Sunday, June 28, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, June 28, 2026
From Ian:
Lyn Julius: There is no distinction between Jews and Zionists - ask Jews from Arab countries
Lyn Julius: There is no distinction between Jews and Zionists - ask Jews from Arab countries
It has been six months since 15 people were gunned down on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, prompting the establishment by a shocked government of a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.Between Jakarta and Jerusalem
The Commission has received over 16,000 submissions, and a block of hearings is slated to begin at the end of June.
My organization Harif – the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – was asked to make a submission on behalf of the 10 to 20% of Australian Jews who are Sephardi or Mizrahi (easterners), i.e., hailing from the Middle East and North Africa.
They may be a minority within the Jewish minority, but their experience of living in Arab and Muslim countries and fleeing from these lands can bring an essential perspective to understanding the causes of antisemitism sweeping through the West today.
The Commission might be able to learn useful insights from them, the first being that almost a million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the MENA, even though they had no part to play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Almost no Jews live in the Arab world today because Arab governments conflated Jews with Zionists. Jews were victimized as potential spies for Israel.
Whatever their political leanings and however spurious the pretext, Jews could be arrested, tried, and even executed for the crime of Zionism.
The second insight is that one cannot perceive a distinction between Jews and Zionists in Western antisemitism. Today, supporters of the Palestinian cause say they are against Zionism, not Jews.
When 'Zionism' becomes the cover
They point to the small number of Jews who join their protests.
However, it doesn’t take much to see that “legitimate criticism of the Israeli government” takes the form of verbal and physical abuse of Jews, firebombings, arson, and shootings at Jewish schools and synagogues, and ultimately, the murder of Jews simply for being Jews.
Left-wing Jews attempt to deflect by claiming that antisemitism is a problem for the Right. They claim that curbs on incitement proposed by the Commission are in reality limitations on free speech.
But the two gunmen who slaughtered Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach never asked what their victims’ views on Israel were.
Mizrahi Jews who are now resettled in the West are experiencing a sense of déjà vu, reliving the trauma they experienced in their birth countries. The bullying and harassment they thought they had escaped are back with a vengeance.
The slogans chanted in every anti-Jewish riot in Arab countries never did distinguish between Jews and Zionists.
Conclusion: The dawn of functional normalisation
Ultimately, Indonesia’s calculated steps toward the Gaza post-war architecture reveal a sophisticated paradox. President Prabowo’s conciliatory rhetoric and his willingness to engage with the Board of Peace demonstrate a level of pragmatic goodwill that would have been unthinkable under previous administrations. The strategic benefits of the move – currying favour with Washington, positioning Indonesia as a responsible global middle power and securing a seat at the table in Middle Eastern affairs – are simply too lucrative for Jakarta to ignore.
However, Western observers must avoid the illusion of an imminent, warm normalisation. The path to formal diplomatic ties remains firmly blocked by the domestic Palestinian veto and is entirely contingent upon a prior breakthrough between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
What we are witnessing instead is the birth of “Functional Normalisation”. The massive logistical realities of a potential Indonesian deployment, combined with daily operational coordination within the Board of Peace, will force Israeli and Indonesian defence, intelligence and diplomatic officials into unprecedented direct contact.
A stark preview of this reality occurred recently with the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, where the detention of Indonesian activists forced Foreign Minister Sugiono to utilise the Board of Peace as a direct de-escalation channel with Jerusalem. This crisis proved that while institutional ambiguity can be “quicksand”, the operational imperatives of crisis management create an unavoidable, functional dialogue.
For Israel, securing the active involvement of the world’s largest Muslim nation in securing its post-war periphery is an extraordinary geopolitical achievement. For Indonesia, it is a high-risk domestic tightrope walk. Therefore, functional, quiet and deeply cautious coordination is the maximum the current geopolitical architecture can bear, and even that is only feasible if the ISF mandate remains strictly defined and a Saudi catalyst remains on the horizon.
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday I wrote that the burden of proof is always placed differently on the Jew: the rabbi who must clear himself from "supporting genocide" before renting a house in France, the army whose seized weapons are presumed staged, the citizens of revolutionary France told to prove a loyalty no Catholic was asked to swear. The structure is built so the burden cannot be met. Compliance and defiance, denial and proof, all resolve to the same verdict, because the only admissible evidence is the defendant's Jewishness, entered as a guilty plea before the proceedings began.
A day later, Scott Wiener walked into Dolores Park.
Wiener is the front-runner for Nancy Pelosi's congressional seat, a California state senator who has attended the San Francisco Trans March for 22 years. He is also a Jew who, after sustained pressure, paid every cent the purity test demanded. He had once declined to call Israel's war in Gaza a genocide; in January he reversed himself after the mob went after hum and said plainly that he believes Israel committed genocide. He met the price. And on Friday a crowd surrounded him, screamed obscenities, flipped him off, made it impossible for him to safely remain, and drove him from the park for the first time in more than two decades.
This is the proof of what I argued in Friday, delivered faster than I could have arranged it. Wiener gave the mob the confession it wanted, and the confession didn't silence them - it emboldened them. The man who recorded the encounter told him he had been "wonderful for trans people" and "terrible on Gaza" — yet Wiener had already conceded Gaza. The grievance survived the concession. One heckler supplied the tell: Wiener "stopped being queer the moment he started supporting Israel." Past tense, after the recantation. Every policy reason to be angry at him had evaporated, and the anger remained, which means the anger was never about policy. The one variable that did not go away is the one nobody will name: he is a Jew who has not yet agreed that the Jewish state should cease to exist.
Wiener's own statement catalogs the abuse carefully — the crowd that surrounded him, the man who cornered him and his young women staffers at a Mission bar earlier in the week, the same man who in December 2023 stalked him on a plane and in an airport "shouting at me about my 'tainted bloodline.'" A tainted bloodline is a blood-purity slur, the oldest racial antisemitism there is, and Wiener quotes it in his own defense without appearing to register what it is. Then he draws his line in precisely the wrong place. He has "no objection whatsoever" to people disagreeing with him, but this isn't disagreement — it is hate, hate that wouldn't exist if Wiener wasn't Jewish, and anyone who watches the video can see it plainly.
What happened to Wiener is structurally identical to what I described six years ago about corporations and BDS. When a company gives the anti-Israel movement any concession, the campaign against it intensifies rather than subsides. CEMEX sold its West Bank quarry holding and remained a priority target. SodaStream relocated its entire operation inside the Green Line and the boycott leadership announced it would remain subject to boycott anyway. Veolia exited the Israeli market completely and was met with demands for "reparations." The capitulation is read as weakness, and weakness is read as an invitation to push harder.
The one public figure who refused to cave is the one walking around untouched. Jerry Seinfeld has been handed this loyalty test more times than Wiener has, and he has refused it every single time. Outside Madison Square Garden this month, a streamer shoved a microphone at him and demanded he say "Free Palestine." Seinfeld laughed and said, "It doesn't exist," and walked off. At Duke's commencement roughly a hundred students walked out and he told the rest, "A lot of you are thinking, 'I can't believe they invited this guy.' Too late." In Australia a heckler tried to chant him down and he answered, "We have a genius, ladies and gentlemen. He solved the Middle East," then watched the man dragged out. He has even stated the principle outright: "Free Palestine," he told a Duke audience, just means you are free to say you don't like Jews.
Seinfeld has principles and those principles is what allows him to walk in New York City without fear. He knows what he believes and when you know your own position, you aren't afraid of a mob screaming at you. Wiener showed that when it comes to Israel he has no principles and he caves to the mob. And now he cannot walk anywhere among the people he tried so hard to please.
The bully tests for softness. A wall ends the test, and a flinch begins the auction.
Wiener has a way out, and it is counterintuitive for a politician. The instinct is to continue to say how genocidal Israel is — a position Wiener doesn't really believe or he would have said it before January.
The strongest thing a person can do is admit he was wrong. Most politicians read a public reversal as weakness; it is the opposite. The man who cannot say "I was wrong" is the one controlled by everyone whose opinion he fears. The man who can say it owns himself again. Wiener spent the last several months controlled by a mob that despises him no matter what he says. He can take himself back in an afternoon.
He could say he is sorry he showed weakness to a mob that supports Hamas and denies the Jewish people the right of self-determination that it grants to every other people on earth. He could apologize to his fellow Jews for lending his name and his platform to the blood libel of the age. He could withdraw the genocide accusation clearly and forcefully — and on the evidence, I can hand him everything he needs to do it, because the accusation collapses the moment anyone examines the controlling legal standard against the actual conduct of the war. And he could say the thing that would end the auction for good: that his integrity matters more to him than any election, that he surrendered it for a while and regrets it, and that he would rather stand tall and lose the election than win as the coward he allowed himself to become.
That is strength. That would earn respect. He will not get the mob's approval by saying any of this. He wasn't going to get it no matter what he says. The difference is that the first path costs him his self-respect and buys nothing, and the second buys back the only thing the purity test was ever able to take from him.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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From Ian:
We owe the Jews of the 1930s an apology
We owe the Jews of the 1930s an apology
For most of my life, I looked back at the Jews of the 1930s with a question I could never quite answer: Why didn’t they see it?In new book, former AJC chief David Harris traces antisemitism’s past — and warns about its present
Why didn’t they recognize what was unfolding around them? Why did so many continue believing that reason would ultimately prevail, that institutions would protect them, that the political rhetoric wasn’t meant literally or that the hatred would eventually burn itself out?
Those questions become harder to ask with confidence when we look honestly at the world today.
Perhaps we owe the Jews of the 1930s an apology.
Perhaps they saw far more than we ever gave them credit for. Perhaps they understood exactly what was happening but found themselves trapped by institutions they trusted, political coalitions they had spent generations building and a natural human reluctance to believe that civilized societies could unravel as quickly as they eventually did.
That possibility should make every Jew stop and think.
History rarely repeats itself exactly, but it often rhymes with unsettling precision. The slogans change. The technology changes. The politics change. But human nature changes very little. Every generation convinces itself that it is more enlightened than the one before it; yet every generation eventually discovers that prejudice has an extraordinary ability to reinvent itself while insisting it is something entirely different.
Today’s antisemitism rarely introduces itself honestly. It often disguises itself as activism, social justice, anti-colonialism, academic theory or political purity. It changes vocabulary without changing intent. Hatred has always been remarkably adaptable. It learns the language of the moment because it makes it easier to recruit people who would never knowingly associate themselves with antisemitism.
That is what makes this moment so dangerous.
There are candidates seeking public office who have been trafficking in antisemitic rhetoric or repeatedly associating themselves with those who do. There are elected officials who cannot bring themselves to condemn antisemitism with the same clarity they demand on virtually every other form of hatred. There are universities where Jewish students increasingly question whether they can openly express their identity without becoming targets. There are institutions that seem more comfortable explaining antisemitism than confronting it.
None of this should feel normal.
David Harris spent more than three decades leading the American Jewish Committee, where he navigated crises facing the Jewish community and built bipartisan coalitions to advance the group’s mission of supporting Israel and Diaspora Jewry.Thank you, Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Your hate might just be a blessing in disguise
His book, Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press last year, is Harris’ attempt to reach beyond the Jewish community — churches, classrooms and the “average New York Times reader.” His goal, he said, is to turn the “silent majority” into the “loud majority.”
Written in the shadow of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel, the book arrived at a moment of surging antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world. It traces antisemitism from its ancient roots through the Holocaust, the Soviet era and its recent resurgence — the explosion on college campuses and beyond after Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Harris, who quipped that he retired “for about 30 seconds” after serving as AJC’s CEO from 1990–2022, sat down with Jewish Insider on Thursday to discuss the book at a moment in which he said he has “never been more worried” about antisemitism — yet also remains optimistic about the Jewish future.
Mamdani, the newly elected Mayor of New York City, has chosen to lead the charge as an overt anti-Zionist, deploying rhetoric that positions himself squarely against the Jewish state and the mainstream Jewish community. From his policy decisions to his endorsement of congressional candidates aimed at reshaping the American legislature, his positions are stark.
Mamdani is performing a vital service: he is alerting us before it is too late. By abandoning the polite euphemisms that long characterized progressive anti-Israel rhetoric, he is letting us know exactly where we stand. When he openly mocks the traditional Israel Day Parade in NYC while happily attending other cultural parades, he is showing us that the water is bubbling.
Consider his recent public declaration regarding the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Mamdani openly branded the mainstream pro-Israel lobby as “monsters” who move millions in “dark money.” Speaking from City Hall, he argued that they weaponize capital to “preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.” He declared: “In the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we need not live in fear of monsters any longer.”
The mayor governing the city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel is not just looking to have a local impact, but a national and global one. Utilizing the laundering of classic, ancient conspiratorial accusations from the highest municipal podium in America. When an elected official swaps out traditional diplomatic expressions for terms like “monsters” and a hidden hand, “turning us against one another,” he normalizes a dangerous propaganda pattern characterized by three distinct realities:
• The Creation of Moral Binaries: reducing a multi-layered, existential regional conflict into a simplistic fairy tale of pure oppressors and pure oppressed.
• Emotionally Charged Outrage: mobilizing a political base by framing ideological opponents not as mistaken, but as morally illegitimate and subhuman, literal “monsters.”
• The Deployment of Scapegoating: suggesting that a powerful, Jewish-associated organization is the clandestine architect of broader domestic societal suffering.
Mamdani operates within a democratic framework subject to courts and elections; the danger lies in his techniques. History teaches us that when you systematically dehumanize a group and simplify complex realities, you create a social atmosphere where raw prejudice becomes acceptable, normalized, and eventually weaponized.
From Ian:
US-Israel-Lebanon sign trilateral framework agreement aimed at dismantling Hezbollah
Ron Arad remains talks spark skepticism, ex Mossad official says negotiations could help search
US-Israel-Lebanon sign trilateral framework agreement aimed at dismantling Hezbollah
The United States, Israel, and Lebanon signed a trilateral framework agreement aimed at combating Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah on Friday, after days of US-mediated talks in Washington.Full text of Israel-Lebanon ‘framework’ deal that includes slight IDF pullback
According to a US State Department statement, the agreement outlines a structured process for disarming Hezbollah, dismantling terrorist infrastructure, and enabling the IDF to withdraw from Lebanon once the threat posed by Hezbollah is removed.
The agreement also established a US-facilitated trilateral Military Coordination Group for Lebanon (MCG4L) to ensure the implementation of the framework.
The US, according to the statement, will also take steps to improve the capabilities of the Lebanese Armed Forces and support Lebanese military efforts against Hezbollah.
In addition, the US pledged to contribute $100 million for humanitarian assistance to be coordinated with the United Nations.
A first step towards peace, prosperity, and mutual coexistence
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio commended Israeli and Lebanese leadership and delegations for their participation in the talks and for signing the agreement.
While Rubio noted that there is still much work ahead, he highlighted the importance of the framework and stated that the US is “honored to have played a part in bringing this together.”
“Today is the first step. This first step sometimes is the hardest one, but it’s an important one and the one we’ve taken together,” Rubio stated, adding that he hopes the agreement will bring about “a future of peace, a future of prosperity, a future of mutual coexistence.”
During the signing of the agreements, Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter praised the trilateral cooperation as a “historical” move towards peace between Israel and Lebanon.
“In my opening remarks four days ago, I expressed concern that this train was running off the tracks, that Iran and its proxies wanted a trainwreck,” Leiter recounted.
Ron Arad remains talks spark skepticism, ex Mossad official says negotiations could help search
Following a Lebanese report that contacts are underway to bring back the remains of Israeli navigator Ron Arad, who was captured in Lebanon in 1986, his friend Ronen Meir told 103FM on Wednesday that listeners should keep the matter in perspective: "We are overwhelmed with attempts and disappointments."
Meir, a friend of Arad who graduated with him from the flight course during their time in the IDF, spoke on 103FM with Prof. Aryeh Eldad and Ron Kaufman about the report.
In light of the report from Al Jadeed, according to which the political negotiations between Lebanon and Israel are expected to include the possibility of a deal in which Arad's remains would be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners, Meir dampened expectations.
"That sounds to me somewhat absurd, if not delusional," he said. "We are saturated with previous attempts of this kind. From my familiarity with our enemies and neighbors, this tune always plays, and we are saturated with disappointments on this matter."
"Let's assume that the Lebanese do indeed have information about Ron and want to bargain with it. The best and simplest thing they could do is send a sample so we can see whether there is someone to talk to. To refute it through a journalist does not seem to me like a serious channel for anyone who wants to deal with such a complicated issue."
Meir referred to Israel's past and present efforts: "It is worth noting that only a few weeks ago, the Israeli government sent a commando force with four Yas'ur helicopters into Lebanon in an attempt to recover Ron's body, and we almost left a great many dead there. With all the pain and my personal desire to solve the mystery of my friend, we need to be careful about fantasies and fleeing into unrealistic areas."
"The ethos of not abandoning a soldier should not go back to Ron. One can look two and a half years back and see what happened to that ethos when we had living civilians and soldiers in captivity, and some of them returned in body bags. The question is what price we are prepared to pay for that ethos. It is legitimate to use judgment," he continued.
To conclude, Meir recalled the family's position over the years: "In Ron's case, his mother Batia Arad gave her testament while she was still alive and said she did not want any soldier to risk his life if it is known that Ron is no longer alive."
"Tami Arad, my friend, said immediately that same night of the commando operation that 'we said from the outset that for Ron's body, not even one soldier should be put at risk.' If there were really anything to the reports, the first thing they would do is give a sample. How many samples have we already received that we have discovered were donkey bones? It simply does not seem serious to me."
Friday, June 26, 2026
- Friday, June 26, 2026
- Elder of Ziyon
There is one antisemitic trope that was invented in the 18th century, became a central pillar of Nazi ideology, and continues in full force today: the Jew as parasite.
The idea solidified when social Darwinism became fashionable in the 19th century, extending natural selection from individuals to social and racial groups. Under that theory the Jews were a problem. A Semitic people with — the theory insisted — inferior racial and social attributes should have been outcompeted and winnowed away. Jewish survival was impossible, and Jewish success in finance, the media, and the professions was an outright refutation. The framework predicted the Jews should not exist, and they kept existing and succeeding.
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| "Thou shalt devour the peoples of the Earth" Nazi poster of the Jew as a worm |
The Nazis ran with it. Der ewige Jude intercut footage of swarming rats with footage of Jewish financiers. The vermin and the schemer are not a contradiction between the weak Jew and the powerful Jew. They are the same framework, and it resolves the contradiction: the Jew is powerful because he is a parasite, small and contemptible and therefore able to control a host only by burrowing into it. Disgust and fear stop being two reactions and become one. The metaphor also carries its own conclusion — once the Jew is pathogen, extermination reclassifies as hygiene, and the doctor and the soldier do the same work.
A parasite has three features, and the full antisemitic construct requires all three:
- Extraction. It draws resources from the host — labor, wealth, blood.
- Conversion. It turns what it extracts into control over the host.
- Hijacking. It does not merely influence the host; it commandeers the host's own power and turns it against the host's own life, while the host believes it is acting freely.
The Nazis are gone. Yet the trope is as strong today as it ever was, on the right and on the left, and most of the people carrying it have never heard of Schäffle.
From the right, Tucker Carlson supplies all three in sequence. He has described pro-Israel donors and legislators implementing a program to alter American demographics while preserving Israel as an ethnostate (extraction and conversion), and tied it together with the claim that there is "a direct connection between loyalty to a foreign power and a desire to hurt this country" (hijacking). He has even suggested DNA-testing Israelis to determine whether they are "really" descended from Abraham — the parasite must be unmasked as a foreign body in native disguise.
Candace Owens carries it to an audience of thirty-five million. The United States, she says, is "being held hostage by Israel" — and the host need not be a nation. On her old Daily Wire show she described "a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism," a ring "controlling people with blackmail" and branding anyone who objects a racist. That is the whole machine in one image: the parasite's constitutive smallness, control achieved through blackmail, and the shield that turns every accusation back on the accuser. A small ring controlling everyone is the same claim as a small nation controlling a superpower. Either way, the parasite is the Jew.
That hijacking clause is not a figure of speech. When Joe Kent resigned this spring from the National Counterterrorism Center, he wrote that "we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby" and blamed the death of his own wife, killed in Syria, on "a war manufactured by Israel." The host's own blood, a soldier's blood, spent on the parasite's war.
The Left also trades in the trope. Cenk Uygur, who runs the largest progressive show online, says of his ban from Britain that "they say that my charge that Israel controls the American government through donations to 94% of Congress, while factual, is antisemitic nonetheless" — control asserted as plain fact, and the charge of antisemitism folded back in as proof of the control it names. Max Blumenthal, editor of the anti-imperialist Grayzone, has said he used to think Zionist Occupied Government was an antisemitic term but now is "forced to see it as a pretty accurate description of the reality we live in as one nation under ZOG." He reasoned his way to a literal Nazi acronym and announced he was forced to it — which is why his work circulates on neo-Nazi sites.
Nothing shows the construct's reach like COVID, because a pandemic let the parasite jump to the largest host of all: the entire world. The accusation assembled itself in weeks and ran the full sequence: Jews or Israel manufactured the virus (the Press TV writer who held that Israeli pressure groups "running United States foreign policy" were amplifying the plague in Iran, "which one suspects that they themselves may have actually engineered"); they converted the manufactured crisis into control, the lockdowns and the vaccine drive recast as a calculated plot to institute a "Global Jew Government"; and the captured world was then steered against its own life — the vaccine reimagined as the instrument of depopulation, a Jewish scheme to sterilize the white race or to enslave all humanity. This is all three steps by the Jew against the entire planet. There were variants - the virus is a Jewish hoax to control the world, or the virus was a Jewish bioweapon to control the world. Either way, the Jew is the parasite using whatever means he can to make nations act against their own self-interests.
The complete three-stage construct is not confined to the fever swamps. Walt and Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy argues using respectable prose that the lobby steers America to act against its own interests — extraction, conversion, hijacking, all wearing a tweed jacket. America has a farm lobby, a gun lobby, a banking lobby, a pharmaceutical lobby, a tech lobby, each ferociously effective, and no one writes the book in which the dairy farmers capture the Republic and march it into self-destruction. Only one lobby is ever assigned that role. The worst antisemitic trope can be a well-reviewed book without the reviewers recognizing the lineage of the argument.
Like every antisemitic theory, this is a conspiracy theory, and like every conspiracy theory it is unfalsifiable. Jews cannot have succeeded on their merits; they must have captured the system and run it for their own ends against the will of the host. The protest that they did no such thing becomes further proof of how thoroughly they control it. And the host is interchangeable: the United States government, the European Union, Hollywood, the world financial order, the human species under a manufactured plague. The host changes. The parasite is always the same, and it is always the Jew.
But this Jew-as-parasite idea is infinitely more dangerous than the conspiracy theories of Jew as puppet master, or Jew as controlling banks or the media. A parasite must be destroyed for self defense. It was Hitler's central theme, as he wrote in Mein Kampf: the Jew "is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading... wherever he appears, the host people dies out."
In that frame, murdering Jews becomes a sacred task. That is the logical endpoint to this. People with power and influence take this idea seriously and spread it., and as such it is the trope that must be recognized and fought against with full force.
Not only when it is spread by skinheads but especially when it is spread by people with an audience of millions.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Friday, June 26, 2026
- Elder of Ziyon
Palestinians are trained from birth to believe one thing above all: Israel is the enemy, and anything that distracts from that fact is heresy. The word used to enforce the idea is "unity."
There is nothing wrong with unity in itself — I wish more Jews had it — but in the Palestinian context the word does specific work. It makes the worst behavior untouchable, whether terrorism against Jews or the treatment of Gazans as cannon fodder. Criticism of any kind is ferociously attacked. Any crack in the unity gets judged as treason, and the sentence for treason is death.
Today, a mass protest is being planned for Gaza against Hamas. It is being organized from Palestinians abroad. The reason is obvious: if they were still in Gaza they would be arrested, beaten and maybe worse.
The main organizer, a journalist named Abdul Ati now living in Cairo, had his slogan ready before the threats started: "We are one people, bound by pain and a shared fate, and unity remains the shortest path to protecting everyone." He meant it as a plea — let us disagree without anyone getting hurt. He believed unity was a shield.
The clerics of Hayʾat ʿUlamaʾ Filastin, the Palestinian Scholars Association, issued a fatwa the day before the protest and used the same word to try to quash it. The movement, they declared, is fitna — sedition, the tearing of the collective — and ifsad fil-ard, corruption in the land. It serves the occupation. To call for it is forbidden, to join it is forbidden, and staying silent about the people behind it is forbidden too; the duty of every believer is to expose them, denounce them, and strip them bare. The protest is a "criminal movement" that betrays God, His messenger, and the believers.
Abdul Ati reached for unity to protect the right to complain, and the men with religious authority reached for unity to make complaining a capital offense against the nation. His version comes with a slogan. Theirs comes with a precedent: last spring Hamas executed six Gazans who had marched in protests like this one, flogged others, and disappeared the rest.
This is the only unity that has ever actually held in Gaza, and it holds because the alternative is death. You may grieve, you may starve, you may bury your children, you may have been beaten and tortured by Hamas, but the only allowed target for anger is Israel. Abdul Ati learned the rule in real time: he announced he was quitting the campaign after his family was threatened, then reversed himself a few hours later. He's not in Gaza but Hamas' threats reached him. A man with three small daughters, had to decide whether a protest about bread is worth his children's lives. That is what the unity imperative looks like from the inside.
This imperative affects everything you read about Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular. Every Gazan who speaks to a foreign reporter speaks under that same rule. The stringer filing the copy lives in Gaza, his family lives in Gaza, and he reports under exactly the threat Abdul Ati was buckling under, knowing the penalty for blaming the wrong party. So the testimony flows one way. If a death can be possibly pinned on Israel, it must be; if it can't, avoid mentioning it at all if possible. Dissent against Hamas, when it surfaces in Western coverage at all, arrives nameless and hedged — a "resident" who "prefers to remain anonymous" — and that's the rare day. When the outlet is leaning on a Gaza-based stringer, it gets vanishingly rarer than that, for reasons everyone in the chain understands and nobody prints.
Hamas, for its part, is behaving exactly as a movement that executes its critics behaves. The failure belongs to the people facing no penalty at all. Every editor running a Gaza dateline knows the speaker isn't free. They know the fatwa, or they could; they know about the six bodies from last spring. And they run the quote as though it came from someone who could have answered differently and chose not to. The coercion is Hamas's crime. Laundering the coerced testimony into "what Gazans say" is the West's, committed in air-conditioned offices by people who will never be flogged for filing the wrong sentence.
Abdul Ati naively hoped that using the word "unity" might shield him. But it was never about unity. It always was about the Palestinian leaders, whether Hamas or Fatah, enforcing their views in the most brutal way possible and pretending that this is what unity looks like. The Western NGOs and media go along with the farce, because it protects their people under Palestinian rule and because it enforces their own desire to blame Israel for everything that Palestinians do to each other.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: NYC’s black-red alliance of Islamism and ultra-leftism wants us to hate Israel and America
Melanie Phillips: NYC’s black-red alliance of Islamism and ultra-leftism wants us to hate Israel and America
Red-black extremists are now threatening establishment candidates in Colorado, Michigan and Wisconsin, while another radical leftist is poised to become mayor of Washington DC.Alex Hearn: Rooney’s antizionism isn’t political comment but a creed: Israel is evil, its defeat salvation
This process will metastasize even further very fast. Galvanized by the October 7 attacks and the way western elites subsequently turned against Israel, the Islamists believe they’re on the cusp of victory over America and its allies.
While their motivation has gone through the roof, their useful idiots in the West’s liberal establishment are refusing to see what’s staring them in the face. Instead, they’re obsessively sticking pins into effigies of Donald Trump, while acting as an echo chamber for the Islamists’ lies painting Israel as a demonic force in the world.
Although New York’s voters may nod along to these lies, most of them hardly rank Israel as of greater concern than things like the cost of living.
But Israel stands proxy for something else: a state that the public believe is grinding the faces of the poor and disadvantaged. Just like them. So a vote for those who hate “oppressive” Israel appears to them as a vote for the “oppressed” everywhere.
The Democrats imagine that they’re using the Islamists to promote left-wing policies. The truth is that the Islamists are using the Democratic party to turn the US into Ameristan.
People don’t take this seriously because they can’t believe it could ever happen to mighty America.
Look at Britain and believe it. This is how the western frog is being boiled slowly in the pot.
None of this began on October 7, 2023. The atrocities of that day gave permission to people who were already converted. Rooney joined the boycott of Israel in 2021, refusing to let an Israeli publisher translate her novel into Hebrew while it stayed on sale in Chinese and Russian. That same year, academics went viral copying and pasting a single paragraph that declared opposition to the world's only Jewish state “integral” to their scholarship and “moral worldview”. They then instructed one another to evangelise others and “pass it on”. An entire worldview, copied and pasted, about a state thousands of miles away.Rising antisemitism ‘the biggest disgrace of our times’, says incoming Telegraph owner
And the permission has had consequences. Attacks on Jews spiked the moment Hamas broadcast its atrocities, and they have not fallen back to where they were. The ideas surface now where they once stayed hidden – in workplaces, in the arts, and on the street. In Stockholm a few months ago they staged a piece of medieval theatre: a man dressed as the caricature of a Jew wearing a blood-soaked apron, holding a champagne flute of blood. He mimed the slaughter of a Palestinian woman while the crowd chanted “crush Zionism”.
It is an old habit. During the Dreyfus Affair, Frenchmen used the figure of the Jew to settle what kind of country France was. A victim of an antisemitic conspiracy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused and convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana. He was later cleared but the question behind his case – whether Jews truly belonged – was not. The philosopher Hannah Arendt described the Affair as a dress rehearsal for a performance staged decades later. In 1944 Dreyfus’s granddaughter, Madeleine Lévy, was murdered in Auschwitz. Her name was carved into his gravestone because she had no grave of her own.
The case against Dreyfus only broadened, from one man to a people. The question moved with the times: from “can a Jew be a citizen?” to “can Jews have a state?” Antizionist where once it was anti-Dreyfusard – only the right in dispute has changed. Back then, the French parliament had a debate about “Jewish infiltration”. Now in 2026, the British parliament just had a debate about “Israeli” infiltration. Same shtick, different century.
Rooney cannot be waved away as a masked figure at a march. She is one of the most gifted novelists of her generation, read by millions, and she has taken the oldest accusation in Europe and given it the vocabulary of the age. In her telling, to stand against the Jewish state is not merely permitted. It is the measure of whether you are a good person at all.
When religion receded it left a space – the need to feel good, and to belong. What looks like politics is really a faith, and what looks like a faith is really the search for a self. People build an identity out of their stance on what Jews represent, then call Jews the rootless ones. But the emptiness is their own.
The chief executive of The Telegraph’s incoming owners has described the resurgence of antisemitism among young people as “the biggest disgrace of our times”.Is The Media Turning a Blind Eye to Montreal Shooter’s Antisemitism?
Speaking in London on Wednesday, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, warned that hatred of Jews had become a “global export” in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, with alarming levels of support among younger generations.
“The thing that worries me most is that antisemitism is now a global export, originating largely from Germany and Austria, and is particularly popular among very young audiences,” Döpfner told delegates at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference.
“That is for me the biggest disgrace of our times. I simply cannot believe it.”
Döpfner, who is also the controlling shareholder of the German media giant, reflected on the failure of the international response to the attacks.
Despite what he described as the clear distinction between perpetrators and victims on October 7, he said the aftermath had produced not a surge of solidarity with Jews, but a wave of hostility.
“After October 7, where the question of who started it, who was the perpetrator and who was the victim, was so obvious, that did not create a global wave of solidarity, but a wave of new antisemitism,” he said.
“That goes way beyond Jewish life. It affects us all. Jews are the first victims in an open society model.”
His comments drew rapturous applause from the several hundred audience members attending the conference at the vast Olympia venue in Hammersmith.
Axel Springer has one of the most explicit pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist policies of any major Western media company. Its corporate constitution, known as the Essentials, includes a formal commitment to “support the right of existence of the State of Israel and oppose all forms of antisemitism”.
Is the media fully explaining the ideological drive behind the actions of Seth Scott Hatfield, whose shooting rampage in the heart of Montreal on June 22 led to the deaths of a police officer and a Jewish civilian?
Based on a manifesto that was made public following the attack, both the Canadian media and international outlets (such as CNN, The Guardian, and Le Monde) have compiled an ideological profile of Hatfield, focusing on his stated hatred for feminism, liberalism, capitalism, pornography, “favored males,” and immigrants.
The manifesto reads as though it is inspired by a mixture of revolutionary Marxism and incel (involuntary celibate) culture and is being presented as such by the mainstream media.
However, one aspect of Hatfield’s hate-filled screed that has received little to no mention by the media is his abhorrence of the Jewish people.
Either his antisemitism is mentioned in passing several paragraphs into an article or it is not mentioned altogether.
Despite this lack of media attention, Hatfield’s hatred for the Jews is not an insignificant part of his violent ideology.
From Ian:
Who’s Afraid of the Good War?
Who’s Afraid of the Good War?
To help answer this question, we turn again to Obama. In May 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago, he gave a little-remembered speech in Japan.Israel Is Not Just Another Ally
“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” Obama posed this question to the world at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, seemingly conscious of making history as the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city—one of only two ever targeted by U.S. atomic bombs. Obama had already embarked on a much lambasted multiyear “apology tour” to foreign countries, including a 2009 talk before Turkey’s parliament in which he lamented America’s “darker periods” and the ongoing “legacies of slavery and segregation.”
His Hiroshima audience might have expected an address on nuclear nonproliferation, and Obama did deplore the “capacity for unmatched destruction” that nuclear weapons make possible. He also praised the hibakusha—survivors of the 1945 strike—citing a “woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself.” He offered no corresponding tribute to the American pilots who risked their lives for their country, nor any defense of the American decision to attack Japan; rather, he lamented the human tendency “to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He enjoined his listeners “to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering.” He came to Hiroshima, he explained, to be reminded of the “ordinary people” who “do not want more war.” He never once sought to legitimate the cause in question or the notion that war is at times justified.
None of this is especially surprising given Obama’s famous insistence on “change.” Around midway through the speech, however, he offered something distinctive. After portraying World War II as having grown out of “the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes,” he sketched his view of Hiroshima’s significance:
There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war—memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
Here, Obama was engaging in a tentative attempt at mythmaking. The defining image of World War II, in this telling, was not that of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy or the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign above Auschwitz. No: It was an image that, in Obama’s words, represented a sinister “material advancement,” employed by America “to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.” American capitalism and American racism thus seem to undergird Obama’s understanding of World War II. He neatly placed the American decision to use the atomic bomb alongside the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany; all of it, he suggests, reminds us of mankind’s aptitude for evil. In this moment, he drew no moral distinctions in his condemnation of the horrors of war. In subtly conflating Nazi evils and the American response, Obama created a permission structure for his ideological partners to do the same thing.
Revisionists on the right, in part by taking refuge within Obama’s permission structure, have furthered this de-mythification project. Instead of castigating America for being racist, however, the right-revisionists rebuke their country as an antireligious tyranny, run by global elites. In this telling, American leadership became drawn into World War II by globalist interests while ignoring the plight of their own countrymen. Other, more extreme voices cast Hitler and Mussolini as heroic for wanting to strengthen their own nations and sense of national identity.
The loudest advocate for this New Right ethos, as of this writing, remains Tucker Carlson, who seeks not merely to keep America out of war or restore American manufacturing, but to remake American mythology.
In a dangerous region, words from Washington are not simply opinions. They become strategic signals. America must lead without losing the trust of its allies. Israel is not a temporary partner or a tactical convenience. The relationship between America and Israel is strategic, democratic, cultural, moral, scientific, military, and historical. It is woven into the American story, just as America is woven into Israel's story.For Israel, the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran Is an Existential Question of Survival
Israel, for generations, has stood as a democratic ally in a region where democracy is rare, danger is permanent, and the cost of miscalculation can be existential. The countries on the front line with Iran - Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait - do not experience Iran as an abstraction. They experience it through missiles, drones, proxy networks, air-defense alerts, threats to shipping lanes, and the permanent pressure of a regime that has made destabilization a method of statecraft.
These countries have the right to ask questions. They have the right to demand clarity before being asked to live with the consequences of an agreement negotiated above their heads. If the U.S. wants regional partners to choose moderation over extremism, normalization over rejection, and modernization over ideological darkness, then Washington must show that such choices are rewarded with respect, consultation, and protection.
Israelis were told that the war with Iran was over last week, yet the shooting continued into the weekend and at least five Israeli soldiers were killed by the Islamic Republic's Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon. For us, Washington and Tehran's "memorandum of understanding" isn't a policy debate; it's an existential question of survival, deterrence and the balance of power in the Middle East.
Israelis know that our interests are aligned with but not identical to those of our friends in America. We also know that the current disagreement doesn't diminish Donald Trump's historic support for the Jewish state. We've never had a stronger ally in the White House.
The Islamic Republic isn't a normal state. It is a revolutionary, imperialist dictatorship bent on exerting its will around the globe. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has systematically lied to the international community, armed terrorist proxies, called for Israel's destruction, and brutally oppressed its own people.
An alarming development is the Islamist coalition, led by Turkey, that helped bring about this moment. Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become one of the most destabilizing powers in the region, fueled by a poisonous blend of Islamist ideology and neo-Ottoman imperialism.
Israel learned on Oct. 7, 2023, what happens when you refuse to take your enemies at their word. We now listen carefully to the jihadist slogans of al-Sharaa's forces in Syria, the imperial and antisemitic declarations of Turkey's leadership, and the Iranian regime's contempt for the U.S.
Stability can't be gained by empowering those who reject the foundations of the Free World. Peace can't be bought by rewarding regimes and movements that treat diplomacy as a tactical break between rounds of aggression. And the goal of Israel's destruction can't be treated as a legitimate grievance.
The Middle East punishes wishful thinking without mercy. It will do so again if the West continues to mistake Islamism for pragmatism, appeasement for diplomacy, and silence for stability.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
- Thursday, June 25, 2026
- Elder of Ziyon
humor, Preoccupied
Gaza City, June 25 - The Islamist terrorist organization that governs much of the Gaza Strip announced today that it will hold the first Palestinian parliamentary contest since 2007, on the first day of the month between this coming Septober and Novuary.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri addressed reporters from a reinforced underground facility, flanked by maps of the region and portraits of deceased resistance leaders, crowded on the wall to th point that most could not be identified. “Our people have waited long enough,” he said. “Octember 1 represents a fresh chapter, one where every voice in Gaza and the West Bank can be heard clearly. We have consulted widely, and this timing aligns perfectly with our strategic needs and the will of the masses.”
Hamas secured a decisive victory in the last legislative elections held in January 2006. In the years since, the movement has focused its energies on governance, infrastructure projects, and emplacement of human shields around military positions and stockpiles. Officials noted that shifting to Octember allows sufficient time for candidate registration, platform development, and ensuring broad participation across factions committed to the cause.
Residents in Gaza offered a range of perspectives. “It’s about time we had our say,” remarked shopkeeper Fatima al-Masri, 52, while arranging produce at her stall. “Octember feels right. Things have been quiet on the political front for too long.” Younger voters appeared cautiously optimistic, with many taking to social media to share memes blending campaign slogans with local humor.
Others voiced disappointment. "I was hoping for the traditional Palestinian election date of the thirty-first of Never," confessed Fat'hi al-Masri, 44. "The younger generation isn't old enough to remember any actual elections, which means they lack any cultural memory of it. It's up to the older generation and the decision-makers to ensure that the lore is preserved, whether it's the lore of Yasser Arafat riding a white horse to Al-Aqsa to secure the presidency, or the traditional Palestinian celebration of electoral victory involving tossing defeated rivals off of Gaza rooftops."
Party officials assured the public that preparations would be thorough. Ballots will offer clear choices among approved candidates, all unified in their dedication to liberation. Campaigning will unfold through community meetings, digital outreach, and public rallies, with security measures in place to maintain order. Hamas emphasized that the process remains open to those who prioritize national unity and resistance, just as soon as authorities can master the logistics of Octember elections.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Thursday, June 25, 2026
- Elder of Ziyon
The UN Commission of Inquiry's report on Palestinian children accuses Israel of deliberately exterminating the young of Gaza, and there have already been excellent rebuttals. UN Watch's Salo Aizenberg took apart its evidentiary method, showing that across ninety-four pages the Commission never establishes a single case in which a soldier identified a child as a civilian and killed the child for being one, while erasing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the battlefield entirely. Brian Cox, working the legal seam, showed that the report's doctrine is hollow — that it never accounts for munition-mitigation techniques the IDF routinely uses, never establishes the knowledge and intent that the laws of armed conflict actually require, and reverse-engineers "genocidal intent" from outcomes rather than building it from doctrine. Both are right, and both work from the top down: the architecture is rotten, so the conclusions fall.
I want to come at it from the opposite end. Taking a single statistic in a report that has hundreds, I plan to show that the UN "experts" that wrote this report deliberately chose whatever supported their predetermined verdict and ignored everything else.
Paragraph 27 says: "Some 5,160 children are estimated by Save the Children to be buried under the rubble."
That figure is false, and the way it got into the report is the report in miniature. There were four separate points at which the Commission could have checked it. At each one, it either failed to look or looked and printed the number anyway.
The first check was the Commission's own arithmetic. Save the Children built the 5,160 estimate on the assumption that children make up 43 percent of Gaza's casualties and there were 12,000 people missing under the rubble. It is a guess made up out of multiplying two statistics, one from the Gaza Ministry of Health and the other from Hamas police.
Yet the Commission's own paragraph 26 puts the child share of the dead at 30%, not 43%. And the UN at the time it wrote its report claimed 10,000 buried under the rubble, not 12,000. If the commission would use Save the Children's methods, there would have been 3,000 presumed dead under the rubble in 2024, not the 5,160 Save the Children estimated then. That is over 2,000 supposedly dead children who disappear if the UN commission would have trusted its own accusation of 30% casualties being children.
That's a large number of dead children to make up.
The second check was the date on the citation. Save the Children page came up with its estimate in June 2024. The Commission published in June 2026. It reached back two years, past a war whose reported toll had since nearly doubled, to retrieve an estimate made when the conflict was only nine monhs old. Save the Children itself had moved on: by September 2025, its recap of Gaza's child casualties had dropped the specific number and reduced the claim to a vague "thousands more are missing or presumed buried under rubble." The source downgraded from a figure to a gesture, and the Commission reinstated the figure. A body searching for accuracy reaches for the most recent estimate. This one reached for the largest, and the largest happened to be the oldest, because the passage of time had only shrunk it.
The third check was the parent number's provenance. The 5,160 is a fraction of the "missing under the rubble" figure that circulated in 2024, reported anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 and traceable to Hamas's Civil Defence. OCHA used the 10,000 figure in its weekly Gaza snapshots, repeating it without caveat the way it repeated most figures the Gaza authorities supplied. The Commission could have asked whether that base number still stood. It did not stand. OCHA's February 4, 2025 snapshot carried the missing-under-rubble figure as it always had. Its February 11 snapshot, one week later, dropped it — no retraction, no correction, the number simply gone. Even the academic researchers who argue Gaza's dead are undercounted excluded the rubble population from their models precisely because it could not be substantiated. The figure the Commission resurrected is the one that everyone closer to the data had already quietly discarded.
The fourth check was the recovery data, the most direct test of all. The "thousands under the rubble" premise predicts that once the rubble could be cleared, thousands of bodies would emerge. The January 2025 ceasefire created exactly that condition: weeks with no airstrikes impeding recovery, no operations sealing off neighborhoods. The bodies did not emerge. According to Gaza's own Health Ministry, the daily recovery counts fell week over week, down to two bodies recovered on one day in February — a rate that cannot be reconciled with 9,500 still to be found. That is why OCHA dropped the figure the moment the ceasefire made it checkable: it had been checked, by reality, and it failed. The recovery data is Gaza's own. The Commission did not have to trust Israel or anyone else to consult it. It consulted nothing, and printed 5,160.
Internal arithmetic, citation date, source provenance, recovery data — four levels at which the figure could have been tested, four levels at which it collapses, and the Commission cleared all four to deliver the number to print. The pattern is not that the Commission made an error. An error is random; it points in no particular direction. This points in one direction at every step: toward the stale figure over the current one, the abandoned base over the corrected one, the largest available number over the verifiable one. A single buried statistic, traced to the floor, shows an institution that did not weigh its evidence and arrive at a conclusion. It arrived at the conclusion and went looking for the largest numbers that would dress it.
This is the Commission's methodology. That is one paragraph, one number, in a report that runs to three hundred and sixty-six of them. The Commission asks the world to accept the other three hundred and sixty-five on trust.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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From Ian:
The Church of England’s problem with antisemitism
The Church of England’s problem with antisemitism
In the photos posted on social media, Sarah Mullally is seen in their living room, and prominent on the wall is a painting of a man; when they are standing and praying, Sarah is standing right in front of him.Liberal Jews must stop appeasing the socialist radicals who hate them
This man is Layan’s great uncle, the brother of her paternal grandfather, Kamal Nasser. Nasser was born in 1924, and became a celebrated political leader, writer, and poet. In 1967, he joined the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, who has invented the term ‘Palestinian’ to refer to those who wanted to destroy Israel and return to their land (prior to that, ‘Palestinian’ has been a regional term that described modern Israel, Jordan, and Syria). Nasser was also a ‘Palestinian Christian’—and this is the point where we need to recognise that, in this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus as we might use it.
Nasser had joined the PLO just at the point where it made the Khartoum Resolution, in response to the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. This was known for its three ‘Nos’: no peace agreement; no negotiation; no recognition of the State of Israel. This led inevitably into more warfare, culminating in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Part of the violence of the PLO, which (with Russian help) developed into the foremost global terror organisation, was the 1972 Munich massacre, when Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village, killed two Israeli athletes, took nine more hostage, and eventually killed them during a failed rescue attempt. Nasser was one of the people who masterminded this operation.
For anyone outside the situation, it is hard to understand how ‘Palestinian Christians’ could be involved with anti-Israeli and antisemitic terror. But in fact the links between the two are longstanding and well developed. Nasser’s father was Reverend Butrus Nasir, who was a leader within Palestine’s Arab Protestant community from Bir Zeit. The founder of the PFLP, a radical Marxist terror organisation, was George Habash, a ‘Palestinian Christian’.
And the Greek Orthodox Church has had long links with the PLO going back to the 1960s. Many ordinary Palestinian Orthodox Christians and clergy of Palestinian descent are sympathetic to or actively involved in Palestinian nationalist politics — many Palestinian officials across ministries, the PLC, the PNA, and the PLO are Christians. There’s also a documented history of crossover between Greek leftists and the PLO more broadly: during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Greeks belonging to the anti-dictatorship socialist movement trained in PLO camps in Lebanon, and when the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, Greece—under PM Andreas Papandreou, who had close ties with Arafat—became its first destination.
That is why we can see a picture of Yasser Arafat on the wall of the office of Archbishop Benedictus, as he is meeting Sarah Mullally. Our archbishop has managed to be photographed in front of, not one, but two notorious terrorist leaders within the space of a couple of days—quite an achievement! And you can see the intertwining of terrorist resistance with Christian devotion in the painting of Nasser: in the background of the canvas, there is a traditional iconographic depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ.
It is worth reflecting how both Israelis and British Jews will be made to feel by seeing these images.
The old saying goes that an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.Yehuda Teitelbaum: No, New York Didn't Vote on Gaza
When it comes to progressive Jews and the DSA, the well-fed crocodiles are just about ready for dessert.
I’ve been watching this strategy of inclusion of hateful actors by Jewish groups and politicians play out since I came to the US almost 20 years ago from Israel.
As someone who always believed in freedom, peace and equality, I imagined I’d find a home on the American left.
Imagine my confusion when I learned that in many circles, being a liberal in good standing meant denouncing the only democracy in the Middle East, staying quiet in the face of racism and violence directed at my community from other minority groups, and all but a pledge to agree that, sure, synagogues are being fire-bombed and Jews threatened every day, but don’t let the statistics confuse you — it’s only real antisemitism if it comes from the MAGA-hat region.
I have yet to encounter a club where turning my back to the truth was worth the price of admission.
So my confusion turned to rage over the years as I saw fellow Jews align themselves with people who openly and proudly spread hateful propaganda and support violence against the Jewish community.
Many cloaked these partnerships in the language of “allyship,” patting themselves on the back for being open-minded enough to have conversations with those who disagree with them.
But at what point do you close the flaps of the “big tent” of Jewish thought to those who are trying to destroy it from within?
Brad Lander, who less than a year ago still considered himself a Zionist, was happy to trade in his dignity for Instagram likes, embracing the lie of a genocide in Gaza, and posing happily in campaign ads alongside Darializa Avila Chevalier, who chose to celebrate the massacre of Oct. 7 in Times Square as Israeli mothers were still frantically searching for their missing and murdered children, among them several Americans and New Yorkers. They may not see eye to eye on political issues like whether Lander’s friends in Israel deserve to live or not, but hey — we can agree to disagree, right? Other politicians and activists practically trip over themselves to virtue-signal their standing as “Good Jews.”
I'm already seeing people trying to turn the election results into some grand lesson about Israel and Gaza. Sorry, but no.
If anti-Israel politics were really driving these races, Ritchie Torres would have been in trouble. Instead, he just won nearly 72% of the vote in one of the poorest and most heavily minority districts in the country.
Whatever else yesterday showed, it certainly didn't show that Democratic voters are punishing politicians for being pro-Israel.
The candidates who won have spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy spreading horrific blood libels about Israel, accusing Jews and Zionists of all sorts of crimes, praising convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, marching with people celebrating Hamas on October 8 while Jews were still being slaughtered, defending Mahmoud Khalil, and treating a conflict 6,000 miles away as though it were one of the central issues facing New York.
And yet I don't think any of those things are what put them over the top.
The average voter is not lying awake at night thinking about Gaza. The average voter is worried about paying the rent and buying groceries, and progressive politicians have figured out that they don't actually need to explain anything in order to capitalize on that anxiety. They don't need to explain where the money is coming from. They don't need to explain how any of it works. They just need to promise lower costs, free healthcare, free childcare, free college, debt forgiveness, more benefits, and some version of economic salvation.
Once people become convinced that there's a pot of gold sitting in front of them, almost everything else becomes irrelevant.
That's not an excuse for the voters, and frankly, I find it astonishing that someone can spread grotesque lies about Israel, praise actual terrorists, mock American symbols, and still get elected. Not very long ago, pulling just one of these stunts would have ended an entire political career.
But that's where we are, and confusing what voters tolerated with what they actually voted for is a serious mistake.
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