2025 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Saturday, December 20, 2025

12/20 Links: ISIS kills Jews while Australian politicians blame guns; The Progressive Takeover of Jewish Campus Life; A Son’s Eulogy for Norman Podhoretz (1930-2025)

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: A Son’s Eulogy for Norman Podhoretz (1930-2025)

So many nice things have been said about him the past couple of days that my sister Naomi pointed out it was a genuine shame he wasn’t here to read them and hear them, because you just cannot imagine how much he would have enjoyed it. How much he would have enjoyed the tributes from Senator Cotton, and Ruth Wisse, and Jonathan Tobin, and Abe Greenwald, and Noah Rothman, and Matthew Continetti, and Elliot Kaufman, and Barton Swaim, and Yuval Levin, and Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Tevi Troy, and Seth Mandel, and Meir Soloveichik. He. Loved. Praise. But there was something in him, some iron in him, some deep well in him, that did not allow him to trim his sails or maintain the reputation that meant so much to him by acting with a careerist’s prudence.

That’s why his greatest flaw, or at least the quality that caused him the most unnecessary pain, was how much he continued to value or judge himself by the cultural settings established by the same fashionable folk who had rejected him for holding fast to his love of country and love of tradition and love of his faith—in Billy Joel’s words, “the people that he knew at Elaine’s.” I once told him that he didn’t know who he was, by which I meant, he had no idea how many people had been influenced by him, who viewed him as a titanic figure, who saw him as one of the great men of our time. He had no idea, really, because while he had contempt for the New York City bubble, he remained inside it for most of his life, and couldn’t find his way out, even after the bubble itself lost control of things.

But not always. In 2004, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his room at the Hay-Adams Hotel the morning of the ceremony, he sat on his bed as he began to get dressed and began to sob and could not stop sobbing. He was 74 years old at the time. His father had been a milkman. He had shared a pullout couch with a very young uncle in the living room of the family tenement flat until he was 18. His magazine never had more than 30,000 real subscribers. He hadn’t published a bestseller. But there he was, a first-generation Jew whose parents were never fully fluent in English, who never took the easy path, and in a matter of hours the president of the United States would be garlanding his neck with the nation’s highest civilian honor. He wept with gratitude. As he said in his book, My Love Affair with America, “What America has done for me could not have been done for me alone, and could not have been done at all if the institutions, ideas, and attitudes that grew out of its founding assumption had not been in place and applicable to all who were lucky enough to live under them.”

What was this, really, but humility in its highest form? It was the humility that said what has happened to me in my life, the greatest gifts of my life, were gifts—gifts from the Almighty, gifts from the founder, things he did not do for himself but that America “has done for me.”

But there are things he did for himself, and by himself, that marked him as a great-souled person, and they are matters he did not write about, nor did he seek celebration for. If I am a good man, and I hope I am, it is because of the gift he gave me of showing me what it truly means to be a man. Not because he was tough, or intellectually honest, or brave, or possessed of good views. It’s because of what he did for my sisters.

I have three sisters. Ruthie and I are his issue. Rachel and Naomi were not. They were the children of our mother’s first marriage. Norman married Midge when Rachel was 5 and Naomi was 4. Rachel and Naomi had a father. Norman was determined not to interfere with the parental rights or paternal connection between Rachel and Naomi and their biological father. And yet. That man would miss his child-support payments. And that man would skip out on some of his time with them. And when they did have time with him, the girls would often come home from their visits sad or upset or gloomy. A lot of this took place before I was born. Rachel was 10 when I was born and Naomi was nine. And I swear to you. I swear to you. This is my truth, as they say. I never, ever, ever, ever, felt that he was any more of a father to me than he was a father to Rachel and Naomi. Whom he at some point determined he was simply going to have to raise, and care for, and succor, and support, and love.

He became their father. This was a choice he made. It was a choice that, in some fundamental sense, he did not have to make. What he was obliged to do was to be kind to Rachel and Naomi, and be friendly to them, and treat them well. He was a nice guy, so of course he’d be nice and friendly to his wife’s daughters. And they were smart and charming and cute, I assure you, and so, that being nice and friendly to them would not have been hard duty. Besides which, he was a kid. He was 27, 28, 29 when this challenge was presented to him. The challenge to stand up and man up and take responsibility.

So he clasped them to his heart. In a million ways great and small, he made certain that Ruthie and I knew we were not to view ourselves as different from them in his eyes. More important, we felt it. It was inhered in us. The only difference I could discern is that Ruthie and I called him Daddy and Rachel and Naomi called him Normie.

Of course the psychological story for all concerned was more complex than this, as I have come to understand as we all grew and we all aged and we lived through crises and disappointments and then through the horror and heartbreak of our Rachel’s passing 13 years ago, which tore a hole in our family that could never be mended, and then through the final years of our mother’s life. Through it all, we have always been close, closer than most, and more than our mother, more than our shared love for all our children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren and grand nieces and grand nephews, all 29 of them, this was possible because of what he did. He made that happen. He made Ruthie and me feel that Rachel and Naomi belonged to us and we belonged to them, because it could have been otherwise. But it wasn’t otherwise, because he looked at these two girls and he said, “You are mine too.”

On her deathbed, Rachel told Norman that he had made her feel safe. That phrase has been poisoned over the past decade or so, made political and false, but what she meant by it was that he had made the world under her feet feel steady. And what greater tribute could there be to his actions than the fact that it has been Naomi, whom he did not even meet until she was 3, who has been the primary provider of his care and attention these past three years? Ruthie and I owe her a great debt—but then, Naomi and Rachel alike were the greatest rewards we received from him in any case. They were ours because he made sure they became his.

So yes, he was a wonderful writer. And yes, he was a brilliant editor. And yes, he changed the world for the better. And I hope the world will remember him for all of that.

But the man I hope my children will emulate, and that their children will emulate, and all his grandchildren and great grandchildren here in this room—that man is the one who said I will be the father that my God and my wife and my honor demand that I be for these two little girls.

That is the greatest moral success story I have ever known.

That is making it.

Mark Levin: Tolerance, rational discourse are being smothered

The following is a transcript of Fox News commentator Mark Levin’s opening statement from the Dec. 14 episode of “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

The shooting at Brown, two dead students, others wounded. Terrible, terrible, terrible, and our soldiers murdered in Syria. I mean this is serious stuff, and I know our president will deal with what took place in Syria.

We are going to have to figure out how to deal with these colleges and universities. I am not sure but that we do need to figure out. And also this slaughter that took place in Australia.

You know, ladies and gentlemen, people have written books, Hitler’s American Friends, The Abandonment of the Jews, Beyond Belief, Buried by the Times, Stalin’s Apologist. People say that history repeats itself. Is that going to happen now? I fear it damn well might. You have two men slaughtering Jews on Chanukah. You know what it reminded me of? When I watch Schindler’s List, and that colonel goes on the balcony with a rifle. There are Jews in the field and they are working in the camp and he takes his riffle and he starts picking them off one by one as if he is shooting at deer or hogs or something like that.

With a United Nations that is nothing but a cesspool of Jew-hatred, the vast majority of European governments, left-wing governments, are appeasers of Islamists. You have Communist regimes such as China that arm our enemies and arm the enemies of Israel, stoking antisemitism in our own country. You have fascist regimes that are doing exactly the same thing. Monarchies in the Middle East. We have a Western press that is essentially a voice for Marxists and sympathetic toward Islamism, spreading blood libels, accusing Israel of committing genocide knowing they are using false information that Israel is creating famines, executing innocent civilians blowing up hospitals, schools and mosques.

Everybody knows exactly what is going on. Israel is not going in and doing these things. Israel is defending itself for the zillionth time against enemies that surround her trying to obliterate her and destroy all of its people. The Marxist paradigm of Israel the oppressor and its enemies the oppressed. A lie that Israel is occupying lands that are in fact the ancient, indigenous lands of the Jewish people. Do you have a Bible on your night table? If you read it, it will tell you right there, as will the rest of history.

Hamas operative behind group leading anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian marches in UK – report

A man said to be an operative for the Hamas terror group is at the head of an organization leading anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests in the United Kingdom, The Times reports.

Zaher Birawi serves as the chair of the Palestine Forum in Britain (PFB), one of six groups that make up the Palestine Coalition which has organized at least 20 rallies this year, including one this week to support detained hunger strikers from Palestine Action, proscribed as a terror group.

Israel said in September that Birawi is one of a number of “high-ranking, well-known Hamas operatives” involved in the Gaza flotilla movement. He is described on the pro-Palestinian outlet Middle East Monitor as a journalist, the chairman of the International Committee to Break the Siege on Gaza, and a founding member of the International Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

In October 2023, Labour MP Christian Wakeford used parliamentary privilege to name Birawi as one of four “senior Hamas operatives” active in Britain, The Times reports.

“This house rightly voted to proscribe Hamas in its entirety in November 2021,” he said. “It is therefore a serious national security risk for Hamas operatives to be living here in London.”

One of the other three individuals named by Wakeford was Ziad El Aloul, who is also connected with PFB, The Times says.

ISIS kills Jews while Australian politicians blame guns

Albanese’s response sends a chilling message to Australia’s Jews: We will protect you symbolically, but we will not confront those who want you dead. We will light candles, hold vigils and issue statements, but when it comes to naming the ideology that made the massacre possible, we will avert our eyes and purse our lips.

This pattern is not new. Jews have seen it across Europe, North America, Britain, Canada and Australia. When jihadists attack Jews, the authorities’ response is always curiously oblique. Leaders speak of “hate,” “extremism” or “violence,” as though these were free-floating abstractions. The word antisemitism is often whispered. Islamism almost never is.

This is because acknowledging Islamist antisemitism shatters too many illusions and upsets too many powerful constituencies. It would force governments to confront the limits of multiculturalism, to debate immigration honestly and to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that some belief systems are not merely “different,” but actively hostile to liberal democracy and minority safety.

It also complicates the preferred narrative—a superb piece of inverted fiction in which Jews are cast as powerful oppressors rather than perpetual targets. In progressive moral hierarchies, Jews are rarely granted the status of innocent victims. Naming Islamism as the enemy would force a reckoning that many Western elites are desperate to avoid.

So instead, governments regulate objects.

Every time a leader responds this way, extremists learn that their ideology will not be challenged, that their networks will not be named and that their religious justifications will be handled delicately, if at all. The state will busy itself rearranging furniture while jihadists plan their next attack.

Here is what I want Australia’s leaders to say: Australia has a problem with Islamist extremism, and Jews are being targeted because they are Jews. There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? I didn’t even need to issue a press release or hold a media event.

Solving the Islamism problem will require acknowledging its scale and severity; deploying extensive intelligence resources against radical networks; and embracing deportations, surveillance and prosecutions where necessary.

Above all, it will require the courage to say that these ideas and beliefs do not belong—and cannot belong—in a liberal democracy.

12/19 Links Pt2: Chanukah Is Relevant for Everyone—but Not in the Way You Might Think; At TPUSA Ben Shapiro completely dismantles Tucker Carlson; Hezbollah’s Secret Maritime Plot Exposed

From Ian:

Josh Hammer: Chanukah Is Relevant for Everyone—but Not in the Way You Might Think

The core message of Chanukah, then, is one of traditionalism and cultural preservation in the face of menacing and assimilationist forces, both within and without. That's the real meaning of the holiday—not exchanging gifts or waxing poetic about universalist platitudes.

Yet paradoxically, especially in light of tragic recent events, something occurred to me for the first time: This stridently particularist Jewish holiday does have broader—indeed, global—relevance. It's just not the relevance liberal politicians have ascribed to Chanukah. Indeed, it's the exact opposite.

The Maccabees were able to prevail and thereby preserve Judaism, against the odds, because they had purpose and conviction. They believed that Judaism stood for something important: They believed that ethical monotheism was important, the Hebrew Scriptures were true, and the Land of Israel belonged to the Children of Israel. In short, the Maccabees had national and civilizational pride, and it was because of that pride that they fought so valiantly and refused to bend the knee to Hellenistic assimilation. They rejected the universalist cri de coeur that all cultures and peoples are equal—and perhaps interchangeable.

In recent decades, and even more acutely in recent years, Western civilization has had to learn that lesson anew. Human beings, while all made in God's image and thus all deserving of dignity and moral worth, are immensely complicated. We are not reducible to widgets on an economics chalkboard. Our inherited cultural traditions and learned customs and mannerisms are often very different from one another. We don't all value the same things, pursue the same goals, hold the same social standards, or believe in the same political institutions.

We are, in short, different.

The Maccabees understood that there was something special about the truths, values, and principles that Judaism introduced to the world. They were not willing to sacrifice those truths, values, and principles to the siren song of Hellenistic universalism. Western nations today must learn that same lesson anew. The modern Maccabee martyrs senselessly slain last Sunday at Sydney's Bondi Beach are yet the latest victims of Hellenism gone awry, as one culture tries to replace and erase another.

It doesn't have to be this way. A culture can be proud without being chauvinistic. And a people can be self-confident without being imperious. If there are going to be fewer Bondi Beach-style massacres, moving forward, Western cultures and nations are going to have to rediscover and reprioritize what made them great in the first place. They're going to have to remember that human beings, and the specific societies they constitute, are unique. They cannot, and should not, be swapped or frivolously bartered like goods in a marketplace. We have our traditions, values, and ways of life that are worth cherishing and preserving from one generation to the next.

It might not be politically correct, but that is how we can apply the true lesson of Chanukah.

Antisemitism Is Thriving Because Schadenfreude Makes People Happy

One reason our fight against antisemitism is so complicated is that Jew-haters won’t allow Jews to be victims. Victimhood today confers both status and power. Don’t Jews already have more than enough?

I like to study faces and body language. In the hundreds of clips I’ve seen of anti-Israel demonstrators since Oct. 7, I rarely noticed any sadness for the plight of Palestinians. What I saw instead was swagger and bravado, a sense of owning justice and sticking it to those who deserved it.

Because the Gaza war provided so much anti-Israel ammunition for so long, there was a sense of liberation among protesters; a chance to unleash resentment that had built up for years.

The fact that this venom is still being unleashed after the end of the war tells us all we need to know. It’s not about creating a better future for the Palestinians. It’s about creating a terrible future for a people that had it coming. We can only imagine the schadenfreude Jew-haters experienced when Jews were murdered in Australia at the start of that highly visible and joyful holiday of Hanukkah.

I know that hatred for Jews is famously elastic, that haters find a way to hate Jews whether they’re rich, poor, weak, strong, left, right, capitalist, socialist, and so on. Today, maybe because of the extraordinary success of the Jewish state, the dominant reputation of Jews is strong, influential and successful.

A year ago, I quoted British philosopher Eve Garrard who argued that “There are (at least) three principal sources of pleasure which anti-Semitism provides. First, the pleasure of hatred; second, the pleasure of tradition, and third, the pleasure of displaying moral purity.” After seeing the post-war glee on the faces of Jew-haters, I’m suggesting today that we add the pleasure of schadenfreude.

It’s not pleasant, of course, to consider that the more successful one becomes, the more one is likely to be attacked. It’s also not pleasant to think that after all the complex explanations we read about Jew-hatred, a sentiment as primordial as shadenfreude can drive some of that hatred.

But human nature dies hard.

We can only hope for the day when “success” reclaims its place as something to be admired and emulated, not something to be embarrassed about because it’s twisted as “white privilege.”

Until then, we’ll have to settle for the consolation prize that we’re hated for doing great things– even if that ends up bringing temporary pleasure to Jew-haters.

Happy Hanukkah.

X’s Transparency Rules Expose a Synthetic Gaza Disinformation Network

X’s new location-transparency requirement has reshaped the information environment surrounding the Gaza war. After the platform introduced the policy, accounts that had long claimed to report from Gaza displayed locations in Europe, North America, and Turkey. These accounts produced much of the imagery and narrative framing that circulated widely after October 7, 2023. Western journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and policymakers often treated them as front line observers, which gave fraudulent accounts disproportionate influence over public perception and policy debates.

Open Source Intelligence analyst Eitan Fischberger’s November 22, 2025, thread highlighted how X’s new “About This Account” panel first exposed prominent accounts posing as American or local Gaza/Palestinian voices. Fischberger notes that he captured the screenshots himself and urged others to share only accurate examples.

The Gaza information space is target for actors seeking to influence foreign audiences. Accounts that presented themselves as civilians in Gaza posted emotive casualty claims and siege narratives. The new transparency rule revealed that many operated from cities such as Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Istanbul. These accounts maintained credibility by repeating familiar themes and amplifying one another to create the appearance of consensus. Several shared identical videos or images from unrelated conflicts, and the repetition increased engagement and reach.

Western media outlets accelerated the impact of this ecosystem. Journalists cited these accounts as eyewitness sources during breaking-news cycles. Nongovernmental organizations incorporated and echoed posts from them in emergency situational reports. These narratives didn’t stay on fringe accounts. Members of Congress amplified them—for example, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) reshared a miscaptioned Syria photo as “Gaza genocide” before deleting it—and then carried casualty figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry into House speeches, hearings, and ceasefire proposals. The result was a commentary environment in which unverified accounts—sometimes operating thousands of miles from Gaza—shaped the discourse more than professional reporting.

Open-source analysis reveals several recurring patterns. One account that frequently announced broadcasts from Rafah displayed a European location tag immediately after the transparency change. Another that described Israeli operations in real time was posting from different foreign locations, suggesting the use of obfuscation tools. Several videos that circulated as evidence of Israeli strikes originated from Syria or earlier conflicts. These recycled images spread because audiences reacted to their emotional framing rather than their metadata or provenance.

The structure of this network aligns with broader features of the modern media environment. Newsrooms seek rapid content during crises and often draw material from social-media sources before verification. Non-governmental organizations fill information gaps with viral posts that appear to support long-standing narratives. Policymakers respond to perceived public pressure rather than confirmed reporting. Synthetic accounts understand these incentives and produce content designed to meet them. The result is an information space in which misleading claims gain traction before correction mechanisms engage.

The power of synthetic Gaza accounts also reflects Western cognitive vulnerabilities. These accounts focus on themes—hunger, displacement, bombardment—that provoke immediate moral reactions. The framing encourages audiences to assume authenticity even when indicators point elsewhere. Once a claim enters mainstream conversation, corrections rarely reverse its influence. Narratives take hold when they align with preexisting expectations in Western institutions.

12/19 Links Pt1: Howard Jacobson: Shtetl grit and Jewish self-belief; Australia declares day in honor of Bondi Beach attack victims; Suspect in Brown/MIT murders found dead

From Ian:

Howard Jacobson: Shtetl grit and Jewish self-belief

I have promised myself not to be political, which is hard given the last two years, never mind last four days, but allow me to ask an almost political question: Have we Jews gained as much as we have lost by kicking off the mud of the shtetl? To my eye, Jews have looked a little adrift of late, dismayed and baffled in proportion to the degree that they are — I won’t say assimilated – but acculturated or, if you prefer, un-shtetled. The apple can fall too far from the tree.

My father’s Manchester shtetl friends put on their wartime medals and went out onto the street to take the fight to Oswald Moseley. My father claimed he once breached a police cordon and got close enough to Moseley to throw a punch at him. Only Moseley’s horse, rearing back, saved its rider from a bloody nose. Whether it’s true that my father knocked out the horse I don’t know. But it’s a good joke, whether it happened or not. When people asked if he was sorry for the horse, he shrugged his shoulders. In his view Moseley’s horse was antisemitic by association.

Leaving Manchester means learning to see the horse’s point of view.

Well, we have all moved on. Leaving Manchester is a metaphor for loss. Shtetl vitality is no more. We no longer risk the jokes we once made for fear of giving offence. The refined are frightened of their own shadows and the intelligentsia I longed to join have turned out to be gullible fools.

We light the Chanukah candles in memory of a miracle that occurred 3,000 years ago, but we are careful not to rejoice too openly in our victory. Modern historians question the miracle of the oil, remind us that not every Jew was on the side of the Maccabees – ‘Not in my name,’ some of them chanted — and find a hundred other faults with the story. As though there are any stories that don’t exaggerate or distort. You don’t think all I’ve told you about Manchester is true, do you?

What matters is that we recall a vigorous version of our past, because without such past we have no vigorous present.

We survive because we believed in a God who, so long as we fought for who we were, wouldn’t let the oil run out.

May there never be a time when we grow too sophisticated and self-doubting, too cowed and apologetic, to do as the Maccabees did and stand firm against those who want to see the back of us.

Australia declares day in honor of Bondi Beach attack victims

The Federal and New South Wales governments have declared Sunday, December 21, as a day of reflection in order to honor the victims of the Bondi Beach mass shooting, announced Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a press conference early Friday.

Albanese went on to say that intelligence has confirmed that the Bondi Beach attack was ISIS-inspired.

He also announced that Australia will launch a national gun buyback scheme in the wake of the attack, declaring that "we expect hundreds of thousands of firearms will be collected and destroyed through this scheme."

The buyback would be similar to gun reforms introduced soon after the massacre in 1996 in Tasmania's Port Arthur after a lone gunman killed 35 people, which prompted authorities to implement some of the world's toughest gun laws.

"Australia's gun laws were last substantially reformed in the wake of the Port Arthur tragedy. The terrible events at Bondi show we need to get more guns off our streets," Albanese said during a media briefing.

An estimated four million firearms are currently in the country, Albanese said. The government would target surplus, newly banned, and illegal firearms, with the costs to be shared between the federal and state governments, he said.

Following the Port Arthur massacre, Australia announced a gun buy-back scheme and secured the surrender of about 640,000 prohibited firearms nationwide.

Neighboring New Zealand announced sweeping gun reforms, including gun buyback schemes, after the Christchurch terror attack in 2019.

Sociologist Robert Brym published in November 2024 that 94 per cent of Canadian Jews said they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but barely half said they called themselves Zionists.

Anti-Zionist groups, particularly Independent Jewish Voices, seized on the second statistic as proof that many Jews agree with them.

Brym therefore did a followup study to ask the "non-Zionists" why they don't use the term "Zionist."

As can be expected, the reason is because the word itself has become toxic and they don't want to be associated with it, thanks to years of anti-Zionist propaganda. "The follow-up finds evidence that refusal to label oneself a Zionist is largely due to the increasingly negative connotation of the word Zionism—what linguists call 'semantic drift.' "

But that doesn't mean they aren't Zionists in effect. 88% of the "non-Zionists" say that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, which is pretty much the definition of Zionism.

Perhaps the most important finding was the answer to the question of whether they consider themselves anti-Zionist. Of all the Jews, only 1% identified that way; among those who refused to be labeled Zionist, only 4% identified as anti-Zionists.

This proves yet again that Jewish anti-Zionists are truly fringe.

Yet they receive essentially equivalent coverage as the Zionist Jewish supermajority, especially when news media cover anti-Israel protests, making them appear mainstream.

Jews aren't becoming anti-Israel. They are becoming more frightened of calling themselves pro-Israel.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A random child was more likely to die of starvation worldwide every day than in Gaza during "famine"

There was an amazing thread on X by Eirik Schrøder-Bråtane that debunked the "famine" narrative in Gaza, as others have. He put together charts like this showing how far off the IPC estimates were.

But one statistic he threw out there was unreal:

According to Gaza MoH, 42 children died of malnutrition between famine declaration Aug 22 and start of ceasefire Oct 11, corresponding to 0.84 per million per day. The global average death rate of children due to wasting is 1.14 per million per day. I.e. a random child in a random country is more likely to have died of starvation than a child in Gaza in the middle of a supposed famine.

I verified these statistics. The top countries for child deaths per day per million are:

Sierra Leone — 11.3

South Sudan — 9.5

Somalia — 9.0

Mali — 8.8

Kiribati — 8.3

Mexican children are more than four times likelier to die of malnutrition today than in Gaza during the so-called famine.

People vacation in the Dominican Republic - bit no one mentions that children there die at the rate of 134 per million per day - significantly worse than the worst in Gaza during the famine declaration.

Scores of countries have worse starvation statistics, for years, than Gaza during what was the very worst parts of the war as far as receiving food aid was concerned.

And no one talks about them.

It appears that the people who claim to care about starving children really don't nearly as much as they want to falsely paint Israel as creating a famine.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/18 Links Pt2: Waiting for Ran Gvili; The suicidal vanity of Palestine Action; A War on Christmas Was Never about Israel; Norman Podhoretz, a Grateful American

From Ian:

Israel's Enemies Have Only Been Weakened, Not Defeated

The hostage release and ceasefire President Trump brokered in October has brought Israelis palpable relief and renewed optimism. However, they also recognize that peace is not yet at hand.

"We're living with traumas and scars," an Israeli brigadier general told me. "But we're resilient. We need to be because our enemies have only been weakened, not defeated."

Iran's rulers and their main proxies (Hamas, Hizbullah and the Houthis) have no interest in a "two-state solution," except as a step toward a "final solution" in the sense the Nazis used that phrase.

Their goal remains the extermination of the people of Israel. There's a word for that: genocide - one of the crimes Israel is relentlessly accused of.

A new Israeli defense posture is evolving. It will not depend on wishful thinking or deterrence.

It will focus on early detection of threats, followed by kinetic operations to prevent those threats from metastasizing.

This will not make Israelis more popular, but it's necessary if the people of Israel are to live.

Brendan O'Neill: The suicidal vanity of Palestine Action

Last night in London, four days after the slaughter of Jews in our cousin nation of Australia, radical leftists held a vigil. For the dead Jews? Don’t be daft. It was for the Palestine Action hunger strikers. It was for those silver-spooned self-harmers, those preening, plummy food-dodgers who think they can do to the nation what they once did to mummy and daddy: stomp their feet until they get what they want. And there you have it: self-styled anti-fascists weeping not for the Jews murdered by fascists, but for vain, posh Brits whose torment is wholly self-inflicted.

It’s not just in London. In Cambridge too, and outside the Dáil in Dublin, the keffiyeh classes have mournfully assembled in recent days to lament the agonies of the hunger strikers. Let history record this. Let it record that following one of the worst acts of anti-Semitic barbarism of modern times, ‘anti-racists’ gathered not to offer solidarity to Jews but to wang on about their fellow narcissists in the cult of Palestinianism. As Aussie Jews fall victim to the West’s swirling pox of Israelophobia, leftists pay tribute to the activist class that helped spread that deadly pox. Shameful doesn’t cover it.

I’ve always thought the Palestine Action hunger strike was preposterous – am-dram self-destruction designed less to shift the dial in the Middle East than to make a spectacle of the strikers’ own depthless self-regard. But after Bondi, after that merciless slaying of Jews by suspected adherents to the death cult of ISIS, the strike feels callous, too. Anyone who distracts public attention from the anti-Semitism crisis by droning on about five hungry twats in British jails has forfeited the right to be considered a decent person.

Seven Palestine Action activists joined the hunger strike in recent weeks. Two dropped out last night, leaving just five food-avoiders. Their demands include immediate bail for all Palestine Action activists being held on remand, the lifting of the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, and the shutting down of all Elbit Systems sites in the UK. Elbit is one of the main producers of military equipment for Israel. It employs close to 700 people in the UK, including many veterans. It is hubris of historic proportions that five smug activists are saying they won’t eat until 700 Brits are thrown on to the dole queue. Rarely has the conceitedness of the lily-handed left been on such stark display.

Let’s be clear about what this is: moral blackmail. These activists are the political equivalent of the scumbag husband who tells his wife he’ll harm himself if she ever leaves. Their hunger strike is a staggeringly elitist stunt. In the past, hunger strikes tended to be one small part of a larger democratic movement. Think of Gandhi’s hunger strike during the Quit India uprising of the 1940s. The Palestine Action hunger strike is the precise opposite – this is about circumventing democracy.

A War on Christmas Was Never about Israel There's a habit or reflex in discussing antisemitic violence to explain or even excuse it as being a response to purported Israeli injustices. Yet it is hard to explain exactly how attacking Jews celebrating Hannukah in Australia has anything to do with Gaza. It is also thunderingly obvious that Islamist radicals are not principally acting out of grievance at Israeli foreign policy, as they are simultaneously waging war on open and public Christianity in Europe.

German authorities announced Saturday that five men have been arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on a Christmas market in the Dingolfing area of southern Bavaria. Authorities believe the plot was motivated by Islamist extremism. Bavaria is not exactly the center of IDF activity.

In 2024, a car drove into a crowded outdoor Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, killing at least five people and injuring more than 200. In a 2018 attack on a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, five people were killed and several more were injured. In 2016, an Islamist extremist drove a truck into a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more.

In Paris, authorities canceled an annual New Year's celebration that drew half a million people last year, because their safety from Islamist radicals can no longer be secured. It starts with Jews, but it never ends there. These are enemies of our entire civilization, and their only actual demand is submission.

12/18 Links Pt1: Why Won't the West Defend Jews?; Netanyahu pleads for Australia to ‘Wake up’; Police probe possible link between MIT professor's killing and Brown University shooting

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The global intifada

For starters, a responsible and civilized government should be rooting out these extremist imams, prosecuting or deporting them as appropriate. It should be banning the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, along with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is intolerable that these subversive or terror-promoting groups should be operating with impunity in the West.

In addition, any responsible and civilized government should be calling out the defamatory lies about Israel as the tissue of falsehoods that they are and as a weapon of war to destroy Israel through delegitimization

Yet the British, Australian and Canadian governments have themselves been promoting these lies, thus fanning the flames of murderous Islamist hysteria about Israel and Jews.

The Jewish world should be likewise calling out those in its own community who unwittingly lend their support to the Islamist onslaught.

The danger to the Jews is not just from physical attack. What we are witnessing is an all-out onslaught—not just on Israel, but on Judaism, by anti-Israel obsessives both inside and outside the Jewish community who are seeking to set Judaism against Zionism.

Since Judaism constitutes the inseparable fusion of the people, the faith and the land, setting it against Zionism—the right of the Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—is an attempt to rip out Judaism’s very soul.

If the struggle to stamp out antisemitism is to mean anything more than hollow platitudes, then it must consist of zero tolerance for Islamic extremism—and zero tolerance for the delegitimization of the world’s only Jewish state.

Jonathan Sacerdoti: Why Won't the West Defend Jews?

Bondi Beach is not occupied territory. It is not contested land. Still, on a day marked for celebration, Jews were once again slaughtered, picked off by a Muslim father and son who were motivated to kill as if it were their God-given right.

The war has not ended. It has migrated. It is a war that spreads through ideology, through grievance networks, through digital propaganda and imported narratives, recruiting from mosques and message boards, from fringe collectives and activist mobs. The enemies of the West no longer require battalions; they need only a few men with weapons.

Our political leaders urge Jews to stay calm, as if a lack of calm is the issue. Many Jews are drawing the only logical conclusion: their governments may not ever properly protect them. They are making plans - not out of hysteria, but realism. It is not cowardice to prepare for an exit when one's position has been abandoned from above. It is memory at work.

There is an unholy alliance of Islamists and anarchists whose shared aim is to destabilize the West from within. Their targets are not only Jews but the norms that sustain Western civilization: public safety, legal equality, freedom of expression, civic trust. This time they came for Hanukkah. Next time they'll come for Christmas.

Jews represent the freedoms and values of the West because many of those values are actually Jewish, embraced and adopted by Christianity and wider secular society. The attacks by the enemies of civilization on us are actually just one small part of their broader attacks on the entire West.

Security measures once reserved for foreign embassies are now required at primary schools. This is not normal. Yet this is the modern Jewish experience. The moral clarity required to confront this has been replaced by moral confusion. The state, instead of defending its citizens robustly, now negotiates with those who threaten them. It manages risk rather than removing it. That is how a festival becomes a crime scene.

The Impotence of the West in the Face of Islamist Antisemitism

The massacre perpetrated in Sydney against hundreds of Jews celebrating Hanukkah proves once again that Islamists are waging a religious war against the people of Israel and against all non-believers in the West. They consistently choose a Jewish or Christian holiday to commit barbaric attacks.

Western nations have remained unable to eradicate the scourge of Islamist terror. Numerous attacks have been thwarted thanks to invaluable intelligence provided by Mossad to various intelligence services. Without these warnings, the list of Islamist attacks in Europe and Australia would have been longer.

There is no difference between the Palestinian Hamas terrorists and all the Shiite and Sunni terrorists who perpetrate attacks in Sydney, Washington, Manchester, or Paris. They all wish to create Islamic states in place of the Jewish state and Christian countries. Even today, Saladin remains a hero of Islam, the great victor over the Crusaders in 1187.

We have no choice but to continue our tireless fight against the cult of death. It is our collective destiny. For over a century, we have been fighting the scourge of Palestinian terrorism, and every day we thwart planned attacks. The Jewish state is acting in legitimate self-defense and has the absolute right to fight, without pity and without mercy, against all those who want to wipe us off the map.

Police probe possible link between MIT professor's killing and Brown University shooting

Authorities are looking into a connection between last week's mass shooting at Brown University and the death of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno Loureiro, local media reported, citing multiple individuals familiar with the matter.

Investigators are reportedly searching for a person of interest, believing that the vehicle rented by the Brown University shooter is of the same make and model as the one identified in the investigation into Loureiro's killing, according to The New York Times.

According to AP, the FBI had previously said it knew of no links between the cases.

Two shot at Brown Uni, MIT professor gunned down in home
The shooting at Brown University left two students dead and another nine people wounded. Police have released surveillance footage showing the possible shooter in order to gain the public's help in identifying the assailant.

"We are doing everything we can to reassure folks, to provide comfort, and that is the best answer I can give to that difficult question,” AP quoted Providence Mayor Brett Smiley as saying as he acknowledged that "a scary time in the city."

Loureiro, however, was found critically wounded by gunfire inside his home in the town of Brookline near Boston on Tuesday, some 80 km away from Brown University. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead in the early morning hours.

Al Aqsa Sermon To Incite Violence Thwarted By Unskippable Ads (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, December 18 - The firebrand preacher attempting to exhort his Islamic flock to defend their faith and land by visiting bloody vengeance against Jews and asserting dominance over them found that his address missed the mark, the man confessed soon after the event, probably because his momentum was disrupted by the unavoidable commercial clips that plague online media and must be viewed to completion before anyone may proceed to the content for which they came in the first place.

Imam Mustafa Massikr of the Al-Aqsa Mosque voiced his frustration and disappointment this morning following a sermon that he had anticipated would ignite a violent fervor among those in attendance, but that fizzled when the unskippable ads began playing over the compound's sound and video systems.

"I had planned for something grand, something inspiring," he lamented. "Something to restore the pride of our Islamic flock, which faces disappointment after disappointment in the fight against the Jews. A hundred years now of seeing triumph around the corner, of a victory so close we can taste it. Of driving the Jew into the dirt, or into the sea, only to find..." he trailed off.

"Let's just say that any moments of victory have been just that, moments, when in the larger sense, Israel isn't going anywhere, and deep down, we all know it."

"The ads are just a microcosm," he acknowledged.“ I’m up there, voice rising, fists clenched, about to deliver the classic ‘Itbāḥ al-Yahūd’ line that never fails to get the blood up, and suddenly—bam!—a smiling blonde woman in a hijab that somehow costs three hundred dollars appears on every screen telling us we can consolidate our payday loans in three easy steps. At a volume somehow even louder than we thought the speakers could carry. By the time she’s done explaining the APR, the moment is gone. The flock just stares at their phones, wondering if they qualify.”

Worshippers confirmed the account. “I was ready,” said Rami al-Qawasmi, 29, from nearby Silwan. “Knife sharpened, will steeled, everything. Then some guy in a lab coat starts yelling about reverse-osmosis water filters ‘that Israel can’t poison.’ I actually wrote down the website before I realized what I was doing. Now I have cleaner water but zero dead Jews. Mixed results, honestly.”

Technical staff at the mosque blamed the Waqf’s new cost-cutting streaming package. “We switched to the free tier,” admitted sound engineer Hassan al-Dajani. “Turns out the free tier includes fifteen-second unskippable ads every four minutes. We thought it would only affect the ladies’ section livestream. Lesson learned.”

Imam Massikr has vowed to try again next week, this time with a paid subscription. “Ad-free jihad is apparently twenty-nine ninety-nine a month,” he muttered. “Infidel capitalism has found a way to monetize even our sacred rage. Allah help us, the Jews don’t have to fire a single bullet anymore; JewTube Premium is doing it for them.”

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

We've discussed how antisemitism is a result of Jews not fitting into the simplistic binaries of many philosophies and how that makes Jews a threat that must be eliminated. But it still does not explain why ordinary people - people who do not think in ideological terms at all - are so drawn to antisemitism. Why do hundreds of thousands of people eagerly attend anti-Israel demonstrations while showing little interest in almost any other cause? What emotional need does modern antisemitism fill?

Modern Western societies have become extraordinarily good at explaining how the world works. They are far less capable of explaining why anything should matter. This has been the primary goal of traditional religions: they provide moral structure, a sense of purpose, shared rituals, communal belonging, and a path toward moral elevation.

As religious belief declined, those psychological and social functions did not disappear. The human need for meaning remained.

A strictly secular, materialist worldview struggles to offer meaning. If science can explain why we act how we do to so many people, then what good is acting morally? If we are deterministic machines and life has no inherent meaning, then what difference does it make how we act? We might as well be selfish and optimize the world for our personal pleasure. Some philosophies try to replace meaning with reason - "if everyone acted selfishly then everyone would suffer" - but reason alone rarely provides the meaning that spirituality does.

There is a deep need inside us to feel morally oriented in the universe, to participate in something larger than ourselves, and to know where we stand in relation to good and evil. When that need is unmet, it does not vanish. It looks elsewhere.

Modern ideological movements often recreate the form of religion without acknowledging it. They offer a sacred story (oppression vs. liberation), a cosmic struggle (good vs. evil), moral status, a teleology (history itself arcing towards the good.) And activists extend this into sacrament: marches as ritual, slogans as prayer, chanting as gospel music. Chanting together with hundreds of others produces the felt experience of moral elevation, even when no moral action follows.

The modern secularists fill a need that people have for a life beyond themselves But they do not demand what traditional religions do: obligation. No repentance is required, no inward change is demanded. One becomes “good” by simply showing up, standing on the right side, repeating the right phrases, chanting the right slogans. Being a part of a larger movement, marching together with hundreds of others, feels meaningful even when it has no underlying meaning. It feels like moral elevation without demanding moral actions.

This feeling of being morally right - or even morally superior - without obligation is immensely attractive. This is spirituality stripped of introspection.

For such systems to work at scale, they require moral clarity. Complexity does not mobilize passion. Binary frameworks - oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, righteous and evil - provide instant moral legibility. They reduce the world to a story that can be inhabited emotionally without the burden of doubt.

Reality, however, resists binaries. And when it does, something must be forced into the role of the villain to preserve the story. And the story - in modern parlance, the narrative - is central. To understand why, it helps to look at a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the modern use of the term “Turtle Island.”

“Turtle Island” appears today as a capitalized proper name for North America, frequently taught in universities and invoked in activist and academic settings as an ancient indigenous term that predates colonial naming. It is a modern myth.

Certain Indigenous creation stories, primarily among Algonquian and Haudenosaunee peoples, describe the entire world emerging on the back of a turtle after a primordial flood. The application of “Turtle Island” specifically to North America as a proper noun is new, popularized in the 1970s by non-indigenous writers and activists seeking a decolonized vocabulary. It has since been embraced by some First Peoples activists and institutionalized within academia, often presented as a recovered ancestral name rather than a contemporary symbolic adaptation.

The irony is striking. A modern, activist-driven myth, shaped by contemporary political needs, is treated as historical fact by institutions that pride themselves on empiricism, skepticism, and resistance to religious mythmaking. Questioning its provenance is often treated not as historical inquiry but as moral transgression.

A myth was needed to support an ideology. So one was created. Modernity needs myths as much as the ancients did.

Antisemitism operates in precisely the same way, but with far greater historical depth and emotional power.

Jews have occupied a unique role in Western moral imagination for nearly two thousand years. In Christian societies, Jews were not merely another minority. They were cast as the theological counterpoint to Christianity itself: the people who rejected salvation, clung to law instead of grace, and embodied resistance to redemption. The Jew became not just a social outsider, but a metaphysical problem.

Over centuries, this produced a durable archetype: the Jew as the obstinate resistor to moral resolution, the hidden corrupter, the eternal outsider whose continued existence threatened the coherence of the dominant worldview. Even as explicit Christian belief declined, this archetype did not disappear. Western culture, literature, and moral storytelling remained saturated with it.

Modern secular ideologies emerged from societies deeply shaped by Christian categories, even as they rejected Christian theology. The old antagonist was stripped of religious language and recast in political and ideological terms. Zionists replaced Christ-killers. Israel replaced the synagogue. Power replaced heresy. But the role remained intact. The myth of the Jew as the evil Other never went away; it just morphed because it was still needed by modern ideologies.

This helps explain why Western antisemitism differs fundamentally from traditional Muslim attitudes toward Jews. In classical Islamic societies, Jews were subordinate and restricted, but they were not cosmic enemies. They were despised second-class citizens, not metaphysical villains. The idea of Jews as a uniquely malevolent force entered much of the Muslim world through European Christian influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, importing blood libels and conspiracy myths wholesale.

In the West, by contrast, the Jew had already been trained into the role of the villain. When modern secular movements needed an enemy capable of embodying illegitimacy, corruption, and moral obstruction all at once, the figure was already available. And this makes recruitment that much easier since the Jew already was associated with the role in the myth.

Jews are particularly useful for this role because they resist simplification. They are indigenous and diasporic, particularist and universalist, ancient and modern, religious and national. They persist across time in ways that disrupt linear stories of progress and redemption. In mythic frameworks that depend on clean binaries, this complexity is intolerable.

Flattening Jews into a single dimension solves the problem. Once Jews, Israelis, or “Zionists” are cast into familiar villain archetypes - the shadowy power, the colonial usurper, the hidden manipulator - the moral story becomes legible again. Popular culture has trained audiences for decades to recognize these figures instantly, rewarding recognition with emotional certainty. The narrative resumes, complete with righteous heroes and sanctioned hostility.

Antisemitism thus functions as a complete secular religion. It offers a sacred narrative, a cosmic struggle, communal belonging, ritual participation, and a promise of redemption. What it does not require is self-examination, restraint, or moral accountability. Redemption comes through opposition, not transformation.

This is why antisemitism escalates. The Jew as unparalleled evil is the myth that keeps these ideologies alive. The "apartheid" slander, the "genocide" libel, are not based on fact - they are modern myths that are too attractive to be defeated by simple facts, just like the Turtle Island myth. It is social engineering disguised as science, religion without introspection. Jewish complexity must be denied and Jewish existence itself becomes intolerable, because it threatens the coherence of the story. And coherence is more important than truth.

Antisemitism remains attractive not because people are uniquely hateful, but because modern societies have failed to provide meaning without illusion. In the absence of demanding spiritual frameworks, people gravitate toward substitutes that feel moral without being costly. Antisemitism checks every emotional box that religion once did while shedding truth, humility, and responsibility.

That is why it keeps returning, even among those most convinced they have transcended myth.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here's an abstract of a brand new paper in Globalisation, Societies and Education by Jo Kelcey of American University of Beirut:

A tragedy foretold? The necropolitical foundations of the Gaza scholasticide
Jo Kelcey
Published online: 15 Dec 2025
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2025.2598276

ABSTRACT
This article contextualises the scholasticide in Gaza (2023 – ) within the longer history of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian education. Using primary and secondary historical sources, it argues that the near total destruction of Gaza’s education sector is the latest iteration of a longstanding repertoire of Israeli colonial violence enacted on Palestinian education since 1948. Through the lens of necropolitics, the article identifies how this treatment coalesces around three overarching logics: indigenous erasure, political containment and the normalisation of violence. In this way, the article contributes to broader debates regarding the relationship between education and conflict and provides a framework to understand how neo/colonialism operates in and through education.

There is a lot to unpack here. You can see how social sciences take previously defined concepts that may or may not even exist and apply them willy-nilly to Israel, by citing others who did it first and pretending that they are proven fact - hence, "scholasticide" (purposeful destruction of education) and "necropolitics" (a state asserting control over who lives and who dies.)

But it is also a shining example of how anyone can cherry pick whatever evidence they want and ignore the rest. The footnotes mention a handful of cases of Israel supposedly attacking schools, including in Lebanon - no context is given as to whether they were terror sites.

But what is not said is where the lies hide.

Before 1948, Arabs in Palestine were largely illiterate. Literacy rates tripled under Israeli rule as of the 1980s, no doubt they are much higher now.

Before 1967, there was not one university in the West Bank or Gaza. Not one. Under Israel's "scholasticide," 11 universities were opened as of 2005.

Before 1967, only a few hundred Palestinians went to colleges - after Israeli control, that number reached tens of thousands.

We have shown that Israel-haters are epistemologically equivalent to conspiracy theorists, and their explanations for these counterexamples show this clearly. They say that the Palestinians flocked to higher education in spite of Israeli restrictions. If Israeli "scholasticide" explains both why universities were built under Israeli control (and not under Egyptian/Jordanian control) but it also explains why Israel attacked universities in Gaza or Lebanon, then it doesn't explain anything.

It is an unfalsifiable assertion - there is literally nothing Israel could do to make the haters believe anything else.

Which makes this kind of research worse than useless. It is propaganda dressed in academic garb, which describes nearly all of the papers about Israel in many journals.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Washington Post has an investigation of Israel's attacks on Iran in June, Operation Rising Lion, and the operation to assassinate leading nuclear scientists, Operation Narnia.

There are some new details revealed; it is better than most stories about Israel in the media. But even so, it still tries to paint Israel as being heedless of human life:

For Operation Narnia, Israeli intelligence analysts assembled a list of the 100 most important nuclear scientists in Iran, then whittled the target roster down to roughly a dozen. They built dossiers on each man’s work, their movements, their homes — drawing on decades of espionage.

The operation wasn’t flawless. The Post and open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat were able to independently verify 71 civilian casualties in five strikes where nuclear scientists were targeted, using satellite imagery, video geolocation, death notices, cemetery records and coverage of funerals in Iranian media.

The Post and Bellingcat confirmed that 10 civilians, including a 2-month-old infant, were killed in the strike on the Professors Complex in Tehran’s Saadat Abad neighborhood. Witness accounts, combined with videos and images of the blast and resulting structural damage, indicate that the strike was similar to the force of a roughly 500-pound bomb.

Israel targeted another scientist, Mohammad Reza Sedighi Saber, at his Tehran home during the opening wave of strikes. Sedighi Saber wasn’t there, but his 17-year-old son was killed.

On the conflict’s last day, June 24, the elder Saber was killed at his relative’s home about 200 miles from the capital, in Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh in Gilan province. A resident there, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of government reprisals, told The Post that Saber had returned to his family home for his son’s mourning ceremony and was killed alongside other relatives. The Post verified 15 civilian deaths in this strike, including four minors. Two residences were leveled, leaving behind two craters where the homes once stood.

The newspaper then gave a couple of words to an Israeli official so it could pretend to be even-hansded, but the writers of the article clearly do not believe this:

Israeli security officials said they did everything possible to limit civilian casualties. “One of the major considerations for the planning of Operation Narnia was to try to minimize as much as possible the collateral damage,” a senior Israeli military intelligence officer said.

And then, two sentences later, without comment, we learn the truth:

A spokesperson for the Iranian government said in July that 1,062 people were killed in the Israeli strikes, including 276 civilians.

That is a military to civilian ratio of 3-1; absolutely unheard of in bombings that were largely done in urban areas.

And almost certainly Iran considers the nuclear scientists themselves to be civilian in this count.

That statistic proves that Israel really did try to minimize collateral damage and civilian deaths. The military value of the nuclear researchers was high enough to justify - under the laws of armed conflict - even 15 or 20 unwanted civilian deaths. This is not disproportionate under international law.

A decent newspaper would highlight that statistic to put everything else in context. A biased newspaper would bury it, without context, and give the overall impression that the truth is the opposite.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/17 Links Pt2: Norman Podhoretz, American Patriot , 1930-2025; David Collier: The al-Shifa Hospital Hostage Convoy; Trump: ‘I Will Always Be A Friend And A Champion To The Jewish People’

From Ian:

The light answers

In 1931, Rachel Posner placed her family’s chanukiyah on a windowsill in Kiel, Germany. Across the street hung a Nazi flag. She photographed the scene and wrote on the back: “ ‘Death to Judah,’ says the flag. ‘Judah will live forever,’ the light answers.” That menorah now resides at Yad Vashem, returned each year to Posner’s descendants to light anew.

The light answers. It answered in ghettos where Jews fashioned menorahs from scraps. It answered in Soviet gulags where prisoners risked everything for observance. It answers today, when Jewish communities worldwide face the highest levels of antisemitic vitriol and violence in decades.

To every Jew reading this, I plead: Do not dim your flame. Place your chanukiyah in the window. Let it be seen. The entire purpose of pirsumei nisa is to proclaim, publicly and unapologetically, that we are still here. Darkness has tried to extinguish us before. It has failed. It will fail again.

And to our neighbors—Christians, Muslims, those of other faiths or no faith at all—I ask you to consider lighting candles of your own. In 1993, after a brick was thrown through a Jewish child’s window in Billings, Montana, thousands of non-Jewish households placed menorahs in their own windows. The message was unmistakable: An attack on our Jewish neighbors is an attack on us all.

We need that message again. The Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson—taught that Chanukah carries “a universal message of freedom of the human spirit, freedom from tyranny and oppression, and of the ultimate victory of good over evil.” When Project Menorah encouraged non-Jews to display menorahs after Oct. 7, 2023, rabbis responded with overwhelming support. What matters is the intent. Not appropriation, but alliance. Not mimicry, but moral witness.

As the Rebbe wrote, “a little light dispels a lot of darkness.” The Chanukah menorah is not a mere decoration. It is a statement of resolve—that light persists, that the few can overcome the many, that the sacred endures and that evil is a mere shadow against the light.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger died bringing that light to his community on a beach in Sydney. In Los Angeles, plotters driven by the same hatred were stopped before their bombs could detonate. The light endures while darkness fails.

Tonight, and every night of Chanukah, I will add another flame. The darkness grows no darker, but our light grows stronger. Place your candles where they can be seen. Let the light answer.

Reading Washington’s signals: Redefining Israel’s role in America

The United States is gradually shifting its view of the Middle East from a troubled region to an emerging one. This forming zeitgeist is exactly where Jerusalem must meet Washington. Israel cannot offer luxury planes or other expensive gifts, much less free oil. What it can offer is a realization of America’s vision for the Mideast, a source and destination of investments.

Unlike its neighbors, Israel’s greatest asset is its people and their minds. Israeli innovation has produced an exceptionally high number of companies that are traded on American stock markets. Tel Aviv’s stock exchange is one of the best-performing in the world, especially considering the circumstances of the last half-decade. In the wake of the two-year, seven-front war, the country’s defense exports have reached an all-time high, with its missile-defense systems utilized throughout much of the world.

To an extent, Israel is already offering the United States access to much of this. Many Israeli-origin defense articles are developed and produced jointly with the United States. The two nations work together to engage in research that enables the creation of cutting-edge technologies, ensuring a mutual qualitative edge. Israeli entrepreneurs will try their luck in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street long before they’ll do so in any European or Asian capital. What’s missing is a greater governmental commitment to these efforts.

The message from Washington is clear: America wishes to see Israel elevated to the level of an equal partner and ally.

U.S. diplomats visit the country, see construction booms in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and rightfully conclude that it is capable of this. Israeli governments, whoever might lead them in the future, should step up to this moment and pursue extensive business diplomacy with the United States. Their primary task is to make sure that every emerging American entrepreneur is fully aware of just what it is—and just how much of it—Israel can provide.

Since the “classic” American reasons for maintaining a strong relationship with Israel seem to lose validity with each passing year, it is on Jerusalem to create new ones. To that end, it must showcase its advantages and make certain that they work in America’s favor. While this most recent prescription was jotted by the Trump administration, a proper Israeli response will resonate on both sides of the aisle and can define the relationship between the two countries for decades to come.

The Saudis have mastered the art of manipulation

The message was clear: Saudi Arabia has successfully bought American support while keeping its options open with Washington’s greatest adversary.

Meanwhile, Trump has made clear through his negotiations on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that he is much more concerned with satisfying Arab interests than Israel’s. In that regard, he, too, is an Arabist.

Israel has traditionally been allied with the United States due to shared values and interests. Trump, however, cares only about interests—financial interests. He is unbothered by the disparate values of dictatorships. The murder and dismemberment of an American journalist doesn’t interest him. The Saudis are also less troublesome than the pesky Zionists, whom he sees as ruining his chance for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Saudis also have more to contribute to both the American and the Trump family coffers than the Israelis.

Trump is not necessarily pro-Israel; he is transactional. Values do not factor into the transaction.

Moreover, the deals with the Saudis benefit America. The pledge of up to $1 trillion in Saudi investment would inject massive capital into the American economy. Nvidia will prosper, and the contractors and subcontractors that make the F-35s and the other weapons Trump is selling will reap the benefits and create jobs. The economic activity will provide Republicans with talking points to showcase economic growth and industrial strength.

Trump is like his predecessors in appeasing the Saudis. The distinction is that the others weren’t interested in Saudi-Israeli peace. Instead, they were more focused on appeasing the Saudis’ supposed fealty to the Palestinian cause. Trump realizes that the Saudis have no love for the Palestinians. Notice that they have not agreed to allow any Gazans refuge in the kingdom or volunteered to pay to reconstruct Gaza. They look down on the Palestinians and support them only to the extent that it serves their interests.

This is why MBS appeared willing to sell out the Palestinians and normalize ties with Israel during talks with the Biden administration. But that became untenable after Oct. 7.

The crown prince fears that if he acts while Israel is killing Palestinians, then he might suffer the same fate as former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by radical Muslims in 1981, several years after making peace with Israel in 1979. Moreover, as long as King Salman remains alive—a man steeped in antisemitism—normalization is unlikely.

Israel will survive Trump’s betrayal. Security compensation will eventually follow. Arms deliveries will be delayed and modified. Quiet intelligence cooperation with Saudi Arabia will continue against Iran. But the damage is real: The status of the Saudis has been elevated while Israel has been downgraded from strategic ally to negotiable asset.

A trillion dollars bought Saudi Arabia U.S. indulgence. Israel got nothing, except the lesson that loyalty, values and history carry less weight than a well-timed check.