Francesca Albanese has a Katie Zacharia problem: she also lied about being a lawyer. But the media doesn't care.

The media have spent the past several days investigating new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia's legal credentials. She admitted that she failed the California bar exam, even though she has repeatedly called herself a lawyer.

This is legitimate news. Not because a White House press secretary needs a law license, but because someone in a position of public trust should not misrepresent her credentials.

But there is another prominent public figure with a remarkably similar problem: Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian territories.

In her 2021 application for the UN position, Albanese described herself as a "human rights lawyer by training and call." Her official UN biography still describes her as an "international lawyer."

Yet in a May 2025 interview with Vanity Fair Italia, Albanese admitted that she had never taken the examination required to practice law in Italy because she had never wanted to practice there.

UN Watch documented the discrepancy and called for an investigation. Albanese remains in her UN position.

The media is curiously unconcerned. The controversy has attracted nowhere near the attention devoted to Zacharia over the past two days.

Both women studied law. Neither needs a license to perform her current job. But there is a significant difference: Zacharia's job is communicating White House policy. Albanese's job involves interpreting international law, issuing legal conclusions and producing reports accusing Israel of some of the gravest crimes imaginable.

Surely the accuracy of Albanese's claimed legal credentials deserves at least as much scrutiny as Zacharia's.

If misleading the public about legal credentials is a scandal when someone works for Donald Trump, why isn't it a comparable scandal when someone makes international legal accusations against Israel under the authority of the United Nations?

To ask the question is to answer it. 

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10/15 Links Pt2: Obama’s Grudge; It’s Time to Wake from Woke; The Democrats have abandoned Israel, not just Netanyahu; Sally Rooney’s Self-Boycott Stunt

From Ian:

Gil Troy: It’s Time to Wake from Woke

Painfully divided and ideologically adrift, American Jewry has become a case study of weakness at a time when the Jewish people need to display strength and determination. Instead, the news is filled with items like these:
In Michigan, an anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist Democratic senatorial candidate who cavorts with someone who blames America for being attacked on 9/11 has received messages from a Jewish organization proclaiming, “Mazal Tov Abdul El-Sayed.”
In New York, whose new mayor can’t stop demonizing Israel, more than 230 rabbis declared that Zohran Mamdani’s “support for Palestinian self-determination stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions.”
The pressure group J Street has released millions of its donors’ dollars to go “on offense against AIPAC-backed incumbents”—effectively setting themselves against politicians who are supportive of the Jewish state.

Indeed, as more and more American Jews have internalized the mass mania demonizing Benjamin Netanyahu, they have also seemed to sour on Zionism, implicitly joining those who place the onus on Israel for the burgeoning anti-Semitism worldwide.

What kinds of people keep siding with their sworn enemies? I believe the answer is that these people are so emotionally and politically invested in dated, outmoded, and discredited ideas and fantasies that they would rather believe the best of the enemies of the Jewish people and the worst of their fellow Jews.

Three years after October 7, Israelis continue to wonder how it was that their leaders so easily deluded themselves with the conceptzia—the term used to describe the consensus view that Israel had found an effective modus vivendi with Hamas that occasionally required the Jewish state to “mow the lawn” when the terrorist-gang government got too obstreperous but did not require an all-out war to defeat and extirpate Israel’s enemy.

With justification, many have accused Netanyahu and his government of refusing to revisit the conceptzia and explain what went wrong. But no one doubts that Netanyahu has moved on from the conceptzia itself. That cannot readily be said of many American Jewish organizations and prominent American Jewish individuals, who find it impossible to move on from their pre–October 7 hopes, dreams, and delusions. They remain frozen in their own versions of the conceptzia, mired in a set of dated and sentimental notions about coexistence, the pursuit of peace, and being liked, when the nation’s enemies have made it clear that they’re not interested in any of those lovely illusions.

I am not speaking of those who have joined the enemy camp, building careers and delighting the haters as anti-Zionist Jews, declaring that at least Nazi Germany had the decency to seek to hide its genocide; rather, I am referring to mainstream liberal Jews, whose constant invocations of phrases such as “two-state solution” and “doing the work” indicate the degree to which their opinions have calcified. Even as they recognize the threat from growing Jew-hatred, they cannot surrender their priors, among them the certitude that the people with whom they agree on matters as various as abortion and climate change remain their allies rather than participants in a bloodless backstab that has been going on since October 8.

It has indeed been a disillusioning period, since many of the institutions American Jews both shaped and venerated over the past century have been the choreographers of today’s anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist mania—from the universities to the media to the publishing houses to the art world to Hollywood and the Democratic Party. And yet they persist, as do the delusional Jews who refuse to see the truth about those whose love they have long sought and whose approval they apparently continue to need.

Jonathan Tobin: The Democrats have abandoned Israel, not just Netanyahu

The idea that an Israeli prime minister not named Netanyahu could fix relations with a Democratic Party that treats antisemites like El-Sayed as worthy of support is just wishful thinking on the part of people like Shapiro.

That’s because this issue is not just a matter of the positions taken by radicals like El-Sayed and Mamdani or far-left “Squad” members in the U.S. House of Representatives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is also considering a 2028 presidential run.

Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who are perceived as moderates, are also signaling that the alliance with Israel will undergo a “thorough re-examination” in the coming years. Coons, who is in line to become chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, is already planning on proposing discriminatory sanctions on Israelis similar to those already put forward by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.

None of this is because, as Foer claims, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans while neglecting to do the same with Democrats. To the contrary, it was the Democrats who have aligned themselves against Israel’s interests and—under the influence of a base that has swallowed the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—view the Jewish state and Jews in general as “white” oppressors who must be suppressed. The claim that Netanyahu should have rejected the support of conservative Republicans (who were not under the spell of these ideologies) to placate Democrats is not a serious argument.

Shapiro may hope this will all fade away if Netanyahu is defeated on Oct. 27. But his problem is not just the possibility that Israeli voters will reject his advice. It’s that the same Democratic primary voters who elevated people like El-Sayed, Mamdani and a host of other “progressive” candidates in the last year view those who express “love” for Israel, even if it is qualified with Netanyahu-bashing, as simply beyond the pale.

In the recent past, Shapiro’s combination of political liberalism, largely successful governance and record of electoral success would have put him among the frontrunners in a presidential race. But over the course of the last year, even the most enthusiastic supporter cannot have missed the shift in the opinions of Democrats.

To them, a figure like Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who is Netanyahu’s principal opponent, is just as much of a “war criminal” deserving of sanctions as the prime minister. No conceivable concessions that Eisenkot could make to the Palestinians will be enough to win back Democratic voters indoctrinated in left-wing ideologies or the officeholders they want to send to Washington to blow up the alliance with the Jewish state.

A liberal failure
The remnants of a once-dominant pro-Israel faction of Democrats prefer to blame Netanyahu. But the responsibility is theirs. It was Democrats like Schumer and Shapiro who abetted the rise of Obama and who looked the other way as he set in motion the train of events that created so much “daylight” between their party and Israel. They were the ones who refused to anathematize members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and AOC when they helped legitimize antisemitism and Israel-bashing. And they are now the ones who, in the hope of appeasing their left-wing critics, are bolstering the candidacies of Jew-haters like El-Sayed.

Democrats who are blasting criticism of El-Sayed’s radicalism and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence as “Islamophobia” while ignoring or downplaying his bigotry aren’t open to rethinking their opposition to Israel. Nor are they likely to embrace a Democratic presidential candidate who is emotionally committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance but just wants a different prime minister in Jerusalem.

Simply put, Shapiro’s pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stand is not likely to satisfy a party base that now regards hostility to the Jewish state, along with opposition to enforcement of immigration laws, as the organizing principle of politics in the second quarter of the 21st century. And it’s likely that neither he nor any other Democrat is going to be able to get past that problem with the sort of nuanced position articulated at his debate. The collapse of the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is a liberal failure of nerve and principle that won’t be undone, regardless of who wins the next election in Israel.

Brendan O'Neill: Ireland has been conquered by Israel Derangement Syndrome

If the reports are accurate, then this could not be more serious. To kick people out of your hotel for the sin of ‘combating anti-Semitism’ is a flagrant prejudice. To see the words ‘combating anti-Semitism’ and think to yourself ‘Is this an IDF thing?’ is wild. It is proof of the Israel Derangement Syndrome that has Ireland in its unsparing grip. Increasingly in Irish polite society, Jews and the Jewish State and Gaza and ‘genocide’ are all thrown together in a big pot of suspicion and hysteria.

Remember when it was racists who risked being cancelled from public venues? Now it’s anti-racists – if the racism they’re discussing is the one targeted at Jews, that is. In a development that will shock precisely no one, some Israelophobes are cheering for the hotel. One Palestinian journalist offered his ‘full solidarity’ with the hotel’s refusal to host ‘delegates attending a conference about “fighting anti-Semitism”’. ‘Noble, noble people’, he said. Once again, the keffiyeh slips, revealing the ancient animus that lurks behind so much ‘Palestine activism’.

The delegates found somewhere else to stay. The Jew-haters of Europe and beyond who were rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of an anti-Semitism conference collapsing will have to suck that up. And yet serious questions remain. Is it now hazardous to discuss anti-Semitism in Ireland? Is Ireland now hostile territory for people who want to end Jew hate? Will the government speak up loudly and clearly against the hotel cancellation? We will see.

Dublin’s chattering classes should fret less about the IDF and focus more on IDS – the Israel Derangement Syndrome that has colonised Ireland as surely as the Brits once did. Israelophobia courses through the nation’s veins. The Irish parliament froths with invective about the ‘repulsive’, ‘obscene’, ‘disgusting’ Jewish State. The Irish government demanded a watering down of the meaning of genocide in order that the Jewish nation might finally be found guilty of it. The entire Irish establishment puffs itself up with nauseating fake virtue against the world’s only Jewish nation. Irish music acts scream ‘Up Hamas!’ while virtually the entirety of Dublin’s posh college intake consists of keffiyeh cultists who dream of Israel’s erasure. Little wonder Israel shut its embassy in Dublin, citing Ireland’s surrender to ‘anti-Israel’ mania.

‘Virtuous’ Ireland now defines itself almost wholly by its opposition to the Jewish State. It is the most tragic, envious, bitter and bigoted style of politics imaginable, and it flings open the door to outright anti-Jewish prejudice. ‘Are you linked to the IDF?’ Imagine asking that of people fighting anti-Semitism. What are we doing here, Ireland?

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10/15 Links Pt1: Why Hamas Cheered Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize; Kontorovich: Europe Risks an Economic War over Israel and the ICC; Human Sacrifice, Not Human Shields: Col. Richard Kemp on How Hamas Fights in Gaza

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Europe Risks an Economic War over Israel and the ICC

Last month the Netherlands and the UK both announced bans on business activities with what they described as Israeli settlements [Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria]. That includes Jerusalem and other areas America regards as fully under Israeli sovereignty. At the same time, the UK and Dutch governments are leading efforts to undermine new U.S. sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Some of the measures directly conflict with U.S. antiboycott laws, which have been on the books for half a century. These laws were passed to ensure that foreign countries couldn't pressure American companies to give up lawful trade with third countries. Under the Dutch measure, companies trading with Israel must furnish "negative certifications" that boycotted goods aren't included - a requirement explicitly forbidden by U.S. law.

Khaled Abu Toameh: No Elections, No Reform: The Palestinian Authority's Endless Excuses Are the Smallest Part of the Problem

[H]olding elections under the current circumstances will almost certainly strengthen Hamas....

On the other hand, Abbas's decision cannot be mistaken for a genuine effort to reform anything in Palestinian politics.

While elections can be important, they can also be bogus, faked, or even harmful, as one can see in Russia, Turkey or Iran.

Elections do not mean there is a democracy, especially if they take place before any reforms. Elections are needed after the institutions of democracy -- freedom of speech and of the press, the separation of powers, freedom of religion or from religion, due process, equal justice under the law -- meaning accountability for everyone, property rights, rights for women, children and laborers, an independent judiciary, and so on -- have been set in place and are smoothly functioning. Only then can there be elections that mean anything.

What is really needed to help the Palestinian people, now being held hostage by corrupt and self-serving leaders in all of their parties, is not just elections but reforms, all of them, and serious international accountability, starting with shutting down funding for slow or nonexistent compliance.

So far, the international community has been funding leaders who mistreat their own people first, then their neighbors and everyone else second. For the sake of the Palestinians, this has to stop.

Will [Western governments] condition financial assistance on measurable reforms?... Will they impose consequences on Palestinian leaders who obstruct reform? Or will they issue statements of regret, continue providing financial support, and wait for Abbas to pretend he is finally instituting reforms by announcing yet another -- presumably fake -- election date?

Western governments should also avoid the mistaken assumption that an election announcement, by itself, represents progress.

The test of reform is not the number of "presidential decrees" Abbas issues promising elections. It is whether Palestinians acquire institutions that can hold their leaders accountable.

A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 83% of the Palestinians believe corruption exists within Palestinian Authority institutions.

The poll also showed that Hamas leaders are more popular than Abbas and that 79% of Palestinians want him to resign.

The Palestinian political system offers no credible, nationally competitive third alternative to Fatah and Hamas.... Hamas remains an armed terrorist organization, while Fatah has presided over a system marked by authoritarianism, patronage, and corruption.

Western governments have too often treated elections as the principal answer to Palestinian political dysfunction. They are not. Palestinians need new leaders, new faces, and new political ideas. They need pragmatic, realistic, and accountable representatives who prioritize the welfare of their own people over factional interests and revolutionary slogans. They also need an overhaul of an education system that should prepare young Palestinians for peaceful coexistence, critical thinking, and economic opportunity rather than perpetuate hatred and glorify violence. They need independent institutions, financial transparency, effective anti-corruption mechanisms, and a free press capable of scrutinizing those in power.

Ottawa paid a London consultancy $989,714 to prepare Palestinian elections now postponed

Global Affairs Canada signed a $989,714 contribution agreement on April 22, 2026 with Adam Smith International Ltd of London, England, to "foster electoral readiness, political participation, and democratic renewal in Palestine", according to the federal grants disclosure database. The project, titled "SAWT Programme: Support to Elections and Political Processes", runs to March 31, 2028.

The record says the money supports "the scheduled April 2026 local elections and the November 2026 Palestinian National Council (PNC) elections", pays for "independent monitoring and technical assessments", and sets up an "International Observer Coordination Unit" to work with diplomatic missions. It names the Palestinian Central Elections Commission and Ministry of Local Government as direct beneficiaries and says the project indirectly benefits "approximately 2.8 million eligible voters in the West Bank and 1.2 million potential voters in Gaza".

The local elections went ahead on April 25. The Associated Press reported that turnout was 56 per cent in the West Bank, that "many races were not contested", that candidates had to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization's program, and that the Gaza vote was a single "largely symbolic pilot" in Deir al-Balah with 23 per cent turnout.

The November vote is off. Reuters reported on October 9 that Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh wrote to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on October 8 recommending "that the date of the legislative elections be adjusted by several months", because holding them "under the current circumstances faces fundamental obstacles". The election had been set for November 28.

Rebel News reported on October 9 that Carney had pointed to the scheduling of those elections on September 22 as progress justifying Canada's recognition of a Palestinian state.

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Talmud Silent On Two People Calling Shotgun At Same Time (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Lakewood, NJ, October 15 - Scholars pored over ancient, medieval, and modern texts this week to resolve a question that, reports indicate, remains unaddressed in the thousands of years that rabbis and their disciples have debated Jewish law: what happens if competing parties voice their claim to the front passenger seat of a vehicle simultaneously?

The Shotgun Shaila, as the issue has become known, defies the parameters of typical property rights claims, explained Rabbi Nosson Birnbaum of Yeshivas Moshav Kidmi.

"Tractate Bava Metzia establishes that under normal circumstances, merely seeing, or 'calling' possession of, an available object does not carry any weight," he noted. "Acquisition in Jewish law takes place only by means of a recognized act of acquisition, called a kinyan, such as lifting an object. The realm of calling shotgun, which in practice has taken on a binding nature, requires exploration as to how to fit that unique mechanism into the existing systems of establishing claims and duties."

Conceptual approaches exist for adopting non-kinyan mechanisms into practice - handshakes and signatures, for example - and, observed Rabbi Birnbaum, calling shotgun fits squarely into those less formalized, but just as valid in practice, methods. The challenge of calling shotgun, however, becomes a quagmire when two people call it at the same time. Fundamentally, the very idea that two things can occur at precisely the same time does not enjoy uniform acceptance.

"The Talmud notes disagreement over simultaneity in several places," he elaborated. "The sages even disagree as to whether, even if one accepts things can happen at exactly the same time, that it can only happen if a human engineers it - but we wouldn't necessarily accept that it would simply occur by accident. So at a very basic level, before we even reach the question of resolving competing shotgun-calling claims, we must determine whether the two - or more! - claimants have equal claims because simultaneity is possible, or, do we find ourselves forced to assume that one of them made the prior claim because it's not really possible for things to happen at exactly the same split second? The implications of the different answers to those inquiries lead to different outcomes."

Thus, the issue turns on whether shotgun can be called at the same time: if so, then both simultaneous claimants have an equal right to the front seat, and must arrive at a compromise; if not, and the court cannot with certainty identify which one called it first, then the court must decide whether to stow the disputed front seat until Elijah returns and resolves the dispute, or to simply wash its hands of the case and let the claimants fight it out.

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Dutch researchers claim the media is biased toward Israel. Their own study reveals that they are the ones with bias.

A new Dutch study claims that the country's major news outlets have systematically favored Israel in their reporting on the Gaza war. The researchers analyzed more than 17,000 articles published between October 7, 2023, and February 2026, along with interviews with journalists, and concluded that Israeli sources received more favorable treatment than Palestinian sources.

The study, Van terroristische aanslag tot genocide (From Terrorist Attack to Genocide), was conducted by media researcher Nel Ruigrok, journalist Coen Ramaer, and journalism students from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Its findings were published Wednesday in Trouw and discussed in other Dutch media.

The researchers found that Israeli sources were quoted about one and a half times as frequently as Palestinian sources, that Israeli statements were presented with greater certainty, and that language describing Palestinian deaths was more likely to be euphemistic. They also criticized the media's reluctance to describe Israel's actions as genocide.

But a closer examination of the study's methodology reveals something rather different. In two important areas, the researchers appear to have built their own assumptions into the definitions of bias. What they regard as evidence of pro-Israel bias is often simply responsible journalism. And journalists following the researchers' preferred standards could end up producing reporting that is biased against Israel.

Consider how the study defines euphemistic language.

In its coding instructions, the researchers identify words equivalent to "died," "killed," "liquidated," and "fallen in combat" as potential euphemisms when used instead of "murdered."

That is exactly backwards. "Killed" is a neutral term, "murdered" attaches a moral component that often cannot be established by a journalist.

In a war, people are killed. Soldiers are killed in combat. Civilians are killed in airstrikes. Some are deliberately targeted, others die as a consequence of attacks on military objectives. Some killings are lawful under international humanitarian law; others are war crimes.

"Murdered" is not a more accurate or less euphemistic synonym for "killed." It is an accusation that a killing was unlawful, generally involving intentional wrongdoing. A reporter who says that someone was killed is describing what happened. A reporter who says that someone was murdered is making an additional claim that requires additional evidence.

This is Journalism 101. You don't presume a crime merely because someone died violently.

Yet the researchers' methodology risks treating precisely that restraint as evidence of bias. If journalists describe Palestinians as having been killed rather than murdered, the study can classify their language as euphemistic.

So when someone says "70,000 were killed in Gaza" the report would code that as pro-Israel bias, it implies that the proper term should be "murdered." Which is a flat out lie. To suggest that journalists should use "murdered" instead of "killed" for every death without establishing the circumstances is to prejudge the very questions that journalists are supposed to investigate.

The same problem is even with targeted strikes of specific targets, like Hamas leaders. It is accurate to say they were "assassinated" but not that they were "murdered" because murder is a crime, assassination is a disputed method. 

The study's treatment of genocide raises a similar problem.

The researchers created two categories for articles discussing genocide: DEBAT, referring to genocide as a disputed allegation, and DAAD, referring to genocide as an established occurrence.

That distinction sounds reasonable until you examine how they applied it.

Their coding instructions allow an article to be classified as treating genocide as an established occurrence when an authoritative institution, relying on experts and research, concludes that genocide occurred.

This effectively allows organizations such as Amnesty International to confer factual status on a disputed legal conclusion.

The researchers even acknowledge an extraordinary consequence of their methodology: some articles in De Telegraaf reported genocide accusations by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch and immediately rejected those accusations. Nevertheless, the study classified them as articles treating genocide as an established occurrence because of its coding rules.

An article can reject a genocide accusation and still be coded as treating genocide as a fact!

The researchers also classified an article as DAAD when it contained both an established-genocide passage and a passage treating genocide as a debate.

The entire controversy concerns whether Israel committed genocide, a crime requiring proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. Amnesty International's conclusions are not self-validating simply because Amnesty is an established human rights organization. Its interpretation of the legal requirements is itself subject to criticism and scrutiny. In fact, Amnesty's Gaza report controversially argued that the conventional interpretation of genocidal intent was too restrictive. That is a substantive legal dispute, not something journalists should be expected to resolve by accepting Amnesty's authority.

A journalist who reports that Amnesty accused Israel of genocide, explains the accusation, and includes contrary evidence or legal arguments is not necessarily displaying pro-Israel bias. That journalist may be doing exactly what journalism demands.

To be precise, the Dutch study does not explicitly say that every journalist who rejects Amnesty's conclusion is biased toward Israel. But its coding system blurs the distinction between reporting an accusation and accepting it as established fact. That makes its findings about the media's treatment of genocide much less meaningful.

In both cases, the researchers appear to confuse journalistic neutrality with insufficient willingness to adopt accusations against Israel.

There are other problems with the study, too. 

It found that Palestinian suffering appeared in headlines about two and a half times as often as Israeli suffering, which hardly sounds like an obvious pro-Israel bias. The researchers then divided the number of suffering-related headlines by the number of deaths and concluded that Israeli victims received vastly more attention per death.

But why should news coverage be proportional to fatalities? Israeli hostages remained newsworthy throughout their captivity, even on days when nobody was killed. A massacre occurring in a single day and a prolonged war naturally generate different patterns of coverage. Dividing headlines by death counts cannot establish what fair coverage would look like.

Similarly, counting Israeli and Palestinian sources without adequately accounting for their roles, the subjects they discuss, or the accuracy of their claims cannot establish which side receives more favorable treatment. The report  divides sources into Israeli, Palestinian and other. But that doesn't indicate bias; what they say does. An Israeli quoted criticizing Netanyahu is still an Israeli source. A UN official accusing Israel of genocide is not a Palestinian source. Source nationality is not the same thing as editorial viewpoint. Bias must be demonstrated against an appropriate factual baseline, not against the researchers' preferred conclusions.

The study shows how easily a research project can manufacture an appearance of bias by defining ordinary journalistic standards as suspect.

This is a broader problem in contemporary discussions of Israel. Accusations are increasingly treated as established facts, and demands for evidence are interpreted as attempts to excuse wrongdoing. The distinction between describing an allegation and endorsing it becomes blurred.

The result is an epistemic trap: if journalists adopt the accusation, they are considered objective; if they insist on evidence or use legally neutral terminology, they are accused of bias.

The Dutch researchers set out to determine whether the media was biased toward Israel. In significant parts of their methodology, they appear to have assumed the answer to questions that journalists were supposed to investigate.

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10/14 Links Pt2: This Is Not the London I Grew Up In; Dublin hotel cancels 70 rooms booked for conference on combating antisemitism; Anti-Semitic extremists to be banned from running charities

From Ian:

This Is Not the London I Grew Up In

I grew up with London’s history of resilience in the face of war and terrorism. Now a giant statue of a man convicted of five murders has appeared above a London street, his handcuffed hands raised as a symbol of Palestinian resistance.

I was born within the sound of Bow Bells. That makes me a Cockney, an Eastender, and someone who still feels a very personal connection to London, however many years I have lived away from it.

So when I saw the photograph of a giant statue of Marwan Barghouti displayed above a London street, I felt something considerably stronger than disappointment.

The statue has appeared on the balcony of Palestine House in High Holborn, against an enormous Palestinian flag. It depicts Barghouti with his hands raised above his head, joined by handcuffs. From the street, the figure presents an unmistakable image of defiance, intended to transform a convicted terrorist into a symbol of Palestinian resistance.

I understand perfectly well what the people responsible for this display want us to see. A prisoner, defiant despite his captivity, presented as a man struggling for freedom.

What the image doesn’t tell us is why he is in prison.

In May 2004, an Israeli court convicted Barghouti of five murders connected to three terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. Among the victims was a Greek Orthodox monk murdered in the West Bank in 2001. An Israeli woman was killed near Givat Ze’ev in January 2002, while three people were murdered in an attack on a Tel Aviv seafood restaurant that March.

Barghouti was sentenced to five consecutive life terms plus 40 years. He rejected the legitimacy of the Israeli proceedings, and his supporters continue to challenge the convictions. Nevertheless, the court’s findings are part of the historical record, documented at the time by The Guardian⁠.

There is something particularly revealing about the statue’s design. The handcuffs are not an incidental detail. They are the entire visual argument.

By emphasizing Barghouti’s imprisonment, the display directs attention away from the people whose murders resulted in his conviction. The viewer is invited to identify with the prisoner rather than consider his victims. It is an effective piece of political imagery, and I suspect that is precisely why it was chosen.

This is not even the first attempt to give Barghouti a prominent place in London. In June, campaigners tried to install a statue of him in Parliament Square. Police intervened and prevented the installation.

The Mandela comparison comes from the campaign surrounding Barghouti itself. Supporters seeking his release have promoted him internationally as a “Palestinian Mandela,” presenting his imprisonment as part of a struggle for national liberation. It is a powerful piece of political branding, but one that risks obscuring a fundamental part of Barghouti’s history: he is serving five life sentences following his conviction for five murders.

Where should Canadian Jews go? Where is the Promised Land?

Lederman's article was interesting and timely, but I was surprised there was no mention of Israel. While it is true, as she notes, that Canada and the US share a common language and culture, Canada and Israel are a closer match when it comes to social support in areas like health and education, not to mention, for Jews, history, and religion.

She does mention that her maternal grandparents obtained visas to go to British Mandate Palestine, but did not go and were murdered in Treblinka.

However, many of the Jews who had to go did, and are still going. In fact, about half of the more than 7.5 million Jews living in Israel today are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants, most from either the post-war DP camps of Europe, the Arab/Muslim world, or the former Soviet Union.

A small but steadily increasing stream of immigrants has also arrived from North America. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics indicates that about 16,000 Canadians have made aliyah since the establishment of the state in 1948.

Israel’s Aliyah and Integration Ministry reported that 440 Canadian Jews moved to Israel from September 2025 to September 2026. Another 1,000 Canadian Jews have opened new aliyah files. This is a formal process, including an interview with a representative of the Jewish Agency and the submission of documents, including birth certificates and marriage records.

While the Tulsa initiative has received a significant number of inquiries from Canadians, the number of families who have actually made the move so far is quite small, according to an article in The Forward by Benyamin Cohen.

It quotes Jewish Canadian journalist Jesse Brown: “There’s a sadness,” he said about the Jewish exodus from Canada. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a ‘re-shtetling.’”

The Canadian Jewish population, about 400,000, is almost as large as that of France, the third largest Jewish community in the world. Antisemitism is a serious problem there as well. This year, 4,000 French Jews made aliyah, about 10 times the Canadian number.

A 2026 Canadian survey cited by Lederman indicates that one quarter of Canadian Jews are planning to leave Canada or are thinking seriously about it, and there are no signs that the antisemitism experienced by Canadian Jews is abating. While I don’t think we will see a stampede of Jews leaving Canada, I do think the numbers leaving will gradually increase.

As in the French example, Israel will be their primary destination. After all, in the final analysis, it turns out that America is not the Promised Land.

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10/14 Links Pt1: UN Commission Member Chris Challenged on Gaza Genocide Findings in Melbourne Debate; Families of American October 7 victims call for US congressional inquiry into massacre

From Ian:

Joseph Lemkin: My relative defined ‘genocide,’ honoring him means scrutinizing Pillay’s Israel findings

Our history also makes us alert to the danger of collective blame. An accusation against a government must not become an accusation against a people. Jews everywhere must not be made collectively answerable for Israel’s conduct. Palestinians must not be made collectively answerable for Hamas.

That principle obliges us to look directly at Palestinian suffering. A child’s death does not become less terrible because its legal classification is disputed. Families deprived of food, shelter, or medical care do not have to win a terminology debate before their lives matter.

Protecting civilians, allowing and facilitating humanitarian relief, and investigating alleged crimes cannot wait for agreement on a label.

Challenging a genocide accusation does not require declaring every military action lawful. Recognizing civilian suffering does not require accepting every accusation made in its name. War crimes and crimes against humanity are grave crimes in their own right. Genocide is not a measure of whose suffering matters most.

There is danger in both directions. Using the term carelessly can turn it into an instrument of political condemnation. Refusing to consider it when the evidence warrants consideration can abandon people the convention was designed to protect.

A faithful defense of Lemkin’s legacy must confront both. The same discipline must apply whether the accused is an enemy, an ally, or our own government.

I want institutions that investigate allegations rigorously, explain their reasoning clearly and apply standards consistently, including when doing so angers powerful governments. I also want institutions whose conclusions can be questioned without every critic being branded an enemy of international justice.

Public confidence must be earned through evidence, fairness and a willingness to answer difficult questions. Governments cannot claim immunity from that scrutiny. International institutions cannot claim immunity from it, either.

Pillay is right that international law needs defenders. Those defenders should insist that no country is above scrutiny and no institution is beyond it.

My relative helped give the world a word it desperately needed. Our responsibility is to honor both the word and the obligation it created: to recognize genocide when the evidence establishes it, to resist using the accusation as a substitute for evidence, and to protect civilians whether or not that legal threshold is met.

Harris criticizes Biden, Trump administrations for not acting ‘more forcefully’ against Israel

Former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris criticized the Biden and Trump administrations on Wednesday for failing to use U.S. leverage to curb Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, saying Washington should have acted “sooner and more forcefully.”

“Most recently, the failure to use our leverage to curtail the Israeli government’s horrific conduct in the war in Gaza, both under the current administration, which offers [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu a blank check, and our administration before, where we should have acted sooner and more forcefully,” Harris said while speaking at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, South Korea.

The Republican Jewish Coalition called Harris’s remarks “unsurprising,” citing her absence from Netanyahu’s 2024 address to Congress and her opposition to legislation targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

The group also criticized Harris for calling for a halt to Israeli military operations in Rafah, where the Israel Defense Forces later found and rescued hostages, and for agreeing with a student in 2021 who accused Israel of “ethnic genocide.”

Attorney and author Warren Kinsella, who worked on Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, wrote that he is “ashamed to have worked with her,” following her remarks about Israel.

🤮 KAMALA HARRIS: BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SHOULD HAVE ACTED “SOONER AND MORE FORCEFULLY” AGAINST ISRAEL Speaking in Seoul, former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized both the Trump administration and her own Biden-Harris administration over Israel’s war in Gaza. “Most recently, the failure to use our leverage to curtail the Israeli government's horrific conduct in the war in Gaza, both under the current administration, which offers Netanyahu a blank check, and our administration before, where we should have acted sooner and more forcefully.” Harris said the United States has a “moral obligation to human rights and international law” and should use its leverage over allies accordingly.

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) October 14, 2026

Passengers of Egyptian aircraft that landed in Israel before October 7 were businessmen

Two businessmen on a routine trip were the passengers of the Egyptian aircraft that landed in Israel on September 26, 2023, KAN News reported on Wednesday, citing several sources familiar with the matter.

The report comes amid suspicion that Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate Director Abbas Kamel was on board the flight, which was first reported by The Atlantic on Friday.

According to the KAN report, the passengers entered Israel through the Fattal Terminal at Ben-Gurion Airport, and QAS provided ground services before the aircraft returned empty to Cairo.

KAN noted that the flight was not registered as official or security-related, and that the Transportation Ministry, Fattal Terminal, the Population and Immigration Authority, and an Egyptian charter company are all aware of the passengers' identities. However, the entities will not publish the names, in line with standard privacy practices.

The flight in question has come under scrutiny after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed earlier on Wednesday that an Egyptian aircraft had landed in Israel several days before the October 7 massacre.

Netanyahu denied meeting with Kamel in September 2023 and told KAN he was unaware of who the Egyptian intelligence chief met during the alleged trip.

"I want to know who he met. I don't know," said Netanyahu, claiming that whoever had met Kamel was trying to "pin it" on him.

Also on Wednesday, N12 News reported that Israel's security chiefs were unaware that Kamel had visited Israel in September 2023.

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Francesca Albanese @franceskalbs declares Israeli real estate investments in Europe "apartheid" — then deletes her post

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, has apparently found a new form of Israeli apartheid: real estate investments in Europe.

On October 12, she shared an AJ+ video about Israeli investors building gated communities and luxury resorts in Cyprus, adding:

Watch carefully.
Cyprus, Greece, Serbia, south of Italy. Globalizing apartheid one brick at the time. One gated community at the time.

Here we see the obsession Albanese has about Israel. 

Israelis investing in real estate does not affect Palestinians. It has nothing to do with the Israeli government. She is describing private Israeli investments in sovereign European countries as the globalization of apartheid, without even pretending to describe who the victims of this "apartheid" are.

I looked up the statistics. Israelis are hardly the only foreign real estate investors in the countries Albanese lists. The top foreign buyers of land in Cyprus are from also from Russia, the UK, and Lebanon. In Greece we also see major investments from Germans, Bulgarians, Turks and French. 

In Serbia, Israelis are mostly investing in commercial real estate so the "gated communities" jibe meant to separate Jews from others doesn't even apply.  Russia is by far the biggest investor in residential buildings.

In southern Italy, the area  Albanese presumably knows best, Israelis don't even rank as one of the top investors: Americans, British and Germans dominate.

None of this matters to Albanese. She sees Israelis buying land, something investors from many countries do, and she twists it into something evil. Albanese does not explain what makes Israeli investments uniquely immoral, let alone what makes them apartheid.

There is another interesting example in Cyprus. A development called Carob Gardens, in the coastal village of Zygi, is being marketed as a new Jewish residential community, with plans for hundreds of apartments and villas. The broader project reportedly includes a synagogue, mikveh and kosher facilities. It isn't even Israeli, but from a British Jewish investor.

Turkish media have attacked the development, with one outlet describing it as a "silent occupation" and another using the language of a Jewish invasion.

A Jewish residential community with facilities for Jewish religious observance is being treated as a threatening foreign occupation. The developer's own website describes an ordinary commercial residential project, including a gated first phase of 56 apartments. It identifies no prohibition on non-Jewish purchasers.

The distinction between criticizing housing developments and objecting to Jewish communities seems to have disappeared.

Albanese's mandate concerns human rights in Palestinian areas. This post shows that her unbridled hate for Israel  reflexively assumes that anything Israelis or Zionists do must be immoral. Somehow, Jews creating a gated community is apartheid, but Muslims doing the same thing in Texas is simply building a community. 

Yet here she is warning the world about Israelis purchasing real estate in Cyprus, Greece, Serbia and Italy, as if private Israeli citizens carrying out ordinary activities beyond Israel's borders constitute a worldwide system of oppression.

After I and others responded to Albanese's obvious bigotry, her post disappeared. 

As far as I can determine, she deleted it without a correction, retraction or explanation. She perhaps realized that it revealed far more about her than it did about the Israeli investors she wants to demonize.

No matter how you slice it, this supposed human rights defender considers all Israeli Jews to be guilty of human rights violations no matter what they do. And her regular reports about Israel reflect her bigotry, not her care for universal human rights. 

Because to Albanese, Israelis don't deserve the same rights that everyone else has.

---

 

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10/13 Links Pt2: One year ago today, the last 20 living hostages finally came home after 738 days in Hamas captivity; From Dreyfus to David Milstein: The enduring accusation of Jewish dual loyalty

From Ian:

Deborah Lipstadt: ‘It begins with words’ – the dangers of Holocaust denial

The historian and former US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt spoke about the power and danger of words at an event on 20th-century German history, held at the Cliveden literary festival.

“Whether you’re talking about the Holocaust, Rwanda, the [propaganda] radio [broadcasts] from the Congo, no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to get a machete and go kill people. I’m going to go build the gas chamber’. It begins with words.

“So if you hear something… even if it’s a little thing, you’re at the gym on the treadmill and someone makes a crack, say something.”

The event last weekend, titled From Weimar to Nuremberg, covered topics including the rise of Nazism, the lessons of the Holocaust, and the threats posed by artificial intelligence-fuelled Holocaust denial.

Among the speakers was the journalist Victor Sebestyen, author of several books on European history, who warned of the danger of “reading history backwards”.

He said: “I hate that word ‘inevitable’. Things [in Germany] were really booming in the Golden Twenties, and the Nazis and the far right were absolutely nowhere in the polls.” Had the former chancellor and moderate Gustav Stresemann, who helped to stabilise the German economy, not died in 1929, or had bullets fired by government forces that killed 16 of the Munich Putsch accomplices also struck Hitler, the course of history would have been very different, he said.

The historian and journalist James McAuley considered what the lessons of the Holocaust were. “Is it the failure of assimilation? Is it the imperative of Zionism? Is it the urgency to commit to and to protect human rights and human dignity? … I think we’re living in a moment when some of those lessons that we have had for so long are in increasing conflict.”

In a recent essay, The Death of History, the historian Niall Ferguson had charted the rise of Holocaust denial on social media, or as he put it the “algorithmic media”. The panel was challenged about whether the truth could survive into the 21st century.

Natalie Livingstone, author of The Nuremberg Women, an acclaimed account of the reporters, translators and lawyers who played a role in the trials, said it was “very unhelpful”, as Ferguson had done, to speak of a failure of history.

“What we’ve all got to do is to keep trying, to keep researching, to keep writing … and doing our best to fight for the truth,” Livingstone said.

“To throw in the towel and say that history’s failed is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That was why it was so important to have forums such as the panel, and why books were so important. “That’s why it’s so important to delve into the past.”

The world’s distorted view of Israel is built on persistent myths

'Illusion of truth effect'
While the formulation is a paraphrase rather than a direct historical citation, psychologists study this concept as the “illusion of truth effect,” which shows that people are more likely to believe information is true simply because they have heard it before.

The fact is that Israel has urged every American president for the last 40-plus years to take the Iranian nuclear threat seriously and do something about it. No US president prior to the current one has ever chosen to authorize military action against Iran to neutralize their nuclear capability.

However, it was the current US president who chose to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House briefing room to hear his pitch, but it was US President Donald Trump who decided to launch military action against Iran.

Regardless of how it turns out, it is a canard to blame Israel for taking the US to war against Iran, even if the Netanyahu government was in favor of such action.

However, a canard can be manipulated for other purposes as well. Last week, a decision was made by the Nobel Prize Committee to award this year’s peace prize to South African Jurist Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. Among other anti-Israel positions in her history, she is famous for believing the canard that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

While she has done worthwhile work in helping advance a more comprehensive international legal order and, as the Committee noted, “played a central role in ensuring that issues such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are brought to justice,” her activities regarding the supposed genocide by Israel in Gaza dramatically tarnish her reputation.

Elisha Wiesel, in an op-ed in The Free Press, wrote: “My father, Elie Wiesel, received the Nobel Peace Prize for ensuring the Holocaust wouldn’t be forgotten. By honoring Navi Pillay, who accused Israel of genocide, the committee has betrayed his legacy.”

Yet the canard is that Israel, which vaccinated over one million residents of Gaza against polio, enabled millions of kilograms of food to enter the strip during the war (most of which was stolen by Hamas and then resold at inflated prices), put its own troops at risk by having them enter buildings to ensure only combatants were attacked, not civilians, and notified the Gazan population of every significant military operation to come with instructions for moving to safer zones, is somehow guilty of genocide.

A truthful look at the facts will show that it is actually Hamas that was engaged in genocide against Israel given their attack on October 7, intent on killing as many Jews as possible. This, in keeping with their original 1988 founding charter explicitly calling for the killing of Jews, which draws on religious texts to justify violence against Jewish people globally.

While a revised document released in 2017 removed this specific language, Hamas did not formally revoke or repudiate the original charter. Organizations like Genocide Watch and various genocide scholars have stated that Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks against Israeli civilians and statements by its leadership reflected genocidal intent and acts.

Yet the canard that Israel is guilty of genocide continues, with large portions of the world’s diplomatic corps agreeing with or remaining silent about this blatant misstatement of facts.

Former US president John F Kennedy said: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

When it comes to Israel, the world too easily accepts the myth rather than seek the truth. Our job, the job for all of us, is to shatter the prism that enables the myths to fester and do so at every opportunity. That is our obligation as a community.

Stephen Daisley: The Cult of Palestinianism Is Fundamentally Anti-British

Why has Britain been such a focal point for anti-Israel activism since Oct. 7, 2023?

Our open-borders immigration policy has played its part. As, too, has our insistent, suicidal tolerance of people and cultures inimical to our own.

But there is something else at work. Palestinianism is outwardly anti-Zionist, but inwardly it grows from a sense of grievance against the British, their empire, and London's historical sympathy for a Jewish state. They hate Israel, but they blame Britain.

To the Palestinianists, Britain means the Balfour Declaration, the original sin which enabled the entire Zionism project.

Britain would rather not face up to the enmity felt for it by the Palestinianists. We have more than enough mobs who hate our guts, thank you very much.

Our fatal mistake is listening to them in good faith and striving to strike a reasonable balance between their campaign and that of their Israeli enemies.

In doing so, we insist upon a false equivalence that treats these two causes as morally equal. This approach cannot survive honest scrutiny.

The cause of Zionism, the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish state in the ancient Land of Israel, has produced an advanced democracy, with a highly educated citizenry and burgeoning markets in technology, medical science, and military materiel.

By whichever metric you choose, the State of Israel is an objective good and has brought many benefits to Western civilization.

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10/13 Links Pt1: The Palestinians have played the West for fools, and here’s the awful proof; Israeli student killed in hike blast named as Elazar Yair Wilensky; Little if any progress on Jew-hatred at United Nations, Jewish staffers say

From Ian:

Nicole Lampert: The Palestinians have played the West for fools, and here’s the awful proof

These countries insisted they believed – naively? stupidly? wishfully? – that, when Abbas said he wanted a democratic state that would live in peace with Israel, he meant it. It is rather inconvenient that this wasn’t true. Abbas, who also cancelled elections in 2021, has fallen at the first hurdle.

The UK’s expectations were slightly different. It had demanded that the Palestinians organise (but not necessarily hold) an election within a year of a ceasefire taking effect (which it did on Oct 10, 2025). By giving a new election date of Sept 11, 2027, the Palestinians might be able to claim to Labour they have just about done that. But it should have been less easy to fob off the other countries. France, for example, had suggested that elections should actually take place within a year after a ceasefire under international supervision.

What has been the response? On Tuesday afternoon, more than 48 hours after the elections were called off, the foreign ministers of the UK, France, Canada, and Australia issued the weakest of statements denouncing the move. They said they “deeply regret” the decision and it would be “deeply disappointing” to the Palestinians who wanted to vote. A feeble statement for breaking a core pledge for their statehood, it is little wonder the Palestinian leadership knows it can run rings around Western powers.

And what needs to happen for these nations to realise that the two-state solution they demand – of two democracies that live next to each other in peace – is a pipe dream? That as much as we all wish it – and goodness, I wish it could be true – that is not what the Palestinian leadership has ever seemed to want.

That the Palestinian leadership doesn’t appear to believe in a two-state solution is something many in Israel learned when, in response to the Oslo peace process which would have given them a state, Hamas, with the acquiescence of the Palestinian Authority, began a wave of suicide bombings known as the Second Intifada. For those dreamers in Israel who still believed in peace, October 7 buried their hopes in the ground.

Abbas claimed he was cancelling the elections because of the instability in the West Bank and Gaza, but that is unlikely to be fixed within the year. We must surely assume he has once again cancelled these elections because he knows he would lose. Rivals within his own Fatah ruling party, sick of the 90-year-old man’s rule, have been trying to create broader coalitions for both the presidential and legislative elections.

But another of the parties due to take part in the elections is Hamas, even though all the Western nations dreaming of a peaceful Palestine insist the terror group cannot be in control. Abbas’s former Fatah rival Mohammed Dahlan was in talks to create a coalition with Hamas and fellow terrorists Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Dahlan has attacked the cancellation of the elections as an “attack on democracy”.

Abbas himself was likely to be replaced. The most overwhelmingly popular candidate for president is Marwan Barghouti, who is in Israeli prison after being convicted of the murder of five people during the Second Intifada as the co-founder of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. As much as there has been a PR push for Barghouti to paint him as the Palestinian Mandela, the suspicion must surely be that he is loved in Palestine because of his violence not his lack of it.

A few days ago, another Fatah official, Basel Abu Shahab, who runs the group’s movements in Lebanon, was forthright about the two-state solution “trap”. Threatening more attempts to overrun Israel, he was reported to have said: “Israel understands why it does not want to give us a state: it knows what the future could hold ... the establishment of a Palestinian state would mean the disappearance of the Israeli entity and the end of global Zionism.”

Perhaps there are voices for peace in Palestine but they cannot emerge when Western nations continue to reward corrupt politicians and terrorists. It would be good if, just once, our country would acknowledge what the Palestinian leadership actually is. That pointing this out would be too costly at the electoral booth shows not just how democracy itself is challenged by the Palestinians, but how this issue has damaged our own electoral processes.

Jonathan Tobin: The foreign-policy establishment’s war on Israel finds a target

Palestinian statehood
That was to be expected prior to Trump becoming president and in the interregnum between his first and second terms when Joe Biden was president. This was also a time when the promotion of Palestinian statehood and the belief that Jewish communities in the territories were illegal was official American policy.

That’s not the case now, but many permanent State Department employees and diplomats who continue to work in U.S. embassies and consulates, including in Israel, are still drinking the two-state Kool-Aid. The notion of repeating the failed experiment in which Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005—and allowing the creation of a Hamas terror state there in the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria—is regarded by most Israelis as not so much ill-advised as insane. That was already true before the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks in Israeli communities in the south on Oct. 7, 2023. After that, it is nothing short of perverse for Americans to be trying to impose such a suicidal plan on their ally.

Like the Hamas-run enclave in Gaza, a Palestinian state elsewhere would simply be another terror state whose goal would be Israel’s destruction. It would further serve to destabilize neighboring moderate Arab governments, leading to a disaster not just for Israel but for U.S. interests as well.

In addition to still trying to preserve the notion of forcing Israel out of the territories, many staffers, with the aid of a small minority of left-wing Israelis, have been promoting the “settler-violence” narrative about Jews living there conducting pogroms against their Arab neighbors.

This flips the reality of life in the territories on its head. While some Jews have been guilty of violence—and labeled by Huckabee as “terrorists” who deserved prosecution—the overwhelming majority of incidents there are acts of violence and terror against Jews. Most such cases of “settler violence” are really about Jews defending themselves against terror or engaged in non-violent conduct in places where Palestinians and other enemies of Israel wish they weren’t allowed to go, such as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

That many embassy staffers working on Palestinian affairs still hold such views is not surprising since most come out of the same liberal academic institutions, think tanks and other bastions of foreign policy groupthink about Israel and the Palestinians shared by left-wing journalists, such as those who work at the Times.

They’re also angry that the current Israeli government has been willing to allow the Jews in the territories to build more homes and to expand their outposts in parts labeled as “Area C,” as referenced in the Oslo Accords. The article claims that Huckabee and Milstein’s refusal to designate such building activity as against U.S. policy contradicts Trump’s stated opposition to Israel annexing or extending its law to that area.

But that is untrue. Since Trump has signed off on an official change in policy that rightly rejects the notion that Israeli settlement in the territories is illegal (contrary to liberal conventional wisdom, international agreements guaranteed the Jewish right to “close settlement” in Judea and Samaria more than a century ago), there is no contradiction.

Enforcing Trump’s policies
It should be pointed out again that the sources claiming that Milstein had acted wrongly were anonymous embassy employees who are obviously upset that under Trump, the United States has rejected the two-state mantra and effort to demonize the Jewish presence in the territories.

Rather than acting to protect the Netanyahu government from the wrath of Trump, Milstein is, as the anti-Israel and anti-Trump Quincy Institute Washington think tank labeled him in 2025, “Trump’s pro-Israel enforcer.”

He’s serving as a check on diplomats and bureaucrats who are still acting as if Biden or Barack Obama were president. Under their administrations and many of their predecessors, the purpose of the ambassador and other U.S. diplomats in Israel was to act as imperial proconsuls whose jobs were to force the Jewish state to bend to the will of foreign dictates that undermined its security.

Whether some who work for the State Department or liberal media outlets agree with it or not, that is no longer U.S. policy.

It’s also possible that some working in the current administration have been seduced by the Tucker Carlson/groyper wing of the Republican Party and, for entirely different reasons—back an isolationist U.S. foreign policy that would discard support for Israel and be indifferent to the increased power of anti-American Islamist states like Iran and its terrorist proxies. They also wish to promote discord between Washington and Jerusalem.

Under Friedman and Huckabee, in addition to current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the embassy, which is now properly relocated in Israel’s capital, works to facilitate better relations and security cooperation between these democratic allies, not to promote conflict between them. And the old consulate that acted as a bastion of anti-Israel activity is no more.

It is clearly part of Milstein’s job to keep those who want to promote Palestinian statehood in check, rather than allow them to clog up the flow of reports from Jerusalem to the State Department with documents seeking to boost policies the administration opposes and fuel conflict with Israel’s democratically elected government. Doing so isn’t a violation of his oath as a U.S. official or an act of censorship. It’s actually what any responsible person in such a position at this time ought to be doing.

Seen from that perspective, the flurry of stories about Milstein has nothing to do with his alleged misconduct and everything to do with an attempt to thwart current U.S. policy.

But rather than resign and advocate a reversal of Trump and Rubio’s policies, some staffers—with the support of members of the U.S. foreign establishment at think tanks, universities and liberal media outlets—want to undermine it from within. And in order to accomplish this task, they are out to discredit someone who is actually doing his job to carry out current American policy, which just so happens to be far more rational as well as more attuned to what is best for the United States and its allies.

That Milstein is related to Levin and close to Huckabee makes him an even more attractive target. Still, that is no excuse for an anonymously sourced smear campaign aimed at undermining Trump’s and Rubio’s trust in them.

We can only hope that Trump and Rubio will, as Huckabee has already rightly done, stand up for a devoted public servant doing what is best for the United States and the administration.

This disturbing effort should serve as a warning to everyone who follows U.S. foreign policy about what depths the establishment will sink to enforce groupthink orthodoxy. Their pursuit of policies rooted in myths about the Middle East and the Palestinians that sane people know were proven to be failures decades ago isn’t just an obsession. They think it’s a license to destroy the reputation of anyone who stands in their way if it will make it easier for them to retake control of American foreign policy.

Does the West really need a Palestinian state?

The reasons the Palestinians do not want their own state are as heterogeneous as the Palestinians themselves. The supposed state was conceived along the lines of U.N. Resolution 181 (II) of 1947. It was to exist alongside a Jewish state “in peace and security” and, in another, mostly forgotten paragraph, allow a Jewish minority to live “in security” on its territory—a precaution taken by the United Nations to protect Palestinian Jews.

Thus, the Jews’ presence in the “territories” of the envisaged Arab state is by no means “contrary to international law,” as claimed by the European media and European politicians, especially of the left. On the contrary, the presence of Jews is required by international law, as “close Jewish settlement” in the entire British Mandate territory of Palestine was the actual purpose of the Mandate, which was granted in 1922 by the League of Nations and confirmed in 1947 by the U.N. Founding Assembly as applicable international law.

The coexistence with a Jewish state demanded by the United Nations is one of the reasons many Palestinians do not want their own state according to the U.N. model: They would have to make do with only part of the territory that, in their view, belongs to them “from the river to the sea.”

There is a reason they cannot accept this. According to Islamic law, conquered Muslim land, including the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire, is forever Muslim. Thus, the State of Israel (or any other non-Muslim state in the Middle East) is “illegal” in their eyes.

Many Palestinians reject a Palestinian state for another reason: It would be corrupt and inefficient. There are no guarantees of interior or personal security under the corrupt crony networks of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas or a similar figure.

The Palestinian Authority led by Abbas, which was intended to create the necessary conditions for statehood according to the Western model, by no means fulfills the conditions of a state authority or state power: clear “state territory,” a clearly defined “state people” and a “state authority” in possession of a monopoly on the use of force. In fact, the Palestinian Authority would certainly collapse if Israeli troops were to withdraw from Judea and Samaria. It would suffer the same fate as it did in Gaza and be overthrown and eliminated by a fundamentalist movement like Hamas.

In 2006, in the last parliamentary elections in the “Palestinian territories” to date, Hamas won the most votes. It then took over Gaza in a brief but bloody civil war and brutally executed every Palestinian Authority and Fatah official it could get its hands on. In Judea and Samaria, only the presence of Israeli troops has secured the power of the Palestinian Authority, which is hated by the population it rules and, according to estimates by its Palestinian opponents, wastes and embezzles 70% to 80% of Western aid funds.

Under such circumstances, a Palestinian state is difficult to imagine unless the West would like to see another Hamas state (and the wars emanating from it), or Israeli troops and settlers remaining to protect the alleged “state authority.”

The other criteria of statehood according to Western ideas are also not fulfilled by the Palestinians: There is neither agreement on the borders of the state territory nor the minimum of internal solidarity of a loudly declared but not consistent “people of the state.”

The only cohesion between Palestinian Arab groups and clans is their shared hatred of the West, and the common intention to extract as many billions in aid money from the despised and frightened Western states as possible. Arab religious fighters and terrorists of all stripes immigrating to these states provide the bloody actions to create the necessary level of fear to persuade governments and the electorate to continue financing Palestinian corruption.

On all issues beyond this, the positions of Palestinian Arab groups diverge to the point of incompatibility.

A state under the presence of Israeli troops or other foreign forces of order would not be tolerated by radical Palestinians. Nor would they demilitarize and disarm their militias, as we can see in the case of Hamas, which refuses to disarm even though the organization has lost any real power. Such groups would do everything imaginable (smuggling, secret weapons production, etc.) to achieve the actual purpose of a state as they see it, which is religious war or jihad.

Moreover, Palestinian “independence” would remain constrained by dependence on massive foreign aid. If a Palestinian state were established, many Palestinians would lose the refugee status that underpins billions in current assistance, primarily from the corrupt U.N. organization UNRWA and the European Union. Aid would likely come from other sources, such as Iran, which receives billions from China for crude oil. Other powers might also seek influence over the strategically important territory of “Palestine.” Moreover, the state would remain “fragile” or “failing,” marked by violent internal conflict; attacks on neighboring states; and lawless areas where criminal gangs and terrorist networks operate.

The question is why European governments insist on creating a state of this kind. It would most likely be a terrorist state similar to the Hamas regime in Gaza that not only keeps its own population in poverty and ignorance and invests international aid money in rocket building and global terrorist activities, but will also likely trigger another regional war. Does the world really need such a state?

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The Chabad Rabbi Advocating a Jewish State in 1872

While looking at yet another stupid anti-Israel academic paper, I saw that the Romanian writer was upset over an anti-Romanian quote from a 19th century Jew who railed against Romanian persecution of Jews.  

When I checked out that quote, I saw that it came from an 1872 book by Rabbi Haim Zvi Sneersohn, a great grandson of the first Lubavitcher Rebbe and second cousin, three times removed from the most recent Lubavitcher Rebbe.

The book, "Palestine and Roumania, a description of the Holy Land, and the past and present state of Roumania, and the Roumanian Jews" is a collection of essays, letters and articles by Sneersohn advocating for the rights of Jews worldwide. He famously met with President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 and asked him to replace the American consul to Jerusalem. (The consul was indeed replaced but not because of the rabbi.)

But perhaps more remarkable is that the book also calls for a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, 24 years before Herzl. 

Rabbi Sneersohn writes that while some Jews wait for the Messiah to arrive and miraculously re-establish a Jewish kingdom, and he awaits the Messiah with no less eagerness, he suggests that a more practical solution be promoted for Jews in Palestine in the meanwhile. Addressing the Alliance Israelite of Paris to help foster unity among Jews, he uses strikingly Zionist-style arguments for his proposed Jewish commonwealth in Palestine:

Take up at once the great cause of establishing a Jewish independent commonwealth in the land of our forefathers. Hoist up the flag of Jehudah on Mount Zion, and return the scattered sheep of Jacob to their rightful pasture....

If such a political Jewish existence is once established all the misfortunes of our race throughout the world will cease. Russia and Roumania will have to honor the Jewish flag, and our famishing brethren of all parts of the world will flock together to their land to cultivate the soil and to live in prosperity under their own vine and figtree...

The time has arrived when Jerusalem shall awake from her ashes and the mount of Zion shall become once more, and forever, the centre of our glory. We do not want now to renew the institution's sacrifices, or to waste our time in casuistic controversies about an anointed high-priest. These things remain mysteries to be solved by the revealtion of the Lord. Our duty is to help ourselves in the way we best can and leave the other things to the will of the Lord our God, in whose power we trust and rely.

Do not object to my plan because some of our brethren believe that the restoration of our .glory ought to be established in a different manner. I am certainly not one of those who have no faith in the prophecies of our Bible, or who reject the wisdom of our wise. But for the present state of things I do believe (and hope that every right-minded brother will coincide with me) that it is better for us to learn how to handle the spear than to waste our time in mourning over our vanished glory. It is better that we study the science of politics, than to waste our brains with the sharp casuistic dialogues concerning sacrifices and feast-offerings. It is better for us to unite in one council and devise means of bringing new life into the dried bones of Israel than to make synods for the purpose of establishing new ceremonies and abolishing old ones in our synagogues. It is better that we should have to sing songs of victory in the streets of Jerusalem, than to hear strangers sing their songs in the place of our sanctuary. It is better for Israel to dwell in their own land, work their own soil and have their wants satisfied by the blessings of God, than to go astray in the world like birds that have not their nests. And who will tell me that we have not the means of establishing a government of our own ?

Sneersohn is not the first rabbi to advocate a political return to Zion. Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (1857) suggested a Jewish territory governed as an Ottoman tributary state. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1862) was more practical, urging Jewish immigration, land purchases, agriculture, settlement organizations, and security arrangements. But Sneersohn, who was influenced by Kalischer and others, seems to have had a more expansive vision in advocating a truly independent Zion, with a Jewish flag, international recognition, and becoming a new political power in the Middle East. 

Unfortunately, Sneersohn was spurned by the religious community in Israel, who treated him as a heretic and even physically assaulted him when he moved to Tiberias, almost killing him. 

I don't see any evidence that Herzl was influenced by Sneersohn, who died in 1884, But Herzl's vision was in many ways very similar to Sneersohn's.

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10/12 Links Pt2: Brendan O'Neill: The bourgeois war of annihilation against Israel; Andrew Roberts: Why the West Is Losing the Fight Against Antisemitism; Extra hearings for Royal Commission into Bondi terror attack

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The bourgeois war of annihilation against Israel

If Zohran Mamdani had a functioning moral compass, Wednesday would have been the wake-up call of this life. There he was in Union Square being heckled by a feral mob. Their faces hardened into snarls of hatred, they barked ‘Shame on you!’ at the New York mayor. And they were radical leftists, the kind of people who normally gush over Mamdani’s reactionary Third Worldist guff. What sin had he committed to irk his erstwhile fawners? He commemorated Jewish suffering.

That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. He attended an Israelis for Peace vigil on the third anniversary of the 7 October pogrom to pay tribute to the men, women and children slaughtered by Hamas. For that he was damned as a stooge of a genocidal regime. ‘Zohran you can’t hide / We charge you with genocide!’, howled the mob. Some chased him, screaming: ‘Traitor!’ To a Jew hater, sympathy for Jews is high treason.

There’s no denying it now: the Hamasniks of the Islamo-left enjoy Jewish suffering. They crave it. Indeed, some of Mamdani’s scolds waved the Hamas flag and hollered, ‘We support Hamas’. They were mad at the mayor because he had the temerity to look sad about the slaughter of Jews. To these keffiyeh Nazis, when Hamas kills Jews it’s ‘resistance’, and when Jews fight back it’s ‘genocide’. They call themselves anti-fascists yet hail from the same violent, vomitous gutter as the mobs of Kristallnacht.

And yet, even the mockery of Jews at a commemoration for dead Jews is unlikely to wake Mamdani to the horrors of the Gaza cult. Indeed, that mob in Union Square was a monster of his own making. He has made anti-Israel hate respectable in New York City. He refuses to call Hamas terrorists. His own statement on the third anniversary of 7 October spent a few poxy lines condemning Hamas’s ‘crimes’ before raging at length against Israel’s ‘devastating, ongoing genocide’. He had no right to look shook when the keffiyeh fash turned a commemoration of the slaughter of Jews into a Two Minutes Hate against the Jewish nation – he did it first.

For the rest of us, though, it’s time to get real. That crowds feel confident to gloat over the mass murder of Jews is the clearest sign you could ask that a spiritual sickness ails the West. And it’s not just NYC. Across the West last Wednesday, there were orgies of ecstasy over the butchery carried out by Hamas three years ago. In Amsterdam a mob marched with a banner saying ‘We support Hamas’. They screamed ‘Long live 7 October’. In Edinburgh, they marched behind a banner saying ‘Glory to our martyrs’. The martyrs they were referring to were the Islamofascists who invaded Israel to rape and annihilate Jews.

In London, keffiyeh-adorned lowlifes gathered on 7 October to fume against the Jewish nation. Some made an inverted triangle with their fingers – a sly expression of support for the murderous violence of Hamas. In Italy, a mob celebrated 7 October as ‘one of the most significant [acts] of Palestinian Resistance’. Across the West there were scores of anti-Israel gatherings on the day Israelis mourned the rape and destruction of more than a thousand of their citizens. There’s an all-out effort to redefine the day that Hamas unleashed genocidal violence on the Jews of the Holy Land as the day ‘Israel’s genocide’ started. The old Nazis stole Jews’ property – the new ones steal their days of commemoration.

El-Sayed in the Harsh Light By Abe Greenwald

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Then more testiness. Asked by NewsNation’s Leland Vittert last week whether he believed Israel or Iran was a bigger threat to the U.S., El-Sayed responded that it was a “dumb question.” Suddenly realizing it was a bad moment, he hastily offered to shake Vittert’s hand.

The next night, El-Sayed debated Mike Rogers and won on style (which wasn’t hard). But Rogers managed, finally, to move El-Sayed’s familial ties to terrorism somewhere near the center of the race. So yesterday, on Meet the Press, Kristen Welker asked him whether he or his family had any connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said no, twice.

Which means twice he lied. And the Washington Free Beacon has the receipts: El-Sayed’s half-sister has bragged on social media that her family (meaning his family) “has long been” involved in the Muslim Brotherhood, and some relatives have even been jailed for their involvement. In another post, she wrote, “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”

If there’s a brilliant way for him to get out in front of this situation, I don’t know what it is.

It would be too dramatic to call any of this a crisis for El-Sayed at the moment, but he’s just not showing anything like clear frontrunner momentum. We shouldn’t make too much of polls in such a tight race, but they’re not beside the point either. In the RealClearPolitics polling average, El-Sayed’s largest lead over Mike Rogers was 3.6 points. That was on October 3, and that gap has steadily been shrinking since. It’s now at 2.7, well within the margin of error.

As Kamala Harris learned, once the mask comes off, you might as well throw it out. Everyone knows who’s underneath. El-Sayed has three more weeks of the spotlight and nowhere to hide.

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