Monday, December 29, 2025

12/29 Links Pt1: Trump says he would support Israeli strike on Iran; Debunking Eight Gaza Fatality Myths Fueling the Genocide Hoax; U.S. slashes pledge for U.N. humanitarian aid funding, tells U.N agencies to "adapt, shrink or die"

From Ian:

Pierre Rehov: Palestinian Authority 'Help' Is a Trap for Washington: Trump Has the Opportunity to Break a Cycle of Defeat
The Palestinian Authority is not a neutral Muslim-majority entity seeking peace. Its doctrine has, for decades, blended conventional diplomacy with asymmetric warfare — using terrorism as an instrument of policy. In the last decade, this double game has not disappeared. It has merely learned to speak the language of Western guilt. Countries in the West have actually rewarded its terrorism, both by continuing lavishly to fund it and by climbing over one another to recognize a fictitious, nonexistent "Palestinian State."

Palestinians in Gaza might be tired of Hamas, but that does not mean they are ready to live peacefully side-by-side with Israel.

Just imagine the Palestinian Authority inside Gaza's reconstruction ecosystem, with access to donor funds, humanitarian logistics, and institutional channels. Reconstruction money is not neutral. It creates influence, dependency, and leverage. The Palestinian Authority understands this better than anyone.

The Palestinian Authority does not recognize Israel and most likely has no intention whatsoever of dismantling Hamas. For the Palestinian Authority, "reconstruction" offers laundering its legitimacy, access to institutions, long-term influence, and the chance, once President Donald Trump leaves office, of being deliciously positioned to do anything it likes.

For Israel, this scenario is existentially dangerous. Israel would be expected to tolerate a hostile foreign security architecture on its southern border while remaining ultimately responsible for the consequences of its failure. Any future escalation — rocket fire, tunnel reconstruction, arms smuggling — would place Israel in an impossible position: to act militarily and be accused of attacking "the forces for peace " or refrain and absorb the threat. Either choice is unacceptable.

For Washington, the trap is more subtle but equally severe. Once the United States endorses a framework, it becomes politically and financially invested in its survival. Billions of dollars in aid, contracts, and diplomatic capital follow. At that point, acknowledging failure becomes almost impossible. The priority shifts from solving the problem to preserving the framework — even as security deteriorates.

A post-war Gaza that is not fully demilitarized -- and remains that way -- will not stay quiet. Hostility will mutate.... Reconstruction will become camouflage. And the international presence meant to stabilize the situation will end up institutionalizing the very forces it was supposed to eliminate.

That is why this "Palestinian Authority solution" is a terrible idea for Israel — and a strategic trap for Washington: It offers the appearance of control while in fact hollowing out any real security.
Debunking Eight Gaza Fatality Myths Fueling the Genocide Hoax
Few aspects of the Gaza war have been more politically weaponized than fatality statistics. Numbers that would normally be treated with extreme caution during an active conflict have instead been elevated to unquestioned fact, recycled by media outlets, NGOs, and activists to support a predetermined narrative of Israeli wrongdoing, often culminating in accusations of genocide.

This article addresses eight of the most persistent myths surrounding Gaza fatality figures. Each has been repeated so frequently that it now functions as assumed background knowledge. Yet every one collapses under basic scrutiny.

Myth #1: Hamas has been accurate in the past, so its data is reliable now From the outset of the war, UN agencies, NGOs and much of the media treated Hamas's fatality figures as reliable, even though Hamas is a U.S. and EU-designated terrorist organization that live-streamed the murder, rape and kidnapping of nearly 1,200 Israelis on 10/7. Hamas was also actively fighting a war for its survival and therefore had every incentive to manipulate casualty figures for political and legal gain. Yet its numbers were nonetheless elevated as credible, treated as more authoritative than Israel’s and laundered through the official-sounding “Ministry of Health” (MoH).

That credulity rests on selective memory. Hamas’s casualty reporting has a documented history of false claims followed by delayed admissions once the fighting has ended and the narrative damage has already been done. After the 2009 Gaza war, Hamas initially claimed that only 48 fighters were killed out of approximately 1,300 total fatalities, implying a civilian death rate exceeding 95%. Months later, Hamas admitted that between 600 to 700 of the dead were Hamas fighters, closely matching Israel’s figure of 709 combatants. A similar pattern emerged during the 2018 Gaza border riots. Hamas initially described roughly 60 fatalities as civilians killed during “peaceful protests," but after criticism by a Palestinian interviewer, a senior Hamas official acknowledged that 50 of those killed were Hamas members.

Such manipulations are not anomalies; they are recurring features of Hamas’s wartime casualty reporting. The notion that Hamas is not actively stage-managing fatality figures is not a serious analytical position. Acknowledging this record necessarily means accepting that the current 70,000-fatality claim cannot be taken at face value either.


Trump says he would support Israeli strike on Iranian missiles, nuclear sites
Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that he would “absolutely” support additional Israeli strikes on Iranian missile and nuclear facilities.

JNS asked Trump about his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the possibility of the Israeli premier receiving a potential pardon from Israel’s president over an ongoing corruption and bribery probe.

“Israel, with other people, might not exist right now,” Trump told JNS about Netanyahu. “He’s a wartime prime minister. He’s done a phenomenal job. He’s taken Israel through very dangerous period of trauma.”

The U.S. president said that he had talked with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and that a pardon for Israel’s prime minister was “on its way.”

In remarks to reporters, Trump agreed to military action alongside Israel if Iran “will continue with missiles” and nuclear activities.

“Yes, the nuclear: fast.” Trump said. “One will be yes, absolutely. The other we’ll do it immediately.”

It was not clear if Trump meant that he would support a strike under current conditions but suggested that any potential military action would be a response to Iranian actions.

“I hear that Iran is trying to build up again and if they are we’re going to have to knock ’em down—we’ll knock the hell out of them,” Trump said.

He added that Iran should “make a deal,” but that he would not discuss the overthrow of the regime.

The president and prime minister took questions for about 10 minutes outside the gates of Mar-a-Lago, with Trump saying that the two leaders would discuss five “major subjects,” including Gaza.

“There has to be a disarmament of Hamas,” Trump said.


Trump to be awarded Israel Prize next year, the country’s top honor
Education Minister Yoav Kisch informed US President Donald Trump via phone call on Monday that he would be granting him the Israel Prize, considered the country’s highest honor.

Kisch spoke with Trump during the president’s meeting in Florida with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli delegation.

“It is my great and distinct honor to inform you that the Israel Prize committee… has reached a historical decision to award you the Israel Prize, in the category ‘special contribution to the Jewish people,'” Kisch told Trump as Netanyahu held up a phone toward the US president at the table.

Kisch claimed that the honor marks the first time since the founding of the state that the prize is being awarded to a non-Israeli citizen, in a “category created to recognize individuals whose actions have left an exceptional and enduring impact on the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world.”

However, the 1991 Israel Prize was awarded to non-citizen Zubin Mehta, an Indian conductor who directed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for many years.

Responding to Kisch, Trump said that it was a “great honor, really amazing being the first one outside of Israel, it’s really something.”


Kemi Badenoch: Alaa Abd El-Fattah should be stripped of his British citizenship and deported after his antisemitic and racist tweets were exposed
Two things can be true at the same time.

First, Alaa Abd El-Fattah should have received a free and fair trial in Egypt. The long years of detention, the suffering of his family, and the lack of due process are not things any democracy should be comfortable with. There ends my sympathy.

There is a second truth. The comments he made on social media about violence against Jews, white people and the police, amongst others, are disgusting and abhorrent.

They were also anti-British, which begs the question how officials rubber-stamped this application without escalating to then Home Secretary.

The Home Secretary should now look at all possible options, including whether his citizenship can be revoked and he can be removed from Britain.

British citizenship is more than a passport. It means subscribing to our values. Our country is our home not a hotel. But let’s ask ourselves how this mad situation occurred.

Celebrities campaigned for his release as Western politicians, various media outlets, and human rights organisations helped sanitise El-Fattah’s story. I was only aware of his case in passing when discussed in parliament and on the news.

El-Fattah was always presented as a symbol of democratic resistance. It’s now clear from the comments which emerged that many who were supporting him had brushed aside his own published political views, including explicit endorsements of violence.


Antisemitism expert slams Starmer for welcoming activist who praised killing Zionists
Deborah Lipstadt has criticised Sir Keir Starmer for welcoming to Britain an Egyptian activist who previously endorsed the killing of Zionists, warning that such gestures were an affront to both Jews and moderate Muslims.

Speaking to hundreds at a packed-out Limmud event on Sunday, the former United States special envoy for monitoring and combatting antisemitism said she was dismayed that Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a British-Egyptian activist, had been publicly welcomed back to the UK by the prime minister.

“When your prime minister welcomes back into this country a man who has said such horrific things about Jews, any moderate Muslim who is distressed by it will struggle to speak up,” she said.

On X in 2012, El- Fattah said that he rejoiced “when Zionists are killed,” and in 2010, he considered “killing any colonialists and especially Zionists heroic” and that “we need to kill more of them”.

El-Fattah has apologised after some politicians suggested he should be deported as a result of his comments: "I am shaken that, just as I am being reunited with my family for the first time in 12 years, several historic tweets of mine have been republished and used to question and attack my integrity and values, escalating to calls for the revocation of my citizenship," he said in a statement on Monday.

"Looking at the tweets now - the ones that were not completely twisted out of their meaning - I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologise."

Lipstadt, an American historian best known for defeating Holocaust-denier David Irving in a landmark libel trial and who served as US special envoy against antisemitism from 2022 to early 2025, was speaking in conversation with Rabbi Raphael Zarum, dean of the London School of Jewish Studies, at a widely billed session on contemporary antisemitism.

“[With] the failure to call out radical Islam,” she said, “the people we are throwing under the bus, literally, are Jews and moderate Muslims.”

She described this as “identity politics gone rotten”.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah should not be in Britain
Fattah doesn’t seem to be the paragon of virtue that he has been portrayed as by many politicians, media outlets and the celebrities who backed the Free Alaa campaign. He has apparently given vent to racist and anti-Semitic views. Calling for the killing of ‘Zionists’ and seemingly admitting to hating ‘white people’ certainly won’t do much for social cohesion in the UK. This case is yet another reminder of the vast gulf that separates the interests of British citizens from the priorities of the government.

The Conservative Party and Reform UK have called for Fattah to be stripped of his citizenship and deported. This is not as far-fetched as it seems, given he only became a British citizen in 2021, under the previous Conservative government. His claims to citizenship at the time also seem to have been tenuous – he was actually born in Egypt to a mother who only happened to be born in London as Fattah’s grandmother was doing a PhD there at the time.

Starmer may plead ignorance – his office recently said that he had no idea about Fattah’s past statements on social media. But his views are hardly a secret. In 2014, Fattah’s nomination for the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought was withdrawn because of the existence of these very posts.

This is not just down to Starmer’s administration. Successive UK governments should have looked into the social-media history of a prominent political activist before granting him British citizenship, campaigning hard to secure his release from a foreign prison and welcoming him into Britain with open arms. This is basic due diligence and should be part of a standard background check.

There is now significant political, media and public clamour for Starmer to do something about Fattah. But the PM has pretty much tied his hands. Of all the enormous u-turns he has mounted in government, deporting a man back to Egypt, after months of lobbying for his release from that same country, would surely take the biscuit.

The case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah is a catastrophic cock-up, which could have been easily avoided. Once again, our governing elites, cheered on by campaigning media and assorted luvvies, have been left with egg on their face. They have embarrassed themselves on the international stage by supporting a man who hates Britain and its people. The public have run out of patience with this most inept of governments.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah should never have been given citizenship or admitted to the UK
Jonathan Sacerdoti discusses the UK’s warm welcome of the controversial Egyptian despite extensive evidence for many years in the public sphere of his extremist statements and calls for violence.




Stephen Pollard: Alaa Abd el-Fattah's apology changes nothing
el-Fattah’s statement is a model of its kind. Whilst he apologises and accepts some of the tweets are ‘shocking and hurtful’, nowhere does he concede that anything he has written was wrong, merely that his words have either been taken ‘completely misunderstood, seemingly in bad faith’ or, even more hilariously, that they were part of an ‘online insult battle’ and never intended to offend a wider public – as if posting on Twitter is private.

I have translated his statement to save you the bother of reading it:
When I wrote that I hated all whites and wanted the police and Zionists killed, it never crossed my mind that one day I would have to go and live in a country full of white people, which also had a load of Jews. So here is a statement which the idiots who campaigned for my release when they didn’t know the first thing about me can use to try to pretend they aren’t the buffoons everyone how realises they are. Fingers crossed, eh!

You may have seen a video that’s been circulating on social media of some of those very idiots. It’s priceless. Brian Cox, Emily Watson, Harriet Walter, Bill Nighy and Joseph Fiennes are all brilliant at reading the products of other people’s brains, but it’s clear from their campaigning for el-Fattah that they are, ahem, somewhat less brilliant when it comes to using their own brains.

But they at least have the excuse that no one expects them to be anything other than frivolous fools. Less so, the politicians who willingly signed up to the campaign and now think that they can absolve themselves by saying that they didn’t know about his views when they signed up. The likes, that is, of Alicia Kearns – a former chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee and a former FCO official, no less. Yesterday she wrote:
Those of us who campaigned for Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s protection and release as a British citizen plainly were not aware of his grotesque tweets, and at no point had anyone raised them with me until yesterday. I trusted the process to give Alaa citizenship, and then supported the campaign for his release. I feel deeply let down, and frankly betrayed, having lent my support to his cause which I now regret.

In other words, she didn’t have a clue about him and didn’t think it worth the bother of checking who he was before joining in his campaign. And yet she presumably still thinks the rest of us should consider her a voice worth listening to. And, for good measure, Kearns had the gall in her statement to demand that ‘Alaa must unequivocally apologise’ – as if that would make the least difference to her own demonstrable inadequacy or, more importantly, to the threat of having another raging Jew hater in the UK. Does she really think that if he said sorry, it would change anything? Given how idiotically she has behaved so far, the answer to that is probably yes.


U.S. slashes pledge for U.N. humanitarian aid funding, tells U.N agencies to "adapt, shrink or die"
The United States on Monday announced a $2 billion pledge for U.N. humanitarian aid as President Trump's administration continues to slash U.S. foreign assistance and warns United Nations agencies to "adapt, shrink or die" in a time of new financial realities.

The money is a small fraction of what the U.S. has contributed in the past but reflects what the administration believes is a generous amount that will maintain the United States' status as the world's largest humanitarian donor.

"This new model will better share the burden of U.N. humanitarian work with other developed countries and will require the U.N. to cut bloat, remove duplication, and commit to powerful new impact, accountability and oversight mechanisms," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media.

The pledge creates an umbrella fund from which money will be doled out to individual agencies and priorities, a key part of U.S. demands for drastic changes across the world body that have alarmed many humanitarian workers and led to severe reductions in programs and services.

The $2 billion is only a sliver of traditional U.S. humanitarian funding for U.N.-backed programs, which has run as high as $17 billion annually in recent years, according to U.N. data. U.S. officials say only $8-$10 billion of that has been in voluntary contributions. The United States also pays billions in annual dues related to its U.N. membership.


Episode 72: The women fighters behind the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, with Elizabeth R. Hyman
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stands as one of the few shining moments of (temporarily) successful Jewish resistance in the bottomless evil and despair that was the Holocaust. Heroes of the uprising like Mordechai Anielewicz and Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman form part of the national civic religion of Israeli Jews, and of Jewish commemoration ceremonies worldwide.

But the men of the uprising didn’t do it alone. Without Zivia Lubetkin, Tosia Altman and the other women couriers and fighters, the uprising may have failed to organize in the first place. Yet how many Jews know those names or their incredible story?

Our guest today is author Elizabeth R. Hyman, whose recent bestselling book The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto tells the astonishing history of some of the greatest heroes the Jewish people have ever produced, but whose exploits were all but ignored and even forgotten after the war.

Through memoirs and diaries, Hyman tells their story, dragging the couriers of the ghettos into the light of history and Jewish remembrance and giving us a fuller picture of Jewish courage in the deepest darkness Jews have ever known.

Chapters
00:00 The Untold Stories of the Warsaw Ghetto
07:38 The Rise of Young Jewish Activism
17:42 Women in the Resistance: The Kasharyot
27:50 The Smuggling Network and Survival Strategies
36:41 The Uprising Begins: Resistance and Leadership
39:21 The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Identity
41:43 The Role of Women in the Uprising
45:01 The Emotional Toll: Choices of Survival
49:20 The Final Stand: Tactics and Outcomes
52:45 Aftermath: Lives of the Survivors
55:01 Erasure of Women in Holocaust Memory


Erin Molan: How Communities Heal — and Grow After Trauma | Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern + Yair Netanyahu
In Episode 72 of The Erin Molan Show, Erin sits down with clinical psychologist Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern for a powerful conversation on how communities experience trauma — and how they can heal, rebuild, and even grow after it.

Dr. Miri explains:
• Why trauma can feel like it never ends
• What “collective trauma” and traumatic invalidation really mean
• How propaganda and indoctrination exploit vulnerable minds
• Why children and teens are especially at risk
• What parents and communities can do to build resilience, critical thinking, and hope

This episode also includes a special replay highlight hand-selected by Erin: a candid and wide-ranging conversation with Yair Netanyahu, originally recorded earlier this year, revisited now because of its continued relevance and importance.

00:00 Welcome & Why This Conversation Matters
01:42 How Communities Experience Trauma (Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern)
18:45 Yair Netanyahu — Replay Highlight Conversation
57:10 Closing Remarks


Erin Molan: Australia’s Warning to America: Erin Molan Sounds the Alarm | Sid Rosenberg Show
Erin Molan joins New York radio host Sid Rosenberg for a powerful, unfiltered conversation following the deadly Bondi attack in Sydney, Australia.

In this audio-only interview, Erin explains how a breakdown in leadership, moral cowardice, and the silence of the majority allowed hate to fester — and why what’s happening in Australia should serve as a warning to the United States and the wider Western world.

From failures of political leadership to the consequences of appeasing extremism, Erin delivers one of the most important radio conversations of the year.




Humza Yousaf funded by Qatar as authoritarian state pays for international travel
Humza Yousaf accepted money from an authoritarian regime to attend a global forum in the Gulf earlier this month. The former first minister declared that the government of Qatar had paid for his trip to the Doha Forum, an event billed as "a global platform for dialogue, bringing together leaders in policy to discuss critical challenges facing our world".

Qatar is a de facto absolute monarchy with human rights groups raising concerns about the situation in the state. Civil liberties are restricted, homosexual acts are illegal and can be punishable by death, while the treatment of migrant workers was thrust into the spotlight before the tiny nation hosted the 2022 World Cup.

Despite that, Mr Yousaf has holidayed in Qatar and is now accepting money from the government. His register of interests shows the regime funded his accommodation, travel and "some subsistence" for the event, which ran from December 6-7.




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