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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'We cannot protect your child[ren]'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Silenced Howl of Howard Jacobson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Mandel: You Hate To See It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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10/16 Links Pt1: Netanyahu to Obama: ‘Our land isn’t stolen,’; Bret Stephens: Going Back to To Jerusalem and Back; Seth Mandel: Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Going Back to To Jerusalem and Back

Current events books tend to age poorly. Controversies fade. Trends that seem unstoppable in one decade are unexpectedly reversed in the next. Predictions based on extensive data and careful analysis nonetheless prove wrong. It’s hard to make sense of one’s time, or of its direction, while living within it.

Yet to read Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back a half century after its publication feels remarkably, almost disconcertingly, current. On a visit to Kiryat Arba, the Israeli settlement next to Hebron, Bellow is distressed by the sight of Jewish kids playing so close to the Palestinian town: “It’s when I see the children on their bikes that I feel most uneasy, knowing how much madness there is just over the horizon.” (Remember: This is the mid-1970s.) Speaking of settlements, Bellow worries about “ultra-Orthodox zealots who insist that to settle on the West Bank is their God-given right.” The occupation, he says, “is costly and embarrassing. Israel, born out of a national liberation movement, now seems to be denying the Palestinians their political liberties.” But the attitudes of Israel’s enemies aren’t far from his mind, either. He quotes Syria’s minister of defense urging his troops not only to butcher Jewish foes but to eat them. “Egyptian and Syrian leaders speak of the founding of Israel as ‘the original sin,’” Bellow writes. “Is this sin so great that it justifies not only slaughter but cannibalism?”

Turning to global perceptions of Israel, he relates a conversation he had over lunch with Yitzhak Rabin, then the prime minister. “The Arabs have succeeded in winning worldwide public support,” Bellow warns, and “Israel had better give some thought to the media intelligentsia in the United States.” Rabin, like Israeli leaders before and after, shrugs.

In Europe and the U.S., far-left critics of Israel “are not overtly anti-Semitic” but discuss the country using “the Marxist-Leninist categories: finance capital, colonialism, and imperialism.”

The Ford administration, along with prominent commentators who speak for it, are growing weary of what they see as Jerusalem’s recalcitrance in the face of American diplomatic maneuvers, leading Israelis to fret constantly about whether their only true ally is about to turn on them.

Then there’s the problem of historical ignorance, particularly of young people passing judgment on Middle East affairs. “Very few Americans,” Bellow writes, “seem to know, for instance, that when the U.N., in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the U.N. plan.” Many French intellectuals agreed with the Arabs, Jean-Paul Sartre most of all, leading Bellow to note: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

As for the Israelis with whom Bellow spends time—not just political figures such as Rabin or Shimon Peres or Abba Eban but also kibbutzniks, Soviet émigrés, fellow novelists, Holocaust survivors, academics, masseurs and barbers, people of the left and others of the right—they were in 1976 very much what they are in 2026: brimming. Brimming with anxieties and hopes, recrimination and self-recrimination, opinions on every subject, profound doubts about the future matched by that unmistakable Israeli resoluteness. “Life in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is a clear purpose in it,” Bellow writes. “People are fighting for the society they have created, and for life and honor.”

If Bellow’s experience of Israel feels familiar, it’s a reminder that while much has happened in the intervening 50 years, little has changed. Threats from Egypt, Syria, and their proxies may no longer keep Israeli generals awake at night. Threats from Iran, Turkey, and their proxies do. The social tensions and splits that Bellow saw then—between the religious and secular, Israelis and Palestinians, critics of the occupation and defenders of it—remain more or less unchanged. Unchanged, too, is the volcanic hostility Israel arouses from its critics, so completely disproportionate to its place in the world or, even on the most invidious reading of its actions, the comparative scale of its alleged crimes.

Seth Mandel: Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury says Israel is ‘the land that God promised’

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said that Israel is “the land that God promised, and we must hold on to that”.

Speaking to a mostly Jewish audience at an event in Westminster, he said: “I think that the pattern of the history of God's people is that the nature of the land [of Israel] is embedded in who they are, and if we lose sight of that truth, we lose sight of why the situation there now is so difficult.”

The speech was for an event organised by Repairing the Breach, a group which works to “build healing relationships” between the UK and Jewish people who suffered under the British Mandate, especially in the post-Holocaust.

Addressing the current situation in the region, he said: “I'm not commenting on what's going on at the moment.

“It doesn't mean everything else is fine, you can do anything – but it does mean that place and promise, journey and return, are utterly and deeply embedded in the story of Israel, and we have to listen to that truth, and recognise that we must live in that truth.”

Guests heard from speakers who as small children had boarded the Exodus, a ship which carried more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors towards then-Mandate Palestine in 1947, and which was attacked and seized by the British Royal Navy, with passengers forcibly removed and sent back to Europe.

Others spoke about their relatives’ role in the Bricha movement, the underground network that helped Jewish refugees escape post-war Europe and make their way towards the land which would soon become the state of Israel.

“There are no reflections that are adequate in the face of those stories,” Welby said.

“Listen to the truth as to what the British did. Listen to how we kept people from going to the land which they were intending to make sure was the one place of safety in the world, and how we stopped that.

“It’s very easy for institutions to do the wrong thing because the rules say X or Y, or because we've been given orders to do it.

"But the lesson for me and the reflection I hear is that we must act according to what is right, to love justice and do mercy and walk humbly with our God.

“Where we have gone wrong, as the British nation, in our recent history and in our further history, it is a cause for repentance and sorrow and acknowledgement.”

Welby, who served as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury between 2013 and 2025, also spoke positively about the “people of Israel”, and of his reaction on encountering the opposite sentiment.

“One cannot look at the history of the people of Israel in any place without realising that wherever they are, they bring blessing,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To ask the question is to answer it. 

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

From Ian:

Gil Troy: It’s Time to Wake from Woke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider how the study defines euphemistic language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are other problems with the study, too. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

This Is Not the London I Grew Up In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) October 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we see the obsession Albanese has about Israel. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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