11/06 Links Pt2: What Boy George taught me about being Jewish; By backing El-Sayed in the midterms, Democrats betrayed the liberal values they claim to defend

From Ian:

What Boy George taught me about being Jewish

Four decades later, the rules of conformity have changed, but the pressure to conform hasn’t. Look at almost any gathering of celebrities and you’ll see the same familiar symbols: red-hand pins, kaffiyehs, and carefully rehearsed declarations about Gaza. Artists who spent their careers celebrating individual expression suddenly seem reluctant to express an individual opinion. For many, the easiest option is to follow the crowd or remain silent.

Boy George chose neither. He watched in horror as Hamas massacred young people dancing at the Nova music festival on October 7. He released a song, “We Will Dance Again,” in which he sings, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.” He refused calls to boycott Israel, and endured condemnation from former friends and colleagues. And then he got on a plane and came to Tel Aviv.

The man once considered a radical for challenging society’s conventions about gender is now considered a radical for standing with the Jews. But there’s no contradiction. He is doing precisely what he did 40 years ago: refusing to let the dominant culture tell him what to think.

The eyeliner hasn’t changed. Neither has the courage.

As Dara Horn observes, the essence of Jewish survival has never been the ability to fit in. It has been the determination to stand apart when standing apart is the right thing to do. To question the powerful, challenge conventional wisdom, and refuse to trade truth for acceptance.

Boy George isn’t Jewish, but he has spoken about his deep kinship with the Jewish people. Perhaps he recognizes something of himself in our story.

Last night, as he stood before thousands of Israelis — religious and secular, left and right, gay and straight — I thought about what a remarkable lesson this was for my daughter. Not just about standing up for Israel. Not even about standing up against antisemitism. But simply about standing up. About having the courage to be different, the confidence to think for yourself, and the moral clarity to say what you believe even when everyone around you insists that you’re wrong.

We Jews have been doing that for thousands of years. And it has never been particularly fashionable.

Last night, a 65-year-old man in a sequin hat reminded us why it matters. And he made it look fabulous.

How China Weaponizes Jew-Hate

Using both its profitable blockbuster social media app TikTok and the nonprofit networks of Shanghai-based American citizen Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans (founder of Code Pink), China has been able to foment Jew-hatred and unrest on the streets not only of the United States but also the United Kingdom.

Notably, the Chinese-funded People's Forum is out to end not only Israel but also America. At the 2024 People's Conference for Palestine, the organization's Forum executive director Manolo De Los Santos, who advocates for Cuba, also called for the complete destruction of the United States: "We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts, and those one million cuts have to come from every sector of struggle in this room."

According to the US House Ways and Means Committee: "Evidence suggests that The People's Forum and Code Pink have been funded and influenced by Mr. [Neville Roy] Singham and the communist Chinese government, both of which are foreign principals."

Historian Dara Horn suggests that tyrants and totalitarian regimes, to maintain or gain further power, promote the "Big Lie" of Hitler's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that the Jews are "evil." Evil in what way? Just fill in the blank with whatever you like, like a Rorschach test.

It probably helps to select a target that would rather just be left alone under its fig tree, a target disinclined to retaliate – as China already succeeded in doing by oppressing the peaceful Tibetans and enslaving and torturing the Uyghurs.

Now China has lit upon the Jews, who do not even live there, but who, as author and documentary filmmaker Pierre Rehov pointed out, are politically useful.

"These lies are all part of the foundational Big Lie: that antisemitism itself is righteous. If the Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist, resistance against them is not only moral, it is good!... The only thing that varies is what you value the most. Say you're a religious Christian, then you are lied to that Jews are destroying Christianity, or that they killed Christ. Say you're a human rights activist, then Israel's the world's worst violator of human rights, and it doesn't matter that you're being told this by the Islamic Republic of Iran." — Dara Horn, interview, Times of Israel, September 3, 2026.

The Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal: when Islamic sectarians took over

The role of West Midlands Police is the hinge on which events swing from the bleak yet familiar tale of Islamic sectarianism into one of almost unimaginable incompetence and deceit. West Midlands Police’s justification was found in a ‘confidential report’ that it claimed had been made with the help of Dutch police, based on a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam the previous November. The report claimed that, after the match, Maccabi supporters had thrown ‘innocent members of the public into the river’ and had ‘intentionally targeted Muslim communities’. It alleged that police in Amsterdam had been forced to muster 5,000 officers to deal with the supposedly rabid threat.

More than a few eyebrows were raised when this report was leaked to the press, in late November last year. The scenes in Amsterdam had indeed made international headlines – but for a very different reason. Maccabi supporters were subjected to what members of Amsterdam’s local Arab population called a ‘Jew hunt’ on WhatsApp. It was Maccabi fans – not Amsterdam residents – who were thrown into the river, and it was Maccabi fans who were violently assaulted, in what Amsterdam’s own mayor referred to as an anti-Semitic attack.

The ‘confidential report’, it transpired, was the product of West Midlands Police’s own imagination. Its contents, unsurprisingly, were refuted by Dutch police as soon as it came to light. In January, it was revealed that the police force had consulted eight Muslim organisations in Birmingham prior to banning Maccabi supporters – three of which were mosques that had a history of promoting anti-Semitism. In the same month, West Midlands Police chief Craig Guildford admitted that the force had used AI in compiling its dossier against Maccabi supporters. This had led to a non-existent fixture against West Ham United being offered as ‘proof’ of the supposed violence of the Israeli fans. Guildford ‘retired’ from the force soon after (however, he is currently the subject of a gross-misconduct investigation by the police watchdog). More recently, in October, Conservative MP and shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy claimed that West Midlands Police suppressed intelligence that local Islamists had planned to arm themselves in preparation for Maccabi supporters.

Timothy himself was the subject of one of the most remarkable events of the whole grim affair. An Aston Villa supporter who grew up in Birmingham, he visited Villa Park on the night of the match. A large crowd of Muslim men had gathered outside the stadium. ‘Officer, take this dog away’, one of the men said to a police officer, gesturing at Timothy. The policewoman duly interrogated Timothy before leading him away. It was a chilling sight.

The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters was a toxic synthesis of the various forces that many people feel are tearing the country apart: the breakdown of policing, an increasingly hostile and powerful Islamic sectarianism, and the official appeasement of anti-Semitism. Britain has never quite been the same since.

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11/06 Links Pt1: Holocaust survivor dies from Bondi Beach terror attack injuries, raising toll to 16; The fashionable one-state ruse to destroy the only Jewish state

From Ian:

The fashionable one-state ruse to destroy the only Jewish state

After the Green Party adopted its policy that “Zionism is racism”, Prime Minister Andy Burnham correctly, if belatedly, labelled this “antisemitic”, telling Labour councillors to end power-sharing agreements with Green colleagues who do not reject it. With his customary courage in leadership, the Greens’ Zack Polanski attempted to duck the issue entirely, dodging his own conference to lose the contest for Sir Keir Starmer’s former parliamentary seat, then saying he would have voted against the “imperfect” motion. One is reminded of Brave Sir Robin, from the film Monty Python And The Holy Grail – he who nearly fought the fierce dragon of Angnor, and almost stood up to the vicious chicken of Bristol: “When danger reared its ugly head/He bravely turned his tail and fled”.

Identifying as an anti-racist sits at the core of any Good Person™’s self-image. So too, lately, does a monomaniacal, existential loathing of Israel. This creates an irreconcilable dichotomy, because as every Good Person™ knows, antisemitism is bad – in theory. One must be seen to oppose it, or at least make generic noises to that effect, while avoiding any awkward specifics. But how, then, to advocate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish majority state?

Enter the fashionable ruse, deployed in the Green motion, of the one-state solution. Simply place the Jews and Palestinians together, in one big, happy democracy. Why, it’s so obvious, it’s a wonder they’ve wasted all these decades attempting anything else. Surely the only thing that has been prolonging the conflict is not furious rejection on the Palestinian side of any continuing Jewish presence in the region, including that the majority of Israeli Jews descended from families ethnically cleansed from the Arab and Muslim world since the Second World War. Nor the poisonous Islamist adoption of Nazi-brand antisemitism. Nor the reciprocal hostility that has undeniably arisen in Israel, feeding the ultra-nationalist Right. No, it’s just that the silly things haven’t tried living in Kumbaya-flavoured unity.

One wonders whether the One-State Solutionists would be so keen on the idea if (a) Jews in this putative federation would likely outnumber Palestinians, rather than vice-versa; and (b) Israel was actually, not purportedly, genocidal towards its antagonists – rather than vice-versa. And when I say one wonders, I mean one does not wonder at all.

Israel exists precisely because Jews can’t trust a non-Jewish majority to protect them, and as evidenced by Hamas’s 2023 pogrom, the only reason a real genocide isn’t happening right now is that Israel has borders and a military.

The one-state solution is a classic example of the abstract utopianism long indulged in by a certain type of leftist, without skin in the game and safely shielded from the consequences, eager to risk catastrophe for others to gratify their own particular ideological fetishes. Call it the Lord Farquaad phenomenon, after the preening princeling from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”

Curiously, no prominent One-Stater has proposed the same remedy for the long and lethal quarrels of the Indian subcontinent. Then again, there are no Jews involved. True, some of the loopiest also seem to think a one-state solution is the answer to Russia’s war on Ukraine, but most would be rightly appalled by the notion.

The number of countries in which Arabs constitute the majority or largest plurality – not including Palestine, whose national status remains unresolved – is 18. The number of countries in which the same is true of Muslims is 50. The number of Jewish majority countries: one.

Rowan Dean: Australia’s shameful era of progressive antisemitism

Hallelujah! I opened my newspaper on Friday to read, in black and white, the two words I never thought I would hear any Australian academic or Labor appointee ever dare utter. Two words I have spent the last 15 years of my life writing about, warning about, raging against, and shaking my head in despair about. Two words that have poisoned this country, two words that have torn this country asunder, and two words which have been ignored, mocked and denied.

Progressive antisemitism.

In June 2014, I published an article in The Spectator Australia called Dinner Party Antisemitism in which I warned, quote, how ‘even otherwise intelligent and normal people will often reveal their hatred over a few glasses of wine’.

Dinner party anti-Semitism
I went on to define ‘dinner party antisemitism’ and how to spot it. I wrote: ‘Dinner party antisemitism crosses all political boundaries, age groups, geographical and socio-economic divides, and is just as likely to occur in a trendy inner-city restaurant, at a Western suburbs barbeque or within the elegant confines of a plush North Shore dining room.’

In other words, progressive antisemitism. That was over 12 years ago. And I have often spoken at many functions, on TV shows, in print, at conferences, and, yes, at dinner parties, about how the so-called left-wing progressives – I actually think regressive is a far more accurate description – but those of the so-called intellectual left – there’s another oxymoron for you – the luvvies, the lefties, with their moral posturing and self-assured sanctimony and eagerness to tolerate Islamist and third world antisemitism posed a terrifying threat to this country. Frequently I was laughed at, more often simply ignored, especially when I was on the ABC.

But this morning – finally – Jillian Segal, the antisemitism envoy, has belled the cat, with an updated and damning report into Australian antisemitism, in which she says…
‘Modern, progressive antisemitism is the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today. It serves to justify and legitimise antisemitism, providing it with intellectual and cultural credibility and, ultimately, making it fashionable. It does this by effectively laundering far-left antisemitism and Islamic extremism through a progressive lens, such as social justice and human rights, together with traditional antisemitic tropes, giving fundamentally extremist ideologies an apparently acceptable face.’

Finally. There you have it folks, from the official Labor-appointed antisemitism envoy. As the Australian newspaper continues…
‘“Progressive antisemitism” has been identified as the most corrosive form of anti-Jewish hate in Australia, under special envoy ­Jillian Segal’s sweeping new ­agenda to drive discrimination and bias against Jews out of universities, the health sector, media, and the arts.’

The Australian prime minister wants to turn down the temperature

For all the talk of lowering the temperature, one word is missing: consequence.

If an Islamist preacher incites violence, the law should respond. If a Marxist activist unlawfully threatens someone, the law should respond. If a far-right agitator does the same, the standard must be identical.

There must be no ideological indulgences or special treatment for fashionable causes.

Australians need confidence that police, prosecutors and governments enforce the law impartially, rather than allowing political pressure to determine which conduct attracts scrutiny. Even the perception of selective enforcement damages trust. Distrust breeds the resentment that political leaders claim they want to reduce.

The horror of the antisemitic Bondi massacre, threats against elected representatives and allegations of attacks on MPs should not be conflated or assigned a common motive. They do, however, underline the importance of protecting citizens and public officials alike.

How many more tragedies or threats will it take before the government demonstrates that public safety matters more than the sensitivities of political movements?

To those who believed the hatred and intimidation of the past three years were merely a Jewish problem, history offers a warning: it never ends with the Jews. Antisemitism is not simply an isolated prejudice. It can be a warning sign that the social rules protecting everyone are weakening.

What a society tolerates risks becoming normalized. What becomes normalized can enter the mainstream. Each outrage makes the next less shocking until behavior once considered unthinkable begins to seem ordinary.

Jewish Australians have warned about the danger of antisemitism masquerading as political activism. Those warnings deserve to be taken seriously not only because Jewish Australians are entitled to safety, but because the principles at stake protect every citizen.

When intimidation is excused as righteous protest, it does not remain confined to one community. A democracy that makes exceptions for hatred undermines the very freedoms it claims to defend.

Albanese is right that Australia needs to turn down the temperature. But temperatures do not fall because a prime minister repeats a phrase at a press conference.

They fall when leaders hold allies and opponents to the same standards, when unlawful threats attract consequences and when Australians can trust the law will be enforced without fear or favor.

If Albanese wants to lead, he could begin by acknowledging that his own political side is not immune from inflammatory rhetoric. He could challenge extremism in movements he sympathizes with, rather than leaving the impression that civility is principally a duty for his opponents.

The prime minister does not need another speech about turning down the temperature. He needs to demonstrate that there are consequences for those who deliberately turn it up. And perhaps, for once, he could lead by example.

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Palestinian arts festival in Glasgow says the concept of linear time is a Eurocentric lie used against Palestinians

From the Jewish News (UK):

An arts group behind a controversial pro-Palestinian event in Glasgow has received more than £900,000 in public funding, sparking criticism over its use of a slogan widely condemned by Jewish groups.

Arika, which is organising a five-day event called Episode 12: From the Rivers to the Seas, was awarded £911,950 by Creative Scotland, a public arts body funded by the SNP-led Scottish Government, for the period 2025 to 2028.

The funding was revealed by the Daily Mail, which reported that the event had sparked accusations of antisemitism over its title.

I looked through the program and saw these two lectures taking place next Sunday:

Decolonising Time
Ramón Grosfoguel and Luke Devlin
2.45 - 3.45pm
Discussion | T4
Free & unticketed. First come, first served

Join world-renowned Puerto Rican decolonial thinker and activist as he unpicks the Eurocentric lie of linear time, and shares anti-colonial temporalities that arise out of, and in light of the life ways, suffering, dignity, and creative drive of oppressed communities around the world.

Access: Live Captioning

In the Time of Intifada: From Palestine to the Planetary Anticolonialism
Sherena Razek & Peter Makhlouf
4.15 - 5.30pm
Discussion | T4
Free & unticketed. First come, first served

How does Palestinian anticolonial resistance struggle against the colonization of our concept of time?

Access: Live Captioning

The idea that one thing follows another is apparently Eurocentric colonialism. 

There is so much that is so stupid about this. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians kept records of their kings' succession records thousands of years before Europe emerged as a world power. Conversely, the Europeans also maintained a cyclical concept of time along with linear, with agricultural seasons, liturgical calendars, and recurring religious observances.

There is merit to the idea that Europeans imposed their ideas of calendars and 24-hour days on  indigenous peoples. But that is much different from saying that linear time is a "Eurocentric lie."

And what does this have to do with Palestinians? Glad you asked! 

 In answering the call to abolish the cultures of Nakba, how do we confront the Nakba’s planetary scale and the forms of “elemental intifada” by which the land refuses its colonial subjugation? In the wake of the World Wars, Palestine proved the epicenter of the West’s attempt to reestablish capital’s global rule by whitewashing its crimes in the colonies. The genocidal onslaught against historic Palestine and the ecocidal assault on our shared earth are inextricably bound to the same global reordering. Both are grounded in a foundational lie: that catastrophe is inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest. In thinking with the Arabic language, to speak of ecological “disaster” is always already to have named “Nakba.”

In this conversation, Palestinian thinkers Peter Makhlouf and Sherena Razek sketch the chronic contours of Nakba as a temporal technology for securing colonial-capitalist futurity. They will probe how Palestinians militate against the imperial grammars of time that anesthetize us to the infrastructures of accumulation and dispossession that join Palestine and the planetary. Moving across poetry, film, visual culture, and collective praxis, the conversation will explore the temporal cosmologies within which the Palestinian culture of resistance refuses to allow the crimes of Nakba to be consigned to the elemental ash heap of history.

In short, the "nakba" cannot be understood merely as something that happened in 1948, but as something happening now. Which is, in fact, how it is increasingly presented. The distinction between a historical event and its present consequences is treated as a colonial imposition.

But there is a problem. If the "nakba" is defined as an ongoing condition rather than a historical event, what could ever bring it to an end? Palestinian statehood? Reparations? Peace? Or does the "nakba" necessarily continue as long as Israel exists?

The description condemns the idea that catastrophe is "inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest." Yet by making the "nakba" an enduring feature of the political order, it risks making the catastrophe permanent by definition.

And there is a lot of evidence that this is exactly what Palestinians want to do. This is why they relate everything back to 1948, because until Israel is destroyed, they are victims of a "nakba" today. The millions of Hindus and Muslims who became displaced in the same year during India's partition are not suffering a current crisis, nor are the descendants of tens of millions of World War II refugees. But Palestinians are.  The simultaneously complain that they are  eternal victims yet they want to define themselves that way. They could complain that Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and the Gulf states do not allow them to become citizens, but that redirects the blame for their misery away from Israel: better to remain stateless and tell the world that the "nakba" is ongoing.

That's why they hate the idea of UNRWA being dismantled. An organization created by those horrible Europeans is what gives them "refugee" status today. 

It isn't colonialism that makes catastrophe inevitable and permanent. It is the Palestinians themselves. 

The further irony is that if you extend their concept of time to everyone else, then the Jews belong in Israel at least as much as they do. 2,000 years of expulsion is meaningless when linear time is a lie. We might as well invite the Romans, Greeks, Crusaders, British and Turks into the land, because the Palestinian claim is only a recent one and recency is colonialist.  

Anyway, if the concept of linear time is so colonialist, why is the earlier lecture at 2:45 PM and the later one at 4:15 PM? Everyone should be able to attend every lecture simultaneously.  I think they are imposing Eurocentric ideas on the attendees of the festival.  Burn the programs!

---

 

Books by Elder of Ziyon

Reclaiming the Covenant Protocols He's an Anti-Zionist Too! At Ptach Lo (ebook) The Muslim Question (ebook, $8) Sarah Makes the World Better (ages 3-8)

More at: media.elderofziyon.com · Substack

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11/05 Links Pt2: Laundering Libel; After US elections, Iran knows its strategy is working — against everyone but Israel; Mr. Vice President: The Problem Was Not the Iran War. It Was the Ceasefire

From Ian:

Laundering Libel

The false characterization of Zionism as settler colonialism did not begin as neutral scholarship. It took shape as a Soviet-led campaign against Israel’s existence driven by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and was later propagated by activist academics who gave it scholarly veneer. In 1965, Fayez Sayegh, the founding director of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center in Beirut, published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, mapping the political vocabulary of 20th-century decolonization onto Zionism. Sayegh, then a member of Kuwait’s delegation to the United Nations, was the principal author of the 1975 U.N. resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The General Assembly revoked that resolution in 1991, but by then the idea had found a home in academia, where it has flourished ever since.

Maxime Rodinson’s essay “Israël, fait colonial?” (“Israel, a colonial fact?”) appeared in 1967 as the lead piece in a special issue of Les Temps Modernes, the influential journal founded and edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, France’s most celebrated philosopher at the time. The issue, running to hundreds of pages, focused on a single question: Was Israel a colonial state? Sartre’s journal lent that question the prestige of the European intellectual left. Its contributors divided on the answer, but Rodinson’s essay, later published in English as “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?,” proved influential and helped carry the framework into Western academic discourse.

Its timing was telling. The journal issue appeared before the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel did not yet control the West Bank or Gaza. In other words, the colonial charge did not begin as a criticism of the occupation. It was aimed at Israel’s very existence—which is why South Africa traces Israel’s “colonization” back to 1948. Most of the writing from the communist world and the Global South that cast Israel as a colonial state came after the war. Over the following decades, versions of the claim spread through universities, activist groups, NGOs, and international institutions, and each repetition gave it another layer of apparent authority.

But repetition is not proof. The settler-colonial characterization depends on substantial historical erasures. Jews are a people whose national identity originated in the land of Israel and who maintained both a presence and a connection there through centuries of exile and persecution. Zionism had no imperial mother country directing Jewish migration for its own economic or strategic benefit. No metropole extracted colonial wealth. Jews arrived from numerous countries—often fleeing persecution in those very countries. For many Jews, Zionism represented refuge, national restoration, and self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

“Colonizer” and “colonized” cannot simply be assigned as self-proving identities and then substituted for historical analysis. Yet that is the framework South Africa brought to the International Court of Justice. Once again, a false narrative about Jews, developed outside of law, had entered an official legal proceeding.

South Africa did not ask the ICJ to examine the Gaza war solely as a conflict following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre. Its application asked the judges to view the allegations within a much longer history. At the January 2024 hearing, South Africa’s ambassador invoked an “ongoing Nakba” produced through “Israel’s colonization since 1948.”

Why 1948, when the relevant narrative should begin on Oct. 7, 2023? The settler-colonial framework is designed to perform substantial legal work before one even reaches the alleged elements of genocide. It attempts to fix the parties’ identities as colonizer and colonized and to stretch the timeline back to Israel’s establishment in 1948. It also attempts to thread a revisionist continuity through the Jewish national project from the establishment of Israel, to subsequent wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the present war.

The point of the imposed narrative through-line is to supply an asserted criminal motive that is integral to Israel’s very existence: Israel’s military conduct can be understood not primarily as conduct in a war initiated by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, but as the latest stage of an allegedly eliminatory colonial enterprise.

Settler colonialism, however, is not a crime under the Genocide Convention. Nor is it an element of genocide. Its importance to South Africa’s argument is subtler. It is the narrative through which South Africa asks the ICJ to interpret the evidence of genocide.

That is particularly consequential because genocide requires specific intent: the intent to destroy a protected national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such.

The ICJ has imposed a demanding standard when genocidal intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct. In Croatia v. Serbia, the ICJ held that the inference of genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available from the conduct alleged. Alternative explanations therefore matter. Israel has maintained that its military objectives included defeating Hamas, preventing another Oct. 7, dismantling Hamas’ military infrastructure, and recovering the hostages Hamas had taken. These objectives matter enormously to a legal inquiry asking whether genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference from Israel’s conduct.

The settler-colonial narrative short-circuits that inquiry. Once Israel is defined as an eliminatory project since 1948, there is no need to weigh why Israel acted as it did after Oct. 7; the premise has already supplied the answer. Conduct that the war itself could explain is instead read as evidence of an eliminatory purpose supposedly built into Zionism since 1948. The false narrative ends up doing the work that proof of specific intent is supposed to do.

Then comes the second stage of laundering. The accusation acquires a case name, a docket number, written pleadings from sovereign states, hearings broadcast live from the Peace Palace, judicial orders, and a permanent place in the international legal record. None of those things proves the accusation. But each institutional layer increases the distance between the narrative, along with its ideological origins, and evidentiary defects.

The provisional-measures stage marked a particularly significant transformation. In January 2024, the ICJ was not deciding whether Israel had committed genocide. It was deciding whether interim measures were warranted as the litigation proceeded.

Among other requirements, the ICJ considered whether it had prima facie jurisdiction, whether at least some of the rights asserted under the Genocide Convention were plausible, whether those rights were linked to the requested measures, and whether there was a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice.

The ICJ found plausible the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts, and South Africa’s right to seek Israel’s compliance with the Genocide Convention. That was not a finding that genocide had occurred. It was not a finding that genocidal intent had been proved. And it was not a ruling on, much less an acceptance of, the settler-colonial narrative through which South Africa had framed its case.

But outside the courtroom, South Africa called the order a “decisive victory” and said it established that Israel’s actions were “plausibly genocidal.” Plausible rights became a plausible case, a plausible case became plausible genocide, and plausible genocide became apparent judicial confirmation. The legal proceeding added another layer. And then came integration. The provisional order began to be invoked in arguments that third states were now “on notice” of a danger of genocide and therefore faced obligations concerning their relationships with Israel.

The ICJ proceedings became part of disputes over arms transfers and military assistance. Civil-society organizations invoked the litigation in challenges to arms exports.

The ICJ was not necessarily the cause of each subsequent governmental decision, lawsuit, boycott, divestment demand, or diplomatic condemnation. But the mere existence of the proceeding supplied a powerful new source of institutional authority. The result is a loop: The narrative enters a legal proceeding; the proceeding generates consequences; and those consequences are then invoked to authenticate the narrative. That is the recursive structure of juridical narrative laundering, and it explains why the process does not require a final judgment.

Money laundering succeeds when dirty money can circulate as legitimate wealth. Juridical narrative laundering succeeds when an unproved accusation can circulate as legally validated fact. By that measure, the merits judgment may come almost too late. The accusation can accomplish much of its diplomatic, legal, economic, and reputational work years before a court decides whether it is true.

Melanie Phillips: Not waving but drowning

For Muslims, hatred of Israel is the obsession that drives out all other concerns. Now this unhinged tunnel vision is being promoted by Vance too.

Unforgivably, he has now undermined the war against Iran by all but urging immediate surrender.

But the reason Iran was a losing electoral issue was that Trump had not won the war. Instead, he abandoned it at a crucial juncture, declaring victory when Iran remained undefeated and able to push up the price of oil as a weapon of its war against America.

And a major force behind America’s policy of preemptive surrender was reportedly Vance.

Now Vance blames voter anger against Israel for the Republican rout. He fails to observe that this anger was fueled by the lies and distortions about Israel and the war that have been allowed to spread unchecked—not least by him.

The scene is now set for a titanic struggle on both sides of the American political divide. In the Democratic Party, centrists will struggle with anti-West, anti-Israel Muslims and leftists. In the Republican Party, conservatives will struggle with radical Jew-haters, white supremacists and conspiracy nuts.

The momentum is with the hard-left, the Jew-haters and the Islamists because the centrists on both sides of the aisle lack a moral and intellectual spine.

The outlook for America’s alliance with Israel is therefore ominous. That’s the real menace in the sudden ending of America’s $4 billion in military aid to Israel.

This is not in itself the blow that many have taken it to be. The suggestion came from Israel itself and is absolutely the right decision. That’s because, by transitioning to joint U.S.-Israel military projects, it transforms the Jewish state from being viewed as a demeaning supplicant into a partner.

This will free Israel, which is now urgently developing its own huge arms industry, from the stranglehold of dependency by which successive U.S. administrations have lethally curtailed Israel’s ability to defend itself.

The reason Israel wanted this was that it saw the catastrophic erosion of support for it among the American public. And that’s the ominous point.

The red-green alliance is destroying Britain and Europe because there’s now a critical mass of their public that has been left ignorant and unable to think because of an education system that’s gone Marxist and nihilist.

America has been afflicted by the same instruments of chaos for years. Now those forces have conquered the citadel.

Most people don’t like extremes. That’s why Trump was elected: to defeat the lunatics of the intersectional left.

The best argument for Trump was that the alternative was unconscionable. Now the unconscionable have captured Congress and much of America’s governing class.

Blue wave? America isn’t waving but drowning.

NYPost Editorial: Philly’s Nazi-laden boycott proves it was never actually about Palestine — just the Jews

A despicable Nov. 8 protest against Jewish-owned restaurants in Philadelphia proves that the alleged bright line between antizionism and antisemitism is a dirty lie.

Philly bicycle activism group On Your Left is launching a bike-by protest in support of Boycott CookNSolo drive to shut down six restaurants in the tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, all owned by Jews.

“These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” On Your Left demands.

These eateries, it says, must “die,” along with the “political ideology of Zionism.”

Zionists? Of the four restaurant owners called out by name for death or expulsion, one is Israeli-American; the other three are American Jews, but that’s all boycotters need to know.

One target, Marti Lieberman, who runs a popular mac’n’cheese spot, explains that her business has nothing to do with Jews, Israel or Zionism — except that she sometimes wears a Star of David necklace.

So, for the boycotters, simply being Jews is enough to make these people “disgusting humans” who should be driven out of business.

More damning still: The protest date, Nov. 8, coincides closely with the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazi thugs burned more than 1,400 synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses.

The organizers admit they knew this, but excuse themselves their event is the day before Kristallnacht.

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11/05 Links Pt1: Danny Danon: Do Not Mistake Israeli Democracy for Weakness; Will Congress Constrain Trump on Iran?; NPR Mimics UNIFIL Who Shields Hezbollah

From Ian:

Amb. Danny Danon: Do Not Mistake Israeli Democracy for Weakness

The turnout in the Israeli Knesset election on Oct. 27 was 77.7% of eligible voters, the highest in Israel's history.

Most importantly, the election results should daunt our enemies. Since Oct. 7, Israel has fought valiantly against the threats that surround us: Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and the Iranian regime itself.

All the major Israeli parties share the same philosophy: that Israel must address these threats and ensure they can never attack Israel again.

Israeli citizens have proven that in a region of extremism, our democracy remains a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, and that we will fight to protect it.

Eight months after devastating joint U.S.-Israeli strikes, Iran is rebuilding its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

An IRGC spokesperson this month threatened to turn Israel into "scorched earth," and displace our residents to the Sinai Desert. So long as Iran can deliver on these threats, we take them seriously.

Hizbullah itself admitted that it is preparing for confrontation with Israel. Iranian weapons and funds continue to arm radical extremists that seek Israel's destruction.

In the first election since Oct. 7, Israelis demonstrated that a secure and prosperous Middle East remains a top priority, and that we will defend our country from those who threaten to destroy it.

Our message to the Iranian regime is clear. We will not stand by as Iran doubles down on its radical agenda. We will protect our people.

After the U.S. Midterm Elections

Years ago, a Palestinian journalist argued to me that without America, Israel would have lost every war. I reminded him of the War of Independence and the Six-Day War, in which we won almost entirely on our own. It would be harder, I told him, but we would win every military campaign.

After the U.S. midterm elections, one pro-Israel stronghold remains, the White House, and it too will probably fall in the next election or the one after. Quite a few pro-Israel senators and House members remain. But what was once the lunatic fringe of Congress has become the mainstream.

The cause was a years-long, dollar-rich campaign, antisemitic in essence. It held that Israel is to blame for nearly every trouble Americans have, has no right to exist, and is a state of European colonialists that stole the land of the poor Palestinians.

President Trump's hasty declaration on Election Day about a full halt of aid to Israel only seemed to prove the claim that American aid does come at the expense of budgets meant for the American citizen. And try explaining to them that the $3.8 billion a year brought several times that amount into America every year, in jobs, arms sales, and joint developments.

Congress is expected to complicate the war effort in Iran. It will not truly be able to halt the moves, at least not for several months, but it will try, despite the complete contradiction to American interests and to those of every U.S.-friendly state in the region.

A new era is beginning. Israel will have to reach independent military capabilities sooner than expected and, at the same time, reposition itself diplomatically against a hostile Europe and a confused America.

Ending U.S. Military Aid to Israel

On Tuesday, President Trump announced that the U.S. would stop providing nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of 2026. President Trump just did Israel an enormous favor with an important step toward completing the promise of Israeli independence. For nearly 80 years, the Jewish state has been building toward a moment when it could finally say something that Jews, for most of their history, were rarely in a position to say to anyone: Thank you. We can take care of ourselves.

The foreign military financing is overwhelmingly directed toward purchasing American-made military equipment. It supports American manufacturers, American workers, American military production, and American technological capabilities. Yet, Israel finds itself portrayed as a helpless foreign dependent draining the American treasury. That perception is not only misleading. It has become strategically and politically damaging.

Israelis should be asking: What exactly are we sacrificing in exchange for that money? A country that has developed some of the most sophisticated military technology on Earth has been operating under a system that increasingly directs its military purchasing power toward foreign manufacturers rather than its own. Military assistance gives Washington considerable leverage over Israeli decision-making that may involve a delayed shipment, a threatened restriction, or a disagreement over how Israel conducts a military operation.

There is an enormous difference between listening to a friend and being dependent on that friend's approval. A country responsible for the survival of its own people cannot afford to confuse the two. The lesson of Jewish history is that a people who cannot ultimately provide for their own security are always vulnerable to the decisions of others.

Ending military aid should not be confused with abandoning the American-Israeli alliance. The U.S. has compelling reasons to maintain that alliance. Israel provides intelligence, technological innovation, military expertise, and a capable regional partner in one of the most strategically important parts of the world. Replacing military assistance with a more conventional commercial and strategic partnership could make the relationship healthier.

America has been an extraordinary friend to Israel, and American military support has contributed meaningfully to Israel's security. Gratitude, however, is not the same as permanent dependence. The greatest compliment Israel can pay the U.S. is to demonstrate that decades of partnership helped create a country strong enough to stand increasingly on its own.

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Intruder Filmed At Iran Nuke Facility Described As 'Scruffy-Looking Nerf-Herder' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Tehran, November 5 — Iranian security personnel released closed-circuit footage Tuesday of an unidentified male who breached the outer perimeter of the Natanz uranium enrichment complex shortly after 0300 local time. Facility officials described the individual, later estimated to be in his mid-thirties, as “a scruffy-looking nerf-herder” who displayed “an irritatingly confident posture” while moving through restricted zones near the centrifuge halls.

Footage shows the man, of medium build and apparent Corellian extraction, wearing a white collared shirt under a dark vest, with a holstered energy sidearm on his right hip. He made no attempt to disable cameras and at one point paused to adjust a pair of fingerless gloves while glancing upward, an action security analysts later characterized as “looking for an exit vector or simply checking whether anyone was impressed.”

Plant personnel found explosive devices or sampling equipment. A single coarse strand of long brown hair recovered near an access hatch has been sent for genetic sequencing; preliminary results indicate it may come from a Wookie - though a spokesman denied any such creature appeared on the cameras or life form readings.

Colonel Reza Mohammadi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force told state media the intruder’s gait and “smirk-to-blaster ratio” matched no known opposition profile, not any Mossad operative. “We have dealt with many foreign saboteurs,” Mohammadi said. “This one walked like he already knew which corridor would not set off the motion sensors. He also appeared to be talking to himself about having ‘made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs,’ which our technical staff is treating as either a coded threat or an unusually specific boast about reaction time. Isn't a parsec a unit of distance, not time? It makes no sense in itself.”

The facility’s independent power systems registered a brief surge consistent with a large freighter-class vessel performing a low-altitude pass roughly forty minutes after the breach; radar returns showed only transient clutter that operators dismissed as atmospheric interference, insisting that no ship that small has a cloaking device.

Iranian officials have increased patrol density and issued a standing instruction, despite assurances that nothing serious appears to have occurred during the breach. “Never tell me the odds," insisted Colonel Mohammadi.

A joint statement from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and the Ministry of Intelligence emphasized that the incident does not indicate a loss of nuclear material and that “all centrifuge cascades remain under full national control.” The statement added that any further unauthorized entries by individuals claiming prior experience with asteroid fields or carbon-freezing chambers will be met with “force.”

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Reclaiming the Covenant Protocols He's an Anti-Zionist Too! At Ptach Lo (ebook) The Muslim Question (ebook, $8) Sarah Makes the World Better (ages 3-8)

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