2025 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, August 28, 2025

08/28 Links Pt2: One eye and four blindfolds; Iran’s evil does not stop at its borders; The UN’s Blue Flag, Hamas’s Black Hand; UNIFIL’s Looming End: Why the UN Won't Let it Happen

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: One eye and four blindfolds

So why has Albanese suddenly decided to act against the Islamic regime? The reason is almost certainly that he has begun to feel some heat over his government’s appalling behavior.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed diplomatic niceties to one side by chewing him out in public over the Rothman ban, while Israel has stripped some Australian diplomats of their visas. This may have concentrated Albanese’s mind on the fact that intelligence-sharing with Israel remains crucial to Australia’s national security.

In 2017, Israel alerted ASIO that there was a plot to blow up an Etihad Airways flight leaving Sydney. And this week, Sky News revealed that a tip-off from Israeli intelligence had assisted ASIO during its investigation, which unraveled the Iran connection to the terror attacks.

More significant still, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be taking a very dim view indeed of Australia’s anti-Israel antics. He has yet to meet Albanese.

And Australia’s defense minister, Richard Marles, was humiliated this week by American defense officials’ ambiguity over whether exchanges with his U.S. counterpart, Pete Hegseth, in Washington, D.C., were an actual “meeting” or a “happenstance encounter.”

Any idea that Albanese has now seen the light over Israel is vanishingly unlikely.

On Sky News Australia, Sharri Markson revealed that in 1998, a “starry-eyed” Albanese met Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, which had sponsored and funded his trip to Ramallah.

Two years later, she said, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinian Arabs were blowing Israelis to bits on buses and in pizza parlors, Albanese joined protests against Israel, during which American and Israeli flags were burnt.

In a speech to the Australian parliament while Israel was struggling to stop the slaughter of more than 1,300 of its citizens, Albanese condemned Israeli roadblocks and other restrictions on Palestinians as abuses of their civil rights.

Albanese has now admitted that he has been an advocate for the Palestinian cause his whole life and says he is angry at the anti-Israel protesters—only because their extremism is undermining that cause. In other words, in the great battle now underway between civilization and barbarism, Albanese has put Australia on the wrong side.

This matters not just to Israel but to the West. Australia is a member of the Five Eyes security alliance. The other four members are the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and New Zealand.

In its hostility to Israel—the West’s indispensable front line of defense in the Middle East—Australia has been puncturing that alliance, a breach that its belated burst of realism over Iran cannot repair.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not alone in this. The United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have also turned into foes of the Jewish state, demonizing it with lies aimed at its delegitimization and preparing to recognize the illusory “state of Palestine” which is being willed into existence purely as a means to Israel’s destruction.

Only America is holding fast to Israel’s security and defense. So the Five Eyes alliance has now turned into One Eye and Four Blindfolds.

Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand can no longer be trusted with the defense of the West. It’s now America and Israel fighting for a free world that no longer understands what that means.

Iran’s evil does not stop at its borders

These revelations should hardly have shocked Albanese. After all, Iran has long exported its brand of violent Islamism well beyond its borders. This has ramped up especially since 7 October 2023 and the start of the Gaza war.

In May, seven Iranian nationals were arrested across the UK, accused of plotting two separate terror attacks. A July report from the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee described Iran as a ‘wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable’ threat. Iranian-backed attacks have also been carried out in Spain, France and Argentina. Even 7 October itself had Iran’s fingerprints all over it. The Hamas militants who murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel were flush with Iranian cash and weapons.

It is, of course, hardly positive news that a foreign country is sponsoring anti-Semitic attacks in your own country. Yet you can’t help but think the career politician in Albanese must have breathed a sigh of relief. Flanked by Australia’s top spy Mike Burgess and foreign minister Penny Wong, Albanese was suddenly able to pose as a protector of Australian Jews. Even though he has been anything but in the recent past.

Indeed, Albanese cannot fully wash his hands of the crisis of anti-Semitism in Australia. Ever since 7 October, he has depicted Israel as essentially the sole perpetrator of every misfortune in Gaza. His Labor government has repeatedly demanded ceasefires which would have offered strategic advantages to Hamas. It even condemned Israel for its counter-attacks against Hezbollah – Iran’s most lethal and well-armed proxy. Albanese’s one-sided, unwavering criticism of Israel has cultivated a national hostility to the Jewish State. It is not hard to see how this has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish.

Anthony Albanese is right to stand up to the Iranian terror threat. But Australia’s Jewish community will expect far more from the prime minister before trust is restored. The arson attacks may have been ordered from abroad, but the broader climate of Jew hatred is largely homegrown.

The UN’s Blue Flag, Hamas’s Black Hand: A Case Study in Complicity

The UN’s Three-Part Mantra of Excuses
1 Humanitarian Necessity – UNRWA claims it is the “only game in town.” But humanitarian aid isn’t just bread and water, it has included cement, wiring, and infrastructure that repeatedly ends up in Hamas’s tunnels. The UN knows it, yet refuses to answer the obvious: where did all that concrete go? There is even little to no oversight or accounting regarding the projects all the cement, wires and infrastructure was slated for from the beginning. How many schools or health facilities were never developed because the supplies were designated to construct Hamas's underground world?
2 Institutional Separation – UNRWA insists its staff are “civilians.” Yet OIOS admits some were terrorists, and polls show the majority of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria support Hamas. The idea that UNRWA employees are immune from these sympathies is absurd. Teaching jihad in classrooms, wiring electricity from UNRWA buildings to Hamas tunnels, turning blind eyes to tunnel entrances hidden inside compounds, this is complicity, not neutrality.
3 Process Over Outcomes – When scandals erupt, the UN launches reviews, frameworks, reforms. Endless paper. But the system never changes, because the bureaucracy exists to protect itself, not reform itself. Reviews become fig leaves for corruption.

Donors: Suspend, Resume, Repeat
When Israel exposed the October 7 connection, donors briefly froze funding. Then, predictably, they resumed. The EU returned to business as usual. Only the U.S. codified its funding halt into law until at least March 2026. Donor governments know UNRWA is compromised, yet they cling to it out of habit and fear of logistical headaches.

What Honest Neutrality Would Look Like
True neutrality would demand:
- Full Transparency – Line-by-line staff records, affiliations, and vetting against terror lists, continuously audited.
- Independent Verification – If a statistic comes from Hamas ministries, it should be labeled “unverified,” not “UN-confirmed.”
- Operational Redesign – Break UNRWA’s monopoly. Fund private or independent alternatives like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (@GHFUpdates), which has proven aid can reach civilians without Hamas skimming off the top.

The Moral Bottom Line
Neutrality does not mean parroting terrorists. It does not mean rockets in schools, tunnels under headquarters, or staff participating in massacres. It does not mean reviewing the problem to death while feeding the same beast year after year.

Until the UN stops outsourcing truth to Hamas ministries and proves it can police its own payroll, Western governments must stop pretending this setup produces neutral information. It doesn’t.

It produces propaganda wrapped in a blue flag.

The only immediate solution, one that will save billions in taxpayer funds, is simple: Defund the United Nations!

08/28 Links Pt1: Israel Shows Some Diplomatic Spine; US, Israel applaud France, Germany, UK decision to reimpose sanctions on Iran; IDF strike on Houthi military leaders

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel Shows Some Diplomatic Spine

Israel is responding aggressively and appropriately to two recent public relations challenges, suggesting Jerusalem understands the gravity of its situation as well as the fact that it is in the right on both.

The first is the “famine” libel. Israel is asking the IPC, the multinational monitor, to retract its debunked report on Gaza City. According to Reuters, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is warning that “if a new report were not presented within two weeks, Israel would continue to challenge the assessment and would ask the IPC’s donors to halt their financial support.”

Good. Israel can no longer afford to simply be correct on the merits. If corrupt global agencies are going to insert themselves as partisans into this war then they’ll learn to take a (metaphorical) punch.

As a reminder, Israel first meticulously proved the report false based on the IPC’s own data, which suggests the agency is not merely incompetent but corrupt and compromised.

Indeed, it’s clear the report was released as a preemptive attack on Israel’s new operation in Gaza City. The IPC simply declared famine in the one place in Gaza that the IDF was looking to enter, which was also the one place in Gaza relatively untouched by the war. Still, it’s important to have the numbers on your side, and Israel did (all emphasis in the original):

“The report relied on only half of the data actually collected in July — five sub-samples covering 7,519 children, described on pages 49–50 of the FRC report, with a combined average of roughly 16% — just above the threshold.

“By contrast, a Nutrition Cluster presentation released on August 8 — a week before the August 15 cut-off date — reported the full July sample of 15,749 children. Those results showed unweighted and weighted GAM rates of 13.5% and 12.2%, respectively — both well below the famine threshold.”

So the data were clear: no famine. That the IPC chose to manipulate the data for political purposes suggests the agency has forfeited its legitimacy.

Andrew Fox: How a Humanitarian Crisis Became a Fight for Influence

Our central finding was stark: Israel was effectively absent as a source in the media field covering Gaza, while Hamas became the default provider of information. I recently came across a study by the NCRI, a research center based at Rutgers University that examines disinformation, extremism, and media manipulation. Its report on famine coverage has now confirmed the same patterns.

Four things stand out.
First, Hamas-linked sources are treated as if they were neutral. Reports routinely cite the Gaza Health Ministry without noting that it is run by Hamas. Both our own research and NCRI’s analysis found the same result: in roughly 75–80% of coverage, the Hamas affiliation was left out.

Second, Hamas figures are often repeated without any attribution at all. Almost one in five reports simply quoted the numbers as if they were common knowledge. The Guardian was the worst offender, doing this in 43% of its coverage effectively treating Hamas propaganda as fact.

Third, the headlines tell their own story. NCRI found that they blamed Israel or the GHF for famine, but never once Hamas. That matters, because most readers don’t get beyond the headline. About 75% share stories without opening them. In NCRI’s experiment, such headlines cut attribution of violence to Hamas by 70%.

Finally, damaging rumours about GHF have been amplified far beyond Gaza. One striking case was the claim that its flour contained narcotics. The story was traced back to Hamas’s Gaza Media Office, but by then it had already been echoed in NGO briefings and sympathetic coverage abroad. A rumor repeated became the story.

Tom Fletcher from the UN also became a source of disinformation with a reach of millions. Several months ago, his post on X went viral, falsely claiming that 14,000 children would die in Gaza within two days. The claim was later retracted, but not before more than 2.5 million people had seen it. Coming from a senior UN official, it carried extra weight, making the damage impossible to undo. Later corrections were too little, too late to counter the impact of the original message. What is happening in Gaza is more than a military conflict. It increasingly looks like a struggle for institutional survival: the UN seeking to retain control of aid flows, Hamas working to delegitimize alternatives, and GHF challenging a decades-old monopoly.

WSJ: Israel: "We Need to Survive First. After that Comes Popularity"

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar interviewed by Elliot Kaufman
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar marvels at how governments in the UK, France, Canada and Australia "came to the conclusion they need to recognize a Palestinian state now. In the beginning, it was supposed to be under certain conditions" - if the Palestinians would make peace. Instead, they made war, and "all conditions were forgotten." The states plan to make their recognition official in September.

Many Europeans "cannot understand that the Palestinians - all the factions - their ideology is to eliminate the Jewish state. It's a nice term, 'two-state solution.' First of all, you have a solution. But when you ask, 'Do you want a terror state?'" it becomes a different conversation.

In Gaza, "the real aid situation has improved dramatically. The prices of basic products that had been very expensive fell during the past weeks. And this is because the quantities that enter Gaza, mainly by trucks, and also by airdrops, are huge." Israel has had to facilitate the increase, knowing it is "sustaining Hamas's war machine."

"Of course we are in a very tough diplomatic battle. We are a small nation. We are standing against huge propaganda." But "take into consideration that the current reality comes after a consistent two years of war. I want to hope it won't last with the same temperature on calmer days. We will finish this war."

"We will not risk real interests for a temporary period of quiet and better PR. I still recall how Israel had great PR after the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005." It didn't last. Hamas took over and Israel is still paying the price, in diplomacy and in lives.

"We need to survive first. After that, there comes popularity and how much we are able to convince others around the world."

For Your Convenience, Package Delivered Not To You, But Halfway Across Town (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Jerusalem, August 28 - The courier company tasked with getting the item you ordered into your possession announced today by text message and e-mail that, to improve your experience as a customer of the company from which you ordered that product, said product will be waiting for you at a pickup point that requires you either to walk for some time in the summer heat, or to spend additional money on transportation to get there to claim the order, instead of the hassle you might face by having the parcel dropped off at your home address, which you provided when you submitted the order.

HCC, the delivery company subcontracted to deliver the apparel that you ordered online two weeks ago, notified you this morning that the package is waiting for you at a refreshment shop and newsstand three neighborhoods over from yours, for you to collect at your convenience, provided that your convenience coincides with the establishment's operating hours, and tough luck if that forces you to take time off from your regular daytime commitments to collect it. This, the delivery company assured you in the same message, is to help you, as everyone knows the kind of trouble that occurs when a package gets delivered to the very address where you told the supplier you wanted it delivered.

"For your convenience, we have delivered your order to Hertzl's Makkolet, at 3 Yahalom Street," the notification read. The location necessitates a twenty-five-minute walk in the sun from your current location, or a twenty-two-minute journey by public transportation, which also requires waiting in the sun - there is no convenient parking in the area, and you do not own a car anyway.

The location differs form the pickup point for previous orders you submitted, albeit not from the same seller and not through the same website as this one. Those establishments, while also not your address, at least lie within normal walking distance, and in locations near those of errands you run with some frequency.

"Store hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, closed on weekends," the message also stated. This added convenience will require you to clock out of your job to collect the delivery, since you work from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Your lunch break, which gets automatically deducted as thirty minutes if you do not clock out for it, will not provide enough time to get to Hertzl's Makkolet, collect the package, and return to your desk.

HCC also stated in the message that it will soon introduce further improvements to its services for your convenience, which, you assume, will include socks delivered to separate locations, at separate times, when you order them as a pair.

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Recently, the International Committee of the Red Cross released a perplexing document titled, "The Treatment of Detainees: From the Perspective of Islamic Law."

It lists 16 rules, most of which are derived from or somehow linked to Islamic sources, about how prisoners should be treated. The rules are:

Do not kill detainees

Treat detainees humanely at all times

Do not use detainees as human shields

Provide medical care to the detainees

Take detainees to a safe place after their capture

Feed and clothe the detainees

Allow the detainees to contact their families and receive visitors and messages

Do not publish the names and pictures of the detainees

Allow the detainees to practice their religion, without any compulsion

Detain women separately, with female guards

Hold children only where it is in their best interest

Release the detainees when the reasons for their detention cease to exist; or where the detaining party is unable to provide for their basic needs

Make a list of all detainees with their full name; date of birth; rank; service number; when and where they were captured; their state of health; and who is responsible for their detention.

Inform your superior when you take detainees.

Inform the ICRC about any detainees as soon as possible and allow the ICRC to visit the detainees and to speak to them in private

If a detainee dies, inform your superior, record how they died and where their remains are. If possible, inform their family and return their remains.

The choice of rules to highlight, and which ones not to mention (like the right to enslave or execute prisoners), makes it very clear that the ICRC curated this list to make it appear that they are supporting the Israeli hostages in Gaza. This isn't a list of Islamic rules - it is a list of ICRC-approved Islamic rules.

Every single one of these rules has been violated by Hamas and at first glance this appears to be a way for the ICRC to shame Hamas into treating the hostages humanely.

Except, it isn't.

Usually when an organization releases a new publication, they want people to know about it.

And yet....there was no press release. The ICRC did not even tweet about this booklet. It's been out for two weeks, and there has been no media coverage.

The book says things like:

The Qur’ān and the earliest Islamic historical literature (Sīrah) documented numerous examples of humane treatment that detainees received at the hands of the Companions of Prophet Muhammad. Follow these rules, make them known to your group, and report any violations to your superiors.

This makes it sound like the target audience is jihadists. Yet it is not available in Arabic or any other language that Islamists are likely to read.

So why was a booklet, ostensibly to teach Muslim hostage takers how they should act, published to begin with? It isn't a book for Muslims, it isn't a book for the human rights community, it isn't a book for the general public.

It is hard to escape the idea that the ICRC does not want this booklet to be publicized. They can shame Hamas into treating the hostages well by pointing out that they are violating Sharia law - and they don't. They will issue press releases slamming Israel, but not against Hamas.

The ICRC didn't publish this document to help the hostages. They did it so they can point to something when Jews complain about their inaction over the Gaza hostages. "Look! We published an entire book on Islam and detainee law!" they can say - when pushed. But they sore don't want anyone to read it, Muslims or not.

It sure looks more performative than helpful.

(h/t Irene)

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

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There have been a number of excellent detailed criticisms of the IPC report that claimed that parts of Gaza are now officially in a state of famine. The NCRI released two such reports, summarized here.

I found one major problem with the IPC report that I didn't see anyone else address.

The IPC made a remarkable claim: Gaza’s Ministry of Health (MoH) undercounts non-trauma deaths, especially those linked to hunger. This appears on pp. 22–23 of the IPC Famine Review Committee (FRC) report, and it serves as a crucial plank in their case that famine was already underway in Gaza Governorate.

The claim is not just weak. It is flatly contradicted by Hamas’ and the MoH's own behavior.

Every day, Hamas’ official Telegram channel publishes the alleged total number of starvation deaths in Gaza. These figures are trumpeted as evidence of deliberate Israeli “genocide.” Far from ignoring or downplaying non-trauma mortality, Hamas actively foregrounds it for propaganda purposes.

This is the opposite of what you would expect if the MoH were “failing to capture” malnutrition or disease deaths. In fact, the MoH has an incentive structure that strongly favors maximizing those figures. Starvation deaths are propaganda wins - why would they undercount them?

Yet the FRC writes that the MoH “focuses mainly on trauma-related deaths and fails to capture much of the non-traumatic mortality,” adding that “different analyses indicate that MoH data systematically underestimate overall mortality.”

And then, on page 25, the report made the key leap:

Direct evidence on nutrition-related mortality is not available. Indirect evidence suggests that deaths primarily due to undernutrition significantly exceed reported deaths. The MoH mortality counts are those that die in a health facility or whose body is taken to a health facility, missing deaths in the community.

In fact, the MoH takes pains to count deaths beyond those in hospitals. All of its social media ask that Gazans fill out forms for "martyrs" not known to the ministry. About 24% of their deaths counted are self-reported (12,914 as of the May 11 MoH report.) So here the FRC is quite provably wrong.

These indirect sources evidence indicate a much higher mortality rate than malnutrition deaths reported by the Ministry of Health, providing reasonable evidence that mortality thresholds for famine have been passed. The FRC considers the analysis team’s current classification (IPC Phase 5 Famine with reasonable evidence) to be plausible.

There is zero evidence that the MoH is undercounting starvation deaths by orders of magnitude necessary to justify the famine accusation.

If we take the MoH at its word, then 24% of all deaths in Gaza are not taken to hospitals. Presumably most of those are people who were killed instantly by bombs. Injured people don't stay home to die, and neither do people in danger of dying by starvation. We would expect close to 100% of the starvation deaths to happen in hospitals. The IPC's assumptions are way, way off.

But even their indirect evidence doesn't add up.

While the FRC paper does not give footnotes to the "indirect evidence" claims, the language strongly suggests that they are leaning on secondary studies - including Lancet analyses I’ve already dissected for their flaws, like the "capture-recapture" methodology that was wrong to begin with. Or studies that assume Hamas was telling the truth when it claimed that there were 11,000 missing in the rubble which turned out to be completely false. Or other studies that compare reported and unreported deaths in other wars, but do not account for the fact that Hamas is the source of all reported deaths and therefore its counts are not at all comparable to those of independent medical professionals or NGOs in other conflict zones.

The IPC did not explain why these fragile models were weighted more heavily than the MoH’s own daily reporting - reporting that, again, is biased toward inflation, not suppression. As we've seen countless times, many of the deaths blamed on starvation were in fact pre-existing medical conditions.

Mortality is the most decisive evidence in famine classification. When direct evidence is weak, IPC allows “reasonable evidence” to substitute. But here, the FRC crossed a line: it made the false assumption of undercounting part of its formal justification for declaring famine. They do not describe their "reasonable evidence" in ways that stand up to scrutiny, and the counter-evidence is not only available but also follows common sense - few people starve to death at home. Without these false and biased assumptions, the mortality data would not have come close to meeting famine thresholds.

This is not scientific caution. It is narrative-building.

The IPC’s famine declaration carries enormous weight in diplomacy, law, and media. That makes methodological rigor non-negotiable. Yet the FRC leaned on a claim that collapses under the most basic scrutiny: Hamas is not undercounting famine deaths. It is advertising them daily.

Until the IPC can produce independent, time-matched, probability-based mortality surveys that genuinely show undercounting, its conclusion should be treated as speculative. And if the famine finding depends on that speculation, then its credibility is compromised at the core.

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

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The Nasser Hospital incident appears to show that the IDF made significant mistakes.

Here is an analysis by military expert Ryan McBeth:

Andrew Fox adds:

Israel’s Channel 12 has reported that the first strike targeted a man who had been monitoring IDF forces with a camera on the hospital’s fourth floor, a justification repeated by the IDF. Israel’s military also claims to have killed six terrorists in the strike from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. None of this, however, absolves the IDF for what happened next.

Video footage showing a second strike that killed emergency workers responding to the initial impact is deeply troubling. Normally, precision strikes are carried out with drones or guided munitions, not by tank shells. Whether this was a legitimate strike, an operational error, a breakdown in communication or something more sinister will need to be determined through a full investigation. There remain significant questions about proportionality and anticipated collateral damage in this strike.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior IDF commanders have already suggested that something went wrong. The IDF has promised to ‘examine several gaps’ in the strike, including who authorised it. Netanyahu was far more emphatic. He said Israel ‘deeply regrets the tragic mishap’ that led to the strike, and promised a ‘thorough investigation’. The IDF owes Israelis, Palestinians and the international community a clear and transparent explanation.

Both military experts do not hold back when they see something problematic. Yet they don't come close to crossing the line into antisemitism.

Today's "anti-Zionists" insist that they are not antisemitic, that they are only criticizing Israel, and that Zionists are conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism for political reasons stop all criticism of Israel. Their claims fall apart when you compare their hysterical accusations against what McBeth and Fox are doing here.

The difference between the approaches is simple.

"Anti-Zionists" start from the assumption that Israel is evil, and their "criticism" is all couched in that assumption, sometimes stated ("Israel is a genocidal apartheid state!") and sometimes implicit (media righteously declaring "We could not independently verify Israel's claims" - but never say that for Gaza sources.)

Legitimate criticism starts from the knowledge that Israel has valid military reasons to destroy Hamas, that it has safeguards and policies to protect innocent civilians, that it is operating in a theatre where the civilians are themselves tactical defensive shields for Hamas, and that in war sometimes there is a breakdown in communication and the chain of command - which is not to excuse it.

Legitimate critics understand that Israelis are humans doing the best they can under nearly impossible and artificially imposed constraints that no army in history has ever had to work under. Antisemites start with the conviction that Jews are malicious to the core, have a secret agenda of Jewish supremacy and cannot be trusted.

Treating Israel as irredeemably evil while bending over backwards to justify Hamas actions (like HRW's changing the definition of "human shields" only for Israel's enemies) is not "legitimate criticism." It is thinly disguised antisemitism.

A newer dynamic is taking place, where the "anti-Zionists" are becoming to emboldened by the lack of pushback and by their adulation from Jew-haters that they are crossing the line into explicit antisemitism.

This attitude gets certified kosher by the Jewish antisemites. Today, Haaretz's Gideon Levy wrote:

Uberkommandant Avi Bluth, the head of the army's Central Command, decided that he'll show them. With his military kippah worn at an angle, blood-curdling eloquence, boundless arrogance and sick double standards of morality, he ordered "redesign operations" to be implemented so that "everyone will be deterred, any village that dares to raise a hand against any of the residents."

He is saying as clearly as possible that religious Jews are Nazis. This in turn gives license for others to do the same.

The new antisemitism is becoming so mainstream that it is difficult for casual readers to notice it when it occurs. But comparing coverage of Israel in much of the media with how these two actual experts criticize Israel show the huge difference between criticism and papered-over hate.

(h/t Scott, YMedad)

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

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Saudi newspaper: The Israelis in Gaza are just like the Jews who tried to kill Mohammed!

A Saudi Al Madinah columnist M. Talal Al-Qashqari writes:

Is there a similarity between the Jews' attempts in the early days of Islam to kill the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) and their attempts in this era to exterminate Gaza?

I am certain that the answer is “yes.” The evildoers who tried to kill the Prophet are the same evildoers who are trying to exterminate more than two million Muslims from his nation. They share the same ideology, belief, and hatred for Islam, Muslims, and the Prophet of Islam - may the best prayers and most complete peace be upon him.

The Jews tried to kill the Prophet three times. The Jews of Banu Nadir threw a stone at him from above a wall, but Allah saved him. The Jews of Khaybar put poison in his food, but Allah saved him, but the effects of the poison remained in his body until his death. He continued to complain about it. The Jews of Medina put magic in the well of Dharwan, but Allah saved him. Gabriel, peace be upon him, taught him how to break the magic by reciting Surahs Al-Ikhlas, Al-Falaq, and Al-Nas. Allah spoke the truth when He described the Jews as the most hostile of people to those who believe, even more hostile than the polytheists who worship idols and humans instead of Allah.

Today, the Jews of Israel are reproducing the same attempts against Gaza, with astonishing consistency, almost a carbon copy, supported by the hateful Crusader West. From throwing stones at the Prophet, to dropping bombs on the homes and civilian facilities of Gaza, which are crowded with women, children, the elderly, the sick, journalists, and doctors. From poisoning the Prophet's food, to injecting toxins and pollutants into the Palestinians' water, food, and medicine through dubious "humanitarian" institutions. From casting spells on the Prophet to the magic of electronic spying on Palestinians to assassinate them indiscriminately.

There's another similarity that Mr. Al-Qashqari missed: They are all fictional.

The only source for the Banu Nadir story is from Mohammed claiming a divine message warned him and he got up before the stone was to be dropped. There was no stone that he saw - just Allah's warning. Meaning, it was made up.

The bewitching story in the well is not even accepted by many Muslims because it makes Mohammed look like he was subject to magic. But again, the only source is Mohammed talking to an angel.

The Khaybar story might have possibly happened, but if it did, it wasn't "the Jews" - it was one woman. Blaming all Jews for her actions is as classic a bigoted idea as they come.

And the Gaza examples are just as made up.

So, yes, there are some startling parallels here: antisemites in seventh century Medina and 21st century Gaza lie just as easily as each other.

Here is yet another example where a mainstream Arab news source doesn't distinguish between Jews and Israelis, proving that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. But if any "anti-Zionist" wants to dispute that, just publicly denounce this article as antisemitic with your real name. I'll be happy to post about it and give you credit.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/27 Links Pt2: ‘Gaza’ As An Ideology; Younes Ali Younes charged over Adass Israel Synagogue Arson; Israeli intelligence assisted Australian Security investigation into Iran

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: ‘Gaza’ As An Ideology

Forget being on the other side from this crew, politically. What is the effect on aspiring Democratic activists? If you are told to ban the Star of David from the Dyke March, you are made to understand that you will not be considered an ally of LGBT unless you first shed any sign of Jewishness.

If your climate-change priestess wears a keffiyeh and demands you menace a Jewish performer, then that’s what you’ll do. If your public-gardening co-op requires a pledge of anti-Zionism before you can water the flowers, well, can’t let the flowers die.

These are actual real-life cases, and as far as the Gaza ideologists are concerned, the sillier the better. The reason your astronomy TA at Columbia instructs you to think of Gaza when you gaze at the night stars is because you’re being trained to think of Gaza before you think.

So is everyone in the Democratic Party orbit really obsessed with Gaza? No. Whether that’s the good news or the bad news depends on the party’s commitment to asserting its own authority and keeping its own gates. If the progressive activist wing of the party succeeds in making “Gaza” a blood oath to get in the door, then it doesn’t matter if the individual members are passionate about it. They might be passionate about climate change or paid family leave, but if they can’t join those clubs without professing loyalty to Gaza, then Gaza becomes the most important issue by default.

This is also the reason behind one of the pro-Israel world’s great frustrations. Every few years, Hamas starts a new war. And each time, there is a whole new cast of useful idiots in the West that appear to have been born yesterday. Somehow, both traditional media and social media are filled with Hamas windup toys. I don’t mean the bots—I mean the people who might as well be bots. The talking points are the same; the mindless receptacles are different.

Where is this lemming farm? How is it that the enemies of the West always appear to be buying in bulk?

The answer has something to do with the DNC’s gatekeeping problem. Those who feel strongly about Gaza don’t want everyone else to care about Gaza nearly as much. They just want everyone to be required to say they care. They want pliancy, not passion. That’s how their numbers balloon. And it’s up to people like Ken Martin to stop the anti-Zionist inflation over which he is currently presiding.

The DNC Passed a Resolution Calling for ‘Unrestricted’ Aid to Gaza and a Two-State Solution. The Party’s Chairman Pulled It After Anti-Israel Dems Complained That It Didn’t Go Far Enough.

A Democratic National Committee meeting on Tuesday devolved into an anti-Israel slugfest, leading its chairman, Ken Martin, to pull a resolution many party members believed was not harsh enough on the Jewish state. Instead, Martin invited the anti-Israel members to join a committee to reevaluate the party’s position on Israel.

The Martin-backed resolution, which the DNC initially approved, called for "unrestricted" aid to Gaza and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, language that moderate Democrats have long used. An alternate resolution championed by the party’s anti-Israel wing went significantly further, calling for a full-scale arms embargo on Israel, the suspension of American military aid, and recognition of "Palestine as a country."

DNC members initially adopted the more moderate version in an uncounted voice vote, but Martin ultimately pulled both from consideration after the party’s anti-Israel members revolted. Semafor reporter Dave Weigel captured Martin during a private discussion "with the alternative Gaza resolution sponsors" before he canceled the vote.

"There’s a divide in our party on this issue," Politico quoted Martin as having said. "This is a moment that calls for shared dialogue, calls for shared advocacy."

After abandoning his own moderate proposal, Martin pledged to assemble a DNC committee "comprised of stakeholders on all sides of this" that will "continue to have the conversation, to work through this, and bring solutions back to our party."

The tumult during the meeting reflects the Democratic Party’s growing divide on Israel in the nearly two years since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against the Jewish state. The terrorist organization's massacres ignited a flurry of violent protests, primarily involving the party’s progressive base. Anti-Israel Democrats formed an "uncommitted" delegation during the 2024 election, protesting the party’s convention over its failure to grant a speaking slot to a Georgia state representative with a history of pro-Hamas rhetoric.

Allison Minnerly, the 26-year-old DNC member who spearheaded the arms embargo resolution, told the Nation in an interview published Tuesday that her efforts represent the will of the Democratic Party.

08/27 Links Pt1: The U.N.’s long war against Israel; How the UN Engaged in Data Fraud to Undermine U.S. Humanitarian Aid; When hospitals become battlefields

From Ian:

Clifford D. May: The U.N.’s long war against Israel

Given this history, I thought the U.N.’s demonization of Israel had gone as far as it could go.

I was wrong.

Last week, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) released a “report” declaring “with reasonable evidence” that famine now exists in parts of Gaza. It goes without saying – actually it’s being incessantly repeated – that Israelis are to blame.

To make these claims, the IPC manipulated its methodology, adjusted its criteria, and reinterpreted the legal definition of genocide utilizing dubious data from the Gaza Health Ministry – i.e., Hamas – and discarding data provided by Israel.

What’s more, one of the authors of the report, Andrew Seal, had already begun accusing Israel of genocide on the second day of the October 2023 counterattacks against Hamas.

No one denies that, amid a war that has dragged on for almost two years, Gazans are suffering terrible hardships, including food insecurity and, in some cases, malnutrition.

But the incontrovertible facts are these: Hamas started this war and refuses to end it; Hamas takes no responsibility for the people it has ruled and is determined to continue to rule; Hamas refuses to release hostages abducted from Israel and whom it is torturing – even though doing so would almost certainly lead to a ceasefire.

One more fact: Since May, more than 10,000 aid trucks have entered Gaza, with eight out of ten bringing food. This has resulted in wider availability of essential foods at reduced prices in Gaza markets.

The U.N. is making distribution of this aid more difficult by demanding that UNRWA be in charge despite UNRWA letting Hamas take a cut both to feed its leaders in the tunnels and resell for cash to pay its troops on the streets above.

The UN adamantly refuses to work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American/Israeli project delivering free food directly to Gazans with Hamas excluded.

Much of the media have been helping weaponize public opinion against Israel. Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova revealed in The Free Press this month that even before the IPC designation, at least a dozen “viral images of starvation” published by The New York Times, NPR, CNN, and other major news outlets were in fact photos of children with “significant health problems” such as cerebral palsy – not famine victims.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee observed on X: “Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas. Meanwhile UN food sits rotting in sun. The UN should declare itself corrupt & incompetent.”

Which raises a question: Why are American taxpayers still spending roughly $13 billion a year on the most globalist of institutions which for half a century has been waging a disinformation war – including bogus charges of racism, apartheid, genocide, and intentional starvation – against the only democracy in the Middle East which also is America’s most reliable ally in the world?

Memo to President Trump: Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Author of UN-Backed Gaza Famine Report Peddled Anti-Semitic Tropes, Conspiracy Theories, and Terrorist Apologia

An author of a U.N.-backed report that accused Israel of creating "famine" in Gaza is a longtime anti-Israel radical who has defended Hamas, claimed Jewish politicians have a "conflict of interest" on Middle Eastern issues, and supported boycotts targeting the Jewish state.

Andrew Seal, who serves on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) famine review committee and helped write the IPC’s highly publicized report published earlier this month, has a history of incendiary rhetoric that includes comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and accusing the Jewish state of having killed its own people on Oct. 7, 2023.

The report, which declared the situation in Gaza a "famine" and called for an immediate Israeli "ceasefire," said the "time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading."

Numerous mainstream media outlets picked up the IPC’s claims without disclosing Seal’s history of attacking Israel and defending Hamas terrorists or noting the possibility that his beliefs could have influenced the IPC report. Newspapers and networks like the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and ABC News relied on the IPC report to claim Israeli policies have led to mass starvation, with the Times stating that "months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel on the territory" have caused a famine "across most of Gaza."

Just one month after the Oct. 7 massacres, Seal defended a statement from Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad in which the terrorist promised to repeat the attacks "again and again." Seal said he believed Hamad’s comments were reasonable because Israel was "currently committing genocide."

"You can’t ignore the fact that one side is currently committing genocide and the other isn’t," Seal wrote. "And, do you realistically expect a political leader of occupied & oppressed people to say they will stop fighting in absence of an alternative? Let’s be real."

In another post on X, Seal claimed there was "no evidence" Hamas committed sexual violence against Israeli women, describing footage of the Oct. 7 attacks as "propaganda."

Andrew Fox: When hospitals become battlefields

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior IDF commanders have already suggested that something went wrong. The IDF has promised to ‘examine several gaps’ in the strike, including who authorised it. Netanyahu was far more emphatic. He said Israel ‘deeply regrets the tragic mishap’ that led to the strike, and promised a ‘thorough investigation’. The IDF owes Israelis, Palestinians and the international community a clear and transparent explanation.

What happened at the Nasser Hospital encapsulates the tragic reality of the Gaza war. It also highlights the sadistic logic used by Hamas to protract the war at all costs. It has embedded fighters, weapons and command centres in hospitals, schools and mosques. In doing so, it gains a cruel advantage: if Israel refrains from striking, Hamas benefits militarily. But if Israel does strike, Hamas benefits politically, as images of civilian casualties dominate headlines worldwide. Israel, meanwhile, is forced to make decisions in an environment where the normal distinctions between civilian and military sites can be impossible to discern. In such circumstances, mistakes are inevitable. Yet each one becomes a source of global outrage, with Israel pinned as the callous perpetrator of an alleged war crime, long before the facts are established.

The Nasser Hospital strike is, in many ways, a distillation of the insoluble moral and strategic problems of the war in Gaza. It shows how boundaries between civilian and combatant are deliberately erased, how international law is abused for the benefit of terrorists, and how Israel is condemned for fighting an enemy that hides behind the sick and wounded.

The world should demand answers about Monday’s strike – but it should also demand accountability from those who have deliberately turned hospitals into battlefields. Of course, that would mean admitting that this war is far more complex than the standard narrative allows.

When hospitals become battlefields: The strain on Israeli soldiers

International law does not demand perfect outcomes in war. It demands distinction, proportionality and feasible precautions. The Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (Art. 57) states that attackers must take “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian harm—but feasible means “that which is practicable or practically possible, taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time.” Scholars like Yoram Dinstein emphasize that commanders are not required to sacrifice their soldiers’ lives for marginal reductions in collateral damage.

Comparable practices exist elsewhere: “U.S. Joint Publication 3-60” on targeting notes that collateral damage estimation must always be balanced against “force protection and mission accomplishment.” NATO’s doctrine on urban operations similarly acknowledges that standoff firepower may be necessary in asymmetric conflicts where insurgents exploit civilian structures.

Here, the target was a legitimate military objective; at least seven of the dead were confirmed combatants, including participants in Oct. 7; and feasible alternatives that posed less risk to civilians would have required unacceptable risks to IDF soldiers.

No ethical system requires troops to walk into the jaws of a tunnel war to shave down collateral damage that the enemy itself engineered. When Hamas embeds cameras, launchers and fighters in and around medical centers, it is Hamas that erases the line between combatant and civilian.

The tragedy at Nasser Hospital was not born of reckless IDF firepower but of Hamas’s calculated tactic of using civilian cover to wage war. The IDF is left balancing the impossible: protect its soldiers, fulfill its ethical code and fight an enemy that thrives on turning hospitals and homes into battlefields.

Seven of the dead were not innocents. They were armed actors in a brutal conflict, some with blood from Oct. 7 already on their hands. That does not erase the grief of the other lives lost, though it does shift the moral calculus.

The hard truth of Khan Yunis is this: There is no surgical way to fight an enemy that tunnels beneath your feet and hides behind patients’ walls. The burden on IDF soldiers is immense, and the responsibility for civilian casualties rests first and foremost with those who made hospitals into fortresses.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Last week I addressed the accusation of “famine” in Gaza in a letter (HERE) signed by more than 80 Open Orthodox rabbis. This week, I want to look at the second charge in that same letter: so-called “settler violence.”

To hear the rabbis tell it, extremist settlers are raining down bloody hell on “Palestinians.” But that is exactly false. Which suggests that the signatories have not at all done their due diligence before affixing their names to what stands as a very public condemnation of Israel at a time of extreme peril for the Jewish people.

If they had done the bare minimum research before signing their John Hancocks to that statement accusing Israel of not doing enough to combat “settler violence,” they would have discovered that only four months earlier, in April 2025, Israeli NGO Regavim had released a detailed report on this very subject, “False Flags and Real Agendas, The Making of a Modern Blood Libel: The ‘Settler Violence’ Narrative as a Weapon in the Battle to Delegitimize the Jewish Presence in Judea and Samaria and the State of Israel”

Regavim, which monitors land use and policy in Judea and Samaria, examined the UN database that is perpetually cited as proof of “settler violence.” What they found was that the numbers collapse under scrutiny, reduced to dust.

“The UN incident list we obtained distinguishes between 2,047 incidents of violence against Israelis and 6,285 incidents defined as violence against Palestinians… once one delves into the list of incidents, the clear conclusion is that the vast majority do not describe violence related to settlers, and certainly do not describe violence initiated by settlers against Palestinians. Among the 6,285 incidents… 1,361 were simply Jewish ascents to the Temple Mount, every one counted as ‘settler violence.’ Another 1,613 were general complaints, such as ‘entry onto land’ during tours or hikes, which do not involve assault or harm. Ninety-six involved legal infrastructure projects carried out by the State of Israel.”

This is the extent of the UN’s “evidence” of settler violence. Temple Mount visits. Land surveys. Legal infrastructure. In other words: ordinary life contorted into charges of violence. And when those distortions are stripped away, we are left with a big pile of nothing.

“After subtracting these cases, only 833 incidents remain, which the UN classified as settler violence against Palestinians in the Judea and Samaria, allegedly resulting in bodily harm and in some cases also property damage. This constitutes only ten percent of the original list, which sought to reflect alarming levels of severe violence by settlers against Palestinians in the Judea and Samaria. Not only did this review cut 90% of the events, undermining the foundation of the UN’s arguments and their consequences, but the remaining cases suffer not only from lack of credibility but also from a disgusting level of false accusation against the real victims.”

Ten percent. That’s all that survived the first cut. Yet these reports, too, are riddled with distortions. Almost half of the reported cases were clashes with both sides involved. Of the rest, some cases of "settler violence" were attributed to Israeli security forces, while others were Arab terror attacks against Jews—recast as ‘settler violence.' Blood libels dressed up as data.

As Regavim concludes:

“…examination of these cases revealed that in many of them, it is not settler violence of one kind or another, but rather the opposite: these are terror attacks by Arabs against settlers that ended with the injury or elimination of the attacker.”

Had the rabbis taken five minutes to investigate, they would have found this information—current, comprehensive, and devastating to their claim. Instead, they affixed their names to a letter built on entries in a database programmed to tell lies. Even the name of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik is invoked, as if to give the letter's distortions a veneer of authority. But the Rav, as he is known to those who revere him, would never have put his name on something so harmful to the Jewish people.

Which brings us to the names of the rabbis, themselves.

As my friend Julie P. on seeing the list of names helpfully pointed out, "Not one is Sephardi or Mizrachi."

Look down the list of 80 signatories. It’s tragic really. You’ll see Schudrich, Greenberg, Yanklowitz, Dolinger, Chernick, Feigelson, Schlesinger—names that could have come straight from an early, 20th century Lower East Side synagogue membership roster.

With one half-exception—a single hyphenated surname suggesting a mixed background—the entire coalition is Ashkenazi.

And this is telling. Sephardim, even those who are not religious in practice, are deeply respectful of rabbinic authority and tradition. Watching how they comport themselves in the presence of a sage is instructive. I have seen secular Sephardi women cover their arms and heads with a shawl when a rabbi entered the room. Nobody asked them to. They simply revere the rabbis who have guided their people according to the same traditions for generations. Perhaps it is that steadfastness that inoculates Sephardim against the hubris of lecturing Israel on “moral clarity” while parroting Hamas propaganda without looking deeper at the actual facts.

List of signatories
Rabbi Yosef Blau

Rabbi David Bigman

Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich

Chief Rabbi Michael Melchior

Chief Rabbi Jair Melchior

Rabbi Joav Melchior

Chief Rabbi David Rosen (former CR)

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz

Rabbi Dr. Yitz Greenberg

Rabbi Hyim Shafner

Rabbi Daniel Landes

Rabbi Herzl Hefter

Rabbi Shua Mermelstein

Rabbi Yoni Zolty

Rabbanit Mindy Schwartz Zolty

Rabbi Frederick L Klein

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky

Rabbi Michael Whitman

Rabbi Dr. Jeremiah Unterman

Rabbi Barry Dolinger

Rabbi David Silber

Rabbi Yonatan Neril

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz

Rabbi Isaac Landes

Rabbi David Polsky

Rabbi Baruch Plotkin

Rabbi Mikey Stein

Rabbi Elliot Kaplowitz

Rabbi Ariel Goldberg

Rabbi Ben Birkeland

Rabbi Ralph Genende

Rabbi David Glicksman

Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman

Rabbi Dr. Martin Lockshin

Rabbi Dr. Pinchas Giller

Rabbi Avidan Freedman

Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein

Rabbi Dr. Shalom Schlagman

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Ross Goodman

Rabbi Aaron Levy

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller

Rabbi Dr. Mel Gottlieb

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Feigelson

Rabbi Jonah Winer

Rabbi Dr. Michael Chernick

Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn

Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger

Rabbi Elhanan Miller

Rabbi Joel Hecker

Rabbi Michael Gordan

R. Sofia Freudenstein

Rabbi David Levin-Kruss

Rabbanit Myriam Ackermann-Sommer

Rabba Ramie Smith

R. Shayna Abramson

Rabbi Zachary Truboff

Rabbi David A. Schwartz

Rabbi David Jaffe

Rabbi Steve Greenberg

Rabbi Gabriel Kretzmer Seed

Rabbanit Rachel Keren

Rabbi Benyamin Vineburg

Rabba Dr. Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz

Rabbanit Leah Sarna

Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zierler

Rabbanit Sarah Segal-Katz

Rabbi Shimon Brand

Rabba Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez

R. Emily Goldberg Winer

R. Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Rabba Adina Roth

R. Dr. Meesh Hammer-Kossoy

Rabbi Drew Kaplan

Rabbi Dina Najman

Rabbi Emile Ackermann

Rabbi Daniel Geretz

Rabbanit Sarah Segal-Katz

Rabbanit Tali Schaum Broder

Rabbi Max Davis

Rabbi Tyson Herberger

Rabba Aliza Libman Baronofsky

At first, I wondered whether one surname on the list—Neril—might break the pattern. I had never heard that one before and thought perhaps it was Sephardi. But no. Rabbi Yonatan Neril is Ashkenazi, and best known for founding the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, an organization that promotes environmental action across faith communities. His presence on the list highlights the broader orientation of many of the signatories toward progressive and ecumenical causes, rather than toward Israel’s defense in its hour of need.

The rabbis who signed this letter of betrayal may have meant no harm to their own, but intentions matter little here; the effect is the same. That letter was like piling logs onto a raging fire—then dousing it with gasoline.

History will not remember the rabbis' statement kindly. At best, the signatories will be judged naïve or misguided. Sad, but with tragic consequences for the Jewish people and in particular for Israel’s hostages and soldiers. The rabbis' missive jeopardizes Israel’s ability to free the hostages by emboldening the enemy, who now see that even Jewish clergy can be turned into weapons against the Jewish state.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

I came across this sentence fragment on an entertainment site: "Formerly respected and now woefully disgraced author J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books are not only getting a peculiar new HBO series..."

Rowling's crime? Have a nuanced view of transsexuals, and correctly noting that in some circumstances they infringe on the hard-won rights of women. She has never denied the humanity of trans people, nor has she advocated hatred. Her arguments have been calm, reasoned, and grounded in the language of women’s rights.

She has said or done nothing offensive. But the "progressive" community have declared her a transphobe, and the media is too lazy to deal with the nuance and merit of her position.

The only thing that makes her "disgraced" is that certain people declared her to be, and the repetition of the lie at one point in time became the accepted truth, a shorthand associated with her that is extremely difficult to break.

Sound familiar?

Israel acts morally against enemies that take advantage of that exact morality. It does more to minimize civilian casualties than any state in the history of war, yet it is vilified while the Islamist enemy, which has done more that any military force in history to put its own civilians in danger, escapes such scrutiny. Israel is labeled "genocidal" and "using starvation as a weapon of war," when all one needs to do is to read for five minutes to see that none of this is true.

But in the case of both Israel and Rowling, at one point something happens: the lies overtake the narrative.

Once a false framing takes hold, the burden of proof flips. The accused can no longer defend themselves against charges that were never true to begin with. Worse, even neutral or sympathetic observers unconsciously adopt the language, because the shorthand becomes journalistic muscle memory.

This is narrative capture: when repetition, not reality, determines reputation. It is a form of cancellation not through argument, but through branding and the Big Lie. And once it sets in, it requires extraordinary courage - and constant, conscious pushback - to undo.

Rowling and Israel remind us that reputations can be reshaped less by what one does than by how one is described. In a healthy culture, labels are earned through evidence. In a captured culture, labels are imposed by narrative convenience. The result is a distortion of public perception. In the case of a nation like Israel, it is a distortion with deadly consequences, not only for Israel but for Jews worldwide.

In a healthy world, fact checking and skepticism would be taught as normal high school subjects. Anyone can be manipulated but people can learn to resist it and think for themselves, rather than outsource their opinions to journalists or protesters.

Until we recognize and resist this mechanism, more individuals and more nations will find themselves condemned not for what they do, but for how they are framed.

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

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How bad are "ethnic studies" textbooks? Really, really bad.

Recently, the San Francisco Unified School District voted to use the 'Voices' ethnic studies curriculum.

I saw some pages from the textbook. Here's one:

The number of things wrong with this page takes up more text than the page itself.

It positions historical US style racism against Blacks as unique, while ignoring how there was also discrimination against other European groups (Slavics, Ashkenaz Jews) and there are was also major discrimination in other cultures (i.e., the caste system.) The analysis would change significantly if US style discrimination against Blacks was placed into context of all such bigotry,

The use of a Nazi-era image of racism in a page on American racism subtly equates the two, comparing US racism today to to that of Nazis in the 1930s. Students would view this as moral equivalence, which is grotesque.

The Toni Morrison quote is presented as fact and used twice, forms the moral anchor of the page. Yet it is contradicted on the page itself - the next paragraph refers to Irish Americans, Italian Americans and Jewish Americans.

Portraying those groups assimilation as them being "absorbed into the expanding category of being called White” implies some sort of colonialist mentality by the majority culture - another rhetorical weapon against the normative desire by the immigrants to become part of their new nation in order to succeed.

The very concept of "Whitening" is a racial interpretation of normal assimilation into American culture, something that both the immigrants and the larger society largely wanted to occur. A racist society would resist, not encourage, the "other" to become part of the majority.

Moreover, the groups who did successfully assimilate are positioned as a kind of traitors, choosing to become racist "whites" when they just wanted to succeed, as most normal people want. (Of course, the essay is against normativity as well.)

The page is meant to define "Whiteness," but it changes the meaning throughout. Is it a racial descriptor, or an implied power structure, or a norm-enforcing ideology? The last sentence of the first paragraph would allow many of today's' Black people to be defined as "white." The word becomes a pejorative when it can mean nothing more than becoming an integral part of American society. Or perhaps the message being given is that there is something wrong with being a proud American.

The "whiteness as racelessness" theme is also muddled. White supremacists clearly do not consider themselves raceless - they are proud of their so-called "white heritage." This page positions whiteness as damned if you do, damned if you don't - by any definition, being white is racist.

The idea that whiteness is implicitly "normal" and other groups are then inferior is contradicted by the Jewish experience, where Jews are positioned as dominant and scheming - as too smart and too particular. As is often the case, the Jewish example proves the ideology's basic tenets are wrong.

This is astonishingly bad for a textbook that is meant to give children a moral framework. The cure is worse than the illness.

The publisher of "Voices" says it is "committed to making an ethical difference in the world of public education." I guess that is true. It is making public education significantly less ethical.

This page itself is all the proof you need that ethnic studies, as taught today, is not just wrong but is itself immoral.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)