He's A Great Shidduch But He Doesn't Try To Say 'Creole' During Sultans Of Swing (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, August 2 - Mrs. Abramowitz, thank you for setting me up with Avigdor Marcus. He’s sweet, motivated, attractive even, and we share important values. On paper he looks like exactly the kind of young man a serious girl should be happy to meet. We had coffee, talked about our families, our plans for the future, and he was courteous, funny, and clearly committed to Torah learning. I left the café thinking, for a few hopeful minutes, that this might actually work.

Then I remembered the red flag.

When that Dire Straits song comes on, he doesn’t even attempt to speak the one word the vocalist repeats in a seemingly random place. Not a half-hearted mumble, not a delayed echo, not even a knowing nod that acknowledges the moment is approaching. Nothing. It raised a serious red flag the first time I noticed it, and the more I thought about it afterward, the clearer it became that this is a deal-breaker. I’m sure it would be for anyone normal.

I’m not talking about getting the timing slightly off, or even way off. That would be forgivable. Not everyone can tell precisely when to say “Creole” so it lines up exactly with Mark Knopfler at around the three-minute mark. I’m talking about a complete failure to acknowledge that the word exists at all. The compulsion to say it is involuntary in any genuine human being. You feel it rising in your throat the same way you feel the need to answer “Amen” when someone else makes a bracha. Avigdor simply sits there, polite and blank, as if the most diagnostic three seconds in twentieth-century popular music are not happening.

This is not a minor cultural preference. It is a more reliable indicator of in-group membership than the original Biblical shibboleth ever was against the Ephraimites. Those poor souls only had to mispronounce one consonant at the Jordan fords. The test was crude, binary, and easily coached if you knew it was coming. The “Creole” test cannot be coached. It operates below conscious control. Either the word forces itself out of your mouth or it does not. There is no middle ground, and there is no faking it under social pressure.

I cannot share a life with someone missing such a fundamental piece of what it means to live in this world. If, at his age, he has not yet absorbed that this small act is a basic requirement for belonging to a society of normal people, then I am not going to be so naïve as to believe I can change him. Too many women make that sort of mistake. They convince themselves that love, or shared values, or a nice apartment in Ramat Beit Shemesh will eventually override a missing instinct. History, both ancient and recent, suggests otherwise.

So with genuine gratitude for your efforts, Mrs. Abramowitz, I must decline a second meeting. Avigdor is a wonderful young man in almost every respect. He simply fails the one test that actually matters.

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

 

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Basket Weaving for Palestine (and a PhD at Stanford.)

Here's how Stanford's course catalog describes "Decolonization and Decoloniality: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy," taught in Spring 2024 (ARTHIST 460, FILMEDIA 460, TAPS 460):

This seminar mobilizes multiple approaches and orientations from anti-colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial traditions to study discourses of race, caste, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality across a variety of regional and cultural contexts... we will begin to explore decolonial praxis through somatic workshops (including basket-weaving and dance) and through radical pedagogy and critical university studies frameworks.

Neither description begins to describe what a waste of time this course, whose credits count toward a Stanford PhD, actually was.

The instructor, Usha Iyer, and one of her graduate students, Sophie D'Souza, co-authored a chapter in the academic volume Decolonial Entanglements: Praxis, Pedagogy, and Social Theory that proudly lays out what the Spring 2024 seminar actually involved. That spring happened to coincide with Stanford's anti-Israel encampment, and the syllabus changed accordingly. Iyer describes it herself as a "living syllabus," rewritten week to week to track the protest movement outside the seminar room.

 Before long the seminar wasn't meeting in a seminar room at all; the class relocated to the encampment itself, a decision the chapter describes as taking "two weeks strenuously building consensus" — with no indication any student who objected had anywhere else to go.

What did Stanford PhD students do in a graduate seminar, for credit, in place of the coursework the catalog described? Among other things, they:

• Lay on the floor of the classroom in a "die-in" while the names of Gazan families were read aloud, a substitute the chapter explicitly frames as an alternative to close reading
• Took markers to a published scholarly monograph, blacking out most of its words to produce "found poems" from what remained
• Wove baskets with a visiting weaver, framed as resistance to a classroom that demands students "be still, quiet, and resolutely cerebral"
• Danced, in a workshop built around an Audre Lorde essay
• Cooked and shared communal meals as part of the course's "social life"
• Watched a film by a Gazan filmmaker described in the chapter as having been "martyred"
• Wrote weekly posts, in whatever language they chose, processing course material

Iyer writes that she and her students discarded the distinction between professor and pupil, embracing Paulo Freire's model of "teacher-students" and "student-teachers" learning together as equals. It's a nice sentiment for someone who alone decided the syllabus would abandon close reading for die-ins, who alone decided basket-weaving counted as scholarship, and who alone relocated the entire course to a political encampment. Equality between teacher and student apparently stops at the point where the teacher has to give up authorship of (and salary for) the course.

The seminar also had a host of unstated assumptions students were expected to accept before a single reading began — all while the same students, per the chapter, prized their classroom as a space to speak freely against "liberal academic panic over freedom of speech." Among the premises never up for discussion: that Israel is committing genocide; that Israel is best understood as a "Zionist entity" rather than a state; that the university itself is a colonial institution requiring "decolonization" rather than reform; that all Western scholarly traditions are instruments of "epistemic violence" simply by virtue of being Western; and that academic neutrality is itself a form of complicity rather than a professional norm worth defending. 

A seminar that begins by requiring agreement on its conclusions isn't teaching theory. It's issuing a catechism.

This wasn't a one-off. It's a credentialed, credit-bearing course at one of the most selective universities in the country, cross-listed across three departments, now enshrined in an academic press book as a model for other instructors to follow. 

The chapter title is "4Decolonial Pedagogy and Praxis in a Time of Live-Streamed Genocide." Perhaps there is no space between the chapter number and the chapter title because that space represents the patriarchy, but I cannot be sure.

I don't need to argue that the academy has become a parody of what higher education is supposed to be. Usha Iyer already made that argument for me, in her own words, in a book chapter she was proud enough of to publish.

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

 

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07/29 Links Pt2: Why Jews Turn Against Their Own; Netanyahu didn’t lose the Democrats for Israel; Ben-Gurion Founded Israel. Then He Chose to Live in a desert Shack...

From Ian:

Ben M. Freeman: Why Jews Turn Against Their Own

Good Jews and Bad Jews
None of this would be so durable if it were not rewarded. The world that offers Jews the distorted mirror sorts us into “good Jews” and “bad Jews”. The good Jew keeps the palatable fragment, the ethics, the memory, the social conscience, and sheds the specificity the world finds indigestible: the nation, the land, the tribe, the refusal to disappear. In return they are applauded, platformed, held up as the enlightened kind of Jew. The bad Jew is the one who insists on the whole of themselves at once, and in the mirror held by others, wholeness itself becomes the offense. That applause is a powerful drug, and it is administered precisely to those Jews willing to police the rest of us.

Here is the part that is hardest, and most important, because it has two halves that have to be held together. Despite the damage they inflict, the Jews I have described are not just the villains of this story. In a real sense they are also its victims. Bartov, the young activists in Michigan, did not invent the hatred they carry. They inherited it from a world that has hated Jews for as long as there have been Jews, and many of them are, in the deepest sense, sincere. That sincerity is not evidence that they are right. It is evidence of how completely the distortion has done its work.

And yet. Understanding where a harm comes from is not the same as excusing it. A casualty can still cause damage, and a wound is not permission. We are all shaped by forces we did not choose, and we are still answerable for what we do with them. This is especially true of those who Deploy. There is a real difference between the Jew who quietly shrinks from their Jewishness and the Jew who stands on a platform and lends their Jewish name to the case against their own people. The first is mostly hurting themselves. The second is doing the work of our enemies, and no account of their pain erases the harm of that choice. To treat every Jew who acts against the community as a helpless product of history is its own quiet insult, because it strips them of the dignity of being moral agents. Compassion for the wound and accountability for the deed are not opposites.

A Broad Synagogue
This is why the Jewish world needs boundaries, and needs them now. We are, and should be, a broad synagogue. We argue, we disagree, we contain every kind of Jew, whether their connection is theological, cultural or national, left and right, and that endless internal argument is one of the oldest and most beautiful things about us. But a broad synagogue is still a synagogue, and a synagogue has walls. There is a difference between disagreement within the family and picking up the tools of the people who hate us and turning them on our own. Criticism of Israel, of our leaders, of our institutions, offered as a Jew who wants their people to flourish, belongs firmly inside those walls. Lending your Jewishness to a movement that denies your people should exist at all does not. Drawing that line is not a purity test. It is what every healthy community does. It decides what it is, and therefore what it is not. A people with no walls is not infinitely welcoming. It is simply undefended.

The way out, then, is not only condemnation nor limitless tolerance. It is clarity, and it begins by remembering whose hands are on the mirror. The reflections that have taught Jews to see ourselves as a mere religion, or as an awkwardly particular people who would be so much more welcome if we would only universalize ourselves out of existence, were not authored by us. They were authored by a non-Jewish world that has never had the right to define us, and never will. Only Jews get to decide what it means to be a Jew, which means we also get to decide, together, what we will carry into our own house and what we will leave at the door.

So when we next see Jews who seem to have turned against their own, we must resist the easy answer. What we are watching is not simple treachery, and it is not innocence either. It is the oldest hatred in the world, doing what it has always done, except this time from the inside, through people who are at once its casualties and, for what they choose to do with it, responsible. The task is not simply to condemn it, nor to excuse it, but to understand it. Only then can we begin to challenge it.

Dark Season: The Oldest Hatred Deepens and Spreads

Posters of Jewish children, women and the elderly kidnapped by Hamas and held, tortured and shackled in Hamas tunnels — posters that simply asked that those held hostage be remembered — were ripped down. Jewish kids on college campuses were threatened, blocked, berated, surrounded and chased. And university presidents called to testify before Congress were unwilling to declare that demands for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' policies.

But wait! This isn't anti-Semitism, some say. It's something else entirely: it's "anti-Zionism" or "anti-Israelism," but in any event, not anti-Semitism. This, says David Harris, the venerated former longtime head of the American Jewish Committee, is worse than nonsense. Harris, once described by Shimon Peres as "the foreign minister of the Jewish people," has published a new book, "Anti-Semitism: What Everyone Needs to Know," which meticulously shows that the attempt to call the miasma of hatred aimed at Jews something other than anti-Semitism is BS. It is, he demonstrates, right out of the tragic, immoral historical playbook.

Harris ticks off just some examples of what is daily fare for Jews: "Death threats against Jews, thwarted attempts to target Jewish schools, centers and synagogues, neo-Nazis marching and chanting 'Jews will not replace us', the numerous attacks on identifiable Jews, menacing statements by pro-Palestinian individuals or groups for Zionists to get off the subway, (or to) identify themselves at a restaurant, or (calls for) Jewish students to go back to Germany or Poland, or chants of "Gas the Jews." Harris' litany could have gone on much, much longer.

Some of the most virulent anti-Semites around believe that if they angrily deny that they're anti-Semites, they aren't ones. Harris reminds us of the formulation articulated by the great Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, who remained in a Soviet gulag rather than renounce his faith. "The 3Ds — demonization, delegitimization and double standards," Sharansky wrote, "are the three main tools that anti-Semites employed against Jews throughout history." Presently, one of the principal tools is to label Israel, the victim of a genocidal invasion, guilty of genocide because its attempt to prevent the promised next attacks and to free the innocents taken and kept hostage killed a great many Gazans. These were deaths Hamas did everything it could to guarantee.

Then there's the demonization and the double standards deployed against AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies for the alliance between the two countries. It doesn't even rank among the top 100 lobbies in Washington. Still, it has become the most fashionable of bogeymen, the latest in a history of Jewish bogeymen supposedly responsible for some Jewish conspiracy or another. Never mind that those contributing to AIPAC are American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. And never mind that Qatar, for example, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked emirate, plows billions of dollars of foreign cash into America to purchase influence. Those singling out AIPAC couldn't care less. AIPAC is "dark money." Qatari cash is perfectly OK money.

Anti-Semitism is often described as "the oldest hatred." It is certainly the most resilient. And these days, it is extraordinarily potent and widespread. Which makes this a very difficult season indeed.

2025 deadliest year for Jews outside Israel since Buenos Aires bombing, report says

Twenty people were murdered in antisemitic attacks in 2025, making it the deadliest year for anti-Jewish violence outside of Israel since the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, according to a new report.

The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025 across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, which are home to more than 90% of Jews.

The number of antisemitic incidents across the seven countries was 136% higher than in 2022, according to the task force, which called antisemitism in these countries “our new normal.”

The 20 murders included 15 people killed at a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, two killed at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, two killed at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. and one killed in Boulder, Colo.

Although reported incidents declined by 33% in the United States in 2025, they remained 131% higher than in 2021, per the report.

Australia recorded the largest increase during that period at 270%, followed by Germany at 215% and France at 124%. Germany had nearly 70 incidents for every 1,000 Jewish residents, the highest per-capita rate among the seven countries and nearly 70 times the U.S. rate.

Anti-Zionism was identified as a central motivation in 48% of incidents in the United Kingdom, 45% in the United States and 23% in Germany.

The report found that in Ireland, the Jewish community of about 2,200 people reported 143 antisemitic incidents in six months. Ireland has no national strategy to combat antisemitism or dedicated security funding for its Jewish community, according to the report.

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07/29 Links Pt1: Trump’s angry words for Netanyahu reveal the strength of the US-Israel bond; Melanie Phillips: The "settler violence" libel

From Ian:

Gil Troy: Trump’s angry words for Netanyahu reveal the strength of the US-Israel bond

In his 1992 blockbuster, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, John Gray popularized another relevant concept. People apply his “rubber band theory” to all kinds of situations. The metaphor certainly explains the US-Israel dynamic. When two people, or two nations, are so enmeshed, leaders may clash, snap, even pull away, hard, fast, far, without rupture. Ultimately, the structural foundations, shared values, and overlapping needs keep them, like a stretched rubber band, bouncing back quickly.

Clinton was deeply committed to the State of Israel’s survival – and the Oslo Peace Process. When he hosted a newly elected Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House in July, 1996, the Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians had been working the Oslo process for almost three years. Doubting Yasser Arafat – for good reason – Netanyahu promised to be far more unyielding than he ultimately proved to be.

Still, starting in the president’s own Oval Office, Netanyahu lectured his host about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the meeting, Clinton fumed: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

Biden proudly called himself a lifelong “Zionist” and embraced Israel generously, diplomatically, and militarily after the Hamas-led massacres on October 7, 2023. Still, Biden and Netanyahu kept clashing over military strategy.

Wanting Israel to win, but worried that Israel would lose its good name, Biden became increasingly apoplectic. In July 2024, when Israel bombed Beirut, eliminating Fuad Shukur, a leading Hezbollah commander responsible for killing 12 Israeli-Druze children in Majdal Shams, Biden confronted Israel’s prime minister. “Bibi, what the f**k?” the president bellowed, according to Bob Woodward’s 2024 book, War. “You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor.”

Woodward reports Biden also vented to aides Clinton-style, calling Netanyahu “a bad f**king guy!” and a “f**king liar.” Although these assaults were more personal, the rubber band snapped back quickly. Biden didn’t abandon Israel or Bibi – despite growing pressure from other Democrats.

Trump's outburst was just a chapter in their relationship
IN THAT CONTEXT, Trump’s outburst, asking “What the f**k are you doing?” in June 2026, was just another chapter in a long, complex, ongoing story of a special relationship led by strong-minded leaders whose agendas will occasionally clash. Last month, Trump sought a diplomatic formula with Iran, while Netanyahu doubted Iran’s intentions.

Justifiably defending his country’s interests after Hezbollah renewed its attacks against Israel, Netanyahu approved strikes on Beirut and southern Lebanon. Trump, protecting the negotiations he still had faith in then, called Netanyahu “f**king crazy,” claiming Bibi had “no f**king judgment.”

Now, just weeks later, after hysterical cries of “rupture” on both sides of the Atlantic, and Iran’s Strait of Hormuz power play, Netanyahu and Trump seem to share a deep distrust of Iran’s leaders.

My latest e-book, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership: The 250th anniversary edition, brands Israel America’s rare DIY (Defend It Yourself) ally, and ROI (Return on Investment) ally, generating many technological, medical, cultural, diplomatic, and military dividends for the United States. But the book also traces how every president, including such “pro-Israel” stalwarts like Reagan, inevitably clashed at some point with their Israeli counterparts.

Today, with anti-Zionist obsessives like New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani demonizing Israel constantly, the occasional presidential F-bomb seems downright mild – and flattering. Similarly, with European diplomats claiming over the years: “All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country, Israel,” or that the “f**king Israelis” should be “wiped off the face of the earth,” it’s clear how bonded America is with Israel and how most Americans are with Israelis.

Mark Twain understood the joy and power of a good tirade filled with expletives. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, he advised: “When angry, count [to] four; when very angry, swear.” That’s because, Twain explained elsewhere, “Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

More elegantly, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, taught: “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”

It’s impossible to predict if Trump and Netanyahu embraced warmly or crossed swords yet again. But it is highly unlikely that their encounter lacked great drama or reflected a dismissive indifference.

David Horovitz: While Trump blusters, and Netanyahu spins, is Iran already on the brink of the bomb?

This is indeed a critical period — for Israel, the region, and the free world, in the fateful battle against a demonstrably ruthless, spectacularly dangerous regime bent on destroying this country, dominating the Middle East, and exporting its extremist Islamic ideology worldwide.

It is a critical period, too, for the two warily friendly leaders. One is facing an election three months from now which could see him ousted, or triumphally returned for yet another term in which he would aim to complete his grab for all of Israel’s levers of power. The other is indirectly facing an electorate a week later who could immensely complicate his final two years in office by removing his majority in one or both chambers of Congress — including placing all manner of obstacles to his pursuit of this war.

Both these men would like nothing more than for the regime in Iran to be definitively defeated ahead of their respective polling days. Netanyahu is almost certainly more optimistic than Trump that this could yet be achieved, but then again, that’s where his personal political interests lie. Come what may, Trump will still be president at the end of this year, and can afford to think long and hard about the timing of an intensified attack on the regime; Netanyahu may be finished if the Islamic Republic is intact on October 27.

The regime, as was obvious, is exploiting the lax and lousy terms of June’s memorandum of understanding, falsely touted by Trump as the answer to a region’s prayers for peace. It is maneuvering to solidify its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, reviving its military muscle, and predictably avoiding the slightest concessions on its rogue nuclear program, as the MOU’s vaguely envisaged 60 days of negotiations are frittered uselessly away.

But what really matters is that deep underground, at Pickaxe Mountain — where the International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access, and where the US does not have cameras and does not know “exactly what is going on” — Iran just might have sufficient quantities of 60%-enriched uranium, and the centrifuges to enrich it to weapons grade within weeks or even days. If that is the case, it would still likely be several months from a deliverable bomb, but would have completed arguably the hardest and generally the most visible step on the road to nuclear weapons.

And then, whatever anybody says or wants to believe, the war against the Islamic Republic would be anything but over.

Israel should seize Lebanon’s best chance for peace in decades

Even so, Aoun has gone further than any Lebanese president in recent decades. He has opposed Hezbollah and Iranian interference, supported dialogue with Israel, and begun translating those positions into action.

The Lebanese Armed Forces remain limited and far from fully effective, but under his leadership they are doing more than before to restore the state’s monopoly on armed force. This progress has been made possible primarily by Hezbollah’s weakness, but also by Aoun’s policy and direction.

Aoun’s caution should not be mistaken for reluctance. The devastation of the war has created an opportunity to loosen Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon, and Aoun appears determined to guide the country through that transition.

Political necessity and Aoun’s own convictions now point in the same direction: ending Hezbollah’s domination. He understands the price Lebanon has paid for allowing an Iranian militia to operate on its soil. He also recognizes that significant sections of the public – particularly within the Christian community – are weary of Hezbollah and years of war.

That sentiment gives him room to pursue an alternative course. His challenge is to steer Lebanon forward while contending with an armed organization that still enjoys significant support among Lebanese Shi’ites.

None of this makes Aoun master of Lebanon. Hezbollah remains armed, politically entrenched, and capable of obstructing – or violently derailing – the process. Yet so far, Aoun has moved in the right direction.

Israel and and the US should act on this opportunity. Across the border is a Lebanese leader willing to take political risks in defense of his country’s interests – and to make that case publicly to his own people, in Arabic, rather than only before an American audience in Washington. Aoun’s course also aligns with Israel’s strategic interests: advancing peace with Lebanon and dismantling Hezbollah’s military power.

One of the understandable lessons Israelis drew from October 7 was to take their enemies’ declared intentions seriously. But strategic vigilance also requires recognizing when a different possibility begins to emerge.

The road to peace with Lebanon – and to Hezbollah’s disarmament – remains long, difficult, and uncertain. Yet for the first time in years, Israel may have a potential partner in Beirut.

Aoun is no Sadat, and Lebanon is not Egypt in the late 1970s. But history rarely repeats itself in identical form. With the right strategy, Aoun could become both a genuine partner for peace and an important force in restoring Lebanese sovereignty.

Israel and the United States should therefore combine incentives with pressure. Israel should undertake phased, verifiable withdrawals wherever the Lebanese Armed Forces establish effective control.

Washington should sustain military and economic assistance conditioned on measurable progress toward the state’s monopoly on arms.

Both countries should maintain pressure on Hezbollah while avoiding steps that publicly humiliate Aoun or allow his opponents to portray him as Israel’s instrument. In the Middle East, opportunities rarely remain open for long. Israel and the United States should seize this one before Hezbollah closes it.

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There are more attacks AGAINST "settlers" than BY them

The UN OCHA-OPT writes that since the beginning of 2026, they have recorded some 1,330 settler attacks in the West Bank. These include "arson, vandalism, stone throwing and attempted break-ins."

How many attacks happened in the other direction, from Palestinians to Jews in the West Bank?  The media certainly doesn't tell us.

The Shin Bet does keep track, month by month. They only have statistics through May, but for those five months, they count 1,662 attacks, an average of over 330 a month, meaning that by now there have been over 2,000 such attacks.

What kinds of attacks? Many stone throwing, but also Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, arson, and stabbings, as this April report shows.

For some reason, the mainstream media never talks about this. 

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

 

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07/28 Links Pt2: Saving the West from the Evils of Hamas; A 'Respected' Medical Journal's War Against Doctors; Why is the left in denial about Islamist homophobia?

From Ian:

Fighting the New Antisemitism

Shaikh sees a need to “inoculate” students from elementary school age against falsehoods by teaching basic facts about the Jewish people and Israel. He and Michaelis visit high schools as guest speakers, and Shaikh has helped build “a trauma-informed, culturally educated” chatbot designed to screen for potential behavioral threats, such as whether an individual is an extremist risk and might need to be referred to Parents for Peace.

There are fundamentals to consider, too. As Michaelis understands it, teachers are allowed “to intentionally radicalize students,” and “teachers’ unions are rabidly antisemitic.” Schoep recognizes the left-wing emphasis on “oppression” as “the exact same rhetoric I once weaponized as a neo-Nazi leader and what fuels extreme far-right ideology.” The fixation on “whiteness, blackness, brownness” and “divisive terms like ‘white privilege’” only serves to “create racism” and “radicalize entire generations.” This worldview also turns adherents against Jews and Israel, while being divorced from the realities of Jewish identity, history, and diversity.

At the college level, Jeffery observes, undergraduates “taught to hate their own ancestors, history, culture and the overall idea of Western civilization” will also hate Jews and Israel, “because the Jewish people helped build the West.” Without serious change, “it’s not the external enemy the U.S. will be fighting 50 years from now” but “the internal one.”

Universities have spent the past several decades “teaching a frame in which the West is the permanent aggressor, and any non-Western grievance is sacred,” Burmawi says. “Holocaust skepticism and ‘Israel is genocidal’” follow from that. The solution is “teaching why the West produced human rights, individual dignity, limited government, the abolition of slavery, and . . . the Judeo-Christian root” of those ideas. “A generation that knows what built their freedom is far harder to recruit into burning it down.”

Lobell echoes these points: “People who hate Israel and the Jews typically hate America, too.” In her view, there’s a “silent majority” that recoils from radicalism, and politicians should remember that.

Noting that “you can’t fight what you can’t define,” Hafeez urges adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism at the state and federal levels. Further, there must be a “bipartisan realization” in Washington “that those who come to America to live and study must accept our values of a diverse and pluralistic society” and leave Jew-hatred behind.

Al-Aqidi says public officials must resist “Islamist groups . . . insisting that every law or government statement addressing antisemitism also includes Islamophobia.” That “false equivalence . . . shifts attention away from anti-Jewish hatred” and allows political Islamists to “recast themselves as the primary victims.”

Burmawi makes the most compelling case for what’s needed to counter the growing danger of antisemitism and anti-Zionism:
The instinct I see in much of the American Jewish establishment, to fight this by pleading for tolerance, is a losing strategy. It misreads the enemy entirely. You cannot tolerance-seminar your way out of a theological conviction or a critical theory catechism. Reasonableness reads as weakness to people who’ve been taught your existence is the problem. . . . Stop apologizing, and stop asking for permission. The single most persuasive thing the Jewish community can do for other Americans is to model the confidence I call “re-Zionization.” Israel is, right now, the most compelling argument in the world that a nation can be unashamed of its own survival, can name its enemy, can refuse the endless-grievance trap, and still be moral. Most Americans, especially young ones, aren’t antisemitic, they’re demoralized. They’ve been taught that any civilization defending itself is “supremacist.” When they see Jews who won’t accept that framing, who say plainly “our existence is not up for debate,” it gives them permission to defend their own civilization too. Jeffery likewise urges the Jewish community to stop taking “a very apologetic view towards Israel. . . . If someone wants a Jewish person to condemn Israel to be socially accepted, then that’s wrong, and it must not only be rejected but also confronted.” Efforts to educate non-Jews about Israel’s centrality to “Jewish identity” must continue, along with increasing engagement with “non-Jewish allies, who are already battling the lion in its own den.”

Combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism in American society isn’t a favor to Jews. Such efforts are part and parcel of preserving Western civilization. The problems underlying the turn against American Jews and Israel are multifaceted, so there’s no single solution. But clearly, given the recent polling, a rethink is necessary. And the first step must be winning back younger generations of Americans.

Saving the West from the Evils of Hamas

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released an official video that repeated his false narrative that a "genocide" had been committed.

In Mamdani's world, it is Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu that brought on devastation in Gaza, not Hamas.

Listening to Mamdani, you might think it was Netanyahu that started that war on Oct. 7. You might be led to believe that it was Netanyahu who savagely murdered 1,200 in Israel that day.

Or that it was Netanyahu who fired rockets at Israel, built tunnels with aid money, and used his own citizens as human shields in orchestrating the war against Israel.

Why do people continue to reject overwhelming evidence that Israel has been defending itself against brutal terrorists, when it appears clear and compelling?

One reason is psychological "cognitive dissonance" when facts conflict with deeply held beliefs. Protecting one's identity and staying aligned with one's family and community usually overwhelmingly trumps the truth.

We are in a perfect storm when it comes to the rejection of the truth.

For years we were fed with new ideological frameworks that include newly created concepts like "Islamophobia" but have left out antisemitism almost entirely, despite the fact that statistics show that the Jewish community is the most targeted group for racism and discrimination.

It's going to take generations to overcome the distortion and denial that has taken place since Oct. 7.

Gerald M. Steinberg: A 'Respected' Medical Journal's War Against Doctors

[T]he pro-Hamas lobby is circulating a mass petition calling for the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association.

The petition – which blames the Israeli doctors for alleged bias and omits any mention of Hamas' war crimes – was amplified in June by once-respected UK medical journal The Lancet, clearly crossing the line between professional medical publication and blatant propaganda.

Far from providing medical evidence or reflecting professional ethics, the petition, as echoed by The Lancet, recycles political slogans and ancient blood libels, accusing Israel of "genocide" and the destruction of Gaza's health system. Of course, there is no mention of the overwhelming evidence of Hamas's systematic militarization of hospitals and other civilian medical facilities – all actual war crimes.

In promoting this campaign, The Lancet copied the accusations of fringe activist NGOs including the People's Health Movement (PHM), Doctors for Gaza (Artsen voor Gaza), and the "Health Advisory Council" of the so-called Jewish Voice for Peace. Even a cursory review makes clear that the petition touted by this ostensible medical journal is not remotely about medical ethics.

By parroting these NGOs and violating fundamental requirements for a scientific journal, The Lancet does not make even a minimal attempt to examine their credibility and embrace of terror.

Unsurprisingly, this isn't the first time journal editor Richard Horton has used The Lancet to publish anti-Israel propaganda. From 2001 to 2014, a majority of the publication's output regarding Israeli and Palestinian issues – 58.3% of its 264 items – took the form of political commentary rather than medical research.

The Lancet dismisses any mention of Hamas' responsibility for Gaza's medical plight as mere Israeli claims, despite extensive documentation.

Additionally, neither this medical journal nor the NGOs leading the petition have ever asked any other civilian medical associations to condemn their home states' military operations. The list includes Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and other actual violators of human rights and international law.

With Horton and The Lancet again at the forefront of a hate directed at Israeli doctors, and under the thin facade of scientific publishing, an effective response is necessary that will get the attention of the journal's Dutch publisher, Elsevier.

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07/28 Links Pt1: Eli Lake: Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal with Iran; How global elites weaponize anti-Israel hostility to conceal misconduct and crime; It’s time to demythologize the mystique of Palestinianism

From Ian:

How global elites weaponize anti-Israel hostility to conceal misconduct and crime

The dismissal of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, a British-Pakistani lawyer, by the court’s member states marks a watershed moment, not just for international law, but for our understanding of how modern “lawfare” is weaponized as a personal shield.

For months, the global public was led to believe that Khan’s aggressive pursuit of arrest warrants against Israeli leadership was a principled stance on human rights. However, the timeline tells a far more cynical story.

The allegations of coercive sexual misconduct against Khan were formally reported internally to senior ICC officials and the court’s independent watchdog before he launched his lawfare campaign and sought arrest warrants against Israeli officials.

Confronted with an impending career-ending scandal, Khan played the ultimate survival card: he targeted the Jewish state.

By aggressively seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, Khan orchestrated a calculated diversion. This move was designed to align him with the Western political Left and their Islamist coalition allies, who command significant influence over mainstream media narratives.

The strategy was clear: leverage anti-Israel bias to frame any subsequent scrutiny of his personal behavior as a retaliatory, politically motivated attack. In the early stages, the tactic worked seamlessly. The mainstream media accommodated this narrative, focusing on institutional friction rather than the severe allegations of misconduct that have now led to his formal dismissal.

This playbook, using hostility towards Israel as an emergency exit from domestic or personal ruin, is becoming a disturbing trend among contemporary leaders. On May 27, 2026, the offices of Spain’s Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the EU’s anti-Israel-in-chief, were raided by the police.

This escalation follows the formal indictment of his wife on corruption and influence-peddling charges. There are other ongoing corruption charges against those close to Sánchez, including the recent indictment of Spain’s former Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero over corruption linked to Venezuela and oil schemes.

Sánchez’s relentless diplomatic assaults on Israel may be initially seen as aligned with his coalition’s Leftist ideology, or as a professed concern for the human rights of the oppressed.

However, more vicious attacks on Israel also serve a highly functional domestic purpose: convincing a progressive base that internal judicial scrutiny is merely a shadow campaign directed by Jerusalem.

In Persian culture, there is a precise term for this behavior: riya (ریا). Riya is the practice of flagrant hypocrisy, where one projects a false public image to conceal a darker reality. In Iran, modern history has taught citizens a painful truth: the louder a public figure performs ideological purity, the larger the crime they are attempting to hide.

Under the Islamic Republic, a mafia cartel operating under a religious guise, hyper-demonstrative piety is the standard armor for systemic financial and political corruption. The legendary Persian poet Hafez famously identified riya and deceit as the absolute pinnacle of societal moral decay.

Steps toward accountability
Today, Western elites are recycling this ancient vice. Antisemitism is a chronic human disease akin to latent tuberculosis. It exists asymptomatically across millions.

However, when activated by political opportunity, it breaks out into lethal destruction, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the atrocities of October 7. The contemporary Western Left and its Islamist allies have seamlessly repackaged this bias under the acceptable veneer of “anti-Zionism.”

Brian L. Cox & John Spencer: Arresting Netanyahu in America Would Be Illegal

This is what Mamdani left out. He will commit a criminal offense if he orders the prime minister to be arrested during a visit to New York City, as Netanyahu is expected to do in September to attend sessions at the UN General Assembly.

Here is why: New York law establishes that restraining another person is a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in prison. It becomes a class E felony if the restraint exposes the person “to a risk of serious physical injury.”

The law defines “restrain” as restricting “a person's movements intentionally and unlawfully.” There is no question the act would be intentional. The Constitution makes the rest clear. It would be entirely unlawful.

The ICC may have issued a warrant, but it has no legal force in this country because America never ratified the Rome Statute. President Bill Clinton signed it, but the Bush administration withdrew the signature, and no president has ever submitted the treaty to the Senate. Without Senate approval, the Rome Statute has no legal standing in the United States.

There is no ambiguity. An ICC warrant cannot be enforced anywhere in this country. Attempting to act on it would be unlawful.

Although Mamdani only exercises governing authority within New York City, Ro Khanna’s call for President Trump to arrest Netanyahu extends beyond the confines of a single municipality. Regardless of the location, arresting the prime minister on the basis of ICC warrants would also constitute the intentional tort of false imprisonment.

The decisive element in a civil suit for false imprisonment under these circumstances would be that the defendant acted “without lawful authority.” Because ICC proceedings are not recognized by a country such as the United States that hasn’t ratified the Rome Statute, no governmental official has “lawful authority” to implement warrants issued by the international tribunal.

Any attempt to detain him would trigger federal jurisdiction. Israel and Netanyahu could take the offenders to federal court, and the financial and diplomatic fallout would be enormous.

Mamdani claims New York City is a “city of international law.” It is not. It cannot be. And no mayor can declare it otherwise.

The Big Apple is a metropolitan area in the State of New York, which is part of the United States of America. This means New York City is a city of constitutional law, just like every other municipality in the country.

And Ro Khanna asserts “America needs to cooperate with the ICC” because “it’s a matter of a rules-based international order.” This is false.

The “rules-based international order” is built on consent. While the United States agrees with most of the substance of the Rome Statute, this country has not acquiesced to the court’s jurisdiction by virtue of ratifying this multilateral treaty.

As such, arrest warrants issued by the ICC have no legal effect in America. This means arresting Benjamin Netanyahu would violate the rules-based international order as well as constitutional law that applies domestically across the United States.

Yisrael Medad: Going on a narrative offensive: It’s time to demythologize the mystique of Palestinianism

Rewiring the narrative
Historically, the relative success in the turnabout on Israel and Zionism has been a long process. Even if we ignore Jewish anti-Zionism thinking, amongst Jews as well as non-Jews, or take into consideration general anti-Jewish sentiment whether racist or religiously-motivated, surely we are in a very different place as regards control of the narrative.

In a recent piece posted in the +972 Magazine, we learn that France’s Rima Hassan, European Parliament member representing the La France Insoumise party, wants to break four taboos in the French public debate on Palestine.

They are: recognizing Zionism as a colonial ideology; defending the right of return; discussing the legitimacy of armed struggle; and moving beyond the two-state paradigm.

That is not a simple alteration of a narrative but, as the chant that has been increasingly sounded at anti-Israel rallies is formulated, Zionism must be eliminated. We are back in the 1950s and 1960s with the “Throw them into the sea!” sloganeering.

Yet, because of the internal squabbling in Israel over policies, the fundamental truths of the Zionist narrative have been misplaced in our public diplomacy material, as well as the fierce willingness to engage in confronting the waves of lies and fabrications assertively. It appears the “in” thing is to appear at the Oxford Union in evening dress.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, however, provides another problem. Appalled by Hasan Piker’s claim of how much better Hamas is than Israel, he writes in the LA Jewish Journal on July 16 that Piker’s political voice promotes a “toxic narrative … untethered from reality.”

Piker, he continued, is an example of how “Palestinians’ allies have led [the Palestinians] to the dark side of their national aspirations – destroying Israel rather than building their own potential state.”

Greenberg does not address that toxicity’s success. He does not ask if that negativity should be a cause to punish those exploiting such a message or if, and he is a rabbi, an ethical conclusion could be drawn that should advance the idea that an Arab Palestine state would be immoral.

There exists a major underestimation of the damage and danger the Palestine narrative dominance represents. And now that the pro-Palestine camp has reduced the rhetoric to a zero-sum situation, demanding our elimination and that our existence as a Jewish state must be denied, the hasbara (public diplomacy) approach of defense and explaining Israel’s actions needs to be refashioned.

Money is available. According to reports, since October 2023, upwards of $100 million has been allotted to hasbara efforts, most on social media platforms. I probably haven’t seen all the output, but I am confident little of it was framed in an attack mode.

We need to be past that stage of weak, explanatory public diplomacy. Attention must be shifted. The burden of proof and defense must be placed on the pro-Palestine side. Should a Palestinian national identity of less than 100 years be preferred over a 3,000-year Jewish national identity?

Were not the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the real colonization process in the Middle East?

Who is truly engaged in an “ethnic cleansing” if not Palestinianism? Who initiated genocidal violence, beginning in 1920? Should not the side that violates agreements be punished? Should a constant rejection of diplomacy and willingness to compromise be tolerated?

It is time to make major changes in attitude and approach and to reassert Zionism’s narrative.

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Arab and Jews, Palestinians and Zionists: 1925 newspaper cuts through the obfuscation

From the Tablet (Brooklyn):, June 1925.

Arabs Boycott Jews In Palestine

(By N. C. W. C. News Service.)

Jerusalem, June 24.—A boycott of Jewish merchants and Jewish merchandise has been proclaimed by the young Arabs of Jerusalem, with the avowed object of driving the Jews from Palestine. The movement is growing in popularity and has assumed serious proportions. Each person joining it pledges himself to refrain from transacting business with non-Arabs. The boycott even advocates refusal to sell real estate or other property to Jews.

Commenting on the movement, the paper, Meraat-el-Sherk, says editorially:

"May this movement spread throughout the country, for it is the best means of striking a decisive blow at the Balfour Declaration. What is the use of our outcries and protests if we facilitate the execution of the said Declaration by selling lands to the Jews and enrich them by doing business with them whilst neglecting Arab merchants?

"Every patriotic Arab must preach this idea and comply with it. It would be much better if women joined the movement also. Boycott the alien intruder. Boycott him with all your might. Do not sell land to him. Try it and you will see how in a short time he will be compelled to leave the country. In so doing you will have served your fatherland and inflicted a hard blow upon the Balfour Declaration.

"The only way of ensuring our salvation and rest, of ridding ourselves of the Balfour Declaration, is the complete boycotting of the Jews."

This is an early example of BDS, where Arabs decided to boycott Jews. BDS itself, in moments of candor, admits that the current boycott activities of Israel directly came from the Arab boycott of Jews in Palestine before there was an Israel. Obviously, the boycott was aimed at Jews, as this article shows.

But another framing that is taken as obvious in this article is perhaps at least as important:

Nowhere foes it use the word "Palestinian." It wants to protect "Arab" merchants and urges  "patriotic Arabs" to join the boycott to "serve your fatherland." Even among the Arabs who claimed to be part of a country called Palestine, they didn't consider themselves Palestinians. 

A tertiary point worth pointing out: they never accused Jews of stealing land. they urged Arabs not to sell land to Jews. Meaning that they all knew that there was nothing illegal or unethical going on, but they wanted to stop it in the name of forcing Jews to leave. 

Nomenclature has changed. But the underlying facts have not. The conflict was always between Arabs and Jews, not between Palestinians and Israelis. 

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

 

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07/27 Links Pt2: London’s mayor has crossed a far more dangerous line than Mamdani; UK Solicitor General Spoke at Rally Where Protesters Chanted "Khaybar, Khaybar"

From Ian:

Israelis fail to understand anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S., Israeli public opinion researcher says

Israelis generally don’t grasp the extent of the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States, Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli public opinion researcher and columnist, told Jewish Insider.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum this month hours before more than 100 House Democrats voted to cut U.S. military aid to Israel, Scheindlin said that most Israelis feel that warnings of slipping U.S. support have been repeated for years but haven’t come to fruition.

“Israelis for a long time have been told ‘you have to worry about the America-Israel relationship’ and nothing ever really happened — they sort of took it for granted that the relationship would always be there, and in many ways they still do,” Scheindlin said. “From the Israeli perspective, there’s a little bit of a sense of crying wolf. We see that in the 53% who still think that the relationship will be fine.”

She said most Israelis today view Republicans as pro-Israel and Democrats as anti-Israel and have little understanding of the range of views within both parties. And she said they don’t believe Israel’s own actions have any bearing on U.S. criticism of Israel.

Supporters of opposition parties, she continued, believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “personally has undermined the relationship” — but that the issues in the relationship largely end with Netanyahu.

She said that the strong support in Israel for President Donald Trump took a nosedive with the ceasefires in Iran and Lebanon, with many Jewish Israelis feeling that Trump had forced a premature end to the wars and didn’t let the U.S. and Israel carry them to their conclusion or fulfill their main objectives.

But she said that most Israelis still see issues in the relationship as a “disagreement that will pass” rather than a true crisis or turning point. She said a majority of Israelis still feel the U.S.-Israel relationship will survive — and many are too concerned with their own daily lives and the ongoing impacts of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to give the relationship much thought.

“When you ask about the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s somewhere between repressing it and complacent and fearful — but also they have been told year after year for quite a long time, ‘Watch out for this relationship,’ and then America continues to come through in so many ways,” she said.

Dave Rich: Mayoral missteps

The Mayors of New York and London have both weighed in on the Gaza genocide claim in the past week, calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested if he visits either city. In both cases it is an empty threat and an opportunistic piece of political theatre. At a time when Jews have been violently attacked in both cities, the two mayors would be better off trying to protect their Jewish residents rather than engaging in this kind of reckless posturing.

First, the facts. There is an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Netanyahu (and for then-Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant), for allegedly commissioning war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants the US government to enforce this warrant if Netanyahu visits New York, because, he says, Netanyahu is “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” When Channel 4 news asked London Mayor Sadiq Khan if he would do the same, he concurred, calling Netanyahu “a perpetrator of genocide… he’s broken the law and I think justice needs to happen.” “People who commit genocide”, Khan went on, “are not welcome in London.” We’ll come back to that.

This is a classic bait-and-switch, because the ICC warrant that Mamdani and Khan want to be enforced is not for genocide. On the contrary: when the ICC issued the warrant they explicitly rejected a request for it to include the crime of extermination, because the evidence did not support it. Even if Netanyahu were to be arrested and convicted under the ICC warrant it would not prove that Israel is guilty of genocide, because that is not what the ICC has charged him with. This distinction might seem trivial; after all, being accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity is bad enough. But “genocide” is a political label that Israel’s enemies have been trying to attach to it for decades, as a shortcut to declaring the entire Israeli state illegitimate. If the Israeli Prime Minister is guilty of war crimes, it would be a matter of personal disgrace; whereas if the Israeli state has committed genocide, then the entire nation is damned. This is why Israel’s opponents are determined to make everything seem like evidence of genocide. Anything less simply will not meet their political needs.

This is part of a campaign to rebrand Zionism - the Jewish desire for national self-determination in the ancestral Jewish homeland - as a racist, supremacist ideology and a manifestation of European settler colonialism, that has genocidal intent woven into its founding ethos. The sobering scale of the devastation and loss of life in Gaza provides a golden opportunity to make this label stick, so everything must be about genocide, even when, as with the ICC warrant, it isn’t.

The now-disgraced ICC prosecutor who instigated the warrants, Karim Khan KC, who is no friend of Israel, resisted the pressure to go along with the “genocide” charge as recently as May this year. In a telling exchange, he advised a bemused and frustrated Mehdi Hasan that the evidence for genocide simply isn’t there, and “it would be a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamour. You move based upon evidence.”

Not just a reckless prosecutor, but a reckless Mayor too. The belief that Israel is committing a genocide, and that it deliberately kills children and has starved Palestinians, is the driving force behind the rise in antisemitism in the United Kingdom and the United States today. This is the central narrative of the protests that regularly feature antisemitic and violent rhetoric on London’s streets. It is the excuse offered by Palestine Action members when they smash up offices in London or arms factories around the country. And it appears regularly in the antisemitic incidents reported to CST, when ordinary Jews going about their lives in our capital city are abused and harassed by random racists. “Oh, you’re Jewish - you must support genocide”, is what a fellow student said to the university-age daughter of a friend of mine, on discovering there was a Jew in their class.

Both Mayors have condemned antisemitic attacks in their cities. Presumably they would fiercely reject any suggestion that their behaviour might encourage, even unwittingly, the violent extremists and antisemites who are making Jewish life in London and New York so difficult right now. But if they don’t want it to look that way, they should take more care over their language, and be much more visible in demonstrating their opposition to antisemitism. When ambulances belonging to Hatzola (a Jewish-run ambulance service for the whole community) were set on fire in Golders Green in March, Khan visited a different Hatzola base in another part of London the following day, rather than rushing to the scene of the attack. When a series of synagogues and other Jewish community premises were attacked by Iranian-directed arsonists in April, London’s Mayor was nowhere to be seen. It was left to the Metropolitan Police to hold a press conference outside one of the targeted synagogues. After criticism for this absence, Khan held a private visit to Finchley Reform Synagogue a couple of days later; but then, when two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green allegedly by an Islamist terrorist at the end of April, Khan, again, did not turn up in person to show his solidarity.

London’s mayor has crossed a far more dangerous line than Mamdani

The ICC warrant itself also rests on increasingly shaky foundations. It was issued by former chief prosecutor Karim Khan just days before allegations of sexual misconduct against him became public. Earlier this week, ICC member states voted overwhelmingly to remove Khan from office following his suspension.

One might have expected the backlash to Mamdani’s remarks to discourage other political leaders from embracing similar rhetoric.

Instead, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has chosen to follow the same script.

The timing makes his comments all the more disturbing. Only days earlier, Khan visited London’s Nova Music Festival exhibition and urged visitors to remember “the horrors of that awful day” on October 7. Yet within a week he publicly declared Netanyahu “a perpetrator of genocide” and insisted he should be arrested if he visits Britain.

“As a perpetrator of genocide,” Khan said, “I think he’s broken the law. And I think justice needs to happen, and that means him being brought to book.”

Unlike Mamdani’s remarks, these comments carry genuine diplomatic significance. Britain is legally bound by the Rome Statute and has long presented itself as a champion of the international legal order. When the mayor of one of the world’s leading capitals publicly calls for the arrest of the democratically elected leader of a close ally, it lends credibility to an ICC process that many legal experts and democratic governments have questioned.

It also comes at a moment when antisemitism has become disturbingly commonplace across Britain. In the past year alone, Jews have endured stabbings in Golders Green, attempted arson attacks on synagogues, the destruction of Hatzolah ambulances, and the killing of two Jewish men in Manchester during Yom Kippur. Against that backdrop, rhetoric that singles out the Jewish state’s leader while ignoring the world’s countless genuine war criminals risks reinforcing an already dangerous climate.

Demonising Israel has become an easy route to headlines and political applause. Mamdani turned it into political theatre in New York. Sadiq Khan has now elevated it into something with potentially serious diplomatic consequences.

When elected leaders compete to lambast Israel, they do more than dominate the news cycle. They help normalise the hostility that Jews increasingly confront on the streets of New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver and beyond.

Mamdani’s comments generated headlines. Sadiq Khan’s could shape policy. That is why London, not just New York, should be where the real alarm bells are ringing.

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07/27 Links Pt1: Collapse of the Blood Libels; Hamas and its two million hostages; Guterres cements ‘infamous legacy’ with second term for UN rights chief

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: Collapse of the Blood Libels

Sometimes I think I am not angry enough, but the scale of the problem is almost too huge to be angry at, collectively. Towering rage must be split into smaller rages at each of the component parts of the blood libel machine. The fantastical Lancet “studies” salivating over hundreds of thousands of imaginary dead Gazans. AirWars’ pearl-clutching reports, drawing conclusions of civilian targeting in Gaza without a tenth of the evidence needed to draw said conclusions. Amnesty, B’tselem and all the other NGOs, releasing fraudulent genocide conclusions achieved only by changing the definition and parameters of genocide. The paid media squad of hacks, twisting and distorting and murdering the truth just to get one over on the Jewish state. South Africa, ripping apart the genocide convention at Iran’s behest, making it harder to punish real genocides in future.

The whole sorry mess sickens me, and now the great indictment of Israel is coming apart, one revelation at a time. This fact is not being reported by a single damned one of the media outlets that have spent years screeching over the war in Gaza to the exclusion of almost all else. Famine, deliberate attacks on hospitals, the slaughter of journalists and children, and systematic obstruction of aid: each allegation was broadcast as settled fact and then used to prove genocidal intent. The same newsrooms and universities that thundered these charges have shown remarkably little interest in the evidence that now destroys each of these allegations.

It is incredible. There is no aspect of the genocide allegation that has not collapsed.

Start with the famine claim. In August 2025, the IPC used two ways of measuring malnutrition in children: weight compared with height, and the size of a child’s upper arm. Gaza had no local data showing how those two measures matched up, so the IPC used an estimate from elsewhere in the region. It assumed the weight-and-height measure would find about twice as many malnourished children as the arm measurement.

The first large Gaza survey to use both measures found the reverse. Of 1,335 children surveyed in 2026, 0.5% were identified as acutely malnourished by weight and height, while 1.3% were identified by upper-arm measurement. That survey cannot tell us exactly what conditions were like in 2025. The later survey cannot recreate conditions in 2025, but it exposes the rotten foundation beneath a verdict presented to the world as scientific certainty: a key assumption behind the famine declaration had never been tested in Gaza itself.

The food figures are equally awkward. Official COGAT-based data show that about 1.01 million tonnes of food entered Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 17 January 2025, against an estimated requirement of 825,000 tonnes. From the October 2025 ceasefire to 7 June 2026, 1.78 million tonnes entered, against a calculated need of roughly 643,000 tonnes.

Of course, food crossing a border does not guarantee it reaches every family. Roads were destroyed, distribution failed, aid was looted, and Israel’s two-and-a-half-month block on aid in spring 2025 was a grave error. However, those qualifications cannot rescue the claim of a continuous Israeli policy to starve Gaza. The quantities of food that entered Gaza are simply too large.

The hospital narrative has also disintegrated. American intelligence independently confirmed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used al-Shifa for command operations, weapons storage, and to hold hostages. Hamas accounts now describe armed men, including senior officers, sheltering inside the hospital during an Israeli siege. Hospitals remained protected, and Israel still had to obey the laws of war, but the moral fairy tale of innocent hospitals attacked by the brutal IDF is dead. There is now endless evidence in the public domain of Hamas using hospitals for military purposes.

The casualty statistics have fared no better. The claim that 70 per cent of the dead were women and children became a fixture of global coverage. OCHA’s July 2026 snapshot, based on Gaza Health Ministry figures for 71,444 identified fatalities, placed those categories at 45.2 per cent. Adult men make up over 50% of the fatalities, from a pre-war adult male percentage of approximately 25% of the population. Not all adult men can be counted as combatants, but a figure repeatedly cited as proof of indiscriminate slaughter is now shown to be false when applied to the overall toll. The “hundreds of thousands” of dead under the rubble have likewise not materialised. That number is completely implausible, given Gaza’s mechanism for reporting the missing and the financial compensation incentives to use it.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Hamas and its two million hostages

When I spoke out against these trends, I was attacked viciously. I realised that many in the so–called pro–Palestine movement are deeply anti–Palestinian, for they are only interested in platforming and embracing views and experiences that conform to their beliefs. That a Gazan like myself – who lost family members in the war, who is largely deaf in his left ear following an Israeli bombing in 2001 and who has been on the front lines of providing humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza – could be dismissed for sharing the “wrong views” was an alarming sign of the degradation of this Western–based activism.

Furthermore, large segments of the Arab and Palestinian communities in the diaspora became their own worst enemies, enforcing conformity and promulgating extreme positions. They remained silent lest they be called traitors, sell-outs or Zionists. Speaking out against Hamas was somehow viewed as supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, endorsing the horrors experienced by Palestinian civilians or adopting Netanyahu’s and Israeli talking points, or as a betrayal of the Palestinian right to resist Israeli injustices. This simplistic reductionism was picked up by Hamas, which immediately registered the support for its actions in diaspora communities, particularly in the West and in the US, where political leverage matters most. The failure to call out Hamas weakened genuine pro–Palestine advocacy, which by default became associated with celebrations of October 7, finding excuses for Hamas’s heinous acts of terror, refusal to humanise Israeli victims of the attack (including hostages) and the abandonment of political aims that are actually achievable. Instead, a form of mass psychosis took hold of activists, academics, journalists, advocates, politicians and average individuals, all blinded to Hamas’s criminality against both Gazans and Israelis.

Undeterred, I have decided to proceed with sharing my truth. I saw and experienced Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza and witnessed its tactics, strategies and manipulation of an entire people. For nearly two decades, a fascist Islamist terror organisation has been holding over two million Palestinians as hostages to its suicidal, nihilistic project.

Launching the most brutal single-day attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and knowing the kind of devastating and deadly retaliation that this was going to elicit, was a deliberate, reckless endangerment of the Palestinian people: a betrayal.

The decision to launch the October 7 attack destroyed Palestinian lives and aspirations, but it was not the first such terrible choice.

It was a choice to reject the Oslo peace process and the 2000 Camp David proposal; it was a choice to squander the opportunity opened in 2005 by Israel’s withdrawal of settlements on a vanity resistance project that went nowhere for two decades; it was a choice after the 2006 elections to Islamise Palestinian society and waste opportunities to establish new civic and democratic life; it was a choice to antagonise moderates in Israel with suicide bombings, turning many of them against the peace process and helping the rise of the Israeli far right.

It was a choice to align the Palestinian people of Gaza with the likes of Hezbollah, Qatar, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood – failed ideologies and regional projects – just as previous generations of Palestinians aligned themselves with Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union and Gamal Abdel–Nasser’s pan–Arabism; it was a choice to keep Israeli hostages in Gaza for two years rather than surrendering them earlier to avert large–scale death and destruction and to save what could be saved of Gaza’s people and infrastructure.

I do not speak and have never claimed to speak on behalf of Palestinians or Gazans. No one can make this claim, for there is no single voice or entity that can capture or represent the diversity of Palestinian communities across the Middle East and the world. My account and my analysis are steeped in lived experience, connection to the land and extensive relationships with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Still, the cautionary lessons and observations that I discuss will be acknowledged by many in the Gaza Strip, and by Palestinians elsewhere, who often keep quiet.

I share my story in the spirit of seeking justice for my people. This story details Hamas’s horrendous impact on the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to freedom and independence. I experienced the tragedy of seeing my native homeland descend into chaos and disarray, a collapse that occurred in large part because of a group of Jihadi fascists who destroyed the Palestinian national project. This is why I focus on speaking out against Hamas.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Trump's Saudi Nuclear Horror Show

The [US-Saudi civilian nuclear] agreement threatens to weaken decades of US non-proliferation policy, ignite a regional arms race, embolden America's adversaries, and create security risks that future generations may be powerless to reverse.

The most controversial aspect of the proposed agreement is that it reportedly allows Saudi Arabia to develop domestic uranium enrichment capabilities under safeguards that fall short of the stringent standards previously demanded by Washington. While low-enriched uranium is used to fuel civilian nuclear reactors, the same technology can eventually produce highly enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons.

"[W]ithout a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible." — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, CBS News, March 15, 2018.

These words should have ended any discussion about permitting uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. They reveal that Riyadh views civilian nuclear capabilities not merely as an energy project but also as a potential strategic hedge against Iran.

[G]overnments change, regimes fall, alliances split, and today's friend -- even as a member of the Abraham Accords -- may not be tomorrow's ally.

[E]xtremist Islamist organizations continue to view the kingdom as both a battlefield and a prize. No one can predict Saudi Arabia's political landscape 20 or 30 years from now. A future period of instability, succession crisis, or regime collapse could deliver sensitive nuclear facilities, technology, or materials to actors whose goals are fundamentally hostile to the United States and its allies.

The greatest danger, therefore, is not Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or the current Saudi leadership. The greatest danger is the uncertainty surrounding whoever may rule the kingdom decades from now. Nuclear technology lasts far longer than political regimes.

The proposed agreement also abandons the "gold standard" that has guided US civilian nuclear cooperation for decades. Under the 2009 US-United Arab Emirates (UAE) nuclear agreement, Abu Dhabi accepted strict conditions that prohibited domestic uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing while granting comprehensive international oversight. These restrictions significantly reduced proliferation dangers.

The Saudi agreement reportedly discards many of these safeguards. It also reportedly does not require Riyadh to adopt the International Atomic Energy Agency's Additional Protocol, which allows inspectors short-notice access to undeclared facilities to detect clandestine nuclear activities.

The UAE would likely seek to renegotiate its own agreement. Turkey and Egypt would almost certainly demand similar privileges. Russia and China could use the American precedent to justify weaker safeguards in their own nuclear partnerships across the Middle East and beyond.

Instead of strengthening the global non-proliferation regime, the United States would be weakening it with its own hands.

Peace with Israel is not a prize awarded by Arab or Muslim countries. It is not something that should require American bribes in the form of nuclear technology or strategic incentives.

Peace serves Saudi Arabia's own interests. It enhances regional stability, strengthens economic development, attracts foreign investment, and improves security for all parties. Arab and Muslim states should pursue peace with Israel because it benefits their own people -- not because Washington offers dangerous concessions.

The United States should not become the architect of the next Middle East nuclear arms race.

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