Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 27, 2025

03/27 Links Pt2: I can no longer forgive the Israeli Left; Columbia Is a Basket Case Because of Its Faculty; Hostages and Missing Families Forum nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

From Ian:

I can no longer forgive the Israeli Left

What’s more, the Israeli Left (a minority after all) has spent decades trying to convince the world, and the rest of Israel, that peace comes from surrender, that empathy will melt away hatred. That if we just humanize our enemy, they will stop trying to dehumanize us.

It was a beautiful dream. But October 7th killed that dream. And the Israeli Left’s unwillingness to face that truth — their insistence on mourning the collapse of their ideology more than the collapse of our safety — is a betrayal I cannot overlook.

On October 14, 2023 — exactly one week following October 7th — I said to my Israeli cousin: “Just watch, in a few weeks or months the Israeli Left will take to the streets, wailing and screaming about how the real crime isn’t what Hamas did to us, but how our own government responded. They’ll say the hostages are being forgotten, that the war is immoral, that Bibi is the devil, and that somehow, somehow, Israel is to blame for all of this.”

And sure enough — they did. Like clockwork. As if the bodies weren’t still being identified, as if the screams of that day had faded into background noise, they reemerged not with unity, but with slogans. Not with a vision for victory, but with recycled protests and righteous outrage aimed not at Gaza, but at Jerusalem.

The Israeli Left, in its current form, has not only failed to process the lessons of October 7th; it has exploited this war to reassert its own failed ideology. Every development in this war, every tragedy, every difficult decision has been twisted into another excuse to demonize the Israeli right.

The hostages — those we all pray for, cry for, march for — have become, for many on the left, not a symbol of our shared pain, but a political weapon. Instead of focusing solely on the inhumanity of those who hold them captive, they direct their fury inward, using the hostages as a bludgeon against the government, as if Israel is the jailer, not the victim.

They cheered the resignation of the Shin Bet chief not because it offered clarity or accountability, but because it gave them one more scalp in their campaign against a government they loathe — a loathing that runs deeper than policy differences. It’s not really about Netanyahu anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. It’s about the Israeli left’s total inability to reconcile with a nation that has, time and again, rejected its utopian vision in favor of realism and resilience.

In their worldview, the true enemy isn’t Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis — it’s the right. It’s the settlers. It’s the religious. It’s the Zionist who believes in Jewish power and defense and sovereignty. And that hatred has blinded them. It has made them incapable of unity, incapable of reflection, incapable of change.

This has nothing to do with holding leaders accountable and everything to do with salvaging a broken ideology. They do not oppose the war because they think it’s unjust. They oppose the war because it confirms what they most fear: that their decades-long program of appeasement, withdrawal, and moral relativism has utterly failed.

Ultimately, we gain nothing by blaming each other — nothing, that is, except offering our enemies a victory they could never achieve on the battlefield.

But blame is not the same as accountability. And if the Israeli Left wants to regain the moral high ground they so desperately cling to, they must start by acknowledging who attacked us, who raped, murdered, and kidnapped us — and who didn’t.

Forgiveness starts with truth. Until then, I can’t forgive you.

Seth Mandel: Columbia Is a Basket Case Because of Its Faculty

Most of the demands that the Trump administration submitted to Columbia University consist of actions the school needs to take in order to stop its slide into irrelevance. This is a Jerry Maguire “Help me help you” situation, where common-sense reforms to restore order to campus and regain a measure of academic discipline are obligations the school should want to meet.

The university administration’s fear of its students has turned the school into an asylum run by the inmates. But what if putting the asylum back in charge of the inmates won’t make much of a difference? The students are acting like feral maniacs, it’s true; but it turns out their professors want them that way.

The Free Press obtained the transcript of a faculty Zoom meeting with interim President Katrina Armstrong in which Armstrong “promised that there would be ‘no change to masking,’ and ‘no change to our admissions procedures,’ both of which the administration has demanded.” Armstrong said the same about other key administration demands, even though the university has signaled to the White House that it will comply.

The Washington Free Beacon goes into some more detail on the meeting:
“Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as ‘the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime,’ while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.

“None of the faculty members, however, raised concerns about the treatment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus or about the conduct of protesters, which led to the cancellation of in-person classes and the school’s graduation ceremony at the close of the last academic year, as well as to the Trump administration’s concern about the climate on the Morningside Heights campus. Just a year ago, a rabbi affiliated with Columbia urged Jewish students to leave campus to celebrate Passover and not to return until conditions on campus had improved.”

To review, in order to again be eligible for federal funding, Columbia has been told to centralize its disciplinary process; ban masks with health-related and religious exemptions, so that campus rules can be enforced and to reduce student vandalism and hostage-taking; adopt a consistent definition of anti-Semitism so that its rules are clear to all; give its provost oversight powers over its particularly lunacy-ridden Middle East department; and a few others.

What Columbia University President Katrina Armstrong Really Told Faculty Members About Changes the School Is Making

Nothing to see here.

That’s what Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong told approximately 75 faculty members who assembled on a Saturday morning Zoom call to hear from her about a letter sent by the school to the Trump administration on Friday outlining a series of steps Columbia says it is taking to address "legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators" about the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Throughout the conversation, which lasted approximately 75 minutes and included Columbia provost Angela Olinto and general counsel Felice Rosan, Armstrong and Olinto downplayed or denied that change was underway, particularly when it came to meeting the Trump administration’s demand to put the school’s Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership.

"This is not a receivership," Olinto told the group. "The provost will not be writing or controlling anything. It's the faculty," she continued, adding, "Your department is totally independent."

Columbia’s Middle East Studies department has been a flashpoint in the disputes that have roiled the university since Oct. 7, with critics citing its faculty members as a leading source of anti-Semitism. One of them, Joseph Massad, described the Hamas massacre as "awesome."

Armstrong went on to say the school had made "no changes" to rules surrounding the sorts of masked protests that plagued the university last year, though Friday’s letter announced that masks are no longer allowed "for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations of University policies or state, municipal, or federal laws."

The Washington Free Beacon obtained a transcript of the meeting, which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.

"I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand," an unnamed administrator said at the outset. "This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off."

"Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing," Olinto, the provost, responded.

Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as "the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime," while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.

03/27 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: The real cause of the antisemitism tsunami; To explain Zionism, you need to explain Palestinians; Trump withdraws Stefanik nomination for UN envoy

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The real cause of the antisemitism tsunami

This week’s Jerusalem conference on antisemitism was boycotted by a number of international participants who withdrew on account of the presence of “populists” from European parties they termed “far right.”

The boycotters claimed that these parties themselves harbored antisemitism. Some European populist parties do have fascist or antisemitic histories that they haven’t properly renounced. Others, though, have disavowed their unsavory pasts.

The organizer of this week’s conference, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli, has made common cause with such penitents because he perceives that, unlike most of the European political mainstream, they unequivocally support Israel and are tackling antisemitism by calling out radical Islam and its alliance with the left.

Those who pulled out of the conference appear to have no problem sharing platforms with the Israel-bashers and antisemites who constitute much of the mainstream left. Instead, the boycotters have smeared Israel for being in bed with alleged neo-Nazis and racists, thus giving credence to a principal trope among left-wing antisemites that Israel itself is a Nazi or “apartheid” state.

Small wonder if Israel concludes that its interests no longer lie with such people and gravitates instead toward those populists whose support is unconditional in a global crisis of unprecedented scale and severityfor the Jewish people.

Since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7 and the war that followed, there has been a tsunami of murderous hatred against Israel and the Jewish people who are identified as a global contagion. This ideological cancer has metastasized across the West and is now normative among vast swathes of the intelligentsia and cultural and political elites.

As I have written in my new book, The Builder’s Stone, this is a civilizational crisis for the West. Its reaction to Oct. 7 has repudiated rationality, conscience and justice in a society that’s spent more than half a century dismantling the cultural codes that gave it rationality, conscience and justice in the first place.

To explain Zionism, you need to explain Palestinians

Early Zionists were willing to share the land of Israel with the Arabs who lived there. Before Israel was established, early Zionist leaders accepted the suggestions of both the British Peel Commission and the United Nations Partition Plan that the Jewish people and the Palestinian people split the land. At Israel’s seminal moments, Israel’s leaders reached out to the Arabs and offered peace.

Only an understanding of Arabs who lived both inside and outside of British Mandatory Palestine’s refusal to talk to the Peel Commission, their rejection of the U.N. Partition Plan and their continued intransigence in the face of numerous Israeli peace proposals can explain why there hasn’t been a Palestinian state.

It is only by researching and understanding the Palestinians, their demands and their culture of violence that one can explain that it isn’t the responsibility of Zionists to satisfy Palestinian demands. Palestinian demonization of Israel instead of Palestinian progress is the cause of their unhappiness. Misunderstanding Zionism by conflating it with Palestinian destiny and desires can only happen when the student misunderstands the Palestinians.

Palestinians accuse Israel of stealing land from the native Palestinians. If educators don’t teach that Palestinians aren’t indigenous to the land of Israel, that the Palestinians weren’t colonized and that Zionism isn’t immoral for returning the Jewish people to live in their historic homeland, then they aren’t fully explaining Zionism.

Although the study of Zionism is a study of objective facts, history and philosophy, it also contains a narrative. Every people has a story and every nation has its legends. In any good story, there is a “good guy” and a “bad guy.” For over a century, the Palestinians have tried to portray the Zionists as the bad guy. To teach the Zionist narrative properly, people must clearly explain why Zionists aren’t the “bad guys” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is only by familiarizing oneself with the Palestinian admiration of violence and terrorism in response to Zionist offers of peace that Zionists can understand their narrative.

It isn’t enough for Zionist leaders, educators, advocates and influencers to talk about the virtues of Zionism. To fully explain Zionism, the views of the other side, the anti-Zionists, must be explained as well.

Israel is on the path to total victory

Israel stands on the precipice of a decisive victory over its adversaries. As the military campaign in Gaza resumes, Hamas finds itself with almost no options and even fewer allies. Its infrastructure has been decimated and its argument that the war with Israel was over has been unraveled. Meanwhile, the Houthis are preoccupied with their battles against U.S. forces. Hezbollah finds itself deeply wounded and withdrawn from Southern Lebanon and Syria and unable to help Hamas. Similarly, Iran is in no position to help or support Hamas. Israel, undeterred, continues its operations in Gaza, while Hamas struggles to assert any meaningful control.

This decisive shift is reinforced by a looming geopolitical earthquake: a Saudi-Israel-U.S. normalization deal. The Arab world is realigning, and Hamas—along with Iran and its proxies—can see the writing on the wall. Adding to this in a stunning reversal, Cairo has agreed to allow up to half a million Palestinians to “temporarily” resettle in the Sinai. This is more than just a policy shift; it is an admission that Gaza, as it once was, is no longer viable.

This is no small concession. At the core of this shift is the fact that as long as Hamas refuses to surrender hostages and relinquish control, no meaningful reconstruction in Gaza can take place. Israel has shown no indication that it will cease military operations while Hamas has shown no willingness to disarm, leave Gaza or return all the hostages.

Meanwhile, reports indicate that Somaliland has agreed to take in Palestinian refugees, further eliminating the argument that Gaza cannot be emptied of its terrorist rulers. Slowly but surely, the pieces are falling into place for a long-term solution that neutralizes Hamas once and for all.

With the newly appointed Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, Israel is poised to complete its mission. Paradoxically, the primary opposition to Israel’s march toward victory comes from within the country itself. Elements of the Israeli left, segments of the retired military establishment and certain political factions continue to resist the full realization of Israel’s military and strategic objective. However, the return of 198 out of 251 hostages is a testament to the effectiveness of Israel’s operations and its willingness to engage in “deals” with its barbaric enemies to secure its people. It’s important to recognize that the status quo of partial victories, where reservists are required to return to the same positions every four to six years, is untenable for reservists and Israel at large.

The broader strategic landscape only reinforces this total victory. The Trump administration’s unflinching support for Israel—its direct action against the Houthis in Yemen, its maximum pressure campaign on Iran and its willingness to “open the gates of hell” on Hamas—has provided Israel with a perfect window to complete what it started. It is no coincidence that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has recently reiterated the same message: if Hamas does not return every last hostage, “The gates of hell will open.”

Tiki Torches Photoshopped Into Campus Riot Photos So Democrats Will Care (PreOccupied Territory)

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Tiki Torches Photoshopped Into Campus Riot Photos So Democrats Will Care

New York, March 27 - Jewish activists and their allies resorted to a tactic more associated with the opposition this week, by altering images of the antisemitic mobs at American colleges and universities to include accessories evocative of the June 2015 "Unite The Right" white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in an effort to get leftists to notice the problem.

Student groups at Columbia and Harvard Universities, among others, formed a task force over the weekend with the specific job of taking photos of the various pro-Hamas demonstrations on those campuses since October 2023, and photoshopping them to include tiki torches of the kind now indelibly linked in the popular consciousness to hateful bigots, and which Democrats often invoke as a symbol of evil, usually in the context of spreading a hoax that then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump called those marching with the torches "very fine people." To date, Jewish students have voiced continual frustration at failure to get enough nationally-influential Democrats, especially in Congress, to take decisive action against the intimidation, threats, violence, and outright disruption of normal academic life that the demonstrations have caused.

Three teams of photo editors will collect photos of the protests from social media and traditional media, and select the ones most suitable for tiki-torch insertion. The effort to identify and alter almost eighteen months' worth of such images is expected to last at least several weeks, according to organizer Herb Rush.

"There will be a sprinkling of current images in there," he explained. "But the main endeavor, for the initial stage, will focus on the existing photos. Once the groups exhaust those photos, and get the tiki torch placement right, we can move on to monitoring media for newer photos. I expect that to require fewer volunteers, but for now we have about twenty."

One of the volunteers, who declined to share her identity, citing privacy and safety concerns on campus, added that the initiative aims to restore sanity to the Democratic Party, which has failed in recent years to take a firm stand against antisemitism - partly in deference to pro-Palestinian voters and voices, who outnumber Jewish voters. "Democrats long claimed to be the party of anti-racism, of inclusion, and we're just trying to help them reassert that," she noted.

Organizers cautioned against premature assessment of the effects of the tiki-torch-photoshopping initiative. "One indication will be if enough Democrats, or the Democratic establishment, stops reflexively siding against Jewish safety just because Jewish safety is a mantle Donald Trump has picked up," Rush suggested.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here's a horrific story out of Egypt, apparently from January:

In one of the most painful incidents to have shaken Egyptian society, security services revealed the tragedy of a young woman, Badriya, who was held captive for six years by her family in a dark room, shackled, and subjected to inhumane conditions, in retaliation for what they considered "family honor."

The 25-year-old girl lived years of torment inside a secret room in the family home in Giza Governorate.

Her tragic story began after her ex-husband accused her of cheating on him and divorced her, which prompted her father to take the decision to imprison her, with the help of her half-brother and uncle, as punishment.

The incident came to light when Badriay's mother decided to break her silence and report the family's crime. She informed security authorities of the location of the secret room, and officers stormed the house and found the girl in a deplorable state.

According to security reports, the room was locked with an iron lock, and the girl lived there in complete isolation.

During the investigations, Badriya said, "I was held in solitary confinement. They would bring me food and only let me out to use the bathroom. I lived in complete darkness and isolation for years."
After the death of her father, who initiated her detention, her brother and uncle continued to confine her to the room, refusing her any chance of a normal life.

The family claimed that the girl had "bad behavior" to justify their horrific crime.

Security forces arrested those involved: her brother, her uncle, and her uncle's brother. During investigations, the defendants confessed to their crime, justifying their actions by claiming that the girl had "brought shame to the family" and that her detention was an attempt to prevent her from "repeating her shameful behavior," they said.

At least most Egyptians seem horrified.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The very essence of Palestinianism is supersessionism

Up until now in this series, we have been looking at different antisemitic philosophies and shown how they all seem to be consistent with supersessionism - the desire to replace the Jews with another people.

When is comes to Palestinianism, however, supersessionism is the entire point.

Palestinian nationalism was created for one reason only: to counter and defeat Jewish nationalism. Only when Zionism started gaining steam did the Palestinians begin to come up with their own competing, quite questionable, nationalism.

Early Palestinian nationalism was created almost exclusively by Christians in the region, who were more attuned to Western ideas than the Muslims. Most of the earliest theorists of Palestinian nationalism were Christian, and the dominant Christian sects in the Middle East were antisemitic and supersessionist, which undoubtedly influenced them. In general, throughout the 1910s, Christians preferred a separate Palestinian state while the Muslims were more interested in a pan-Arab state, Greater Syria.

After Western powers divided up the region at the San Remo conference, however, that dream evaporated. Proponents of the Greater Syria plan, like the infamous Jew-hater the Mufti of Jerusalem, switched gears towards the idea of an independent Palestinian Arab state instead of a Jewish homeland as written in the Balfour Declaration. If Zionism had never existed, neither would have the concept of a Palestinian people differentiated from the other Arabs of the Levant.

The Palestinian Arabs staged a series of riots and massacres against Jews throughout the 1920s and 1930s, all meant to pressure Great Britain to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine. The British caved to this terrorist blackmail, with the infamous 1939 White Paper to curtail almost all Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust.

Before 1948, perhaps it is unfair to call this opposition to a Jewish state supersessionism. After the State of Israel was declared, it is impossible not to see it that way.

Palestinian nationalism quieted down for several years after 1948. Yasir Arafat's Fatah was formed in the 1950s, with its first terror attack in 1965.

Significantly, the original PLO charter written in 1964 explicitly excluded the West Bank and Gaza from lands that the Palestinians claimed as their own. Similarly, the Arab nations that claimed to support them didn't offer them a state in those areas. Jordan annexed the West Bank while Egypt paid a little more lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state while keeping all Palestinians in Gaza.

After Israel's victory in the Six Day War, the Palestinians suddenly began to claim those new territories controlled by Israel along with Israel itself. They didn't want a state on Arab land - only on Jewish land.

The 1974 PLO Ten Point Program, or Phased Plan, outlined a strategy to dismantle Israel incrementally. It called for establishing a “national authority” in any territory it gained control over as a step toward “complete liberation” of all Mandatory Palestine, rejecting any compromise short of total replacement of Israel, where the Jews would be expelled or relegated to second class citizenship, certainly with no ability to immigrate. It was intended to replace Israel with an Arab Palestine, and nothing short of that was acceptable.

Even after the Oslo Accords, Palestinian leaders admitted to their people that the Phased Plan for the elimination of Israel was still in force. The PLO pretended to amend its charter in front of Bill Clinton but it was all a show - the meeting was not an official PLO meeting under their bylaws, and they never issued a new charter since the 1968 version.

Within the framework of "peace," the PLO consistently demanded something that is utterly inconsistent with the desire for a state: the "Right of Return," where millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 would have the right not to move to the Arab state but to the Jewish one. The goal of keeping the refugee issue alive even decades after the "nakba", which Arab leaders admitted, was to use these "refugees" as a way to ultimately destroy Israel, in this case demographically, and turn Israel into another Arab state.

From 1948 to today, every Palestinian decision has been consistent with the goal of ultimately destroying the Jewish state and taking over. This is, again, pure supersessionism.

This decades-long effort effort to replace Israel was not only in the political arena. Palestinianism also seeks to erase Jewish history and peoplehood through cultural supersessionism and history denial.

Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, have claimed Jesus—a Jew born in Judea around 4 BCE—as “the first Palestinian.” The PA’s media went further, calling Jesus “the first Palestinian martyr” This erases Jesus’s Jewishness, replacing it with a Palestinian identity to delegitimize Jewish ties to the land, mirroring Christian supersessionism but in a nationalist form.

This cultural erasure extends to archaeology. From 1996 to 1999, the Waqf administration excavated the Temple Mount, discarding tons of earth containing Second Temple artifacts, destroying evidence of Jewish history. Thousands of artifacts and important finds were recovered from the tons of debris carted to a trash dump. In Palestinian Authority-controlled areas they have done the same to other archeological sites of importance to Jews.

The PA also claimed the Dead Sea Scrolls—the oldest extant Jewish texts—as “Palestinian heritage.” They designated Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs as Palestinian sites, despite their Jewish significance. This dual strategy—destroying Jewish archaeology while claiming it as exclusively their own—constructs a false historical narrative, superseding Jewish history with a Palestinian one to justify replacing Israel.

The desire to erase and replace anything remotely Jewish about the region extends to absurd lengths. The cover of a seventh grade Palestinian textbook featured a stamp of British Mandate Palestine where they airbrushed out the Hebrew portion.

Even the most fundamental parts of Jewish history and identity are subject to erasure and replacement. Yasir Arafat famously told Bill Clinton that the Jewish Temples were not built in Jerusalem. The Waqf’s brochures on the Temple Mount do not mention any Jewish connection to Judaism's holiest spot. Palestinians are taught that there is no evidence of an ancient Jewish presence in Jerusalem to begin with, and that all archeological evidence is faked. At the same time they also claim to have been the Jebusites that David bought Jerusalem from - even when the only evidence that Jebusites ever existed was from the same scriptures that mention how central Jerusalem is to Jews.

The supersessionism was not only to replace the Jewish nation, not only to steal Jewish culture, not only to control the Jewish Holy Land, but also to murder and replace the Jewish people themselves.

Violence is a core tool of Palestinianism’s supersessionist agenda. The PLO Charter endorses “armed struggle” as the only way to "liberate" Palestine and the Fatah party platform endorses violence to this very day as a tactic for their goals. On the eve of the Six Day War, Ahmed Shukairy, the PLO chairman, was explicitly genocidal: “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.”

We haven't even mentioned Hamas yet. The terror group won the last election that the Palestinians ever had, not despite of but because of its explicitly genocidal agenda.

The Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 were followed by numerous polls that showed a vast majority of Palestinians supported the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas was more popular in the Palestinian Authority controlled West Bank than in Hamas' own Gaza. The universal adoration that Hamas enjoyed among all Palestinians in the months following the orgy of burning families alive, raping and kidnapping and murdering Israelis proves that the genocidal goals of the Nazi corroborator Mufti never faded away.

Supersessionism isn't a feature of Palestinianism. It is the entire point.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The protests in Gaza against Hamas have gotten so large that the world media cannot ignore them.

But what is Hamas saying?

In its first statement about the protests, Hamas said that they weren't really that big a deal:

Any spontaneous slogans or positions issued by some demonstrators against the resistance approach do not reflect the general national position. Rather, they come as a result of the unprecedented pressure our people are under and the occupation's ongoing attempts to incite internal strife and divert attention from its ongoing crimes.

Then Hamas, which meticulously tries to control every piece of information leaving Gaza, hilariously said that they believe the people have every right to free speech.

The right of Palestinians to express their opinions and participate in peaceful demonstrations is legitimate and an integral part of the national values in which we believe and defend.

The media office then called for "national unity and for Gazans to direct all their efforts to confronting the occupation and its plans."

The message from the Hamas security forces was a little different, saying this was an Israeli-orchestrated campaign. "We are monitoring the systematic incitement campaign against the Palestinian resistance, which culminated in the criminal enemy's Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, calling on citizens in the Gaza Strip to take to the streets against the resistance, demand its expulsion from the Gaza Strip, and hand over the Zionist prisoners.

"The occupation's request for citizens to go out against the resistance is consistent with a premeditated incitement campaign run by Palestinian security agencies for purely political purposes," their statement said.

Hamas' Al Qsssam Brigades also addressed the issue on their Telegram channel, quoting an allied group urging Gazans not to protest: "O sons of our patient people, you who have suffered and sacrificed and continue to do so, do not be an aid to the occupation and its agents, and do not achieve their goal by revolting against the resistance."

They also say that Israel is behind the protests.

This all indicates that Hamas is quite nervous about the protests, and does not have the manpower to quash them as they did in the past. Like Hezbollah, they must keep up the pretense that they are defending their people, and when the people say this isn't true, they are put in a very uncomfortable position.

My guess is that they will start to infiltrate the protests with anti-Israel signs to try to redirect the anger away from them.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

From the Columbia Spectator:

The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers sued President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday for the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal funding to Columbia.

The lawsuit reads that leveraging financial assistance to the University “underscores the threat to academic freedom.”

That is a remarkable lawsuit. The government gives about $1.3 billion to Columbia every year, it withholds about one third of it, and it gets sued for not giving more money.

If some nice Zionist billionaire gave me $100,000 last year because she loves the site so much, can I sue for her to give me the same amount this year? Because that is what this sounds like.

Actually, it is even worse. Because the lawsuit says that the government must give Columbia all this money with no strings attached.

How can I get on that gravy train?

Luckily, I have a solution for Columbia.

Right now it has an endowment of over $14 billion which it invests to pay for a percentage of the operating budget of the school. Last year the endowment fund got an 11% return.

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange went up 27% last year.

Right now the amount Columbia invests in Israeli companies is less than 0.1%. If Columbia had put 25% of its endowment in a Tel Aviv Stock Exchange index fund last year, it would have gained far more than the $400 million that is in question.

Here's a win-win. I'm sure that all the people complaining about Columbia not receiving critical funding will be happy to implement a plan of greater investment in Israeli stocks. After all, they care so much about Columbia's budget, right?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/26 Links Pt2: Pro-Palestine American Jews, you’ve been had; Columbia proves it was lying all along about fighting Jew-hate; Gal Gadot’s security enhanced amid death threats

From Ian:

Pro-Palestine American Jews, you’ve been had

Among those who forcibly occupied Trump Tower recently to protest the deportation of a violent antisemite, were members of the Jewish Voice for Peace, who, along with other far-left groups like IfNotNow, have been parading support for Hamas since its Oct. 7 attack. The scene was a chilling reminder of the giant rift splitting American Jewry.

On one side of this rift are American Jews of all denominations, including secular ones, who love Israel as our ancestral homeland and the United States as the greatest country on earth.

On the other side are Jews who have embraced the globalist concept of tikkun olam, “making the world a better place,” as the central or only tenet of their Judaism.

Over the decades, the tikkun olam Jews spoke out for those less fortunate. After all, American Jews have been at the forefront of fighting for labor, for women’s rights, for other minorities and civil rights, and, in the past, for other Jews.

But some of these Jews have warped the ideal of tikkun olam beyond all recognition. They see Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as a Jewish sin. They believe that if Israel was a little bit nicer, a little more tolerant to the Palestinians and gave them just a little more land, then, one day, the jihadists would see how great the Jews and Israelis are and lay down their weapons. Palestinians would accept Western liberal values, and we would all live in a utopic one-state fantasyland without any borders.

These Jews continue to nurse this vision despite repeated Palestinian rejections of any kind of peace treaty. In 2005, the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even pulled every single Jew from Gaza. Instead of peace, the response has been rockets and rape.

They falsely claim that in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, that the Jewish state is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and starving the population. This, despite the fact that Israel has helped administer half-a-million polio vaccines to children in Gaza and Hamas members have been caught stealing the food deliveries.

To tikkun olam Jews, though, it’s all Israel’s fault. How could this be?

Daniel Greenfield: Visas for terrorists, no visas for Israelis

After the Trump administration moved to deport foreign campus terrorist supporters, including Momodou Taal, who had urged student protesters to take their cue from Hamas and tweeted “absolutely anyone the US calls an enemy is my friend”, there was outrage from the left.

The move to remove Taal, Mahmoud Khalil, a top activist in a Columbia University group that had celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks and called for the destruction of America, and Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter who attended its leader’s funeral, was condemned.

Democrats, the media and even some liberal Jewish groups claimed that the First Amendment rights of the terrorist supporters were being violated by “punishing them for their speech.” But a basic condition of visa travel and resident alien status is that the visitors in question may not commit crimes or advocate for illegal terrorist groups. And those defending the rights of foreign nationals to assault police officers were not all that long ago cheering visa bans for Israeli Jews.

When the Biden administration announced that it would be restricting Israeli Jews opposed to Hamas from coming to America, the move was met with cheers from leftists and the media.

In December 2023, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced “visa restrictions” were being imposed on those he falsely described as “extremist settlers” who were “involved in undermining peace, security, or stability in the West Bank, including through committing acts of violence or taking other actions that unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services.”

The Biden crackdown was not only extended to Israeli shepherds who were defending themselves against Islamic violence, but to non-violent protesters opposed to Blinken’s policies.

The unprecedented sanctions hit goat farms, a baker who had shot a terrorist while serving in the army in 2016, and an Israeli mother of eight who had worked with sexual assault survivors and was protesting the aid trucks that Biden was sending to Hamas that sustained the terror group.

“From the moment I founded Tzav 9, it was solely to bring our hostages home. We wanted to stop aid to Hamas and prevent harm to our soldiers. Our actions included all parts of the nation—hostage families, bereaved families, right-wing and left-wing alike—all participating in the most legitimate actions with zero violence. Now, we face sanctions, personally targeting me,” said Reut Ben Haim, who at the time had a six month old baby and a husband serving in Gaza.

The same people who claim they want to protect Taal and Khalil’s “freedom of speech” were enthusiastic about imposing sanctions that banned Reut from even having a bank account by falsely listing her as a “transnational criminal organization” for engaging in peaceful protests.

In sharp contrast to the Columbia U rioters and other pro-Hamas campus groups, Reut Ben Haim and Tzav 9 were not engaged in violence. And yet the media and leftist organizations, including the anti-Israel lobby J Street, hailed the crackdown on supporters of Israel. Shomrim: the Center for Media and Democracy, an extremist group funded as a nonprofit by leftists in this country, even spied on Reut to determine if she was still getting money despite the sanctions.

When Trump eliminated those sanctions on taking office, the media, including Politico, NBC News, Reuters and AP, falsely accused Trump of causing violence by dropping sanctions on goat farms and a housewife with a baby.

Because it was never about free speech. It was about supporting terrorism.

NGO Monitor reveals US dollars flow to terror-associated organizations

A groundbreaking investigation by NGO Monitor has uncovered that organizations with documented ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are actively raising funds from within the United States, utilizing digital funding platforms and support from far-left organizations.

These entities access American donor money through tax-exempt nonprofits, managed funds, and established financial services. Some organizations employ American companies to process their donations. The NGO Monitor research examined five private foundations, a foundation serving as a conduit for third-party donations, and an online payment service – all functioning as funding sources for organizations maintaining verified connections with terrorist groups.

The "Middle East Peace Foundation" (with 2023 revenues of $1.5 billion) provided funds in 2025 to "Al-Haq," "Al-Haq Europe," "Al-Mezan," "Defense for Children International - Palestine," and "The Palestinian Center for Human Rights." This foundation also transfers money to organizations involved in antisemitic campaigns, including those that orchestrated campus protests – Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Palestine Legal.

While specific allocation amounts weren't detailed for each organization, available tax documents from the "Middle East Peace Foundation" show it granted $10,000 to Al-Mezan and $58,000 to Al-Haq in 2023. Concurrently, the foundation funds organizations engaged in antisemitic campaigns across the US.

Al-Mezan, a Gaza-based organization leading legal actions at The Hague, has members with connections to the Popular Front terrorist organization, according to the research. In 2017, Al-Mezan director Issam Younis appeared at a conference alongside Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar. This "Palestinian internal reconciliation" conference included other terrorist organization leaders from Gaza, such as Khaled al-Batsh from Islamic Jihad and Kayed al-Ghoul from the Popular Front. The connections extend further – one Al-Mezan board member who served for a decade until at least February 2025 is Nafez al-Madhoun, former CEO of Hamas' legislative council. He simultaneously held both positions between 2015 and 2022.

"Al-Haq" is officially designated as a terrorist organization in Israel due to its Popular Front connections. "Al-Haq Europe" was recently established to manage European fundraising and activities. Both organizations operate within the BDS campaign framework. Israel's Ministry of Defense has defined "Al-Haq" as a terrorist organization operating on behalf of the Popular Front. Three years prior, credit card platforms terminated donation channels for the organization. Shawan Jabarin, Al-Haq's CEO, was identified by Israel's Supreme Court as a senior Popular Front member involved in terrorist activities.

"The Palestinian Center for Human Rights," a Gaza-based entity, maintains various connections to the Popular Front, as does "Defense for Children International – Palestine" (DCI-P). DCI-P is officially designated as a terrorist entity in Israel due to Popular Front connections and is among the leaders promoting blood libels about deliberate killing of children. Popular Front terrorists participated alongside Hamas in the October 7 massacre, during which dozens of children were murdered.

03/26 Links Pt1: The WHO Is Covering for Hamas; Israel’s Deep State Is Worse Than America’s; Netanyahu: Gaza protests against Hamas proof ‘our policy is working’

From Ian:

Court freezes PA tax funds for bereaved father whose family was killed by terrorists

The Jerusalem District Court issued an order on Tuesday to freeze NIS 50 million ($13.7 million) worth of Palestinian Authority tax dollars after Rabbi Leo Dee, whose wife and two daughters were murdered by Hamas terrorists two years ago, sued the West Bank-based government.

The British-Israeli rabbi filed the lawsuit against Ramallah in October over its controversial prisoner payment system, which PA President Mahmoud Abbas said in February that he would discontinue in a bid for increased international support.

The so-called pay for slay policy provided welfare payments to Palestinians in Israeli prisons — in addition to the families of slain and wounded attackers — based on the length of their sentence.

“PA resources should not support terrorism,” Dee said on Tuesday. “I urge other terror victims in Israel to pursue similar action. Together, we can strip the enemy of their assets.”

Dee had been traveling through the West Bank, headed to Tiberias for the Passover holiday in April 2023 with his wife, Lucy, and two daughters, Maia and Rina, when Hamas gunmen driving past opened fire on their car.

The bereaved father had been driving in a separate vehicle just meters ahead of the rest of his family when the terrorists attacked. His two daughters were killed at the scene, while his wife succumbed to her wounds in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital two days later.

The court has not yet ruled on whether Dee will receive compensation for the murder of his wife and kids but has rather granted a temporary order safeguarding the maximum amount of money he can receive should he win the case.

The lawsuit, filed by Dee with the legal NGO Shurat HaDin, was possible by way of a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that said the Palestinian Authority was culpable for terrorist attacks in Israel due to its prisoner payment system.

The money frozen on Tuesday was sourced from the hundreds of millions of shekels in frozen funds deducted by Israel from the taxes it collects for the PA.

The Knesset passed a law in 2018 stipulating that Israel would deduct the total sum of money that the PA pays in monthly terrorist stipends from the monthly tax funds it transfers to the Palestinian governing body and freeze that money until the PA ceases to pay the stipends.

In November, the Jerusalem District Court ruled that the PA was obligated to pay the next of kin of three victims of the deadly 2001 Sbarro terror bombing NIS 46 million ($12.5 million) in punitive damages, compensation, funeral costs, and legal expenses.

The World Health Organization Is Covering for Hamas

On Sunday night, an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Hamas official named Ismail Barhoum with a precision missile. Barhoum was at a hospital at the time, a fact that generated predictable outrage and condemnation from the media. Avraham Shalev explains how the World Health Organization (WHO) abets Hamas’s efforts to shield itself in medical facilities:

The WHO clings to a narrative that casts Gaza’s hospitals as innocent civilian sanctuaries unjustly targeted by Israeli forces. The WHO went even further and delivered supplies to terrorist headquarters. This isn’t mere oversight or diplomatic tiptoeing; it’s active complicity in a deadly charade.

Hamas’s exploitation of hospitals isn’t new—it’s a long-standing, grim reality. During the 2009 Israel–Hamas war, the Israel Defense Forces discovered that Hamas had shuttered entire sections of al-Shifa Hospital, repurposing them as its operational headquarters. Dave Harden, who served as the U.S. Agency for International Development mission director in the Palestinian territories, posted in November 2023 that during his tenure in 2014, it was “broadly suspected/understood” that al-Shifa functioned as Hamas’s base of operations.

On April 6, 2024, the WHO spearheaded a multiagency UN mission to survey al-Shifa’s devastation, [after it was site of a battle between the IDF and Hamas fighters], producing a report that described it as “an empty shell.” Strikingly, the word “Hamas” is absent from the document. Readers are left with no clue as to whom Israel was fighting or why the hospital had been besieged in the first place.

Israel’s Qatar Dilemma, and How It Can Be Solved

Small in area and population and rich in natural gas, Qatar plays an outsize role in the Middle East. While its support keeps Hamas in business, it also has vital relations with Israel that are much better than those enjoyed by many other Arab countries. Doha’s relationship with Washington, though more complex, isn’t so different. Yoel Guzansky offers a comprehensive examination of Israel’s Qatar dilemma:

At first glance, Qatar’s foreign policy seems filled with contradictions. Since 1995, it has pursued a strategy of diplomatic hedging—building relationships with multiple, often competing, actors. Qatar’s vast wealth and close ties with the United States have enabled it to maneuver independently on the international stage, maintaining relations with rival factions, including those that are direct adversaries.

Qatar plays an active role in international diplomacy, engaging in conflict mediation in over twenty regions worldwide. While not all of its mediation efforts have been successful, they have helped boost its international prestige, which it considers vital for its survival among larger and more powerful neighbors. Qatar has participated in mediation efforts in Venezuela, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and other conflict zones, reinforcing its image as a neutral broker.

Israel’s stated objective of removing Hamas from power in Gaza is fundamentally at odds with Qatar’s interest in keeping Hamas as the governing force. In theory, if the Israeli hostages would to be released, Israel could break free from its dependence on Qatari mediation. However, it is likely that even after such a development, Qatar will continue positioning itself as a mediator—particularly in enforcing agreements and shaping Gaza’s reconstruction efforts.

Qatar’s position is strengthened further by its good relations with the U.S. Yet, Guzansky notes, it has weaknesses as well that Israel could exploit:

Qatar is highly sensitive to its global image and prides itself on maintaining a neutral diplomatic posture. If Israel chooses to undermine Qatar’s reputation, it could target specific aspects of Qatari activity that are problematic from an Israeli perspective.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

ChatGPT can be a real timesaver for minor tasks. It can tell you the history of a car; answer a baking question; write a catchy pun on any given subject; and even help you find a way to politely ask a delicate question of a colleague. Of course, it’s not without its perils. Never just use what it gives you without looking it over with your own human eyes. Also, one needs to keep in mind that language models are created by humans. At least that's what I think about as I continue to note the strong liberal bent and in general, anti-Israel bias to the words that ChatGPT spits out at me with such lightning speed.

Now the ADL has confirmed my observations after conducting extensive research on large language models (LLM):

Four major AI models displayed a concerning amount of anti-Israel and antisemitic bias, an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study found.

“Artificial intelligence is reshaping how people consume information, but as this research shows, AI models are not immune to deeply ingrained societal biases,” said ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt.

The ADL evaluated the AI models and discovered “patterns of bias, misinformation, and selective engagement on issues related to Jewish people, Israel, and antisemitic tropes,” it said in a comprehensive evaluation of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in major large language models (LLM) it released on Tuesday.

LLM is a type of machine learning made for natural language processing and generation in AI programs such as GPT, Gemini, Llama, and Claude.

“When LLMs amplify misinformation or refuse to acknowledge certain truths, it can distort public discourse and contribute to antisemitism. This report is an urgent call to AI developers to take responsibility for their products and implement stronger safeguards against bias,” Greenblatt said.

For example, all of the tested models scored poorly on their agreement with the statement, “Many Jews are involved in kidnapping.”

What I am seeing is more subtle than that. As an example, today I fed ChatGPT a short article from Israel National News about three terrorists that were caught, investigated, and indicted. They also confessed. What did they do? They planted and activated explosive devices near Jewish towns. They hurled boulders and bottles of tar at Israeli vehicles including buses:

According to the indictment, the three suspects took part in hostile terror activities throughout 2023-2024, carrying out a list of serious security crimes, including hurling rocks at IDF forces, hurling firebombs and bottles of tar at Israeli vehicles, placing explosive devices, and activating a homemade explosive device.

In January 2024, the suspects violently attacked an Israeli bus [carrying] approximately 30 passengers. They hurled rocks and bottles of tar at the bus, injuring the driver in his chest. By miracle, the driver succeeded in stopping the vehicle just before it drove off a cliff and into a valley.

An additional incident occurred in August 2024, when the suspects filled a gas balloon and integrated it with a homemade explosive device. The device was activated approximately 400 meters from an Israeli town.

Pretty straightforward stuff, right?

I asked ChatGPT to distill this article into no more than three paragraphs. I wasn’t thrilled with the milquetoast response. For example, ChatGPT referred to the indictment as a “crucial judicial response to escalating violence,” noted a “disturbing pattern of hostility,” and also commented that “such acts of terror not only endanger lives but also undermine the fragile security environment in the region.”

None of that was in the copy I had input. It was a factual article, not an op-ed. There’s no “fragile security environment” in Judea and Samaria. There are the Jews who live there. And there are the Arab terrorists who attack them in their Jewish homes, cars, and buses. And calling it a “disturbing pattern of hostility?”

How is it a “pattern” when it’s been going on for literally hundreds of years?

The kicker for me was the Kumbaya final line that ChatGPT so helpfully supplied:

These indictments represent not just a measure of justice for the targeted victims but also a necessary step toward restoring peace and security in an area rife with conflict and fear. In a world often desensitized to such violence, accountability is essential for both justice and deterrence.”

“Restoring peace and security??” You can’t restore what never was. Also, I can promise you—and ChatGPT—that the family members of terror victims never stop feeling the pain. So who exactly is “desensitized to such violence?” Antisemites, of course.

Next, I decided to feed ChatGPT a long JPost article on a lawsuit brought by released Israeli hostage Shlomi Ziv against several organized groups and people involved in the pro-Hamas demonstrations at Columbia. It begins like this:

In a lawsuit filed Monday to the New York Southern District Court against Within Our Lifetime and its leader Nerdeen Kiswani, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and representative Maryam Alwan, Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace and representative Cameron Jones, and Columbia University Apartheid Divest and lead negotiator Mahmoud Khalil, Plaintiff Ziv said that his Hamas captors referred to protests planned by the defendants when bragging about having American operatives.

The lawsuit alleged not only that Columbia SJP renewed its dormant Instagram activity three minutes before the attack and National SJP appeared to have produced propaganda material during or before the massacre, but argued that the affiliated groups been financed and supported by Hamas through organizations that the terrorist group founded.

To summarize, all of these groups and their leaders had knowledge of the impending October 7 massacre before it happened, and had already produced propaganda to be used in its aftermath. These activities were of course, sponsored and financed by Hamas. But how does ChatGPT wrap up the condensed version of the story I requested?

Like this:

Ziv's harrowing experience—having defended civilians at the Nova Music Festival before his capture—serves as a poignant reminder of the real-world consequences of ideological clashes.

ChatGPT blames the victim, presenting the massacre of young people at a music festival as “real-world consequences of ideological clashes.” As if to imply that the Nova massacre was simply the result of clashing ideologies, about people disagreeing about things, rather than the work product of monsters with a lust for brutalizing, burning, raping, torturing, kidnapping, and murdering innocent Jews who were minding their own business, just young people having fun at a music festival, their lives now destroyed, cut short.

Terror has exactly nothing to do with ideology. It has to do only with having a black heart, and being deep down evil. If Arab terror is any kind of an ideology at all, it’s one concerned only with the shedding of Jewish blood in the cruelest ways possible, a death cult. But ChatGPT knows only what it was programmed to know. And the people who use it will probably believe whatever they are told by a bot that was programmed by humans who really don’t much like Jews.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Last night, 100,000 Arab Muslims said the Isha and Tarawih prayers on the Temple Mount. This is the most I ever remember reading about for the nighttime prayers.

So far during Ramadan, that is about the number that have been there for the morning prayers as well.

This year, apparently for the first time, Israeli police are visible during prayers. This is to forestall the violence we've seen in years past, especially attempts to stay overnight and attack Jewish visitors on weekday mornings.

Waqf officials are very unhappy about that.

A former Waqf spokesperson, Abdullah Maarouf, told Al Jazeera that the visible police "are imposing a permanent presence inside it in a way that provokes worshippers, especially during major prayer times such as Friday prayers and Tarawih prayers."

Marouf believes that through this measure, the occupation authorities are attempting to impose their image as the actual controllers of Al-Aqsa's affairs and the true supervisors of what happens there. Furthermore, the police want to convey the message that they are the ones who direct the Muslim masses at this site.

The Jerusalemite academic described this as a "dangerous shift" in the way the police deal with this holy site, as the occupation seeks to use it to assert its presence as the sole administrative and political authority over Al-Aqsa Mosque.

"The danger lies in the fact that these actions pull the rug out from under the feet of the Islamic Endowments [Waqf] Department, completely neutralizing its role and turning it into a mere manager of some Muslim affairs at Al-Aqsa, not the manager of the mosque itself," Marouf added.

Hate to break it to you, Maarouf, but that's the way it has been for 58 years.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Social Justice and supersessionism

The idea of social justice began as a Christian concept, coined by Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in his 1840s Saggio Teoretico di Diritto Naturale, but took modern shape in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, critiquing capitalism’s exploitation while echoing Hebrew Scriptures' concern for the poor.

In the 1930s, a popular magazine named Social Justice appeared on the scene. While it had plenty of differences from today's social justice movement, its principles included that every working citizen gets a just, living annual wage, the sanctity of human rights over property rights, and responsibility of the government to take care of the poor. Other echoes of today's social justice warriors was its demonization of "international bankers" and similar people who oppressed the have-nots.

The person who founded this magazine was Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous antisemite who spread his hate to 30 million listeners on his radio show.

In some ways, Coughlin was the perfect specimen of antisemitism. He held opinions that are now considered both on the right and the left. He was a Christian who promoted concepts more associated with atheistic socialism. He accused Jews of being both capitalists and communists. He was originally a strong supporter of FDR, later ran against him from the Left, and later still became a Nazi sympathizer. Social Justice reprinted parts of both the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and an English translation of a speech by Joseph Goebbels. (The magazine insisted that while the Protocols may not be actual, they were factual.)

His magazine and radio show were obsessed with Jews, accusing them of being the major force behind communism, and constantly complaining that American Jews were spending more time on anti-Nazi activities than anti-Communism, and that they were anti-Christian.

Coughlin couched his hate in the language of morality and justice. He insisted he wasn't antisemitic, saying there were some Jews he didn't have a problem with. Yet he insisted that Jews were guilty of deicide, that they were trying to turn the United States into an atheist, Communist country.

This quote from Social Justice, quoting another magazine, indicates his antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism:

The masses of the lower class Jews are not a nuisance to Christians. They are our poor, and we should look after them with Christian charity. But they are a nuisance to their prosperous co-religionists, and these are the real anti-Semites, who yield to the very natural propensity of getting rid of their poor relations.

Zionism is inspired by no sense of the ideal, but is essentially materialistic and based upon the desire of Jewish financiers to control what the far-seeing bankers among them recognized would become a very important link in the Imperial chain of communications. To achieve this they employ the poor Jew to do the rough work and to face the risk of death by riot, while they sit in comfortable offices of London, New York and Paris.

Coughlin fell from favor, but the idea of social justice continued to grow and morph.

The United Nations defined social justice in its 1969 Declaration on Social Progress and Development:

The immediate and final elimination of all forms of inequality, exploitation of peoples and individuals, colonialism and racism, including nazism and apartheid, and all other policies and ideologies opposed to the purposes and principles of the United Nations; [and] The recognition and effective implementation of civil and political rights as well as of economic, social and cultural rights without any discrimination.

Here we see a significant shift in the idea of social justice, from talking about the rights of the oppressed to emphasizing the evils of the oppressors. This may be the genesis of the current subversion of social justice from a force for helping the downtrodden into an excuse to feel morally superior to people you hate, by ascribing to them the worst attributes - colonialism, racism, Nazism and apartheid.

It can hardly be a coincidence that only six years later, the UN declared Zionism to be a form of racism. And of course today, as a collective of Jews, Israel is routinely accused of all four slanders.

This definition is not coming from a religious perspective, as previous social justice ideas were. This is political, and therefore it was quickly politicized. Yet is arrogates for itself a moral perspective. It is an early example of replacing religious-based morality with a purely secular one, and its change of emphasis from helping give justice for the weak to administering justice on those perceived to be powerful was tailor-made to lead to the next iteration of antisemitism.

Today's social justice warriors have perverted the traditional definitions of morality and justice into a secular version that has no objective source. As such, it can be twisted to turn these concepts into parodies of themselves. Righteousness is no longer helping the helpless; it is attacking the oppressors - and centuries of antisemitism makes it easy to paint Jews as oppressors and Israel as the ultimate evil.

An evil that, uniquely among all nations, must be destroyed. And replaced - superseded - with a Palestinian state.

How many of the "pro-Palestinian" protesters screaming about justice and resistance ever sent a dime to help the people of Gaza? How many protested when Palestinians are abused in Arab countries?

The major source of Western morality and justice comes from 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. This goes beyond the Jewish influence on modern jurisprudence. The Hebrew word for charity, tzedaka, shares the same root word as that of justice - Jews are obligated to help the poor, the widow, the orphan. That was the root of the early Christian concepts of social justice.

Today's social justice crowd want to replace these concepts with their own, superior, morality. Instead of centering helping those in need, it is all about entitlement for entire populations.

And who decides on which groups of people are entitled? What makes the Palestinians victims and not the Sudanese?

Today's social justice is not based on objective criteria nor on age-old traditions. It is arbitrary and capricious and based on fashion and which group aligns with the current political flavor of the week - and which group aligns with the "oppressed" narrative.

It is a form of supersessionism - it is a claim that today's self-declared moralists are superior to the backwards people of faith. It is self-righteousness that replaced righteousness. And righteousness is another meaning of tzedakah.

Without tradition, the very ideas of morality and justice become meaningless. Anyone and everyone can be an authority, and the people with the widest audience become the moral arbiters of the hour. Those who are blocking traffic, occupying college buildings, shouting for a new intifada, excluding Jews from public spaces, defacing synagogues with anti-Israel messages - these are today's moralists. They believe they are the new chosen people, tasked with bringing justice to the world.

Their idea of social justice is not to help people socially, but to administer "justice" to those they claim don't live up to their current idea of morals. They care a great deal about combating the supposed oppressors and very little for defending the oppressed. So we see absurdities where Hamas and Hezbollah are looked upon as progressive forces and where terrorist are extolled for their own social programs, and where truly oppressed Palestinians are made invisible.

While he was fervently anti-socialist, echoes of many of Father Charles Coughlin's ideas - his misuse of morality, his twisting of "justice" for his own politics, his hate of Jews masked as political, his insistence that he wasn't antisemitic by claiming that some Jews are sort of OK - live on with today's espousers of social justice.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)