conducting an ideological foreign policy largely independent of the people at the top of the organizational flow chart became exposed in the last 16 months of Biden’s term in office. That’s because the anti-Israel bureaucrats, like the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses, believed that the administration of President Joe Biden was insufficiently hostile to Israel after Oct. 7.

Biden’s civil war
As soon became apparent, the barbaric attack on Israeli civilians and the war to eradicate Hamas that followed had fomented nothing less than a civil war within the administration. Large portions of the permanent foreign-policy bureaucracy, as well as many of Biden’s political appointees ensconced in positions below the rank of cabinet and undersecretary rank, simply opposed the ambivalent Biden stand on the war, in which he publicly opposed Hamas but at the same time didn’t want Israel to succeed in defeating it. They wanted a complete cutoff of U.S. aid and an American-imposed ceasefire that would enable Hamas to both survive the war they started and even to win it.

While some officials, including members of the State Department’s human-rights bureau, resigned in protest over Biden’s half-hearted support of Israel, most remained in place. They continued working to undermine that stand and help fund projects that would hurt Israel and aid Palestinians fighting it, including, as one Middle East Forum study noted, indirectly financing anti-Israel terrorism. Indeed, as the City Journal reported in February, USAID was directing American taxpayer dollars to Hamas.

That is the context with which Rubio’s reorganization should be understood.

One aspect of the scheme is that it will eliminate redundancies and reduce costs in keeping with the mandate of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), initially guided by billionaire Elon Musk.

Backing human rights
Rubio, who, as the Times noted, was an ardent supporter of human rights and encouraged using American power to advocate for freedom abroad during his 14 years in the U.S. Senate. Contrary to the assertions of his critics, he has not changed his mind about the importance of the issue. Rather, he is attempting to rescue the cause of human rights and democracy from activists who have turned it into a crusade against Israel and other governments, such as that of Hungary, which is falsely labeled as authoritarian because of its resistance to left-wing attempts to undermine its national identity.

Rubio’s plan involves a massive shift that he hopes will end the radical power base inside the State Department by stripping it of its autonomy and putting it inside existing regional bureaus, where it won’t be free to undermine Trump’s pro-Israel policy or fund groups working to promote policies and ideas antithetical to U.S. interests.

Under Rubio’s plan, there will still be plenty of people at the State Department who will be tasked with monitoring human rights around the world and seeking to promote American values of liberty, including political and economic freedom. The administration will also preserve the office of the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Reportedly, it will shift to a global Jewish affairs coordinator rather than the old division under the office of the undersecretary of civilian security, human rights and democracy—a section of Foggy Bottom that was a major part of the problem Rubio is trying to solve. The Office of International Religious Freedom will also still be there.

Will Rubio succeed in taming and redirecting the energy of the diplomatic bureaucracy away from toxic left-wing activism and toward efforts that will promote American interests and strengthen U.S. ties with Israel and other allies? Only time will tell, but as Trump has demonstrated on other issues, such as his efforts to reform or defund academic institutions that tolerate and encourage antisemitism, enacting such fundamental changes requires bold strokes and decisive leadership.

For far too long, the administrative state, of which the left-wing elements in the State Department were a key part, ruled as an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of the U.S. government that was dedicated to pursuing left-wing policies that no one had voted for. Trump and Rubio have rightly decided this has to end.

Their actions will provoke much consternation and pearl-clutching from the foreign-policy establishment and its liberal media cheerleaders. But their taking an axe to a portion of the State Department bureaucracy run by radicals is a victory for friends of Israel and American interests, and a clear defeat for their opponents who operate under the false flag of “human rights” advocacy.

Melanie Phillips: King Abdullah and the Islamists

A remarkable situation is fast developing in which the West is becoming more Islamist—the term for Islamic holy war extremism—than the Arab Muslim world itself.

This week, Jordan banned the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. All Brotherhood offices there have been closed, and its assets will be confiscated, shortly after 16 of its members were arrested in an alleged armed plot against the kingdom.

The authorities found weapons and explosives being stored in residential areas and transported across Jordan; secret missile-manufacturing facilities that could have produced up to 250 short-range missiles; and “training and recruitment operations” linked to the group.

Hamas, the Brotherhood’s armed wing, praised the alleged plot as an “initiative” by young Jordanian men conscious of the “continued genocide in Gaza.”

The Brotherhood has long been banned in Egypt, where it originated, and in the United Arab Emirates. The ban by Amman is extremely significant and not without danger for Jordan’s King Abdullah, who is permanently threatened by his substantial and restive Palestinian Arab population.

The Muslim Brothers are powerful enemies against whom he has preferred, until now, not to act. However, the Islamist group has been exploiting public anger over the war in Gaza by leading street protests denouncing the government for co-operating with Israel, with which it has had a peace treaty since 1994.

Six months ago, two Jordanian Brotherhood members tried to mount a cross-border raid near the Dead Sea but were shot and killed by Israeli forces. The incident occurred shortly after the group made significant parliamentary election gains amid anger at Israeli actions in Gaza.

Jordan is also worried about a potential Iranian connection with the Brotherhood, especially given Tehran’s increased attempts to destabilize the kingdom through violent cross-border smuggling of weapons and drugs.

Yet the West is even now choosing to ignore or even deny the threat to itself from the Islamist group.

The Brotherhood is a global organization that works in the shadows to conquer the West for Islam. Its tactics are to use a combination of terrorism, infiltration of democratic processes and maintaining a high birth rate among Western Muslims.

Egypt Is Demanding that Hamas Disarm

Israel and the US, with mediation by Qatar and Egypt and with the involvement of the Palestinian Authority, continue to pursue a hostage deal. Parallel to these negotiations, the Israel Defense Forces are pushing ahead in Rafah, taking over one area at a time, consolidating control in northern Gaza, and gearing up for the next phase of combat.

Egypt, which has joined the demand for Hamas to fully disarm, as first reported by Israel Hayom, is now leading the mediation efforts. According to the Qatari channel Al-Araby, Egypt's proposal places demilitarization at the top of the agenda. In return, Hamas would receive a long-term ceasefire of at least five years.

Sources involved in the negotiations say Egypt is providing Israel with regular updates on the proposals, terms, and outcomes of talks with Hamas leaders. A Hamas delegation expected in Cairo is anticipated to address primarily the demand to relinquish all weaponry - a condition that senior Hamas officials in recent weeks have called a "red line."

Egyptian officials have made it clear to Hamas that any further refusal to disarm will lead to an escalation in Israel's military campaign. Reports indicate that the organization's remaining military and civilian supplies are expected to run out within a month to six weeks.

Cairo is attempting to soften Hamas' opposition by offering immunity for its leadership and suggesting the group could play a future role in governing the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian territories more broadly. However, the Palestinian Authority has rejected such a proposal.

A senior Palestinian Authority official said the possibility of integrating Hamas into any governing body would be pushed far into the future, if at all, citing the "bitter experience" of Hamas' 2007 takeover of Gaza, during which hundreds of Fatah members and PA officials were killed. He added that any such agreement would require Hamas to hand over all its weapons to Egypt "down to the last Kalashnikov bullet."

Israeli Physicists Turn Impotent Islamist Rage Into Power Source (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Tel Aviv, April 24 - Scientists at Tel Aviv University have developed a renewable energy technology that has the potential to transform the tiny Jewish State into an electricity-generating juggernaut, the research team announced today, with a new process that transforms the resentment, tantrums, and indignant outrage of Muslim Brotherhood and other haters, into carbon-neutral energy. The scientists announced their discovery yesterday at a press conference at the university.

Professor Evra Vazaam lead a team of researchers in a four-year study that identified and replicated a process to turn the impotent fuming of Islamists into a harnessable energy source, he stated.

"I estimate we can begin generating power by this method within six months," he predicted. "It can hook up to the existing electricity grid, and, at least for the foreseeable future, this energy source is effectively unlimited."

The seething of Islamists and other Israel-haters finds outlets in a diverse array of media and forms, but according to the scientists, enough such bile on social media alone already far exceeds Israel's electricity consumption.

"The cool thing about this is that the development of this technology has the effect of making it even more effective," explained research team member Dr. Harona Po. "Every ounce of success that Israel enjoys makes the haters burn hotter with frustration, and now we can harness that to produce electricity. The honor-shame mentality that characterizes the Islamist mind will never permit reconsideration of violent, bombastic animosity for Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland, which all but guarantees a self-perpetuating cycle that will meet Israel's electricity needs and more for decades. We can basically export all of our natural gas instead of only most of it."

Discoveries of offshore natural gas deposits in the earth's crust under Israel's territorial waters have already steered the country toward energy independence, though Israel must still import all of its petroleum. Solar and wind power have produced limited success at best - but with the new power source available, Israel will be able to export significant surplus electricity to other countries in the region, such as Jordan, that have not achieved energy independence.

"The governments of the countries that are forced by circumstances to depend on Israel are, for the most part, pragmatic," noted analyst Malakhi Mrai'm. "The problem lies with the subjects of those governments. Jordan and Egypt have formal peace treaties and critical economic arrangements with Israel, but the people of those countries, for the most part, absolutely despise Israel. The growing dependence on Israel for energy - especially with the crash in crude oil prices - basically cements this technology as self-perpetuating."

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Jewish Ethics vs. the New Secular Messianisms

I have argued that Jewish ethics can become the basis for a secular morality. But not being incompatible with secularism is not the same as being attractive to secularists. What could secularists get out of a Jewish ethical system?

Let's turn the question around. What do they get out of joining extreme Leftist movements?

The extreme Leftist, usually secularist, movements like Animal Liberation Front, Extinction Rebellion and BDS have something in common rarely seen in their Rightist counterparts - a seemingly religious fervor and a quasi spiritual dimensions. They regard themselves as modern doomsdayers, warning the world of catastrophe if we do not repent from our evil ways like climate change. They demand that we "decolonize" our minds and embrace the new edicts as written in their sacred texts - Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist and the Call to BDS. They chant new rhyming psalms at their demonstrations to the point of self-hypnosis. They anoint new prophets like Great Thunberg. Those who are part of the "oppressor" groups like white men must publicly repent and acknowledge their status, and salvation can only come from allyship with the oppressed. People who do not follow their dictates - especially believers who turn away - are "canceled," i.e., excommunicated. They actively recruit new followers, especially targeting young people. Finally, they promise a utopian vision of a world that they will perfect with their actions and redeem with their struggles - a pseudo-messianic vision.

While they claim that religions are one source of oppression, they have created a new set of beliefs that have all the trappings of religion, without God.

Blaise Pascal wrote, "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? … [T]his infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself’ (Pensées, 425).” Based on the extremist secularist movements actions, it appears that at least for some non-believers, they indeed are looking for a spiritual experience. People who reject religion still crave meaning, justice, community, and moral clarity, and these movements provide a shallow replacement for religion.

As we have seen, antisemitism thrives in groups that view Jews or Jewish beliefs or Israel as a threat to their entire existence. The Jewish ethical system does not accept one-dimensional, simplistic answers to life's questions. It rejects the binaries of oppressor/oppressed, colonizer/colonized, white/people of color, animal lives as sacred or worthless.

So if these movements succeed because they fill a need, what would it take for Jewish ethics to meet that same need more honestly—and more durably? Can a secular version of Jewish ethics, with few pat answers, offer what people are missing from their lives?

Yes.

While these movements present themselves as moral revolutions or secular equivalents to spiritualities, they bear far more resemblance to cults than to religions. They imitate religion’s outer forms—ritual, purity codes, sacred texts, prophets, and excommunication—but they lack its inner core: the pursuit of enduring truth through humility, tradition, and moral complexity.

Cults offer brainwashing in place of moral introspection. They satisfy the desire to belong, but only through enforced conformity. They promise redemption, but only through submission. They silence doubt, they punish dissent, and they demand emotional loyalty above all else. This is not spirituality. It is programming.

And once someone is drawn in, it is incredibly difficult to break the spell. Former cult members often describe their experience as a kind of moral gaslighting: they were told they were good only if they chanted the party line. Their doubts were demeaned. Their previous relationships were severed. The world was reduced to a binary of us vs. them, good vs. evil. The moral complexity of real life was replaced by a simple script. And the answers they were promised were all lies, often meant to give more power to their leaders.

Meanwhile, Jewish ethics form the true DNA of causes like human rights. "The Jewish tradition is a tradition of law and justice. The Ten Commandments and the teachings of the prophets are a source of inspiration for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," according to René Cassin, who drafted the Declaration itself.

So the question becomes: how can we prevent people from falling into these kinds of ideological cults? And how can we help those already captured to reorient themselves toward genuine ethical inquiry?

The answer, I would argue, is not just to critique the cults—but to offer something better, earlier, deeper. The antidote to cult thinking is moral maturity and literacy.

We must teach people—early and often—how to navigate ethical tension, how to hold multiple values in tension, how to argue without dehumanizing, how to seek justice without demanding perfection. And we must do this in community, through discussion, with humility rather than performative rituals of moral superiority. That might take the form of paired study groups, discussion circles, online forums, or even digital tools that foster thoughtful disagreement.

Imagine a secular activist who feels burned out by the moral absolutism of their climate or anti-colonialist group, constantly shamed for not being "pure" enough. They stumble upon a Jewish ethics discussion group, where chesed encourages them to practice kindness without judgment, where machloket lets them debate ideas without fear of cancellation. For the first time, they feel both morally grounded and free.

The medium can vary. The principle is what matters: we must teach people to think morally, not just claim the mantle of morality.

Jewish ethics offers a model for this. Not because it is the only source of moral truth, but because it is one of the few surviving systems that trains people from youth to think ethically without collapsing into ideology. The chavruta system of studying in pairs, the halachic process, the culture of respectful dissent and precedent - all of these immunize against unthinking cult-like movements.

This is not just a philosophy—it is a method. And if we can share it widely, honestly, and humbly, we may offer people not only protection from cultic-style ideologies, but a path to reclaim their moral autonomy after having been misled by them.

The secular extremists claim that they are brave, that they are courageous, that they are speaking forbidden truths. Yet when people try to talk to them, as we saw during the anti-Israel university encampments in 2024, most of them duck the questions and refuse to have a discussion. That isn't courage - it is cowardice.

Moral courage is being able to defend your beliefs in the face of the mob. That takes time and effort, it takes honest debate and discussion. The Jewish ethics system excels at teaching people how to find a moral position, refine it, and defend it against all arguments.

Becoming a mature, thinking person might not be as fun as shouting slogans and vandalizing buildings. But it is a lot more rewarding.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)