09/03 Links Pt1: The new libel to destroy Israel; Amb. Danon: Why are we determined to remove UNRWA from Jerusalem?; Howard Jacobson: How to Kill Jews Unantisemitically

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The new libel to destroy Israel

The overwhelming majority of attacks in these disputed areas are by Arabs on Jews—thousands of incidents of rock-throwing, stabbings, arson, car-rammings, criminal damage and murder.

In recent days, while politicians and journalists whipped up “settler violence” claims into a feeding frenzy, residents in the Judean hills reported that Arabs from a local village had infiltrated the grazing areas of an Israeli farm and scattered lethal poison hidden inside the herds’ drinking troughs.

Jewish shepherds who arrived to find their dying goats—videos of which were posted on social media—said they were attacked with stones by dozens of Arabs lying in wait nearby.

Jewish residents say farmers’ herds are regularly being stolen and turning up in the Arab casbah. When IDF troops go in to retrieve them, they are set upon by hundreds of Arabs with stones and fireworks.

Israelis’ extremist or revenge attacks on Arabs, their homes or their mosques are happening, and they are shocking and inexcusable—as are their nihilistic attacks on IDF soldiers. But this is a highly complex situation that’s being weaponized to delegitimize and destroy Israel itself.

Western media and politicians never acknowledge attacks on the “settlers,” who have been effectively dehumanized.

The prevailing unwisdom is that they shouldn’t be there in the first place because they are in “illegal occupation of Palestinian land.” So if they are attacked or even murdered, they’re asking for everything they get, and their plight doesn’t even deserve a mention.

Apart from the callous inhumanity of this attitude, it also displays gross ignorance of history and international law.

Unfortunately, a significant number of IDF members and police, who are on the left along with most mainstream Israeli media outlets, also hate the “settlers” and produce a distorted picture on which the venomous West greedily feeds. And Israeli politicians, including the prime minister and president, have merely condemned the Israeli “rioters” and refrained from presenting the other side of the story.

Those who assume that this means the “settler violence” canard is true would do well to remember how in 2000, the Israelis leapt to take responsibility for the apparent shooting and killing of a Palestinian Arab child, Mohammed al-Durah, when a demonstration in the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada apparently came under IDF fire.

Subsequent evidence revealed that the boy had not been killed and that the whole demonstration was staged.

But the Israelis were less concerned with establishing the truth than with tamping everything down and making the issue go away. The result was a libel against Israel that incited untold numbers of killings, including the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.

The same politically craven thinking seems to be operating here. Israel is now under enormous pressure over “settler violence” from both the Trump administration and American Jews, for whom this has become the No. 1 issue because they, too, believe the distorted accounts.

In addition to finally dealing properly with the true miscreants, Israel should not only be responding with the real story behind these “settler attacks,” including the role of foreign provocateurs. It should be telling the world that its citizens have the legal right to live in these disputed territories. It should also be publicly listing every single Arab attack on these Jewish residents.

But as ever, the Israeli government thinks there’s no point trying to persuade the incorrigibly anti-Jewish West of the truth and justice of Israel’s cause.

The result is untold damage being done to the Jewish state, as yet again it fails to engage with the war being waged against it on the battleground of the mind.

Adam Louis-Klein: The New Genocide Libel

Israeli settlers, including those who belong to the specific movement to establish deep outposts in Judea and Samaria, noted that, since the reports were published on Shabbat, they themselves hardly had time to give their own account of the events. For a group of people categorically defined as evil, the expectation that we might hear their side of the story before anyone rushes to extreme conclusions feels like a bridge too far. No one else, certainly not the international media, including NBC, even thought it was relevant.

The Qusra incident took place within a broader narrative that had been building over the past month that settlers were “besieging” a particular house. It turns out the house belongs to the American citizen Loui Abu Rida, who, as he stated in a New York Times op-ed, demands a return to Biden’s sanctions policy. Foreign agitators, such as Andrey X—known for his constant filming of Israeli settlers and attempts to stoke online outrage, and who once described a settler peacefully walking by with his sheep as an incident of settler violence—and Jasper Nathaniel, who proposed to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., that he enter a protected zone and harass settlers for publicity—have been present at the site. The residents at Tel Talpiot, a nearby settler outpost, claim the house was built recently and it is usually uninhabited. It functions instead as a base from which to launch attacks on Israelis.

That’s what seems to have happened in the Qusra incident. Video released by Channel 18 Israel, a Judea and Samaria-focused media platform founded in 2024 by former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Sam Schubert, and shared by Saadia Hershkop, an American tour-guide who lives in the region, show a crowd of masked Arab men, accompanied by foreign journalists, launching the assault around noon of Shabbat day. When the IDF had some delays in arriving at the site, the settlers organized a security patrol and pushed the Arabs back to Rida’s house. The situation then turned into a skirmish in which both sides threw stones at the other. The Qusra attack was, according to Israelis at Tel Talpiot, designed to produce an international media spectacle of Israeli aggression.

If Arabs initiated the incident at Qusra—which no doubt will simply be classed indifferently as a case of “settler violence” —then questions ought to be asked about Jalud and the NBC attack.

The same narrative—of a home under continuous “siege,” by settlers, which, in the Qusra case, had been actually used as a base to launch attacks on Israelis—was also unfolding at the Toubasi household in Jalud. The NBC crew there was accompanied by Khaldoon Eid, a local Palestinian journalist, and Lawahez Jabari, who had collaborated on a documentary, Death Trap: No Safe Place in Gaza, alleging that Israel intentionally targeted journalists in Gaza (a claim that has been falling apart over the last several months, as the Committee to Protect Journalists has been forced to admit that more “journalists” were terrorists wearing the press vest). NBC instantly attributed the attacks to “settlers,” even though masked Arab men were present around the same time due to the confrontation in nearby Qusra.

Notably, the attack on the NBC crew was perpetrated by masked men driving in a car—on Shabbat, a detail that would perhaps suggest the men weren’t religious settlers, who would in any case seem to have little motivation to attack a camera crew aiming to depict them as villains.

After the initial attack at Qusra, the Israelis called in reinforcements from surrounding towns. While Israelis usually use pickup trucks or SUVs for security patrols, the IDF and police later found private passenger cars at Qusra. It is possible that some of the Israelis who were recruited by the Tel Talpiot settlers traveled around the same time to Jalud and committed the attack on the NBC crew. Nevertheless, the timing of the two events is strange, as is the decision of the media crew to be at the Jalud site at precisely that moment. Besides, the fact that the car had Israeli license plates hardly establishes the occupants as Jewish—unless the stereotype of the violent settler is all one is prepared to see.

Danny Danon: Why are we determined to remove UNRWA from Jerusalem?

We could’ve predicted the reactions to the enforcement mission at the former UNRWA compound in Jerusalem.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a statement expressing his outrage over Israel’s actions. The UN spokesperson condemned the operation by Israeli security forces during his press briefing. A number of foreign ministers, most of them from Europe, voiced their disapproval.

It was never a question of if this would happen, but when. Recently, Israeli authorities completed their mission.

This move was not a matter of choice. It was a matter of necessity.

Exposing UNRWA
Over the past few years, we have exposed UNRWA for what it truly is. It has become increasingly clear that the UN agency established to assist Palestinian refugees functioned, in practice, as an active arm of the Hamas terrorist organization.

UNRWA employees participated directly in the October 7 massacre, including acts of murder and kidnapping. Throughout the war, Hamas terrorists operated from UNRWA schools, using the agency’s facilities to store weapons and conduct military activities.

Even deep into the conflict, UNRWA continued employing thousands of individuals who simultaneously held positions within Hamas’s military wings. They taught in classrooms that incited hatred against Israel by day and planned terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians by night.

Even before October 7, UNRWA had become the problem rather than the solution. Instead of helping resolve the Palestinian refugee issue, it perpetuated it and fueled the conflict. Numerous reports documented the incitement and hatred promoted in UNRWA schools, shaping another generation of Palestinians through anti-Israel indoctrination. But after October 7, the agency’s conduct crossed every possible line.

And, yes, Guterres did not condemn the terrorist acts carried out under the auspices of the organization he leads. Nor did we hear any unequivocal statements from the UN spokesperson during the daily press briefing about it.

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Candidate Hoping For Lurid Sex Scandal So He Can Blame Media (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

Jerusalem, September 3 - With Likud’s list taking shape and the October 27 election just weeks away, an embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told people around him that a lurid sex scandal would not be the worst thing that could happen to the campaign — provided it is large enough that he can spend the autumn attacking Channel 12, Haaretz, and “the left’s studios” for putting it on air, and perhaps ride the manufactured public outrage to an underdog victory.

The hope, described by two people who have heard the proposal in private, is not that Israelis will forgive the conduct, though the public has previously treated Netanyahu's peccadilloes as no big deal. It is that the conduct will be so vivid — a hotel, a phone, a power gap — that every subsequent question can be treated as proof the press is the story. Public polling keeps dragging the race back to October 7, the failure to heed warnings of it, the wars that followed, the hostage crisis, the cost of living, and whether the longest-serving prime minister should get another term. Those subjects force him to defend a record. A sex scandal would let him defend a headline.

“If it’s small, it looks like character,” an ally said. “If it’s a circus, it looks like a hit. We know how to campaign against a hit.” The ally asked not to be named, which in this political-media ecosystem has become less a legal caution than a habit.

No such allegation is circulating. That, in the current telling, is an opening the media has irresponsibly failed to provide. Draft statements already exist in two piles. One denies everything and demands the raw material. The other concedes “personal matters,” condemns “the timing,” and notes that nobody is asking about the attorney general, the judges, or the Opposition bloc’s donors. The second pile is thicker: it already contains the potent “they’re trying to decide the election in the editing room.”

Sympathetic panelists have been sounded out, hypothetically, for vocabulary: “feeding frenzy,” “same old junta,” “they never do this when it's their people.” None suggested waiting to establish whether a story was true.

Polls show the Netanyahu-aligned bloc falling below the 61-seat majority required for him to retain power. Formerly-effective strategies such as portraying himself as the only credible choice for a secure Israel ring hollower in the aftermath of the October 7 debacle.

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

 

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When does an academic paper cross over into antisemitic rhetoric?

When George Holmes, a professor of conservation at the University of Leeds, first read a commentary in the Royal Geographical Society's flagship journal, he told Times Higher Education that his first assumption was that the journal had been hacked. That is a reasonable reaction to a paper in a geography journal that explains the 2024 Southport riots by way of a "strategic consensus between Zionist groups and fascist groups" against Muslims, that declares white supremacy the core of the Zionist project, and that relays a claim that most anti-Muslim rhetoric in America is financed from "Zionist Israeli" sources.

The paper is Kawtar Najib's "The United Kingdom's first anti-Muslim pogroms in a context of genocidal Islamophobia in Gaza," published in The Geographical Journal in August 2025. Jewish News flagged it a year ago, noting that its sources for the Zionism material include such overtly biased sources as David Miller, Hatem Bazian, and Press TV. The RGS replied with a statement about academic freedom. Now, as the Telegraph reports, the row has reached the Society's own annual conference, with Holmes calling for the article's editor to step down and the RGS insisting the piece passed double-blind review by two referees and needed only a single factual correction.

Both sides are arguing about the wrong thing. Holmes says the paper is racist; the RGS says academic freedom protects it. Those positions can both be true, and neither one tells you whether the paper should have survived peer review. Peer review exists to ask a narrower question: does the evidence in this paper support the claims in this paper? 

So I ran the article through TAMAR, the propaganda-analysis tool I built to check exactly that, and the answer is that the paper has a credible factual core wrapped in a structure of assertions that never touch it.

The core is real. Mosques were attacked after the Southport murders; false claims that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker spread through far-right channels and social media; British Muslims were frightened and targeted. A paper that stopped there would be unremarkable.

Of course, the paper does not stop there. It builds outward in layers, and each layer is treated as proven by the time the next one is laid on top of it. Targeted anti-Muslim violence becomes "pogroms," a word the author herself defines as requiring state support and organized intent to massacre, neither of which she then demonstrates. The pogroms are placed inside a "genocidal context" in Gaza. Gaza becomes evidence of a global "genocidal Islamophobia." Zionism and the far right are fused into one project, and by the end conservative parties and even the centre-left are said to be pursuing the same anti-Muslim enterprise with different methods. Each step borrows the credibility of the step before it, and none of them has independent support.

Take the Gaza claim, since it is in the title. What is the evidence that the war in Gaza motivated anyone in the Southport riots? The paper places the riots in a genocidal context and says the dehumanization of British Muslims "echoes" that of Gazans. That is the entire case. No rioter is quoted mentioning Gaza. No organizer is shown invoking it. None of the channels that mobilized the crowds is shown telling anyone to take to the streets over it. Meanwhile the actual drivers are unusually well documented: parliamentary evidence traces the sequence from the murders to the small-boat lie to amplification by far-right accounts, and reporters on the ground recorded the slogans, which were about immigration, "our country," and the grooming-gang scandals, a narrative the paper itself discusses at length. The paper has the well-evidenced causes and the unevidenced cause in front of it, and it makes the unevidenced one the organizing principle. Gaza is an interpretive backdrop that the author promoted to an explanation without ever passing through the stage of finding even a tenuous link.

The Zionism claim fails differently, and this is where the paper becomes something worse than sloppy. The author observes that some far-right activists admire Israel as a model of muscular nationalism, and from that she concludes that Zionism is part of the far right's war on Muslims. But that inference runs the wrong direction. If A admires B, that tells you something about A. It tells you nothing about B, and it certainly does not establish that B admires A back, shares A's ideology, or participates in A's projects. Tommy Robinson waving an Israeli flag is a fact about Tommy Robinson. To turn it into a fact about Zionism, you would need Zionist organizations cooperating with the far right toward anti-Muslim ends, and the paper offers nothing of the kind. It offers a Press TV report that the rioters' sympathy for Zionism was "open and enthusiastic," and it offers Hatem Bazian's number about Zionist financiers of Islamophobia. The Iranian state broadcaster and the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine are the evidentiary bridge between a British football hooligan and the Jewish national movement.

There is an awkward fact the paper never mentions. While the riots were still under way, the Community Security Trust warned that the forum used to instigate the first riot in Southport was co-run by a suspected neo-Nazi who was urging followers to target synagogues, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue's analysis of the riot-related Telegram channels found white nationalist channels accusing the riot organizers themselves of being paid by "Zionist" interests. The one place Gaza and Zionism did show up in the rioters' own ecosystem was as an antisemitic conspiracy theory aimed at the rioters. That does not disprove that pro-Israel sentiment exists on the British far right, but it makes a story in which the mob belonged to a coherent Zionist-fascist alliance very hard to tell with a straight face. The British far right contains pro-Israel nationalists, anti-Muslim agitators, and open antisemites, frequently in the same forum thread, and a scholar who collapses that into a single actor with a single ideology has stopped describing the far right and started using it.

Academic freedom protects a scholar's right to hold and argue an unpopular thesis. It has never meant that a journal must publish a thesis regardless of whether the argument for it works, and a journal that waves the phrase around to avoid saying whether the argument works has confused its own reputation with the author's rights. The RGS could have said the paper was reviewed, the reviewers erred, and the Society will publish the criticism alongside it. Instead it said the views are the author's own, which is the one thing nobody disputed.

Notice, too, what the paper does to the people it claims to defend. British Muslims were attacked because of a lie about an asylum seeker and a decade of politics about boats and grooming gangs. Those are British problems with British causes, and they can be addressed. A theory that relocates the cause to Tel Aviv, and that names Jews as the financiers behind the mobs, offers British Muslims nothing except a familiar enemy, and it hands the far right a gift by lettign them off the hook and blaming Zionists.

The author has told THE she is preparing a formal response. She will presumably defend her thesis, and she is entitled to. What she cannot supply in a response is the thing the paper lacked in the first place, which is a rioter who mentioned Gaza and a Zionist organization that coordinated with the mob. If those exist, they belong in the response, and the row will end. If they do not, then the referees were asked a simple question a year ago and got the answer wrong, and the only issue left for the Royal Geographical Society is whether it is prepared to say so.

By the way, the paper's author seems to fully support Hamas-style "resistance."

(h/t Phyllis)

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

 

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09/02 Links Pt2: ‘Jewish values’ are not a suicide pact that empowers antisemites; Hollywood’s paranoid hatred of Israel; Nothing Spontaneous About Anti-Israel Protests

From Ian:

Dara Horn tackles enduring antisemitic lies head-on with optimistic ‘Final Solution’

For centuries, argues author Dara Horn, people have tried to gain or maintain power by employing the lie that Jews are responsible for destroying whatever a society, government, or institution values most.

Tyrants, totalitarian regimes on both the right and left, and conformist societies in particular, have employed this lie, Horn says, because they are threatened by Jews — and by Judaism’s long history as an anti-tyrannical, countercultural tradition.

It is the central argument of Horn’s new book, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” which was released September 1. The title is every bit as provocative as that of her 2021 bestseller, “People Love Dead Jews” — and its cover is sure to draw attention in bookstores and on social media.

With its direct reference to the Nazis’ nearly successful extermination of Europe’s Jews during World War II, this collection of related essays is, unsurprisingly, about antisemitism. But its subtitle, “A Love Letter to the Living,” hints from the outset that things are not all doom and gloom.

Writing after the bloody October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacres in Israel, Horn could hardly avoid addressing what she sees as a dangerous escalation of Jew-hatred in the United States and around the world. But she is also hopeful about the possibility of turning the situation around, especially through the right kind of education.

“I absolutely think that this is winnable,” Horn told The Times of Israel in a recent interview.

“The through line of antisemitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t native to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational Big Lie: that antisemitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the Big Lie is winning,” Horn wrote.

One only needs to look at various eras throughout history to grasp how consistent the Big Lie has been.

“It’s in every era, every social circle. The only thing that varies is what you value the most. Say you’re a religious Christian, then you are lied to that Jews are destroying Christianity, or that they killed Christ. Say you’re a human rights activist, then Israel’s the world’s worst violator of human rights, and it doesn’t matter that you’re being told this by the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Horn said.

This new book resulted from countless people reaching out to Horn after reading “People Love Dead Jews,” attending her lectures, or hearing her on a podcast. They emailed and messaged her, and they approached her at speaking engagements.

Jonahan Tobin: ‘Jewish values’ are not a suicide pact that empowers antisemites

Taking it one step further, Nessel had the chutzpah to invoke the lessons of Purim and the heroism of Queen Esther to back up her assertion that Jews must sacrifice their security to advance the Democratic Party.

“It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path,” she said, “and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”

In point of fact, in a demonstration of her utter ignorance of Judaism and Jewish tradition, Esther did nothing of the kind. Her goal wasn’t the abstract saving of humanity. She risked her own life to save the Jewish people in the Persian Empire, who were under an immediate threat of genocide from the henchman Haman. What Nessel wants Jews to do is the opposite of Esther’s successful effort to rescue Jewish existence.

No matter what one thinks about Trump, global warming, illegal immigration or the right of biological males to play sports against females, the idea that Jews should, as Nessel urges, sacrifice not just their interests but their collective existence for these notions isn’t, contrary to her vile claim, an expression of “Jewish values.” It’s insane and deeply immoral.

If there is any lesson to be learned from Jewish history, it is that those who seek the destruction of the Jews—as those in the alliance of Marxists and Islamists El-Sayed represents wish to do—aren’t doing so to right a wrong or as a result of alleged Jewish misbehavior. It’s a function of their lust for power and a desire to use the scapegoating of Jews to achieve it. And when societies allow Jews to be targeted in this manner, the objective isn’t a better world but a far worse one, in which other groups, sooner or later, will meet a similar fate.

Let’s be clear: Jews have no obligation to sacrifice themselves for liberal myths about any issue. Real Jewish values are not a suicide pact whose purpose is to empower antisemites.

Anyone who urges them to do so isn’t advancing a higher cause. Rather, those individuals are aiding and abetting the oldest hatred in the world and taking the side of genocidal Islamists against a democratic Jewish state. To support El-Sayed because you share his intolerance and hatred for the rights of the Jewish people is awful. But to do so merely because you have drunk the partisan Kool-Aid and think the Democratic Party is the “ultimate good” and the Republicans are the “ultimate bad” is indefensible.

In staking her political career on this proposition, it’s doubtful that Nessel can save herself from the same treatment accorded other liberal Jewish Democrats rejected by a party that is drunk on woke ideology. But she has ensured one thing: She will always be remembered for betraying her own people.

Pro-Israel Dem. Haley Stevens says anti-Zionism has become a hate movement in America -interview

Just weeks after a grueling primary battle and a recent engagement, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) is not a woman who sounds defeated.

Although she recently lost her Democratic primary race in Michigan, Stevens arrived in Israel with a message that was as sharp as it was unequivocal: The movement to delegitimize Israel is not simply a policy debate – it is an infection.

“I believe that anti-Zionism is a hate movement that has taken over in America and throughout parts of the West,” Stevens said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

For her, the rhetoric used by the far Left of her party has moved far beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.

“I think that Israel is more than just a punching bag for some of the challenges that America is facing,” she said, pointing to what she sees as a growing trend in which domestic American frustrations are projected onto the Middle East’s only democracy.

“There is this bizarre obsession that has reached pitch level with calling out one country, one tiny country in the Middle East,” she said, her voice rising with a mix of frustration and disbelief.

Stevens, who describes herself as a “traditional and classical liberal Democrat,” has long been a supporter of the US-Israel relationship.

Haley Stevens: I was demonized by Democrats because I supported Israel
But in the current political climate, that support has come with a heavy personal and professional price.

“I was demonized for that,” Stevens recalled, reflecting on her recent years in office. “I was booed off my convention stage. I was chased out of a labor event in Detroit.”

The hostility was not limited to political rallies.

Stevens described an environment in which “heightened bullying” became the norm.

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09/02 Links Pt1: Mohsen Mahdawi: A Timeline of Support for Terrorism; Durban’s 25-Year Legacy of Antisemitism; Giving voice to the stories from Bondi; Richard Flanagan’s dangerous fiction about Australian Jews

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Miliband is proving even more dangerous as our Foreign Secretary

Quite ridiculously, a British trade embargo would be little more than a performative gesture. It would harm ourselves far more than the dastardly Israelis, with their booming economy, world-class tech, superlative security and intelligence services, military prowess and pesky determination to survive.

Bilateral trade stood at £5.9bn last year, with Britain selling Israel £3.5bn of goods and services and buying £2.4bn in return. Goodbye to all those profits, then.

Twenty-two Israeli-linked companies are listed in London with a combined market capitalisation of $11.5bn; many more have set up or expanded their operations in Britain over the last two years, promising British jobs. Goodbye to all that, as well.

What about the capsule camera with which NHS England spares tens of thousands of patients the indignity of a colonoscopy? After all, it was dreamed up by an Israeli missile engineer, who repurposed the imaging technology from a guided warhead. Goodbye to that, too, I guess. Certainly, it will be goodbye to any similar healthcare tech innovations in the future.

Then there’s the Challenger 3 tanks, which will enter service next year. Those hulks are supposed to be protected by Trophy, the advanced Israeli defence system that shoots down incoming anti-tank munitions mid-flight. Will our servicemen have to make do without?

And the intelligence sharing? Countless terror attacks on Britons have been thwarted thanks to tip-offs from the Israelis. Yossi Cohen, the former Mossad chief, has revealed that an MI5 director-general once told him that Israeli spies deserved “an Oscar” for saving “many, many lives on British soil”. But it’s worth losing that for the virtue signalling, amirite?

To make matters even more absurd, the embargo will likely harm Palestinian workers most. Tens of thousands of them work in Israeli businesses, receiving far more pay than they would at home.

For what? Sure, London is appalled by the Jewish extremists on the West Bank. But out of about 530,000 “settlers”, only a few hundred have been involved in nationalist crime, and a tiny number are hardcore criminals.

This madness it is emblematic of a new and myopic British hostility towards our ally – erstwhile ally? – which, for all its flaws, is the only Western-friendly advanced democracy in the region. (It even offers more political freedom to its Muslim citizens than any other Middle Eastern country, for goodness’ sake.)

It hardly comes as a surprise that Miliband is the one wielding the knife. In 2014, as Labour leader, he responded to Operation Protective Edge in Gaza – launched in response to the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenagers by Hamas, followed by intense jihadi rocket fire – by whipping his MPs to back unilateral Palestinian statehood recognition.

Today, Britain has already extended that recognition, regardless of the fact that the supposed state of Palestine has no defined borders, pays reward money out of public funds to those convicted of terrorism, uses textbooks rife with anti-Semitism, and is half-controlled by jihadis.

It’s the same old shameful story from the Left: everything Israel does to defend itself is condemned. All the Israelis are permitted to do is die. Let’s dismantle capitalism. Let’s win back the Muslim vote from the Greens. Let’s tighten our grip on power.

And if Britain ends up weaker – did you know that at least one in eight packs of medication in Britain is produced by the Israeli pharma company Teva, which employs 1,500 people here? – then that is a small sacrifice to be made for the cause.

Israel again warns of retaliation if UK imposes sanctions over West Bank settlements

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has again warned his country will retaliate if the UK imposes sanctions against it over the potential expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Jewish News reported yesterday that, addressing Parliament for the first time as foreign secretary, Ed Miliband said he would introduce a “comprehensive reset” of policy on Israel “in the coming weeks”.

He said the government would examine how to stop UK companies “financing, constructing or advertising new settlements” in the occupied West Bank.

Responding, Gideon Sa’ar said: “If Britain acts against Israel, Israel will act against Britain.”

“If they act, I think they will be making a big mistake,” he said.

Asked how concerned he is about the prospect of sanctions, Sa’ar claimed Israel will respond and charged that any British measures would be politically motivated.

“There is a government there that is systematically acting against Israel. It has already harmed defence exports to us and imposed sanctions on ministers.

“What guides it is its domestic politics, and at the end of the month the Labour Party conference is convening,” he said.

Pressed on how Israel would respond, Sa’ar declined to elaborate, saying only: “There are tools. I’m saying this clearly and unequivocally. If they act, I think they will be making a major mistake. It will work the opposite way from how they may be dreaming it will work.”

Pressed further, he said: “Why hint at it? What I’ve said is enough. We are preparing. If they make a mistake, there will be a response.”

Who Pays the Price for the UK’s Potential Settlement Trade Ban?

Beyond the challenges of singling out goods from the West Bank for boycott, it is impossible to ignore who would be negatively impacted by such a trade ban. Prior to October 7, 2023, roughly 165,000 Palestinians worked in Israel and the West Bank. While that number has decreased in the years following, a trade ban would have significant potential negative ramifications on Palestinian workers.

This isn’t purely theoretical. When, in 2014, SodaStream was boycotted for the location of its manufacturing plant in the community of Ma’ale Adumim in the West Bank, the vast majority of those impacted were Palestinian employees. After the production plant was moved to the Negev desert following international pressure, 500 Palestinian workers lost their jobs – jobs which provide higher wages than average in the West Bank alongside employment benefits.

But the potential consequences do not end within the borders of Israel. A settlement trade ban could also have implications for British Jews, particularly if restrictions on settlement goods contribute to a broader environment in which Israeli products, businesses or institutions become increasingly subject to boycotts.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council warned that such a boycott could further damage UK-Israel relations and risk creating an even more hostile environment towards British Jews.

If a ban on trade in Israeli settlements goes through, the consequences will undoubtedly be far-reaching. From impacting the very people that the ban is supposedly meant to help, to hurting Jews outside of Israel, the ban would prove to do more harm than good.

These results are not difficult to foresee, making the decision to pursue it driven by policies of activism and double standards. A policy this disingenuous doesn’t advance peace, but it does advance the warped anti-Israel hatred that has too frequently presented itself as genuine concern for Palestinian rights.

Badenoch: Labour is ‘singling out Israel’ with West Bank trade sanctions

Kemi Badenoch has accused Labour of “singling out Israel for their own internal political reasons” ahead of the government’s expected announcement of tough new sanctions on West Bank settlement trade.

Asked by Jewish News for the Tory leader’s view on Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s expected move to target settlement trade, Badenoch’s spokesperson said she believes “there are a lot of countries doing things that this country would feel is not entirely alright.”

Reflecting Badenoch’s stance on UK sanctions, the spokesperson added: “It is interesting that the Labour government always feels the need to single out Israel. And I would suggest that’s for their own internal political reasons.”

On Wednesday, Downing Street said it would not respond to “speculation” regarding Israel’s threat to retaliate against any UK sanctions.

A spokesperson for Andy Burnham told Jewish News: “We have been consistently clear that illegal settlements threaten the viability of a Palestinian state and undermine security for both Israelis and Palestinians.

“We want to see an end to the appalling suffering in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank, and a resumption of the peace process to deliver a two-state solution.”

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Amnesty's default position is that Israel wants to kill children for no reason

Amnesty tweeted this last week:

The Israeli cabinet statement as captured in Israel Katz’s social media posts claiming to treat balloons and kites flown in the Gaza Strip as military drones further strips away any prospects for moments of joy for children in Gaza, who have been denied a childhood by Israel’s ongoing genocide. Third states must act and end Israel’s genocide. No more impunity for Israel’s disregard for international law.

Here we can see everything despicable about Amnesty in one tweet.

Amnesty knows that Hamas and Islamic Jihad has used kites as incendiary devices in the past, burning thousands of dunams of fields in Israel (an environmental crime that Amnesty is  curiously incurious about.)

Amnesty knows that the kites being referred to are not being flown by children. The cabinet statement was specifically about kites being launched into Israel. There is a buffer zone of 500 or 1000 meters around Gaza so any kites that reach Israeli territory are not from kids playing nearby.

Amnesty knows, or should know, that the recent kite launches used lines that are kilometers long, so they are clearly meant for some sort of military purpose, not entertainment.

The video accompanying the tweet shows the conclusion that Amnesty wants its millions of followers to reach:

The Israeli military has threatened to take forceful action against kite-flying in the Gaza Strip. 

Kite-flying is one of the very few moments of carefree escape for Palestinian children. 

This would further strip away any prospects of joy for them in Gaza.

According to the UN, at least 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and 44,000 more injured in Gaza since 7 October 2023. 

Israel's genocide has denied them their childhood. 

Most children in Gaza are displaced, and over 56,000 have lost one or both parents.

Israel must respect the rules of international humanitarian law. 

It must take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects. 

And third states must act to urgently bring Israel's genocide to an end.

End Israel's genocide and unlawful occupation. Humanity must win. Amnesty International.

Amnesty does not even consider for a second that Israel has legitimate defense needs. It assumes from the outset that the entire goal is to target Gaza children. Without that base assumption, none of the post makes sense. 

To Amnesty, Israel's desire to murder children is a given, so any rules about kites must be aimed at that end. Because there is no connection between the decision to treat kites that cross the border with Gaza children - that is Amnesty's perverted choice of how to interpret it.

Notice also that Amnesty doesn't give a damn about the Israeli children on the other side of the border who might be injured by incendiary devices attacked to kites. 

The pattern is consistent: to Amnesty, Israel has no legitimacy, Israel has no right to self defense, and Israeli Jews are not deserving of human rights.

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

 

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09/01 Links Pt2: Democrats are selling their souls by accepting Abdul El-Sayed; El-Sayed Campaign Seeks 'Jewish Liaison' for Damage Control; El-Sayed scrubbed old tweet trashing America on 9/11

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: Democrats are selling their souls by accepting Abdul El-Sayed

Mainstream Democrats are failing the Abdul El-Sayed test — badly.

For starters, the establishment seems to be buying the creepy Michigan Senate candidate’s pseudo-apology for his obscene justification back in March for a crazed Islamist’s attempt to slaughter children at a suburban Detroit Jewish day school.

“Hurt people hurt people,” El-Sayed smugly told Michigan Jews twice in his video statement at the time, explaining that the perp, Ayman Ghazali, was upset because his Hezbollah-commander brother had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a weapons depot.

On Sunday, El-Sayed expressed some regret for those words, admitting that right after the attack was “the wrong time” to be “contextualizing” the perp’s motives.

That is: He still believes his words were correct; the testy Jews just weren’t ready to hear it.

El-Sayed also refuses to disavow his erstwhile BFF and campaign surrogate Hasan Piker, despite his record of toxic anti-Americanism and overt Jew-hatred; the candidate merely writes off the hater as just a “streamer from California” . . . though El-Sayed regularly had Piker stump for him during the primary campaign.

Top national Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer sit by as El-Sayed worms out of his ugly record; at least one Michigan Democrat is far worse.

State Attorney General Dana Nessel — a Jewish Dem who says she’s won’t attend the state convention because of nonstop antisemitic harassment — just urged Michigan’s 100,000 Jewish voters to vote for El-Sayed despite his hate . . . to save the world.

Really: “We have a moral imperative,” Nessel insists, “to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”

Sorry: Empowering a blatant antisemite is the opposite of serving “the needs of the world”; such unhinged hate is a warning sign of even deeper depravity.

Eight Democrats join Republicans in resolution condemning socialism, DSA

The House voted 220-192 on Tuesday to adopt a Republican-led resolution condemning socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America. The vote fell largely along party lines after GOP leaders attached language to the resolution backing President Donald Trump’s priority voting rights legislation.

Introduced by Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), the resolution “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.”

However, the resolution also explicitly “calls for the enactment” of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — a priority for the president that would mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

Seeking a clean vote denouncing the DSA without endorsing the election bill, a group of moderate Democrats — including Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Hillary Scholten (D-MI) — offered an amendment on Monday to strip out the SAVE Act language while preserving the anti-socialism provisions. However, the House Rules Committee declined to take up the amendment, forcing Democrats to vote on the combined GOP package.

Most Democrats opposed the measure due to the SAVE Act rider, though eight moderate lawmakers broke ranks to vote with Republicans in favor: Reps. Don Davis (D-NC), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Kathy Castor (D-FL), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Jared Golden (D-ME), Darren Soto (D-FL), Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) and Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX).

In addition, Reps. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) and Maggie Goodlander (D-NH) voted present.

Jew hate is as fashionable as ever — look no further than Anna Wintour’s Met Gala disaster

The collapse of the Met Gala’s outrageous plan to honor antisemitic fashion designer John Galliano marks an important victory in a major battle. But there is no sign that triumph is at hand in the larger war against the explosion of Jew hatred in America and around the world.

On the contrary, the outbreaks are numerous and growing in boldness.

One of the lessons of the Galliano affair is that many of the haters feel safe enough these days to come out of the closet and publicly express their loathing.

Wherever you look, from politics to the media to the United Nations and now the fashion world, the scourge is shockingly bold in its emergence.

A common trait among many of the guilty is the use of Israel as a fig leaf for their sickness. A sure-fire sign is the habit of judging the lone Jewish state by a set of double standards never applied to other nations.

Oppressive regimes are given seats on UN human rights panels, where they are encouraged to demonize Israel without fear they will be called to account for their misdeeds.

And when Israel is attacked by Muslim neighbors that vow to destroy it, the victim is routinely accused of war crimes for daring to defend itself and take the war to the attackers’ turf.

As the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7, 2023, demonstrated, the Holocaust would be repeated if Israel were foolish enough to permanently lower its guard.

Wherever the place and the particulars, the battlefield is encircled by enablers and cheerleaders, giving rise to dark suspicions about their motivations.

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09/01 Links Pt1: The Altalena’s enduring lesson: Israel must choose unity over division; IDF capture Hamas's Head of Internal Security; Swim legend Dawn Fraser speaks out on antisemitism royal commission

From Ian:

The Altalena’s enduring lesson: Israel must choose unity over division

In a week that shook the nation, the rediscovery of the Altalena made headlines across Israel.

Seventy-eight years ago, as the Altalena went up in flames on the Tel Aviv beachfront, the Jewish people stood on the precipice of civil war. In today’s divided times, with another election on the horizon, the echoes of the Altalena serve as a stark reminder of the perils of internal strife and the urgent need for unity.

The Altalena affair marked a tumultuous chapter in the birth of the new nation of Israel. In the early days of the War of Independence, the fledgling state mourned the loss of 1,176 soldiers, while the invading Arab armies also suffered heavy casualties. The UN-brokered truce provided a crucial respite for both sides to regroup and strategize.

On June 20, 1948, amidst the ceasefire, the Altalena, chartered by Menachem Begin’s Irgun, arrived off the shores of Israel, laden with immigrants and arms. The conflicting accounts of the ship’s destruction – Begin’s claim of delivering arms to his fighters and David Ben-Gurion’s accusation of a coup attempt – underscored the deep divisions within the Jewish community.

The tense standoff at Kfar Vitkin escalated into violence, leading to casualties on both sides. As the Altalena made its way to Tel Aviv, the clash of ideologies and loyalties reached a boiling point. Ben-Gurion’s firm stance on maintaining government sovereignty and order set the stage for a tragic confrontation on the Tel Aviv beach.

The intense gunfire and mutual animosity that erupted on the beach reflected the deep-seated divisions and animosities that threatened to tear the young nation apart. The aftermath of the Altalena’s destruction left a scar on the collective memory of Israel, a wound that refused to heal.

JPost Editorial: From critic to ally, Israel and Greece grow closer amid regional shifts

Greece seeks Israeli protection amid growing European divisions
The other is that here is a frontline European power - a vital NATO ally on Europe’s southeastern flank and a key member of the EU - turning to Israel for its defense. The same Israel that other European countries, including Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium - and, come the end of the month, Britain - are spurning and seeking to boycott.

Those boycotts are ostensibly aimed “only” at products from east Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights. But the fear is that, because of the difficulty in determining exactly where every Israeli product or component originates, they will inevitably open the door to wider boycotts of Israel itself.

The contrast could hardly be sharper.

One part of Europe is looking to Israel for protection; another wants to boycott it. Ireland would not let its new government jet be fitted with an Israeli-made system designed to help it land in fog. Greece is entrusting the protection of its population and critical infrastructure to Israeli-made systems.

But the sale does more than highlight the countervailing trends in Europe, where political hostility toward Israel and strategic dependence on it are moving in opposite directions. It also shines a spotlight on Israel’s remarkable defense prowess.

Greece turns to Israel’s multilayered defense system
Greece is interested in the same type of multilayered system that protects Israel because it has seen how effective that system has been over the last three years in defending the country against missiles, rockets, and drones launched from Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and elsewhere. Greece watched and now wants that same level of protection for itself.

Under the agreement, dubbed Achilles Shield, Israel will provide Greece with an integrated national air-defense network. It will incorporate David’s Sling to intercept ballistic missiles and heavy rockets; SPYDER and BARAK MX systems to defend strategic sites against threats ranging from drones to cruise missiles; sophisticated MMR radars; Drone Dome counter-drone systems; and a national command-and-control network to tie everything together.

This is not merely an arms sale. It is the export of an entire defensive architecture - developed under fire, tested in war, and refined through repeated attacks by enemies using a wide variety of weapons.

Other European countries, feeling increasingly threatened by the cold winds blowing from Russia and the growing shadow of Iranian missile tech, are likely to follow suit. Governments want what works, especially when the lives of their civilians are at stake. Just ask Finland, which quietly extended its defense cooperation framework with Israel for a decade, guaranteeing the smooth, long-term deployment of its newly acquired David’s Sling system despite fierce domestic opposition.

Austrian gov’t begins work on constitutional ban of ‘Political Islam'

Austria’s government is beginning to work on a proposal to constitutionally ban “political Islam,” after Chancellor Christian Stocker called for the legislation and Integration and Europe Minister Claudia Bauer said she would draw up a proposal for the coalition partners.

ORF first reported on August 30 that Bauer is preparing the proposal and intends to send an outline to SPÖ and NEOS. This was then confirmed by Bauer on social media.

Stocker first raised the possible legislation in an interview with Heute on August 28. The chancellor expressed his intention to implement a constitutional law on political Islam, which he called “incompatible with democracy and Western values.”

In a statement, Stocker said, “I do not want our children and grandchildren to grow up in an Islamic state.”

Stocker argued that everyone in Austria is free to believe whatever they want and to have whatever faith they choose, “But where believers and non-believers are treated differently, where men and women do not have equal rights, and where our institutions, authorities, and courts are not respected, that freedom ends.”

Stoker: “It cannot be allowed to happen...that a preacher dictates things rather than Parliament”

He then claimed that there is a relative majority of Muslim students in Viennese schools, but “The crucial question is: Will these students become democrats who accept and abide by our legal system and live alongside our society? Or will they become Islamists and be politically influenced?”

Here, Stocker cited a recent figure that pupils with an Islamic religious affiliation represented 41.2% in Vienna’s primary and middle schools, constituting a relative majority.

“It cannot be allowed to happen in this country that a preacher dictates things rather than Parliament,” Stocker added. “It must not be the case that morality police in schools determine what girls should wear or how they should behave. Nor can we ignore the foundations of an ‘honor killing’ while punishing only the act itself. That is why I am in favor of regulating this at the constitutional level as well.”

Bauer reposted the statement, adding, “We will fight political Islam with all means available.”

This follows an earlier proposal by the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in March 2026. The proposal would prohibit activity in support of political Islam or its objectives, dissolve mosques and organizations deemed part of political Islam, confiscate their assets, and potentially revoke Austrian citizenship from members/supporters.

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El Sayed didn't apologize. He doubled down.

The headlines say Abdul El-Sayed apologized for justifying the Temple Israel attack when he linked it to the Lebanon war and said "hurt people hurt people."

He didn't apologize. He doubled down.

Here is what he said:

I didn’t appreciate that in the attempt to offer broader context, I was trampling the dignity that that fear and that pain should have been afforded.

And I could imagine that for a lot of folks, that would have read like he doesn’t see our pain or weigh it equally. Correct.

And that was not my intention with the statement.

And if my statement caused pain, I’m sorry. That was not what I intended to do.

And sometimes you can offer context for something, but not in the moment when people are feeling it acutely.

And, you know, I made a mistake. I should have— I mean, we issued a statement, of course, condemning it, and it just should have been a full stop.

And in the fullness of time, I hope that we can have conversations that are about context, but sometimes you can’t really see context in the moment of acuity or pain.

And so the intention for me wasn’t to trample that pain, it wasn’t to discount it, it wasn’t at all to justify any sort of domestic terrorism.

He isn't saying that he was wrong in what he said. He is apologizing for the timing.  He still wants people to understand the context of a domestic terrorist, Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, a hurt person who hurt people, whose Hezbollah brothers were killed in a war. Because of course that is relevant to his wanting to murder Jewish schoolkids in Michigan. 

It's all context. 

The next day he repeated this: "What I was trying to do was offer context for what happened, and it wasn't the time for context."

Here's some context: El Sayed wants to win the election, so he goes through the motions of apologizing for what he said when he really didn't apologize for anything he said, only when he said it, and he hopes the Jewish Democrats are too stupid to realize it and only read the headlines that accepts that this was a real apology.

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

 

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08/31 Links Pt2: RNC chair Dem majority a: ‘Direct threat to the Jewish community’; Hollywood celebrities are backing a terrorist murderer; Michigan AG tells Jewish Dems to put ‘needs of world’ ahead of ‘our own survival’

From Ian:

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner: Hollywood celebrities are backing a terrorist murderer — read the facts

These were not fictional villains in a screen-adapted comic book tale — they were real terrorists with real victims.

And one of the victims was an American citizen.

That is the problem with the Marvel campaign. These are limousine liberals at their most comfortable: wealthy, privileged and insulated from the consequences of the causes they champion.

They have spent their careers playing superheroes, but appear to know remarkably little about the history they are now trying to rewrite. They sit comfortably in their movie studio trailers and pronounce moral judgments on a bitter conflict in which they have no personal stake and, judging by this campaign, very little understanding.

They do not have to stand before the widows — the parents and orphans of the five people whose murders resulted in Barghouti’s convictions — and explain why their loved ones’ killer should be released. They simply sign a petition.

And now they have something bigger to answer for, because a candidacy is not a pardon; it’s a promotion.

Barghouti drew the most votes in Fatah’s central committee elections in May.

Everyone involved can do the arithmetic: The plan is to run him from a prison cell, win, and dare the world to say a democratically elected murderer should remain incarcerated.

What do you think? Be the first to comment.

But before the Marvel justice league starts drafting its victory statement, they should do something remarkably simple: Read the documents.

Acknowledge the five people he was convicted of murdering.

Then explain to their millions of followers why those victims should be written out of the story while Barghouti becomes its hero.

Hollywood can manufacture superheroes. It cannot manufacture innocence — nor can any election.

And a man convicted of murdering five innocents cannot be transformed into a statesman because the red-carpet revolutionaries have decided to make him one.

Israel, the DEI exception to 'everyone': How the music industry lost its moral compass

Peace-building musical collabs such as Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa's Arabic show, Jarak Qaribak (“Your Neighborhood is Your Friend”), were canceled as a result of the BDS Movement. The project involved musicians from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq - the kind of cross-collabs generally praised by the arts & culture.

While peace-building performances become unacceptable, shouting hate speech and antisemitic libels through a mic when accepting an award on stage becomes celebrated as an act of cool resistance; what is being contributed to these foundational DEI values of the music industry? Because where does political accountability end and collective punishment of a people as a whole begin?

By 2025, over 400 musicians had joined a geo-block boycott to make their music unavailable in Israel, calling their campaign ‘No Music for Genocide’. The name itself invites an uncomfortable question. If No Music for Genocide is really a principle rather than a geographical preference, where were the comparable mass geo-blocking campaigns and cultural boycotts as Sudan or Iran descended into mass atrocity?

Challenging their objective, I posted a few very politically correct words on my LinkedIn, the point of which was ‘Boycotting musicians and fans in Israel will not free Palestine’.

Exclusion, hate, and polarization didn’t really seem like the way to go for me as a music executive who believed in dialogue and listening to each other.

I’d lead my own panel for five years at Amsterdam Dance Event on the subject of DEI, so I believed in ‘talking about the hard stuff’. Then followed the wave of hate, antisemitic libels, and threats from industry professionals employed by major labels, publicly traded tech companies, and places of work with codes of conduct specifically prohibiting them from publicly attacking ‘fellow colleagues’.

'I believed... safety, dignity, inclusion applied to everyone'
The proof remained, indeed, in the pudding.

I believed that the principles we spent years building - safety, dignity, and inclusion - applied to everyone.

Radical inclusion, it seemed, had added an exception: it did not apply to people born in a particular country, or to Jews and Israelis. A counterculture that once challenged the boundaries of society was now policing the ideological boundaries of its own. Glorifying terror under the banner of DEI was dubbed ‘resistance’.

DEI's own conviction of righteousness and one-sidedness expanded rapidly, well organized, and well funded. By then, the contradiction became impossible to ignore.

And perhaps Damon Albarn provides the simplest counterexample. Albarn has hardly been silent about Palestinian suffering or his criticism of Israel. Yet after Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, he called the episode a ‘spectacular misfire’ and spoke instead about wanting to work with musicians in both Palestine and Israel.

It really should not be revolutionary to suggest that one can advocate for Palestinians without demanding the cultural exclusion of Israelis. Isn’t this exactly what music was supposed to be for?

What started as an industry-wide commitment to safety had developed into ideological gatekeeping: diversity but under political uniformity. Inclusion, except when the artist was born in Israel.

Freedom of expression, unless the expression comes from Boy George or another ‘wrong person’. And #MeToo, except if you were a girl dancing at 6:29 a.m. at the Nova festival.

To quote a house classic: If music is the answer, the answer cannot be less cultural contact. It has to be more. Because when we try to make music morally pure, we destroy precisely the thing that made it morally valuable: its ability to bring together people who would otherwise never meet.

The Loophole in "Death, Death to the IDF"

That is the element a stadium field and a cordoned riverside protest both managed to avoid, while a shared public highway outside a gig was not. Weeks after disclosing the Kentish Town charge, the Met announced that organisers would, for the first time, be made responsible for speakers’ hate speech at future protests, and that it was reviewing with the CPS “language… previously advised [as not meeting] the threshold”. An acknowledgment, in effect, of the gap it kept running into.

None of this requires bad faith on the Met’s part, or a plan on Robinson-Foster’s. Everything is explainable by a comparison of reach, not culpability. Robinson-Foster is documented saying the words on number occasions, including at Alexandra Palace, Glastonbury, Amsterdam, and the Embankment. Each performed or broadcast to a crowd in the thousands, one to a live, nationally watched BBC stream; the phrase has since acquired its own Wikipedia entry. His own public response to the Glastonbury backlash was to mock “crying” critics rather than dispute what the words meant.

The Kentish Town defendant is alleged to have repeated the same six words, that single night, a number of times, on a small loudhailer. He reached, cumulatively, a demonstration of dozens on one residential street. But the Kentish Town defendant had clearly defined victims, which Robison-Foster did not..

If the harm the law exists to address is the spread of a chant calling for the deaths of people who are, for most Israelis, their children or themselves, it is not obvious that the more repetitive but contained allegation did more of that harm than the far less repeated but internationally amplified fact. That the defendant with the smaller reach is the one facing trial, while the man whose performances actually spread the phrase abroad has been cleared twice and gained rather than lost from it, looks less like a corrupt system than a badly drawn one.

The Public Order Act is highlighted as measuring proximity, not scale: it catches a chant however few times it was said, provided somebody was standing close enough to be frightened by it, and lets the same words through however many times repeated, provided the crowd chanting back is large enough, sympathetic enough, or simply on the right side of a river.

The gap between impact and proximity leaves one wondering if the real problem is a weakness in the law. Chanting for the death of anyone is distinctly uncivilised, an invasive cultural meme that should be resisted rather than absorbed. If not, whose death shall be heralded next, leaving one wondering, when shall it be my own fair turn.

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08/31 Links Pt1: Durban’s legacy: How NGOs helped mainstream anti-Israel hatred; Protesters mark 2 years since recovery of 6 slain Gaza hostages; Egypt's Dangerous Palestinian 'Unity' Project to Legitimize Terrorists

From Ian:

Brett McGurk: No, Iran is not winning: In Act IV of the war, it’s losing its leverage in Hormuz

Tehran may seek to fight its way out of this noose. Its strategy through the first three acts was clear: threaten commerce in the Strait, raise energy prices globally and gasoline prices in the US, increase global economic pressure and ultimately force Trump to back down, particularly with midterm elections approaching.

Iran has also targeted the energy infrastructure of the Gulf states and could do so again. Its proxy force in Yemen, the Houthis, have threatened to shut down commerce through the Red Sea with Iranian missiles and drones.

All that would mean resorting to the same tactics from the early acts of the war. Strategically, it has not worked for Iran. The Gulf states are not happy with the war, but most do not support giving in to Iran’s extortionist demands in the Strait. Iran’s attempts to close the Strait with drones and mines are also now — for the first time — failing.

So, I would not discount the risk of an Iranian escalation as the economic pressure builds. But it may not be enough at this stage to reduce that pressure. Trump appears far more committed than Iranian leaders apparently presumed.

Breaking point
Iranian leaders and many Western analysts project immunity to pressure. Iran will never surrender its nuclear program or the Strait of Hormuz. Or its terrorist proxies around the region.

That’s something we all must accept as a fact of life in the Middle East, according to Tehran.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi argued last week that the blockade and sanctions pressure are “bound to fail” just as all other campaigns, he said, had failed to change Iranian policy.

I used to hear the same thing from experts about ISIS, when I was leading the campaign to defeat the group. And Hamas, when negotiating to free the hostages held in Gaza.

In fact, everyone has a breaking point. Iran thought it had found Trump’s. Trump may yet find theirs. It’s too early to call.

Not the last act
This contest in some form may last through the end of Trump’s presidency and beyond. It’s been ongoing for nearly five decades.

The earlier acts in this war were mired from the US side by shifting and ill-defined objectives, widely careening positions, and inconsistent statements.

But Act Four seems different. The US military has a clear objective as outlined this week by the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper. It is enforcing the blockade on Iran and facilitating the movement of commercial traffic.

The objective for the US should be similarly well-defined. Iran must abandon claims on the Strait and give up the nuclear enrichment program. Until then, this will be the new status quo.

And that status quo — perhaps for the first time since the war began — now favors Washington, not Tehran.

No Exit, No Trap By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
When the regime decided to hold up shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, however, the “trap” claim took off. Trump, went the argument, could neither free the strait nor leave it in Iran’s grip. He had been checkmated.

It was around this time that I began to worry, as it became clear that the administration had not gamed out this possibility before the war. And Trump had made it well known that he despised the idea of deploying American ground forces. Even with the strait threatened by Iran, the U.S. could prevail so long as the commander in chief chose to take the steps that were needed to do so.

Soon, instead, Trump decided on negotiations to end the fighting. And that’s when he really did stumble into a trap—because he’d decided that he wanted out. Trump wanted to escape the consequences of the aborted war and his responsibility to win it—and he let the Iranians know.

That was all it took. Through months of off-and-on talks, Iranian negotiators would keep the U.S. trapped by refusing to grant any American conditions that might let Trump walk away from what had become a terrible mess. So long as the U.S. was looking for an exit, we’d remain paralyzed.

If the tide now seems to be turning in the U.S.’s favor, it’s because we started looking for solutions. Currently, the U.S. naval blockade of Iran is in effect to freeze the regime’s maritime and energy exports. At the same time, we’re now only one week into Operation Economic Outcast, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s campaign to “sever every economic lifeline” that the regime has—and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has admitted that it’s already working.

The start-and-stop war has been going on for six months, and the U.S. has stumbled in a number of unforeseen ways. It still can. But there’s one critical mistake that Trump should now know to avoid: prioritizing an American exit over an American victory. In order for the U.S. to prevail, we must keep up the current economic war on the regime. This means enduring the inevitable rise in oil prices and the concerted media campaign focusing on the increased hardships imposed on ordinary Iranians. Both have already begun, but neither of these are traps unless Donald Trump decides they are.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Egypt's Dangerous Palestinian 'Unity' Project to Legitimize Terrorists

The real question, however, is: Unity with whom, and against whom?

Why is Hamas being treated as a legitimate political organization rather than a terrorist group that needs to be disarmed, dismantled, and removed from power?

Egypt, a key ally of the United States, should be asking these questions. Instead, Cairo appears to be doing exactly the opposite.

The Trump Administration and the Board of Peace might make clear to Cairo that Hamas cannot be both a terrorist organization that needs to surrender its weapons and a political partner invited to negotiate the future of the Palestinians. One approach eliminates Hamas. The other rehabilitates it.

Even more alarming are reports of a possible electoral alliance involving former Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan's Democratic Reform Current, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – all terrorist groups that do not recognize Israel's right to exist.

What possible role should these terrorist organizations have in Palestinian elections or a future Palestinian government?

If Egypt welcomes the designation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, why is it simultaneously trying to give Hamas – which emerged from the same organization – renewed political legitimacy?

The Trump Administration would do itself a great service to tell Cairo that Palestinian reconciliation cannot include organizations that retain weapons, embrace terrorism, and seek the destruction of Israel. There is no need to unify the Palestinian ranks around Hamas. There is a need immediately to remove Hamas from those ranks.

Egypt should be using its considerable influence not to persuade Fatah to reconcile with Hamas, but to pressure Hamas and other terrorist groups to surrender their weapons and permanently leave the Palestinian political arena. A politically rehabilitated Hamas, still armed and still committed to its Islamist ideology, will only strengthen the very ideological current that the Egyptian government has spent more than a decade trying to suppress.

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