10/20 Links Pt1: Elisha Wiesel: Obama's Dangerous Mideast Words; The Truth about U.S. Aid to Israel; Shattering the Palestinians' Hope of Defeating Israel

From Ian:

Richard Goldberg: Time for a Reset in U.S.-Israel Relations

America will only win the century over the Chinese Communist Party if it dominates super intelligence (SI), quantum computing, critical supply chains, and defense technology. Israel is one of the world's most important centers of innovation in every one of these areas - with both a capability and will to align its own strategic investments for the benefit of the U.S. Americans should want Israel to invest billions of dollars into SI and quantum research and development in full cooperation with the U.S.

Notably, Israel's innovation ecosystem also includes research and commercial activity in advanced chemicals, synthetic materials, critical mineral recovery and refining, and the development of substitutes for scarce raw materials. Israel is already a member of the State Department's Pax Silica, a diplomatic alliance aimed at building out an American-led ex-China supply chain for critical minerals.

The U.S. 2026 National Defense Strategy recognizes Israel as a "model ally," already spending a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any NATO ally. After the U.S., Israel is the most innovative country in the world when it comes to defense technology. It battle-tests American platforms and makes them better. It co-develops missile- and laser-defense systems that help keep both countries safe from threats beyond the Middle East.

Moving from a foreign aid paradigm to an interest-based joint venture will deliver massive economic and security return on investment and help guarantee another American century. That's a U.S.-Israel relationship every American should support.

Elisha Wiesel: Obama's Dangerous Mideast Words

Last week former President Barack Obama said of the Jewish people that after millennia of persecution, "they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, 'This is injustice and I want my land back.'"

Was it excessive for Jews to buy land, at fair or often inflated prices, from absentee landlords in Beirut and Damascus who were glad to sell malarial swamps? Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state to blame?

Was it excessive for Jews to accept the UN's 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005? Is it excessive to want to live in peace?

And what does "understandably" demanding one's land back look like? There can and should be no understanding of Hamas's ambitions.

The deeper problem is the story itself. In Mr. Obama's telling, Jews were oppressed in Europe and then arrived somewhere else and took too much. Jewish history in the land disappears. My father drew a line when he wrote in the New York Times in 2001: "To compromise on territory might seem, under certain conditions, imperative....But to compromise on history is impossible." That is the line Mr. Obama crossed.

My father's life was a testimony to what words can do. History is replete with speeches, lectures, editorials and textbooks turning neighbors into intruders and murder into justice. Mr. Obama's place isn't with those who call Jewish survival excessive.

Black American pastors rebuke Obama for accusing Israel of taking land

A national organization of Black American pastors on Monday categorically rejected an assertion made by former U.S. President Barack Obama that Israel “took land off people,” saying that claim was a dangerous omission of the Jewish people’s three-thousand-year-old connection to the Holy Land.

The strong pushback by the Christian leaders came just days after the first Black president made the contested remarks in Northern Ireland, adopting a common claim used by anti-Israel activists.

“When a former president of the United States tells a European arena that Israel was founded on theft, he hands a talking point to every campus mob, every synagogue vandal and every ideologue who has spent half a century teaching that the Jewish state is a colonial crime,” said the Black Christian Leadership Council on Israel.

“The Council will not be silent while that happens, and we will not let the claim go unanswered in the African American churches we serve,” the statement added.

At his talk, Obama said that after millennia of persecution, Israel “took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said: ‘This is injustice, and I want my land back.’”

The church leaders noted that Obama himself had called Israel “the historic homeland of the Jewish people” during a 2013 visit to Israel, and had highlighted that Jews lived, worked the soil and prayed in that land more than 3,000 years ago.

“He was right then. He is wrong now. Nothing in the ground changed between 2013 and 2026. Only the audience did,” the statement continued.

The pastors added that in his Belfast speech, the former president omitted the historical connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, noting that it was never emptied of Jews and was both lawfully recognized and legally purchased.

The group, which was established this summer and seeks to revive historic Black–Jewish relations, plans to lead a major pilgrimage to Israel next month of 500 pastors and church leaders.

The tour, which has been dubbed “Unfinished Business,” commemorates a large-scale Holy Land visit originally planned by Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1967, which was postponed following the Six-Day War and later prevented by his assassination in 1968.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also fired back at Obama’s remarks.

Read More

In Morocco, even celebrating Jewish-Muslim coexistence is accused of "Zionism"

Morocco is unique among Arab countries in its efforts to preserve and celebrate its Jewish heritage. Its constitution recognizes the Hebrew component of Moroccan national identity, the government has restored synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, and King Mohammed VI has repeatedly emphasized that Jewish history is an integral part of Moroccan history.

But that doesn't mean antisemitism has disappeared from Morocco. As I noted recently, a Moroccan newspaper promoted grotesquely antisemitic historical narratives.

That is not an anomaly. For years, efforts to promote Jewish-Muslim coexistence have been under attack.

On Monday, the Moroccan news site Journal24 reported that Moroccan academics participating in an event about historical Jewish-Muslim coexistence had been criticized by opponents of normalization with Israel. Their objection? Discussing Jewish-Muslim friendship during the Gaza war might improve Israel's image. They argued that such events should address the Palestinian situation rather than simply celebrating coexistence.

This is hardly an isolated attitude.

In July 2023, the Moroccan Front for the Support of Palestine and Against Normalization, a coalition of Islamist and leftist organizations, explicitly condemned the proliferation of associations promoting "coexistence, tolerance, peace, and living together," claiming they were designed to mislead the Moroccan public and advance Zionist influence. It warned Moroccans against joining such organizations.

On October 5, 2026, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported that the same Front was campaigning against educational, cultural, and academic normalization, warning of supposed Zionist infiltration of Moroccan schools.

These activists have expanded the concept of "normalization" to include organizations that accept Jews as full citizens of Morocco.

The assumption is that Moroccan Jews cannot simply have their history celebrated. Their cultural heritage is presumed to serve a hidden Zionist agenda unless accompanied by the appropriate political condemnations.

The Journal24 article even acknowledges that it lacks sufficient information about the event to determine whether it had anything to do with normalization. The suspicion apparently precedes the evidence.

When celebrating Jews and their history becomes suspicious simply because it doesn't condemn Israel, that isn't criticism of Israeli policy. It is antisemitism. 

---

 

Read More

10/19 Links Pt2: American Intellectual Antisemitism; Sally Rooney is a posturing ingrate; Radical anti-Israel leftist a suspect in car ramming attack on Australian MP; Palestine poppy creator is NHS doctor who branded Israel ‘a cancer’

From Ian:

Shai Davidai: American Intellectual Antisemitism

At its core, American Intellectual Antisemitism recasts Jews as the embodiment of privilege, oppression, and global power. According to this ideology, Jews are White oppressors, settler-colonialists, and European capitalistic imperialists who wield disproportionate influence over foreign governments, financial systems, and global media in order to ethnically cleanse Palestine and establish a Jewish supremacist ethnostate through dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. Hiding behind a polished veneer of academic jargon and intellectual sophistication, American Intellectual Antisemitism portrays the Jewish people not merely as participants in historical events but as the embodiment of evil, responsible for all that’s wrong in the Middle East and far beyond it. By recasting rape as “resistance” and murder as the means for “liberation,” it creates a moral framework through which even the most horrific violence becomes justifiable. Within this framework, no atrocity against Jews, not even the kidnapping and killing of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, is too horrific to rationalize.

Taken to its ideological conclusion, American Intellectual Antisemitism casts Israel — “the Jew among the nations” — as inherently evil and its very existence as inherently unjust. Insisting that justice can come only through the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, it holds that anyone who supports Jewish self-determination, Jew or non-Jew alike, must be opposed. Put into practice, this ideology sanctions the targeting of Jews and their allies as an act of moral virtue.

Of course, criticizing Israel’s past and current governments, policies, or conduct is not inherently antisemitic. Yet, by crossing the boundary between criticism of Israel’s actions and opposition to its very existence, this seemingly new form of Jew-hatred reproduces deep antisemitic patterns that are anything but new. Satisfying what Natan Sharansky famously called the “Three Ds” of antisemitism, American Intellectual Antisemitism does all three: it demonizes Jews and Israel, delegitimizes Jewish self-determination, and imposes double standards it demands of no other people or nation. Though its language may be new, the underlying Jew-hatred is ancient. Academia did not invent Jew-hatred. It just gave it a PhD.

Naming the ideology, however, was only the beginning. To understand how American Intellectual Antisemitism had taken hold of so many unsuspecting minds, I needed to trace not only its origins, but its transmission. I needed to uncover where these ideas were developed, who gave them legitimacy, how they traveled beyond campus, and which financial pipelines sustained their spread. I needed to expose not only what people had come to believe, but who had taught them to believe it and how obscure academic ideas had entered mainstream American life. Once I understood what I was seeing, I needed to make sure others could see it too.

That investigation became my book, American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities. Tracing the rise of this radical and hateful ideology within American higher education, the book exposes the ideas, institutions, and individual – from Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and Rashid Khalidi to Nerdeen Kiswani, Judith Butler, Katherine Franke, and, of course, Mahmoud and Zohran Mamdani - that helped recast Jews from a persecuted minority into privileged oppressor. In doing so, I traced the pathways through which American Intellectual Antisemitism escaped academia and entered the media, K-12 education, professional organizations, cultural institutions, and politics. Following its journey from the seminar room to the protest encampment, from academic journals to social media, and from elite universities into institutions that shape how millions of Americans understand the world, I draw on my own transformation from a popular professor at Columbia Business School to one of the country’s most outspoken Jewish and Israeli advocates, enduring relentless defamation and death threats along the way, to reveal just how deeply American Intellectual Antisemitism has become entrenched within our academic system. Above all, the book tells the story of how antisemitism, long before it reached the streets, captured the syllabus.

Writing this book helped me understand how we got here, but it also forced me to consider whether things could have turned out differently. I often think back to my conversation with Mr. Rosberg and wonder what might have been. What might have happened had he taken me and the warning I was trying to deliver more seriously? What might have happened had he not dismissed me as a nuisance and an alarmist, but instead recognized that I was raising a critical alarm? What might Columbia have become had its leaders chosen moral clarity, accountability, and a constructive path forward rather than cowardice, appeasement, and indifference?

We cannot undo what has already been done, but we can still decide what happens next. The need for a better path forward is no less urgent today than it was on that bright November afternoon in Riverside Park. If anything, it is greater. We must be willing to name the hateful ideology of American Intellectual Antisemitism even when it disguises itself in the language of social justice, hold people accountable when they turn that ideology into intimidation and disruption, and offer something better in its place — democracy, pluralism, coexistence, intellectual humility, and universal human dignity. You don’t defeat destructive ideologies merely by exposing the damage they cause. You defeat them by helping people understand what is happening, refusing to accept it as normal, and standing up against it.

That is ultimately why I wrote American Intellectual Antisemitism. Not merely to explain what happened, but to prevent it from happening again. Jews and non-Jews alike must recognize the ideological hatred that has taken root within some of our most elite institutions, understand where it came from and how it spreads, and resist it before it takes root elsewhere.

I walked into Riverside Park that November afternoon believing Columbia could still climb out of the moral pit into which it had dug itself. Nearly three years later, I still believe that it can and that other ideologically captured institutions can as well. American Intellectual Antisemitism is a powerful and menacing ideology, but it is not undefeatable. No ideology is. By choosing moral clarity over confusion, accountability over appeasement, and hope over hatred, we can turn what threatens to become a historical turning point into a historical footnote.

I wrote this book because, once I saw what was happening, I could no longer remain silent. Now that you see it too, will you?

Lionel Shriver: Sally Rooney is a posturing ingrate

Amnesty International indignation to the contrary, this is not a free-speech issue. Rooney may still shout her devotion to Palestinians from the rooftops. Should the author truly wish to fund their cause, legal outfits rowdily clamouring for “free Palestine!” are multitudinous: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Oxfam… But, no. Rooney has to plump for Palestine Action, because that will stir a kerfuffle.

This isn’t Rooney’s first gesture of impotent activism. She flaunted her refusal to sell Hebrew translation rights to her third novel, her Israeli publisher being politically impure. She helped spearhead a 2024 authors’ boycott of book festivals funded by Baillie Gifford, supposedly involved in fossil fuels and Israeli defence shares. Yet according to the investment management firm, only 2 per cent of its investments involved oil and gas, and claims of the company’s investment in the Israeli military were “offensively misleading”.

Did this showy, clubby boycott decrease the sale of oil and gas by a single litre or cubic metre? No. Did it deprive Israel of a single bullet? No. But it did convince Baillie Gifford that the fastidious literary set was more trouble than it was worth, leaving Edinburgh, Hay, Cheltenham and six other festivals with funding black holes. While most festivals have recovered, the boycott merely imperilled opportunities for fellow authors to promote their work.

The same Zero Benefit to the Real World model applies to Rooney’s PA spectacle. Will her novels’ withdrawal from British bookshops improve the lot of Palestinians a jot? This grandstanding appears to have nothing to do with Palestinians and everything to do with moral vanity. The gambit is attention-seeking self-aggrandisement. (It’s working. I’m bolstering Rooney’s rep right now.) Real virtue entails action with some small chance of helping the people on whose behalf it was ostensibly taken.

Maybe Rooney will still scrounge a few quid from her paltry savings to toss a proscribed organisation. But does Palestine Action have any effect on the Middle East? The outfit comprises a small, self-righteous group of halfwits in a small island nation itself with no influence on Israeli policy. During a violent 2024 assault on Elbit Systems, the group did over £1m in criminal damage and fractured a police officer’s spine with a sledgehammer.

I challenge you to construct a cause-and-effect narrative that demonstrates how these childish, spiteful ructions in faraway Britain have improved conditions in Gaza by a smidgeon.

Given the woman’s very occupation relies on creativity, Rooney’s pet cause is disappointingly trite, especially for an Irish national. This year, I appeared in two festivals in Ireland, where support for Palestinians, with zilch to do with the Republic, has grown crazed, irrational, manic – even hysterical. Palestinian flags on every lamppost. The signing queue for Avi Shlaim’s Genocide in Gaza out the door and round the corner.

Yet this Irish advocacy is perfectly pointless, reminiscent of the mass trooping about for Black Lives Matter in 2020, when European protests hadn’t the weensiest effect on policing in Minneapolis. This variety of Left-wing activism isn’t driven by a desire to affect the outside world positively. It aspires to a cosy self-regard and parades trendy political credentials. It’s all about me, me, me.

In a London synagogue, a Jewish David stands up to the Green Party’s Goliath

MEANWHILE, THE UK’s “little” David, Highgate Synagogue, steps forward.

The Greens’ Goliath, who passed the Zionism equals racism motion, sent a letter via Councillor Mark Blake, leader of Haringey Green Council, to the rabbi and chairpersons of the synagogue in his area.

He was trying to reassure them about the implications of the party’s disgraceful stance on Zionism and what it means for the local Jewish community. Everything was going to be fine.

This is the usual response of a coward. Having inflicted the blow, the antisemite then goes back to hide behind the parapet with false assurances. This is what Blake did.

Highgate responded with both barrels: “We reject your assurances. You make us unsafe.”

“You may see no connection between the ceaseless vilification of Israel, the blood libels that you and your party regularly trot out, and the hostility to Jews in this country, but we do.”

“We take it from tone and content (of your letter) that you are deeply embarrassed with the decision taken by your party to not only brand Zionism as racism but to call for the eradication by any means necessary, including violence, of the only Jewish state, the only practicing democracy in the Middle East and home to half of the world’s Jewish population…”

“This (motion) has been publicly celebrated by the Haringey branch of the Greens party, aligning itself with Hamas, a genocidal, homophobic, misogynistic, and Islamist terrorist organization.

“This synagogue has had close relatives who were victims of October 7. And let there be no doubt the love of Zion is integral. The threat of the Greens is an ignorant and one-sided view, and we expect you to resign from it.”

The wagons are circled, the war continues.

There is no room for weaseling around, and Highgate Synagogue has sent a message – not just to our enemies who come in many guises, but also to the leaders of the community too often showing themselves inexplicably obsequious. Polite overtures often fall on deaf ears.

During the High Holy Days, government officials were given jars of honey to wish them a sweet new year. Their response was the imposition of sanctions and the desire to disestablish the state of Israel.

Our nation produces brave Davids, not timid Sauls.

As Elie Wiesel said in his oft-repeated guidance: “Stand up, do not stay quiet. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Read More

10/19 Links Pt1: How ‘Palestine’ conquered France; UN Watch Releases Database Exposing Who Funds UN’s Human Rights Experts; As a UN envoy, I saw my colleagues’ anti-Israel obsession first-hand

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: How ‘Palestine’ conquered France

This is why the omnipresence of the Palestine flag matters – it confirms France is being consumed by the flames of anti-Westernism, by a nihilistic disdain for the very virtues of our civilisation. For that is what the so-called Palestine cause now embodies – not concern for the Palestinian people but contempt for ‘the West’. Not a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East but a longing for fire here at home.

Some of us have argued for a while that the Islamo-left’s hysterical, disproportionate, bigoted and at times demented loathing for the Jewish State is proof that Israel has been made into the whipping boy of modernity, into the scapegoat, the sin-eater, of the West and all its supposed crimes. That the birthplace of the Enlightenment is now being burnt down by mobs draped in the Palestine flag proves this beyond doubt.

As one commentator notes, the ‘Palestinian cause’ seems to have become ‘a symbol of protest against Western institutions, national identities and political establishments’, even in situations that ‘have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians’. It’s the great, mad omnicause – a raging engine of grievance that absorbs every local resentment and every anti-Western pathology into a single, holy crusade. The actual geopolitics of the Levant are irrelevant to the Palestinianism that has swept the West, except, of course, that many of these people long for the annihilation of the Jewish State as a proxy for Western sin. What Palestinianism really adds up to is a cult of self-loathing. The keffiyeh is the mask the death of the Enlightenment wears.

This is the intifada coming home. The West’s craven failure to hold the moral line after 7 October, its indulgence of the Islamo-left mobs who hailed Hamas and libelled Israel, has started a fire of anti-civilisational hysteria that it will be incredibly difficult to put out. The nation that erodes its borders, tells newcomers their culture is just as valid as ours, fails to assimilate its foreign-origin youths and coaches its own young to feel shame over their national history is a nation that has signed its own death warrant.

Gavin Mortimer at the Spectator made a striking observation. The far-left agitators in France are mostly white, while the looters and cop-fighters ‘appear to be of immigrant background’. ‘The people seen on television forcing their way into the city halls of Marseille and Lille were mainly white’, he said, where the store invaders of Paris and Bordeaux were non-white. This is the New France. The New Europe, in fact. A place where there are youths who have no real roots in society, and youths whose roots have been violently torn up by institutions that have incited them into national self-loathing. Youths who are unassimilated, and youths who are from here but are constantly taught to hate ‘here’.

Entitled whites, young Muslim irritants, foreign-born louts, Islamist troublemakers, post-Enlightenment leftists and sanctimonious pricks who hide their hatred for the West behind a love of Palestine – that’s France now. Who’s next? Germany? Britain? We have so much work to do.

How “Globalize the Intifada” Came to France’s Streets

Israel has seen the devastation and destruction of intifadas firsthand, with buses and cafes attacked by suicide bombers that left countless people dead, injured, and traumatized. The call to globalize such a catastrophe reveals the dark desire to spread that same violence beyond Israel’s borders.

This is especially true in France, where despite the Jewish population representing less than one percent, antisemitic incidents account for 53 percent of all anti-religious acts. And as the protests spread, Jewish institutions are likely to continue to be a target. It is for that reason that in the midst of the protests in Paris, a synagogue was vandalized. In another incident in Marseille, a journalist noted that only Jewish businesses were attacked and set ablaze.

But the trespassing, vandalism, and destruction of property do not stop at a synagogue. Those protesting in the streets of France have frequently found common ground in hostility toward Israel, the Jewish people, and the systems and framework of Western civilization, including the country they are protesting. As such, the Palestinian flag and slogans have been a primary marker at these initially anti-government protests in France and Europe more broadly. Whereas the Palestinian cause has been turned into a vehicle for the radical left to express deeper anti-Western and anti-Jewish grievances, the same protests provide Islamist movements an opportunity to bring the symbols and rhetoric of a far-away conflict closer to enemies at home.

The supposed interconnectivity of these previously unrelated causes led Greta Thunberg, who previously traded her climate activism for the publicity yacht that attempted to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, to join the protestors in France. With a keffiyeh draped across her shoulders, Thunberg, who was “incredibly proud” of the protestors, insisted that all protest movements “need to be united” because they face the “same enemy,” which is an “extremely destructive system.”

Ultimately, the protests are a telling sign of how the pro-Palestinian movement is no longer confined to demonstrations explicitly concerned with Palestinians, Israel, or the war against Hamas. The Palestinian flag, symbols, and slogans being chanted have become attached to other social or political movements, regardless of relevance, making the cause a prop for broader anti-Israel or anti-Western activism.

The integration of such symbols has become so normalized that “globalizing the intifada” is no longer merely a slogan chanted without understanding its words, but a European reality. The result is the exportation and glorification of a campaign of violence onto the streets of France.

Don’t Tell Me London Wasn’t Warned

In August 1994, The Independent⁠ reported Jewish students’ complaints about intimidation and literature invoking the killing of Jews. Farid Kassim, quoted as a spokesman for the organizers of a Wembley conference, rejected allegations of antisemitism and said the quotations had been taken out of context. Omar Bakri Muhammad was identified as Hizb ut-Tahrir’s national organizer.

The report also recorded Muhammad condemning the London bombings and the authorities saying there was no evidence of terrorist attacks by the group’s followers. That did not dispose of the concerns about what was being preached and circulated.

By the time I photographed Abu Hamza, officials were familiar with him too. A released Home Office document⁠, dated September 11, 2000, described his activities, his Supporters of Sharia organization and his extreme views. A year before the attacks in America, he was already the subject of government paperwork.

In November 2001, answering questions concerning Al-Muhajiroun and Omar Bakri Muhammad, Home Office minister John Denham said enforcement units were “monitoring and evaluating”⁠ information that might support prosecution.

There were investigations, and eventually prosecutions. The government’s later account of the Hamza case⁠ described earlier decisions that the evidence was insufficient, followed by material supporting charges in 2004. Knowing that somebody holds extreme views is not the same as having the evidence to prosecute them. I understand that. But the official record makes it impossible to pretend the concerns had never reached the people responsible for acting on them.

What I witnessed on London’s streets contributed to my decision to move to Israel in 2007. London remained the city where I grew up, learned my profession and spent much of my working life. Leaving did not remove that attachment. It is why the photographs still trouble me, and why there is anger in the pieces I write about the city today.

I look at today’s images with memories of what I photographed decades ago. I remember the people raising concerns, the public arguments and the assurances that the authorities were paying attention. My archive gives those memories faces, places and dates.

Outside the embassy that day, nobody needed an intelligence briefing to establish that an Israeli flag was burning. It was happening in front of us. I was recording it, and the police decided that my taking pictures risked antagonizing the people doing it.

Watching the rioting and looting in Paris over the past few days⁠, I find myself worrying about London again. The immediate causes are different, but the sight of another European capital struggling with violence on its streets brings back uncomfortable memories. I fear London could face scenes like these. That is my judgment, shaped by years of standing behind a camera in crowds that the authorities knew perfectly well were there.

The police were warned repeatedly. So were the security services and successive governments. Jewish communal organizations kept raising concerns, and the public record shows how long those concerns had been reaching officials. There were investigations and prosecutions, but there are still questions about the years in between. I remember being told to stop taking photographs because I was “antagonising them.” Looking at those photographs now, I wonder how much more people were expected to tolerate before their warnings carried sufficient weight.

Should London face the kind of scenes we are watching in Paris, I will have very little patience for anyone in authority who claims they could not have seen trouble coming.

Read More

The Green Party isn't about the environment anymore, and the Palestine movement isn't even about Palestinians

British investigative journalist David Collier attended the Green Party conference earlier this month, and as usual, he hits it out of the park. He describes a political party that has been taken over by anti-Israel activists to the point where its original environmental mission appears almost secondary.

Collier describes an exhibition hall filled with booths devoted to Palestine, anti-Zionism and associated activist groups. Environmentalism was still present, but the excitement seemed to be elsewhere. Speakers repeatedly insisted that Palestine was an environmental issue, because obviously everything has to be about Palestine nowadays. Otherwise, organizers think, no one cares.

One particularly revealing episode involved the Green Party Women stand. The women displayed a sign reading "More Trees, Less Hamas," referencing the sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7. According to Collier, a man confronted them, upset that they had criticized Hamas without also criticizing Israel.

To many Green members, women's rights are apparently subordinate to anti-Israel activism.

And the party has now officially adopted a resolution declaring that Zionism is racism, by a vote of 1,022 to 813. In order to do that they needed to redefine Zionism so that by definition it was racist, making the declaration a ratification of a made-up definition. But truth is not something the party values to begin with.

The hijacking is explicit. Animah Kosai, a co-chair of Greens for Palestine, openly explained her approach: "I don't believe in serving the Green Party ... I actually believe in using the party in order to reach certain goals. And in this case, for Palestine, for anti-imperialism."

At least she's being honest.

This should sound familiar to Americans. The Democratic Socialists of America have openly embraced running candidates on the Democratic ballot line to build political power and advance their own agenda. The idea is to use an established political party's infrastructure to change its direction from within even when its values and the values of the governing party contradict each other. 

One detail that Collier noticed is most telling. Despite the conference's obsession with Palestine, Collier found that three events specifically devoted to Palestinian causes, organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, International Centre of Justice for Palestinians and Friends of Al-Aqsa, were held in rooms that appeared more than half-empty.

Hating Israel and Zionism attracts enormous enthusiasm. A resolution declaring Zionism racist mobilizes the membership. Activists celebrate what they regard as a historic victory. But sessions supposedly devoted to helping Palestinians cannot even fill their rooms.

I've argued for years that much of what calls itself the "pro-Palestinian movement" is better understood as an anti-Israel movement. Palestinian welfare is often used to give moral legitimacy to a campaign whose overriding objective is opposition to the Jewish state, and Palestinians are pawns in this larger desire to delegitimize Israel. The most prominent anti-Israel political party seems to bear this out. 

The activists don't spend too much time raising money to provide food or medical services to Gazans. Their energy is in tearing Zionism down, not building Palestine up. It just so happens that the latter is the most convenient excuse for the former.

But to claim that these organizations are pro-peace or pro-Palestinian is false. Their motivation is anti-, not pro-.

And in this, they have illustrious ancestors.

.

---

 

Read More

Can you teach philosophy to five-year-olds? I decided to write a book to try!

Introducing Sarah Makes the World Better, my first children's book inspired by Derechology.

As my regular readers know, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years developing a philosophical framework I call Derechology. It’s an attempt to build a practical system of thinking from first principles that makes intuitive sense and can be applied to literally any situation.

I’m still trying to organize the Derechology book, but as I played with the idea, I wondered: could the concepts be made simple enough for a five year-old?

The result is my first children’s book, Sarah Makes the World Better.

Sarah is a little girl who wakes up one morning to the sound of workers repairing a pothole outside her window. She learns that things wear out and need to be repaired, but also that people can create entirely new things that make life better. She decides that she wants to make the whole world better herself.

 It turns out to be harder than she expects.

In the course of a deceptively simple story, Sarah encounters several problems that adults struggle with as well.

She discovers that telling the truth is important, but so is how you tell it. She finds a drooping flower that she wants to move into the sunshine, but doing so might destroy an anthill beside it. Which is more important? How can she know what the right thing is?

 

These are serious ethical questions that are difficult to answer. That’s the point. Sometimes we don’t have enough information to know what is best, and sometimes legitimate values conflict with each other. How do we navigate these decisions?

Sometimes we should not act. Sometimes we do what is clearly right, like when Sarah visits a friend with a broken leg. Even then, she inadvertently hurts her friend’s feelings, recognizes her mistake, apologizes, and learns to listen to what her friend actually wants.

She also discovers something about relationships: helping one person can help others as well. And since those people are part of the world, making their lives better really does make the whole world better.

Along the way, the story introduces ideas about truth, the limits of knowledge, ethical judgment, competing values, creativity, relationships, and learning from mistakes. These are all central to Derechology, but none of the philosophical vocabulary appears in the story itself.

I wanted to avoid the usual formula where a children’s story presents a moral problem and then supplies the correct answer. Real life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes there are no perfect choices. Sometimes we misunderstand other people. Sometimes what matters most is recognizing that we made a mistake and doing better next time.

Sarah Makes the World Better includes a note for grown-ups on how to discuss some of the issues mentioned in the book with the child. These are mostly open-ended questions but even children face real dilemmas every day, and the book helps children navigate them without giving black and white answers.

The Hebrew word derech means a path. That is really the central idea: ethics isn’t about making one perfect decision. It’s about choosing a good direction and continuing to learn as we travel along it.

Sarah doesn’t solve every problem by the end of the day. But she has made the world better in her own small way, and she wants to stay on that same path tomorrow.

I’m happy at how this came out. It was also an interesting test of Derechology itself: if these concepts are genuinely fundamental to human life, they should be scalable from children to nations.

While Derechology is based on Jewish thinking, the book is for all; there is nothing overtly Jewish in it.

Sarah Makes the World Better is now available on Amazon. It would make a great gift for your children or grandchildren.

You can see all of my current books available on my new media kit.

I’d be interested in hearing what readers think, especially whether the story succeeds in encouraging children to ask questions rather than simply accept the ready-made answers most children’s books offer.

---

 

Read More

10/18 Links: Trump endorses ‘great warrior’ Netanyahu; Collier: Inside Occupied Territory at the Green Party Conference; Synagogue vandalized in Paris amid nationwide riots

From Ian:

David Collier: Inside Occupied Territory at the Green Party Conference

I attended the Green Party conference, spending time inside the conference halls and observing demonstrations outside. I tried to speak to as many Green Party members as possible. When I dive into sewers such as this, I rarely rush to publish. I need time to recover, as well as to analyse footage and digest and understand what I have experienced. My goal is to try to bring deeper insight to what is unfolding.

As always, I bring receipts. In these two photos, you can see me alongside Mothin Ali, Deputy Leader of the Green Party, and Ismail Patel, the Islamist Founder and Chair of Friends of Al Aqsa and one of the key people responsible for the hate marches that have plagued our streets for years.

Green Party conference selfies. Ismail Patel and Mothin Ali

To be fair, I doubt they knew who I was.

The Ignorant Cult of Hate
Lee Harpin captured footage of a group of Green Party members chanting “all of Palestine is Arab” in Arabic after the motion passed.

Harpin also uploaded two videos in which he spoke to Green Party members who had supported the motion. I identified both of those involved. In one video, Lambeth’s Serena Oliver explains that people who support Israel are the real antisemites, before outrageously suggesting that Jewish people who associate their Jewish identity with a belief in Jewish self-determination are the ones who need to educate themselves.

It is hard to imagine white people on the left dismissing the self-identity of any other minority group in this fashion. As if to prove she has been totally brainwashed by ahistorical garbage, Oliver says Jews should learn about how the “Zionist project was linking with the Nazis.” Turning her Holocaust revisionism dial up to maximum, she implies that “history has been rewritten” to suggest otherwise.

It may shock her to learn that Jews at Auschwitz were not divided into Zionists and non-Zionists before being selected for the gas chambers.

The second video features Alex Blower from Peterborough. Blower was one of those singing “Palestine is Arab” in Arabic, although it is unclear whether he knew what he was saying. Then, speaking straight to camera, Blower suggests that “Zionism has to go” and that the motion “empowers UK people”. He tells them to “go out and fight” Zionism. Stressing how important this mission is, he says “we cannot have a world with Zionism”, adding that the future of humanity depends on it.

This is unhinged, irrational hate, fuelled by ignorance and targeting the only Jewish state in the world. This is what the Green Party has unleashed – and it is their motion the party adopted.

Standing Next to a Jew
This movement evolved within Corbynism, but many of those involved believed Corbyn was too weak. They are more forceful in their antisemitic ideology, more confident in their manner, and now supported by an army of arrogant, cocky young people who truly believe Israelis are the new Nazis. A generation educated through doomscrolling classes on Instagram or TikTok.

“How on earth can we be antisemitic?” they will respond. “The leader of our party is Jewish.”

Finding Jewish outliers to hide behind is standard practice for left-wing antisemitic movements.

History is littered with examples. The early communists created a special group, the Yevsektsiya, for just this purpose. The Soviets did it again in 1983, creating the Anti-Zionist Committee and placing Jewish figures at its forefront to deflect accusations of antisemitism.

The Soviet propaganda statement that accompanied the 1983 launch stated that Zionism “concentrates in itself extreme nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, justification for territorial seizures and annexations, armed adventurism, the cult of political permissiveness and impunity, demagoguery and ideological diversions, filthy maneuvers and perfidy.” It also rejected attempts by Zionists to call their opposition to Zionism “antisemitic.”

That 1983 Soviet propaganda statement is mirrored in the Green Party’s 2026 ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion.

Within ten years of the committee’s formation, the Soviet Union had collapsed, its borders had opened and approximately 1.5 million Jews had escaped, most of them to Israel. So much for the committee’s insistence that there was no Jewish problem in the Soviet Union.

Yet the strategy is still deployed successfully on the left. Corbyn’s inner circle created Jewish Voice for Labour. It is no coincidence that, after Corbyn’s defeat, ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ changed its name to ‘Jewish Voice for Liberation’ and some of its founders became Green Party members. I saw JVL executive member Jonathan Rosenhead at the conference. In the video below, Mike Cushman, a JVL founder and now a member of ‘Jewish Greens’, talks about how happy he is that the motion passed:

This is always how it is done: find fringe members of the Jewish community and use them as cover.

Andy Burnham, knowing he was going to swing left to chase the Islamist vote, deployed Ed Miliband in the Foreign Office to make criticism of his anti-Israel policies more difficult. The Green Party chose Zack Polanski.

Once that protection is in place, fringe anti-Zionist groups form around the larger movement to reinforce it:

Green Party Jews against Zionism
For Jews, the strategy is transparent. They know most of these token Jews already have one foot, if not both, outside the community. But non-Jews are left scratching their heads, and this confusion helps to blunt the voices of Jews who speak out in opposition. After all, how can a movement be antisemitic if Jews are there defending it?

Someone should ask the 1.5 million Jews who fled the Soviet Union.

The antisemites have invaded and occupied the Green Party.

I am unsure whether the Green Party has the numbers or the energy to oust them.

When Sunday arrived, I could not wait to get home.

Predictions of Gaza’s death toll were wrong - why is no one being held accountable?

Gaza’s Health Ministry, an arm of Hamas with every incentive to inflate, reported 455 malnutrition deaths across nearly two years of war, fewer than Somalia’s famine killed in half a day at its height.

By the IPC’s own threshold, two deaths per 10,000 people a day, the declared famine should have killed about 9,000. Hamas’s own ministry counted fewer than 200, across all of Gaza, fewer than the US records in four days.

Rafah followed a familiar pattern. Before Israel entered the city in May 2024, the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry warned an assault would bring “the annihilation of about 1.5 million Palestinians.” The EU’s then-foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, scoffed at evacuating civilians: “Where? To the moon?” Within three weeks, about a million people had evacuated Rafah. There was no annihilation and no apology.

The pattern is older than this war, and it only ever runs in one direction.

In April 2002, during Israel’s operation in Jenin, PA negotiator Saeb Erekat told CNN that Israeli troops had killed more than 500 people. The UN secretary-general’s own report later counted 52 Palestinians dead, at least half of them terrorists, along with 23 Israeli soldiers, and found the 500 figure unsubstantiated. By then, the “Jenin massacre” had entered the world’s vocabulary.

Operation Cast Lead followed the same arc. Hamas initially acknowledged fewer than 50 dead combatants. The since-discredited 2009 Goldstone Report cited a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights tally identifying just 236 of the dead as combatants. Then, in November 2010, Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad acknowledged that up to 700 men from Hamas’s military wing and security forces had been killed, close to Israel’s count of 709.

Abroad, the dead were nearly all civilians. At home, they were Hamas martyrs.

On October 17, 2023, Hamas’s health authorities instantly blamed Israel for the Ahli hospital explosion and reported nearly 500 dead. American, British, French, and Canadian intelligence assessments concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the likely cause; US intelligence put the toll at a fraction of the ministry’s tally. The New York Times later conceded that its early coverage had relied too heavily on Hamas’s claims.

The progressive Left, which prides itself on following the science, rarely asks why so many catastrophic predictions and claims about Israel fail. A growing faction of the populist Right, the so-called “woke Right,” recycles Hamas figures and UN forecasts it would ridicule on any other subject.

The method works because the claims and predictions do their work before they can be tested. Put Israel in the dock. Push for sanctions or an arms embargo. Pressure Israel, but not those sworn to its destruction. By the time the evidence arrives, the damage is done.

Tom Fletcher still runs the UN’s humanitarian office. The IPC has not retracted its 2025 famine declaration. Newsrooms still headline the forecasts and bury the accounting.

In most fields, predictions this consequential would at least produce an audit. When the subject is Israel, they produce the next failed prediction.

If Gaza Is "Genocide," What Was Tokyo?

On March 9, 1945, close to 300 American B-29s bombed Japan under cover of darkness, dropping 1,665 tons of napalm incendiaries on Tokyo. Between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in a single night. More than 60 Japanese cities followed.

Yet almost nobody calls the firebombing of Japan "genocide," and for good reason. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group "as such." America aimed to completely defeat a regime that murdered millions of civilians across Asia, massacred Nanjing, ran the "comfort women" system of sexual slavery on an industrial scale, and performed human experiments under Unit 731 - a regime whose cruelty rivaled that of the Nazis.

The clearest proof of intent came after the surrender. America occupied Japan, gave it a democratic constitution, fed its people and poured money into rebuilding it. A country bent on destroying the Japanese people, as such, does not spend seven years rebuilding them.

In Gaza, instead of fire, Israel used precision munitions. Instead of surprise, it warned civilians by leaflet, text message and phone call before strikes, and opened evacuation corridors. It moved food and medicine into the territory it was fighting in. It accepted losses no army in 1945 would have accepted to spare enemy civilians.

The law is clear about who bears responsibility when one side hides its war machine among civilians. The 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions forbids using civilians to shield military targets and requires each side to keep military objectives away from populated areas as much as possible. Hamas spent 16 years doing the reverse. The presence of civilians does not make a military target immune. If it did, then every terrorist group and tyranny would win every war simply by hiding among its people.

America burned dozens of Japanese cities to the ground and is remembered, correctly, as the nation that defeated a monstrous regime and helped rebuild its people into a free and prosperous ally. Israel faced a more entrenched version of the same problem, chose far greater restraint, and stands accused of "genocide."

There is one more lesson from 1945: Japan became a free and peaceful nation only after its militarist regime was totally defeated, disarmed and replaced, and its schools stopped teaching children to die for the emperor. Nobody suggested leaving Japan's rulers in place to rearm.

Read More

Palestine Scholars Association co-founder takes the Nazi side against the Jews

I've been writing about Arab antisemitism for many years, and Western media simply pretends it doesn't exist, or that Arabs don't hate Jews but only Zionists.

It is one of the least covered stories in the Middle East. The idea that Arabs could hate Jews, as Jews, is too uncomfortable for Westerners to accept in the 21st century. Even though surveys confirm this time after time - the ADL Global 100 says that 76% of the entire MENA region harbors antisemitic attitudes - things like October 7 are blamed in Western media on political factors, not pure hatred of Jews.

That refusal to accept the obvious is dangerous to Jews. Instead of denouncing the antisemitism that pervades Arab societies, the world accepts explanations of anti-Zionism as if they explain the obsessive hate. As a result violent and pervasive anti-Israel protests are similarly  categorized as reasonable anger at Israeli policy rather than rooted in the insane hate that is behind age-old antisemitism. The fact that no other country sparks such vitriol is then presumed to be because Israel's alleged crimes are the worst in the world, and the classic antisemitism grows. 

All because the Western media and politicians refuse to call out what everyone knows: Arab Jew-hatred is not an anomaly but the default. Not being antisemitic is the anomaly, and anyone who says anything nice about Jews or meets with them as normal human beings are routinely accused of supporting "genocide."

Of all Arab countries, Morocco is the biggest anomaly. It is by far the most friendly to Jews. Its media includes many stories that are sympathetic to the Moroccan Jewish community, arguably more than its Jewish population merits. Yet even in Morocco, one can find virulently antisemitic attitudes without any visible pushback.

Dr. Abdullah Al-Mashukhi is a founding member of the Turkey-based Palestine Scholars Association. 

He wrote an article for a Marrakesh-based news site that shows, yet again, that anyone who claims that the Arab world is only "anti-Zionist" and not antisemitic knows nothing. 

Excerpts:

Anyone who examines the history of the Jews will notice that all the countries of the world have rejected them and sought to expel them from their territories, particularly the countries of Europe during the Middle Ages, when they were expelled from England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and other countries.

Likewise, the Jews have been subjected to the hatred of other nations since ancient times, including the Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Assyrians, Hittites, and others.

This hostility and hatred can be attributed to several factors, including:

1. The first factor: Religion

The Jews believe that they alone are God's chosen people, that they are God's children and beloved ones, and that all other peoples have no value or importance. Rather, they regard other peoples as insignificant and inferior. For this reason, they contemptuously refer to them as goyim. The term goyim derives from goy, which, according to the author, refers to animals gathered in a herd or to insects.

The Jews also believe that they were created from the essence of God, whereas all other human beings were created from satanic clay. 

Because of this sense of superiority, we find them enslaving others and considering their blood permissible to shed.

Another matter that contributed to the hatred of the Jews, and even to their killing and expulsion, was the accusation that they kidnapped Christian children and used their blood to prepare bread for the Jewish Passover.

This occurred in Britain, where an English child was killed during the reign of King Henry II. Ninety-three Jews were accused, and eighteen of them were executed. The Egyptian writer and novelist Naguib al-Kilani wrote his novel Blood for the Matzah of Zion about this subject.

Hostility toward Jews intensified because they were accused of responsibility for killing Christ, according to Christian belief. The Jews had incited Pilate to kill Jesus, peace be upon him, and said to him: "His blood be upon us and upon our children." This is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.

As a result of the foregoing, we find that hatred of the Jews featured prominently in the sermons and writings of religious figures such as Martin Luther, who declared that the Jews were a source of evil, economic harm, and betrayal of God.

2. The second factor: Their bad morals

Among the factors that have caused hatred of the Jews are their bad morals, including treachery, betrayal, breaking promises and covenants, and spreading corruption.

For example, one of the things that provoked German anger against the Jews was the accusation by German Nazis that the Jews had betrayed Germany during the First World War, thereby causing its defeat.

They also accused the Jews of spreading corruption, vice, homosexuality, and moral degeneracy in Berlin because of their control over the press, media, and theater. The Jews also caused economic problems and unemployment through usury.

The words of God Almighty are indeed true concerning them:

"And they strive to spread corruption upon the earth."

3. The third factor: Their greed and usury

Among the factors that led to the loathing and hatred of the Jews were their extreme stinginess, material greed, exploitation of people's needs, and their permitting themselves to engage in usurious transactions with non-Jews.

These usurious practices caused bankruptcy and unemployment within European societies. In addition, their dealings in mortgages and pledges resulted in many people losing their homes and farms, provoking widespread resentment and hatred toward the Jews.

The secret behind Jewish control of banks and financial institutions during the Middle Ages was that the Church prohibited lending money at interest. The Jews exploited this situation, gained control over the lifeblood of the European economy, and caused bankruptcy and unemployment among most of the people of Europe.

Shakespeare portrayed the Jewish usurer in his famous play The Merchant of Venice, associating the Jewish character with a greedy, avaricious, voracious man whose heart knows no mercy.

Likewise, Jewish characters in many European plays were portrayed as men obsessed with money and thirsting for blood.

For all these reasons, the Jews were subjected to loathing, hatred, and expulsion from Western societies.

This occurred in France, where 100,000 Jews were expelled in 1147 CE.

In 1290 CE, King Edward I of England issued an order expelling all Jews from his country.

In Geneva, a special quarter was designated for the Jews, and they were not permitted to touch any food in the marketplace.

In Russia, the Jews were persecuted because of their crime of assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

In America, former American president Franklin warned the American people in 1789 about the danger posed by the Jews. He expressed his fear that the Jews would gain control over America, dominate every aspect of life, and reduce the American people to slaves working for them.

Among the things he said were:

"Gentlemen, in every land where the Jews have settled, they have lowered the moral standards and corrupted its commerce..."

Conclusion

In conclusion, the hatred of the Jews by peoples, states, and nations throughout the world stems from the corrupt characteristics and morals that have distinguished them throughout the ages.

These are deeply rooted, fixed, and enduring traits, inherited by successive generations throughout history because of their connection to a corrupted religious doctrine that glorifies every Jew while degrading all other human beings.

This is as pure antisemitism as there is. All the greatest hits are there like the blood libel, Jewish control of media and banking, and fake "President Franklin prophecy." But it adds an Islamic flavor by describing attributes of Jews that are considered inherent, practically genetic, something that even the worst Christian antisemites usually stayed away from as a primary reason to hate Jews. 

---

 

Read More

10/17 Links: The problem with Israel’s hasbara is what it refuses to say; Shai Davidai exposes universities’ deep-rooted antisemitism; Netanyahu warns of 'campaign to smear Israel' after European diplomats attacked in WB

From Ian:

'Now is not a time to tremble': Casey Babb's Moral Case for Zionism

Babb's new book argues Zionism is not the colonialist or racist caricature commonly presented by its critics, but a Jewish national-liberation movement
No part of this book is me pontificating about Zionism or how to live a Jewish life or a Zionist life. In fact, as I mention in the book, the recommendations I make in the book are for me, too.

That said, one of the ideas I raise is to remember that the Jewish people and our allies have never been stronger, never in history, and that now is not a time to tremble. There’s a distinction between fear that sharpens your attention, which I think is what we need now, and fear that paralyzes action, and the second kind is the enemy of Jewish life in virtually every era.

There’s no need for us to retreat inwards. We need to really remember who we are, embrace our story, and all that comes with it, and muster up a new level of chutzpah and courage, because that’s what it’s going to take to get through this. We cannot allow ourselves to fall victim to the gaslighting and the moral inversion that has characterized not just Jewish life, but most of our society the last number of years.

People need to know who they are, know the story that they’re part of, and know that they aren’t alone. Another thing, is to do Zionist things. Help people in your community. Start living a more Zionist life. There’s a temptation to orient ideas and day-to-day living around opposition and defensiveness. I understand that, but we can’t allow that to shape who we become. That’s no way to live. We have to say yes to things like Shabbat. We have to say yes to the Hebrew language. We have to say yes to Israeli culture, have the full fullest expression of what living a Zionist life actually means – a genuine abundance of meaning, of connection, of beauty, of purpose, of pride, and of exhilaration.

How is your book different from Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel”?

OK, so that was published 25 years ago and much has changed since then. Too much. Dershowitz’s is principally a prosecutorial defence of Israel against historical, legal, and political accusations. It is legalistic and forensic.

I make a more affirmative moral, historical, and civilizational argument for Zionism itself. I speak of dignity, belonging, return, liberation, tikkun olam, democratic pluralism, Jewish historical continuity. He speaks of legal context, double standards, anti-Israel demonization. I’m not refuting charges against Israel; I’m building a case for Zionism as a morally serious, positive ideal – one of the most morally inspiring stories and ideas in all of history.

I think there’s a lot to be said about keeping Zionism alive and modernizing it and renewing it. If Dershowitz’s book asks, “Why is Israel not what its detractors say it is?” mine asks, “What valuable moral ideas are its detractors failing to see?”

'American Intellectual Antisemitism': Shai Davidai exposes universities’ deep-rooted antisemitism

In 1919, my grandmother applied for admission to Barnard College of Columbia University. The notoriously antisemitic dean at the time, Virginia Gildersleeve, told her she would not be notified of her acceptance until after the start of freshman year, in an attempt to encourage her to choose a different school. My grandmother stood her ground and entered the graduating class of ’23 only a few days late.

In ousted Columbia Prof. Shai Davidai’s exposé, American Intellectual Antisemitism, I learned that Gildersleeve, who supported Nazi Germany’s expulsion of Jews from academia, was taking her cue from the higher-ups at Columbia.

“After Jewish enrollment reached 40% of the incoming class of 1919… the university implemented a series of exclusionary policies explicitly designed to curb the presence of Jews on campus,” he writes.

Jew-hatred is nothing new in the Ivy League. It just takes on new forms.

“American Intellectual Antisemitism” is the term Davidai coined for what he defines as “a modern and insidious form of Jew-hatred that cloaks itself in progressive jargon and academic rhetoric,” using the “language of social justice” to disguise bigotry as intellectual virtue, and constitutes “a direct assault on Western liberal values.”

Davidai became known throughout the world after he posted a long letter on social media on October 18, 2023, in reaction to vile and violent post-October 7 events – and top-tier American university leaders’ shocking support, or at least lack of condemnation, of those pro-terror, anti-Jewish incidents.

'We cannot protect your child[ren]'

“I want this message to get to every parent who sent their kids to Columbia University, entrusted their kids and their children’s safety with us. I want this message to get to every parent in America who sent their kids to New York University, to Harvard, to Stanford, to Berkeley, and I want you to know one thing: We cannot protect your child[ren],” he wrote, calling Columbia University President Minouche Shafik “a coward.”

Over the following year, he organized rallies, appeared on prime-time television, and testified before Congress.

Davidai paid dearly for his ongoing peaceful activism on behalf of beleaguered Jewish students, organized with “a small but dedicated group of Jewish students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and alumni.” He and his family received death threats, and he was barred from teaching his award-winning business course. He was derided by detractors as a “genocidal maniac,” “a hate-mongering charlatan,” and an “extremely dangerous” professor.

A year after the Hamas-led massacres in Israel, when Davidai’s video of the unchecked disruption of a campus memorial service for October 7 victims garnered over a million views in a few hours, Columbia’s administration suspended him – not the perpetrators – from campus.

“The decision’s timing told me everything I needed to know about Columbia’s priorities,” he writes.

Blending a firsthand account with broader analysis, his book exposes the radical politics, ideological indoctrination, institutional indifference, leadership failures, and moral unraveling of American academia.

The timing of the book’s release coincides with the beginning of another school year. “Across the nation, more than 1.5 million new students are stepping into lecture halls for the first time, joining student organizations, and attending campus events where the dogmas of American Intellectual Antisemitism are paraded as moral virtue,” he writes.

Mother referred to Prevent for ‘over-identifying with Israel’

When Holly Passmore heard a knock at her front door at about 11am on July 4 last year, she assumed it was an Amazon delivery.

Instead, the 44-year-old mother-of-two from County Durham found two plain-clothes police officers on her doorstep wanting to know why she had recently visited Israel.

“They said it was a safeguarding matter,” recalled Ms Passmore, who cares for her nine-year-old son, Rex, who has severe autism, while studying for a master’s degree.

She assumed they were concerned she had taken her son into a war zone.

“I said, ‘Well, my son didn’t go to Israel. He stayed here with my mum and my daughter, who’s 20’,” she recalled. But the female officer replied: “No this is about you – because you may be at risk of manipulation.”

The officers from Durham Constabulary were investigating an anonymous referral to Prevent, the Government’s counter-extremism programme.

Ms Passmore suspected her support for Israel had prompted the referral. It was only months later, when she obtained police records through a subject access request, that her suspicions were confirmed.

A police intelligence report seen by The Telegraph reveals that the referral said she “over-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and was “supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel”.

It also described her as having “MH” – meaning mental health – issues and being “vulnerable to negative influence”.

“Nobody would describe me as vulnerable,” said Ms Passmore, who combines caring for her son Rex with studying for a master’s degree in Holocaust studies at the University of Haifa.

Ms Passmore said that, while she has health concerns, including severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, and has been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, she has no mental health issues.

“I think they knew I’m not vulnerable but they wanted to monitor me because I was advocating for Israel,” she told The Telegraph.

“When they came to the door they didn’t discuss my health. They only asked about Israel.”

The police intelligence report Ms Passmore obtained under data protection laws acknowledged that there “is no CT [counter-terror] concern with an individual being supportive of Israel as a democracy and it would not be a CT concern for a person to travel there”.

Read More

10/16 Links Pt2: Simon Schama: Jew hatred feeds on lies. The antidote is truth; The Silenced Howl of Howard Jacobson; El-Sayed in 2018 to a Synagogue: Hamas Is 'the Same' as the Israeli Military

From Ian:

Simon Schama: Jew hatred feeds on lies. The antidote is truth

Antisemitism is now the fastest metastasising race hatred in the Western world. Eighty years after the end of the war that exterminated two-­thirds of their European population, Jews are experiencing a drastic contraction of citizenship. They no longer enjoy the assumed right, for instance, to wear in public what clothing when and where they wish; to gather for prayer or weddings or bar mitzvahs without the necessity of armed guards in front of their place of worship.

Should Jews have the temerity to show up near a pro-­Palestinian demonstration carrying a sign indicating their allegiance, they are the ones threatened with arrest unless they remain silent or, preferably, remove themselves altogether from the scene. In April 2024, the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism was told that looking “quite openly Jewish” near to a demonstration (he was wearing a kippah) constituted “a breach of the peace”.

Never mind that this dramatic loss of security in the Diaspora makes the case for Zionism more effectively than anything Herzl or Ben-­Gurion wrote (though in many ways it rehearses their prophecies and warnings); the pile-­on continues unabated. College faculties are commanded by student demonstrators to cleanse themselves of suspect – or, worse, professed – Zionists.

An undergraduate leader of marches and rallies at my own Columbia University in New York excitedly proclaimed on video that he would like to go out and murder as many Zionists as he could. A British government review in June 2026 revealed National Health Service workers saying they would refuse to treat Israeli patients, even if they were on the verge of death. Medical staff at a hospital in Bankstown, Australia, were filmed performing a throat-­slitting gesture, indicating how much they looked forward to prime opportunities to hasten the death of any Israeli patients.

Everywhere, Jews have been instructed that they cannot expect to remain in cultural or social institutions in which they have participated, should they not publicly and vehemently repudiate their ancestral homeland. Installed on this cultural and social selection ramp are the arbitrators of which Jews may pass this acceptability test and which not.

In Italy, Keshet Italia and Keshet Europe, Jewish LGBTQ organisations, were forbidden from joining a Pride march in Rome for insufficiently denouncing Israeli genocide. The Israeli presence at the Eurovision Song Contest was enough for Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Ireland to pull out of the event, claiming in high dudgeon that it would be morally tainted. Purges and exclusions, active or passive, are now the norm.

On a New York subway car in 2024, a shouty pro-­Palestine militant demanded to know whether there were any Zionists aboard, as they would have to exit before the train could proceed. In November the following year, supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team were banned by Birmingham City Council from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa on the grounds that they had demonstrated a thirst for exceptional violence at an earlier match in Amsterdam.

The council acted on information supplied by the West Midlands Police; the fact that the information turned out to be false did not prevent the chief constable from repeating it to Parliament. In January 2026 it was revealed that the WMP had had intelligence about local groups planning to arm themselves and target Maccabi fans but failed to disclose this to the MPs.

On 3 June 2026, an unhinged woman on the C train subway in New York shouted that “Jews are eating kids”, adding that she could smell the children on a nearby Orthodox woman whom she went on to assault.

Appearing at an anti-­Israel rally in the heart of a conspicuously Jewish district of  Toronto, Abbas Hamze – who has been an instructor at Canadian colleges, including the University of Niagara Falls – spoke of Jews “practising black magic” and raping and eating children. The fleeting period when social media platforms made an ostensible effort to block evidently harmful lies from multiplying has given way to the higher imperative of clicks, triggered not by conscientious resistance to conspiracy and malevolent fantasy but by encouraging its profitable sensationalism.

The road to revenue is lined with lies and Jews are its run-­over casualties.

In the digital universe, the revelation of outlandish falsehoods is no guarantee of their impotence, much less their disappearance. Long gone are the times when John Milton, arguing in Areopagitica for an unlicensed press, could write, “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

The Silenced Howl of Howard Jacobson

Is a brilliant new novel about Britain after October 7 being cashiered?

Many of Draxler’s demoralizing and deranging experiences are inspired by real events, among them teenagers filmed tearing down posters of October 7 hostages, London police officers telling “obviously Jewish” people to get off the street lest they provoke Gaza marchers into violence by their mere presence, and upper-middle-class activists vandalizing paintings to protest Zionism. Even so, there is a surreal quality to Draxler’s experiences. He is a far from reliable narrator, and even he wonders whether his Holocaust-shadowed childhood is distorting or intensifying his perceptions of post–October 7 London.

Does his daughter really have “Kill all Zionists” tattooed around her belly button? Could it be that it was his own brother, not roving anti-Semites, who daubed “Yid 1” on his car while he sleepily kept guard outside his mother’s house? And on the night of October 7 itself, did Draxler really hear his neighbors chorus “gas the Jews” as they “popped prosecco corks”? In real life, there were no reports of such an incident in Britain, as bad as things became in the days after October 7.2

Draxler is well aware that his mind is swimming in paranoia, but he also knows that there are sound historical reasons for a Jew like himself to be fearful, and that on a more local scale, there really are people who are out to get him.

In one of the richest parts of the book, Draxler has a friendly conversation with a Syrian Arab doctor, the father of one of his pupils. (Draxler has carefully made sure that a copy of the Koran is prominent on his office bookshelf.) The physician tells him about the hadith concerning the Gharqad tree. He explains that during the End of Days, when the Faithful are in their final war with the Jews and the very rocks and stones call out “O, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him,” only the Gharqad tree will refuse to take part and stay silent. But then, says the doctor, “because Jews seek safety behind Gharqad trees we will know where to find them.” The doctor says he doesn’t subscribe to this teaching; he just wants Draxler to know what he is up against.

But Draxler’s predicament is not just a question of fear and the reasons for it. He is dealing with overwhelming disillusionment. He (like Jacobson, presumably) has always put his faith in the morally improving effects of knowledge, education, and culture, a faith that has become untenable in the face of campus bloodlust and bigotry: “Teach people and Belsen will never happen again, the world said in 1945. We forgot that it depended on what we taught.” Far from a source of hope, the young generation programmed in the West’s universities possesses an ugly moral certainty as profound as its ignorance. Language itself can no longer be trusted: “The language I’d been reading all my life assumed a common enterprise of imagination and compassion. Words were there to help us navigate our way to the truth. Not any more.”

Howl is not without flaws. Despite Jacobson’s acute understanding of the various forms of anti-Semitism, he does not and maybe cannot portray a convincing anti-Semite. Then there is his own predilection for Jewish stereotype. Draxler, like most of Jacobson’s male stand-ins, is proudly ignorant of the natural world, compulsively argumentative, impractical, and obsessed in a quasi-Oedipal way with his mother. Perhaps in the 1960s, when Jacobson’s comic sensibilities were taking shape, it was a cute act of aesthetic rebellion for Jewish authors to favor male Jewish protagonists who were hairy, sweaty, neurotic, self-conscious, unathletic, sexually perverse, and socially awkward. As quintessentially Jewish as those qualities may have seemed in the era of Lenny Bruce, today they feel like tired shtick.

None of this diminishes what Jacobson has achieved with Howl, a comic novel that is as serious and important as it is funny. Its implications reach far beyond Britain and the predicament of its Jewry—a predicament that has actually darkened since the book was written, as the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 made clear. Howl is the Catch-22 of the post–October 7 era, the first major artistic response to that horror and the ways in which it has changed the world.

It is therefore all the more bizarre—and troubling—that the novel could not find a mainstream American publisher.

That failure is so striking that it has become a key exhibit in the charge that mainstream American publishing has become institutionally hostile to Jewish authors and Jewish books (with the exception of those that are explicitly hostile to Zionism and/or reek of anti-Semitism).

According to a widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal, there is considerable evidence of something that looks like an informal boycott in the publishing industry: “Published writers with overtly Jewish books say their agents have dropped them from their roster; writers are being asked by editors to purge Jewish or Israeli elements from their books.”

Jacobson’s mixed commercial record over four decades and the general decline of the literary novel could make for a plausible market-based explanation for the failure of Howl to find a U.S. publisher—if it weren’t so topical, so timely, so well-reviewed in the UK, and, above all, so damned good.

A publisher would have to be an idiot not to see the commercial potential of a comic masterpiece like Howl. Given that most heads of major publishing houses are not idiots, it does look, troublingly, as if some other, less creditable factor has been at play.

At best, it could reflect the cowardice of politically correct middle-aged executives who fear more than anything condemnation by their intolerant young staff. Certainly, it would be interesting to know what influenced the decision-makers at Simon & Schuster, which previously published two of Jacobson’s novels (Kalooki Nights and The Act of Love). It is not as if S&S has been afraid of publishing politically controversial authors. It has, after all, bought the novels of the Arab-American writer Susan Abulhawa, whose overtly anti-Semitic remarks have been condemned as “reprehensible” even by Zohran Mamdani.

Eventually, Wicked Son, the small publishing house that has inaugurated a new line of books specifically from the list of those by Jewish authors who find their work summarily rejected by the big firms, bought Howl. It is apparently due to come out in 2027. The fact that no mainstream American publisher would touch Howl is a disturbing confirmation that Ferdinand Draxler’s October 8 perceptions of a world changed for the worse are spot-on: “I had suffered no loss but the space I moved in, like the air I breathed, had acquired a different density.”

Seth Mandel: You Hate To See It

Though the Times gushes that Mamdani could have been built in a lab, he is running into a problem: his voters believed him.

Mamdani was always looking for ways to up the ante—rhetorically, at least. And so he infamously told socialist activists that the Jewish state was to be blamed for every local New York City problem. If you see police brutality, he mused, picture an IDF soldier lacing the cop’s boots. Then he insisted he would abuse his office by directing the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of government, the prime minister of the one and only Jewish state.

These were ludicrous claims, and they suggested Mamdani was very much a bigoted con man who would try to sell New Yorkers the air they breathed. But people believed him, because they hated Israel enough to believe anything.

And what is one thing you’d expect of a man who blamed Jews for NYPD misbehavior and who claimed total control over the police force as if it were his praetorian guard? Of course: His rabid supporters want the head of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.

Demands to purge high-profile Jews who haven’t renounced their own people are not unprecedented, of course. But rarely are they so nakedly proposed in New York, home to more Jews than any city outside Israel (and most cities inside Israel).

Of course, the pro-Palestinian fire-the-Jewess campaign is part of a larger menu of items on which anti-Zionists seek to gorge themselves. As the Times notes, Mamdani “is being asked to fulfill an activist wish list unlike any delivered to mayors in the recent past. It includes abolishing the City University of New York Board of Trustees (over investments tied to Israel); intervening in the programming decisions of local synagogues; and halting any military shipments to Israel through the city’s major airports, which the mayor does not control.”

Why would they think he had control over U.S. foreign policy? Perhaps because he indicated that he had precisely those powers when he threatened to J. Edgar Hoover the NYPD on Bibi Netanyahu.

The reporting on this all suggests poor Zohran Mamdani has been put in a tough spot. But of course, that’s not true at all. Mamdani put himself in that spot. He deserves all of this. It is important, in fact, that an anti-Semitic power-hungry demagogue be brought back down to earth with simple politics.

Mamdani’s mob wants what it voted for. They won’t get it—not all of it—and Mamdani will look like what he is: a man who over-promised and under-prepared for a serious role in a democracy.

Read More