Friday, October 17, 2025

10/17 Links Pt1: They Said Justice. They Meant Jihad; Mamdani’s anti-Israel obsession is key to his rise; Oct 7 Terrorist Charged With Entering the United States Illegally

From Ian:

New Poll Finds Soaring Approval for Trump's Handling of Israel-Hamas War
President Donald Trump's net approval rating on his handling of the Israel-Hamas war surged after his peace deal secured a ceasefire and the release of hostages, according to a poll released Friday.

"Following the Gaza ceasefire deal, 47% of voters approve of Trump's handling of the war between Israel and Hamas, while 34% disapprove," Emerson College Polling reported. "Public opinion has flipped since the Emerson 100-day poll [in April], when 30% approved and 46% disapproved of the president's handling of the war between Israel and Hamas."

Republican voters overwhelmingly support Trump's handling of the conflict, 80 percent to 7 percent, while Democrats disapprove by a 57-to-19 margin, according to Emerson Polling executive director Spencer Kimball. "The shift in overall approval comes from independents, who approve 43% to 38%; in April, independents disapproved 43% to 25%."

Trump's peace deal last week brought a ceasefire in the two-year war that began with Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. The terror group has released all 20 living Israeli hostages but failed to make good on its promise to return the bodies of all 28 dead hostages. Israel, which has released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, responded to the hold-up by keeping a Gaza border crossing closed and restricting aid until Hamas returns all dead hostages.
They Said Justice. They Meant Jihad. By Abe Greenwald
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It would be fun to watch him take a shot at that. Those, such as father and son Mamdani, who’ve been intimately entangled with SJP surely know that it’s a straightforwardly pro-Hamas (and generally pro-jihad) organization. That’s why they got involved.

But the question will never be asked because it also exposes the media’s complicity in pretending that the Jew-hating zealots of the woke jihad were actually concerned for suffering Gazans. In May, for example, Sharon Otterman of the New York Times described SJP as “the most organized pro-Palestinian group on many college campuses.” A month after Hamas’s October 7 attack, the Times’ Alan Blinder characterized SJP as “perhaps the most popular and divisive campus organization championing the Palestinian cause.” What say you now, Otterman? Blinder?

Probably not much. While the committed Hamasniks are coming out of the closet, their liberal followers and enablers will likely make themselves scarce. They were conned. That’s the way leftist radicalism works. The true believers pitch well-meaning liberals a sweet-sounding story to get them on board. And, boy, did it work this time.

The war is over, and the part-time anti-Zionists have left the stage, most still thinking they were part of something noble. But the work of their groomers, the full-time terror propagandists, doesn’t end when the war stops. Groups like SJP will cheer so long as some jihadist, somewhere, is killing someone in the name of Palestine.
Jonathan Tobin: Mamdani’s anti-Israel obsession is key to his rise
Since foreign policy is not part of the responsibility of an American mayor, it’s fair to ask why this is so important to him. The answer is patently obvious.

It’s something he learned from his far-left parents—his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor at Columbia University, and his mother is India-born filmmaker Mira Nair—and even shared by his wife, who publicly mourned the death this week of a pro-Hamas influencer who cheered for the Oct. 7 atrocities. He grew up around and became friends with hard-core scholastic ideologues like Edward Said, author of Orientalism, and Rashid Khalidi, who helped normalize hatred for Israel and the denial of Jewish rights. And so, such sentiments are at the core of his being.

Hatred and intolerance for Jews and their rights are not marginal to the 21st-century Marxist mindset that he exemplifies. The embrace of toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that brands Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors is at its heart. The key to understanding the impact of these ideas is that, as the Democratic Socialists of America’s condemnation of the ceasefire-hostage release deal that ended the post-Oct. 7 war showed, those who believe this consider Israel’s existence illegitimate under any circumstances and justify any actions, no matter how atrocious or inhuman, as justifiable “resistance.”

While such views were confined to the fever swamps of the far left not so long ago, they have gone mainstream in the wake of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the last decade, coupled with the surge of international antisemitism since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Mamdani is therefore the perfect illustration of the same attitudes that are causing much of the Democratic Party to oppose Israel, and to accept and spread blood libels about Jews committing genocide against the Palestinian people. The fact that The New York Times published a fawning paean this week to one of the world’s leading pro-Hamas antisemites, U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, is just another symptom of how a person like Mamdani could become the idol of the Democrats’ left-wing base.

A Mayor Mamdani will not have much power to harm the State of Israel. Nor will his adherents be rounding up Jews in the streets of New York. And whoever is governor—especially if, due in part to Hochul’s support of Mamdani, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a congressional scourge of antisemites, is elected governor in 2026—could make it difficult for him to do anything. Nevertheless, his command of the New York City Police Department will be a godsend to antisemitic mobs on college campuses or in the streets of the city, who will know that the man in charge will not only be reluctant to arrest them but actually be on their side. That will have a tangible impact on the security of the city’s Jewish population.

Just as important, Mamdani’s election will be a potential turning point in American Jewish history as antisemitism not only becomes endemic but part of mainstream political culture.

We’ve continued to see the knee-jerk reaction of the mainstream liberal media to any attempt to call Mamdani to account for his extremism and Jew-hatred by falsely labeling it “Islamophobia.” Along those lines, demonizing Mamdani’s critics as “Islamophobic” demonstrates how most such accusations are nothing more than an attempt to silence critiques of jihadist ideology and Muslim attacks on Jews.

Of course, this is still a minority view in the country as a whole. The overwhelming majority of Republicans reject the antisemitic views of the left and even those on the far-right, like political commentators and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. That said, an America in which Mamdani isn’t just the mayor of New York but representative of the views of a large percentage of the Democratic Party and its media cheerleaders, like the Times, is a place where Jews can no longer think of themselves as entirely safe.


Hundreds pay tribute to ‘pink angel’ Inbar Haiman as slain hostage is laid to rest
Hundreds of people lined the roads and bridges in central Israel to pay last respects to Inbar Haiman — the last female hostage to be released from Gaza — as her funeral procession made its way to a cemetery in Petah Tikva on Friday.

Haiman, 27, was murdered at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and her body was taken to Gaza, where it was held until it was returned to Israel on Wednesday night as part of the Gaza ceasefire.

She is survived by her parents Yifat and Haim Haiman, brother Ido and partner Noam Alon who advocated tirelessly for her release over the past two years.

Haiman’s family requested that those paying their last respects for Inbar wear the color pink, in honor of the visual communications student’s graffiti moniker, Pink. A pink rose lay on her coffin.

Speaking at the funeral, Haiman’s mother Yifat, said: “Rest in peace, my pink angel.”

“You waited for all the Nova people to return, and you came back last,” she said. “We waited month after month, deal after deal, and in the end, you came last, because you’re a personality that helps everyone.”

“How does a mother separate from a daughter after raising her for 27 years?” she asked. “How do you raise such a radiant and beautiful girl, who always helps everyone and puts herself last?”

Haiman’s father Haim said Inbar was “a girl of endless giving, freedom, light and love.”

“How can I separate from you when I feel like you’re still alive?” he said. “I remember our hikes every Saturday, when we would ride bikes in the orchards behind home.


Israel receives hostage remains after Hamas locates body in Gaza
The IDF received the remains of one slain hostage after Hamas announced earlier on Friday that it had recovered a captive's body in Gaza.

The remains arrived in Israel at 12:45 a.m. Saturday morning. The Red Cross received the remains at around midnight, though Hamas said that the handover would happen at around 11 p.m. on Friday.

The terror group discovered the remains of the hostage on Friday evening.

"Israel has received, through the Red Cross, the coffin of a hostage who was killed, which was handed over to the IDF and Shin Bet inside the Gaza Strip. From there, it will be transferred to Israel, where it will be received with a military ceremony, including a military rabbi. It will then be moved to the National Center for Forensic Medicine at the Ministry of Health," a press release from the Prime Minister's Office stated.

"All families of the hostages who were killed in action have been informed, and in this difficult time, our hearts are with them. The effort to bring back our hostages continues without interruption and will not cease until the last hostage is returned."


They Murdered Innocent Jews. Now They’re out of Israeli Prison With Millions of Dollars From the Palestinian Authority in Their Pockets.
At least 160 prisoners freed in the first phase of the Gaza peace plan are "terrorist millionaires" thanks to the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) pay-to-slay program, which funneled a total of nearly $70 million over the years to the 250 prisoners Israel released as part of the deal.

An analysis by the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) research group showed the PA "paid the terrorists high monthly salaries," detailing exactly how much money each terrorist received while imprisoned for crimes that include kidnapping, murder, and suicide bombings.

Among those released are several veteran Hamas commanders who established terror cells around Jerusalem and helped orchestrate attacks that killed dozens of Israeli civilians. As these terrorists languished in Israeli prisons, some with multiple life sentences, the PA bankrolled their fortunes with cash often subsidized by the international community.

The list of the 160 new millionaires includes some of the most notorious Palestinian terrorists Israel has imprisoned over the past few decades.


Alleged Oct 7 Terrorist Charged With Entering the United States Illegally After Receiving Fraudulent Visa From Biden Admin
An alleged terrorist who participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel is currently being held in a Louisiana jail, charged earlier this month with entering the United States using a fraudulent visa given to him by the Biden administration, according to a criminal complaint and inmate records.

Federal prosecutors charged Mahmoud Amin Ya’Qub al-Muhtadi, 33, with visa fraud and support for a foreign terrorist organization, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Friday that details his alleged participation in Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 Israelis. Al-Muhtadi is currently being held in the Saint Martin Parish Correctional Center in St. Martinville, La., inmate records show.

Al-Muhtadi, also known as Abu Ala, allegedly served as an operative in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (DFLP) military wing, a Gaza-based terror outfit that stormed through Israel on Oct. 7. When Al-Muhtadi "learned about the Hamas invasion," he allegedly "armed himself, alerted others, and crossed into Israel with the intention of assisting in Hamas’s terror attack," according to the criminal complaint, which is based on testimony from an FBI agent.

Federal investigators determined al-Muhtadi was present in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, "the location of a horrifying massacre by Hamas and its supporters," based on geolocational data gathered from his cell phone. Israel’s security services provided additional information about al-Muhtadi’s terrorist ties, the complaint states.

Shortly after Hamas breached Israeli territory, al-Muhtadi began "coordinating a group of armed fighters to join him in traveling from Gaza into Israel to participate in Hamas’s attack," the complaint alleges. About three hours after the first wave of fighters crossed into Israel, al-Muhtadi arrived near Kfar Aza.

Hamas and Gazans murdered more than 60 civilians in that kibbutz, including at least 4 Americans, and kidnapped 19 others. One of the 19 kidnapped was also American.

On June 26, 2024, less than a year after Oct. 7, an individual named "Mahmoud Almuhtadi" submitted an immigrant visa application to the Biden administration’s State Department. The alleged terrorist swore in the document he was not a member of a militant organization and "did not seek to engage in terrorist activities while in the United States," according to portions of that application described in the complaint.


The secret life of the alleged new face of Islamic terror who is accused of trying to recruit Australians to become martyrs
A newly-graduated university student has been arrested on terrorism martyrdom charges - but had dreams of one day becoming a high school teacher.

Shantel Shandil, 24, was seized by cops at a home in Quakers Hill, in Sydney's north west, on Thursday following a four-month investigation by police.

Shandil had allegedly been sharing content on two social media accounts that intended to motivate or inspire people to commit violent acts, and glorified martyrdom and allegiance to known terrorist groups.

The Australian Federal Police launched a probe into the social media accounts in July after receiving a tip-off, with officers raiding Shandil's home later that month.

Police will allege a phone seized from the property contained 43 files of 'violent extremist material' which Shandil had posted online.

Shandil has been charged with using a carriage service for violent extremist material and possessing or controlling violent extremist material obtained or accessed using a carriage service.

Daily Mail can reveal Shandil, who also uses the surname Hussain, only graduated from Charles Sturt University with a Bachelor of Islamic Studies in September.

She is also enrolled in a Master of Secondary Education and Teaching at the same university, which the Daily Mail understands she began earlier this year.
Fifty years since the UN’s ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution
In less than a month, we’ll be marking 50 years since the U.N. General Assembly gave its blessing to the worst antisemitic canard of the postwar era: that Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is a form of racism.

On Nov. 10, 1975, the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, setting in motion a half-century of demonization targeting the State of Israel that has only intensified over time, especially in the two years that have elapsed since the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The text of the resolution incorporated many of the themes promoted these days by the pro-Hamas movement internationally, not least the claim—made while white minority regimes were still in power in South Africa and what was then Rhodesia—that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin.”

This assertion was extracted from the anti-Zionist playbook designed by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. At the time, the Soviets ran a thriving industry of anti-Zionist publications and conferences that provided the ideological justification for the wretched persecution of Soviet Jews and the denial of their right to immigrate to Israel. Critically, Soviet antizionism was rooted in classical antisemitism. In perhaps the most notorious example of this genre, a Soviet hack named Trofim Kichko published a book titled Judaism Without Embellishment, portraying Zionism as the natural outgrowth of a religion whose primary purpose was to cheat and swindle non-Jews. This same trope was reproduced in books and pamphlets with titles like “Beware! Zionism” and “Zionism in the Service of Anti-Communism.”

The insult leveled by the passage of Resolution 3379 did not lie simply in its wording. In adopting it, the General Assembly turned the United Nations into the world’s main vehicle for the promotion of Jew-hatred, creating a bureaucratic apparatus designed to amplify the Arab and Palestinian campaign to eliminate Israel as a sovereign state. Examine the world body’s various agencies and committees, and you will see this apparatus in action. To give an example, the U.N. Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item dedicated to the alleged violations of the State of Israel—and no other country. To give another, the United Nations appoints a Special Rapporteur for the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” whose current incumbent, Francesca Albanese, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for pushing antisemitic, pro-Hamas propaganda.

Exhibit “A,” however, is the committee created by a separate resolution on the same day that Resolution 3379 was passed, and which continues to reflect the core theme of “Zionism is racism” in its work and activities. That body is the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” (CEIRPP), whose very existence is a violation, when it comes to Israel, of the commitment in the U.N. Charter to the “sovereign equality” of all its member states.

At its various seminars in different parts of the globe, as well as its annual “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” CEIRPP pushes all the messages associated with those organizations and states that reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic polity—false claims of “apartheid,” insistence that the Palestinians displaced by the Arab war on the nascent State of Israel in 1948-49 have a “right of return” and refusal to characterize systemic Palestinian violence against Israelis as terrorism. Although Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 with what may well be the shortest resolution ever passed by the General Assembly (something that was only possible in the brief period that the United States was the unrivaled world power following the Soviet Union’s collapse), CEIRPP behaves as though it is still on the books.
As Gaza is rebuilt, the toxic Unrwa structure must be dismantled
This ideology has not only survived for more than a century but been institutionalised and sustained – through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa. Created in 1949 as a temporary body to assist the roughly 700,000 Palestinians displaced during Israel’s War of Independence, Unwra has become a permanent agency with a single overriding purpose: to perpetuate the refugee status of Palestinians indefinitely. Whereas the role of the international community should be to create the circumstances for enhancing peace, in this case it did the exact opposite.

Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which resettles refugees and ends their statelessness, Unrwa enshrines it. Only in the Palestinian case is refugee status permanent and passed down to descendants for eternity. The result: the number of Palestinian “refugees” has swelled from 700,000 to some six million (Palestinian leaders routinely claim eight or nine million). In reality, more than 95 per cent of them were never displaced from anywhere. They were born in Gaza, Ramallah, Amman, or Beirut.

Unrwa has become a symbol, in the eyes of Palestinians, of their desire to “return” – in space, to their previous homes inside Israel (most of which do not exist any longer), and in time, to an era before the creation of the Jewish state. Given the demographics, such a “return” would mean the end of the Jewish state. Under the auspices of the international community, Unrwa has become the political vehicle through which the number of Palestinian “refugees” has been exponentially inflated, to serve the political goal of “return” and, ultimately, of undoing Israel’s existence.

This political mechanism has devastating consequences. It teaches generation after generation that their homes lie not in Gaza or Nablus but in Haifa and Jaffa – that their birthright is to “return” to cities inside Israel, and that Israel’s very existence is a temporary injustice waiting to be undone.

In Unrwa schools, textbooks glorify “martyrs,” maps erase Israel, and pupils are taught that “return” – meaning the destruction of Israel – is not a dream but a duty. Unrwa has become part and parcel of Palestinian rejectionism.

The leaders of Hamas, including Yahya Sinwar, spoke openly in the days before October 7 of an imminent “return” – a chilling reminder that the concept is not a metaphor but a call to violent action.

If Gaza is to have a future different from its past, Unrwa must be dismantled and the very concept of a “Palestinian refugee” in Gaza must disappear. One cannot be a refugee from the place one was born.

The message should be clear: you can live next to Israel in peace, but not instead of it.

Gaza’s reconstruction must be explicitly conditional. Any new governing authority – whether local Palestinians, a joint Arab body, or an international trusteeship – must adhere to a few non-negotiable principles: recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and a formal end to the state of war against it; renunciation of claims inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders; acceptance that Gaza’s residents are not refugees and that they do not possess a “right of return”; and a firm commitment to demilitarisation, with all aid monitored to prevent its diversion into weapons or tunnels.

These are not maximalist demands but the bare minimum for any sane policy. Without ideological surrender, military defeat is meaningless. Israel can destroy Hamas’s arsenal, but if children are still taught that Jews have no right to be there, a new Hamas – or any other organisation different only in name – will rise from the rubble.

For too long, Western diplomacy has tiptoed around these truths, preferring to pour concrete and hope for moderation. But real hope for a different future will come only when Palestinians choose life over grievance, reality over myth, and coexistence over the dream of “return” and erasure. The war will end only when the ideology that caused it ends.


Ask Haviv Anything: Episode 52: Why do people hate Jews, with Dara Horn
Dr. Dara Horn, award-winning novelist and scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, joins the podcast to help us dig deep into the Jewish bookshelf, the whirlwind of antisemitism in which so many Jews find themselves, and, unavoidably, into Judaism’s most successful go-to solution for seemingly every problem: Education.

We talk about Jewish “anti-literature,” about why people (and museums and politicians) so often seem to love stories about dead Jews but get uncomfortable with living ones, and about how American Jews, the biggest, wealthiest and possibly most Jewishly illiterate diaspora community in the history of Jews, reclaims the richer, deeper Jewish culture it abandoned in generations past.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Jewish Literature and Identity
06:33 The Concept of Jewish Anti-Literature
13:33 Exploring Resilience in Jewish Narratives
19:59 Cultural Gaps in American Jewish Life
25:32 The Impact of Anti-Semitism on Jewish Identity
27:20 The Cold War and American Judaism
34:36 The Rise of Antisemitism in Modern Society
38:03 Understanding Antisemitism: A Deep Dive
42:59 The Impact of Antisemitism on Jewish Identity
48:43 Personal Experiences with Antisemitism
54:12 Defining Antisemitism: Origins and Implications
01:03:09 Understanding Anti-Semitism Through Jewish Civilization
01:11:02 The Importance of Jewish Identity and Education




travelingisrael.com: Patrick bet David is almost there! (Who is Committing Genocide against Christians in Nigeria?)
Patrick Bet-David did something huge last week. Something very important. He uploaded a video about the genocide of Christians in Nigeria...




Pro-Palestine protesters set restaurant ablaze TRAPPING workers as policemen HOSPITALISED
Ten workers were trapped in a restaurant set ablaze by a rampaging mob of pro-Palestine demonstrators this weekend in Bern, Switzerland. The unauthorised protest turned violent as the crowd clashed with police, leaving 18 officers injured and four hospitalised.






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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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