Wednesday, January 07, 2026

01/07 Links Pt2: Norman Podhoretz Leaves a Legacy of Political Principle; Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”; Oct. 7 Hostages Reveal the Music That Helped Them Hold On

From Ian:

Norman Podhoretz Leaves a Legacy of Political Principle
Podhoretz’s death comes as the notion of even having political principles has become tenuous. On the left and right, many politicians and pundits refuse to criticize their own side. The principled and courageous perspective that marked Podhoretz’s life and writing, with a willingness to leave former allies, is rare. The few politicians who do it—like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who broke with their party over January 6—often pay a price for being courageous, and lose their seats.

Today, publications like The Dispatch and The Free Press exist because their founders and many of their writers were unwilling to embrace progressive shibboleths or MAGA elements and thus had to leave institutions where they’d once belonged. Last month, Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, demonstrated moral courage at a TPUSA event and may pay a price for it.

As a Christian who believes that human beings are made in the image of God, I resonated with Podhoretz’s perspective. We should we care about democracy and human rights around the world because humans are made in God’s image. Why should we battle Marxist and Islamist dictatorships and hope to see human flourishing expand through free markets, entrepreneurism, and innovation? Because people are made in the image of God. For Podhoretz, religion was not central, but his point of view had deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Podhoretz also understood the importance of stewardship regarding the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and stories. He was grateful for the gifts our forebearers bequeathed to us, and we should remember how his ideas shaped the understanding of Ronald Reagan, Kirkpatrick, and others who led the global movement to defeat the Soviet Union.

Podhoretz’s body of work reminds us that we don’t need to “make America great again,” because its principles, legal structure, history, and symbols are already great. It’s a treasury to be stewarded, as the Constitution says, to made more perfect rather than deconstructed.

Podhoretz’s legacy of principled stands based on deep moral conviction deserves remembering. As our Jewish friends often say at a moment of loss, may his memory be a blessing to us—a nation in search of its soul—at this fraught moment.
Seth Mandel: It Was Ever Thus
Review of 'Antisemitism, an American Tradition' by Pamela S. Nadell
Indeed, American history is littered with instances of full-blown anti-Jewish violence. When Major-General Ulysses S. Grant expelled all Jews from the territory under his control during the Civil War after accusing them of disloyalty to the Union, he didn’t “merely” cause them economic loss and social disruption. He also opened them up to vigilante attacks from citizens who were riled up by their war leader and took matters into their own hands.

The discrimination discovered in hospitals surely cost some Jewish patients their lives—doctors and relatives of deceased patients later testified as much. In 1902 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hundreds of Jews participating in a funeral procession were attacked by factory workers and then the police; some victims compared it to pogroms back in Russia. And then there were the immigration restrictions: Calling it “social anti-Semitism” was of no consolation to the many Jews around the world who were condemned to systematic murder in their home countries because the gates of America were closed to them.

The lesson that jumps off the pages of Nadell’s book is not that some forms of anti-Semitism are harmless but that all forms of anti-Semitism are connected and will, with the reliability of a law of physics, proceed toward violence unless acted upon by an outside force. Responding to the Damascus Affair, Nadell writes, U.S. Jews “honed strategies that they would employ to counter discrimination and persecution in the future. They held public meetings, lobbied the government, appealed to the press, welcomed allies, and stood up individually and collectively against antisemitism wherever and whenever it arose.”

Which is why Nadell’s concluding chapter is so important. She weaves together the post-10/7 wave of discrimination against Jews in major institutions and across party lines. In Nadell’s telling, that very much includes not just the post–October 7 atmosphere on campus but the two decades’ worth of buildup to this moment in colleges throughout the country. “The battle lines over antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism—the disapproval or demonization of all things Israeli—on campus were drawn,” Nadell writes about such fights in the early years of the new century. “They would widen into deep trenches in the years to come. Jewish students and faculty experienced what they perceived as antisemitism no matter what others called it.”

Nadell should be commended for refusing to adjudicate the debate over terminology. What matters most is what is happening, not what name you give it. The goal of all these anti-Jewish and anti-Israel extremist movements is clear, ambitious, and evil: Exclude Jews from society, and put targets on their backs in the process. And they will ultimately fail so long as American Jews remain vigilant and willing to exercise their rights.
Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”
In May 1925, President Calvin Coolidge offered a vivid tribute to the “Hebraic mortar … of American democracy.” It should have been a vanilla speech at a prosy Washington event—the dedication of a new Jewish community center. But Coolidge took stock of the moment; a century later, his address is worth revisiting.

Just a couple of years earlier, in 1923, Henry Ford—America’s great industrialist, in many ways the Elon Musk of his time—had dominated multiple presidential polls, trumping the incumbent, Warren G. Harding. Ford never announced his candidacy for the 1924 election, nor had he ever held elected office. But he had captured the American imagination as an avatar for business ingenuity, education reform, and general uplift for the American middle class. It is also undeniable that Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. He ultimately endorsed Coolidge for president in December 1923, after Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack. In Coolidge’s 1925 speech to a largely Jewish crowd, he decisively broke with the anti-Jewish element of Ford’s movement.

In November 1920, Ford published the first installment of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. A multivolume anthology drawn from Ford’s anti-Jewish weekly, The Dearborn Independent, it was soon translated into sixteen languages—including six editions printed in Germany between 1920 and 1922. By the mid-1920s, the Dearborn Independent had reached a circulation of between 700,000 and 900,000. These numbers were in part due to the paper’s distribution in Ford automotive dealerships, but are nonetheless significant, considering that the New York Times had a circulation of 345,149 in 1925; the Chicago Tribune reached 608,130.

Of course, other forms of bigotry flourished in the teens and twenties. The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation was banned in cities across the Midwest for its insulting depictions of black people. Despite these widespread restrictions, then–President Woodrow Wilson watched the film upon its release, in the first-ever movie screening held at the White House. Birth of a Nation soon inspired a new iteration of the anti-Catholic, racist, and anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan. Hugo Black, the Alabama politician and sometime Klan member who eventually became a Supreme Court justice, built his early career attacking Catholicism; he delivered dozens of anti-Catholic speeches at Klan meetings across Alabama during his 1926 Senate campaign.

It was in this troubled atmosphere that Coolidge took the stage at a dedication ceremony for a community center, in 1925, “a year of dedications and rededications.” Hearkening to the start of the American Revolution in 1775, Coolidge attributed the success of the American project to a “common spiritual inspiration” powerful enough to “mold and weld together into a national unity, the many and scattered colonial communities that had been planted along the Atlantic seaboard.” He reminded his audience that tension among the early colonies seemed more organic and far more likely than cooperation. There was no guarantee that the colonies would form a national entity for revolution, and no clear idea of which colonies might agree to join it:


Prof. Halperin-Kaddari: Oct. 7 exposed failure to address sexual violence
Professor Ruth Halperin Kaddari, a law professor at Bar-Ilan University and a former vice chair of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, said that the October 7 Hamas attack marked a turning point in the international response to conflict-related sexual violence, exposing what she described as a profound failure of global institutions to act in real time.

Halperin Kaddari, who served 12 years on the UN committee known as CEDAW, said she expected immediate condemnation after reports of sexual violence emerged, in line with the longstanding international principle of “believe women.” Instead, she said UN Women did not publicly acknowledge reports of sexual violence until nearly two months after the attack, a delay she described as unprecedented.

In response, Halperin Kaddari joined legal experts and former senior Israeli officials to establish the Dinah Project, an initiative focused on recognition and accountability for conflict-related sexual violence. The team spent thousands of hours analyzing open source material, survivor testimony, intelligence information, and first responder documentation to construct what she described as a legally sound evidentiary framework. Evidence of sexual violence on October 7

According to Halperin Kaddari, the project identified at least 17 real-time eyewitnesses or ear witnesses to rape, gang rape, and sexual mutilation during the October 7 attack and in captivity. She said the absence of firsthand victim testimony is due to the fact that many victims were killed during or immediately after the assaults, while survivors remain deeply traumatized.

She pointed to findings by senior UN officials, including a March 2024 report by the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations. These findings led to Hamas being added to the UN secretary general’s blacklist of groups that use sexual violence as a weapon of war.


Oct. 7 Hostages Reveal the Music That Helped Them Hold On
Much has been said and written about the hostages who survived Oct. 7, the day in 2023 when Hamas terrorists systematically murdered 1,219 people in areas of Israel neighboring the Gaza Strip, assaulting and abducting hundreds more. The 168 hostages — of 21 different nationalities — who lived to tell described horrors, crippling fear, abuse (mental, physical, and sexual), and loneliness. And upon their return, many have pointed to music as a tool they used to cope during captivity.

“My body is stamped with music,” says Moran Stella Yanai, a 40-year-old Israeli jewelry designer who was taken hostage while fleeing the Nova music festival. “I ran for five hours,” she tells Rolling Stone, recalling how she dodged bullets, saw friends gunned down, ducked under brush, and evaded capture twice by convincing terrorists that she wasn’t Jewish. Yanai, who is of Moroccan and Egyptian descent, spoke some Arabic and wore a necklace that spelled “Stela” in Arabic letters.

But the third time, she was caught, loaded onto a jeep with her head covered, and driven into Gaza, where, she says, she was sold to Hamas. Yanai counted being transferred 11 times and held in five different apartments. She believes her captors treated her more harshly because of her Middle Eastern heritage, calling her a traitor and a spy, and vowing she’d never return home alive. It was a time of absolute despair.

All the while, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” served as her “mantra, prayer, and road map.” The 1969 song is a favorite childhood memory, conjuring pictures in her mind of listening to the radio with her mother on Saturdays. “When I hear the song, I’m home,” says Yanai. “It’s my safe space.”

Yanai would play the Sinatra classic in her head. “I’d think: ‘My way, I’ll do it my way,’” she says. “Every time I was being abused, I sang to myself, ‘And now the end is near, so I face my final curtain,’ and found the strength to go on.… You disassociate to survive the situation. You go out to a different place, travel in your head somewhere else.… The scariest thing is to lose faith. When you lose your faith, you’re done.”

For Doron Steinbrecher, who was kidnapped from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza and held in tunnels for 471 days, having sporadic access to a radio became a lifeline. “Music helped us keep a small portion of our sanity,” she says. “Being able to listen to even a little bit of radio and catching some music from home really helped me sustain a connection to reality.”


The Maccabi mess has exposed Britain’s babbling bobbies
You may recall the cancellation of the Maccabi Tel Aviv-Aston Villa game back in November. What has happened since is that, due to constant scrutiny by Nick Timothy MP, Lord Austin and a small number of journalists, the narrative that West Midlands police spun at the time – that the Israeli fans were too dangerous to host – has slowly been unravelling. The force stands accused of retroactively cobbling together evidence for a ban that was actually rooted in fears about sectarian violence in Birmingham; ‘elements’ of the local community reportedly wished to ‘arm themselves‘ and target visiting fans. So far, so reassuring. Four senior officers were called to the Home Affairs select committee to answer questions about their particular combination of apparent incompetence and deceit – allegations which they deny.

The four representatives from West Midlands police were fascinating creatures. Three of them babbled while one remained completely silent. The Four Horsemen of Incompetence. They communicated like aliens from the heart of a different planetary system. They had become so consumed in their own baffling internal culture, that they had actually ceased to communicate like human beings.

They spoke in a torrent of meaningless jargon. A simple question about whether minutes were taken in a particular meeting was answered with a deluge of completely irrelevant information about silver stars and party conference policing. It was sort of the opposite of lying by omission, a very modern British form of deceit: lying by a surfeit of meaningless word salads. Some of their terms though were very telling. One officer referred to ‘a rising tide of concern locally’. Now to me that’s the sort of language you might use to describe opposition to a housing development or a change in a bus route, what it actually transpired to be was the threat of armed Islamic militias seeking to enact a pogrom.

Asked if AI had been used to assemble the ‘intelligence’ report on Maccabi fans, Chief Constable Craig Guildford smirked. ‘We don’t do that. We don’t use AI,’ he said. A few sentences later he admitted that a police officer had in fact used Google AI to find references to a Maccabi/West Ham match that had never actually taken place.


Adam Louis-Klein: Constructing the "Zionist" as Political Enemy
It is instructive to revisit the original debates surrounding the Genocide Convention—especially the exclusion of political groups from the definition of group destruction—in light of today’s antizionist hate movement, which presents itself as political opposition while actively constructing Jews as threats. The Soviet Union led the charge to block the inclusion of political groups, knowing full well that its mass atrocities were largely directed against those it labeled “political enemies”: kulaks, Trotskyists, revisionists, bourgeois nationalists, “Zionists.”

This strategic manipulation of political categories has long complicated genocide studies, as national, ethnic, and religious groups are frequently reframed as political threats to rationalize their destruction. Consider Stalin’s mass deportations of the Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others—entire ethnic populations cast as traitorous or disloyal and thus treated as legitimate targets. The exclusion of political groups from the Genocide Convention rested on the assumption that political identity is voluntary and revocable, unlike racial or ethnic affiliation. But in practice, the line between political and ethnic identity is repeatedly and deliberately blurred.

Antizionism thrives on that ambiguity. It singles out those it marks as “Zionists”—not as advocates of a specific policy or ideology, but as incarnations of Jewish Peoplehood—and declares them to be political enemies. Left-wing antizionists, in particular, regularly “right-code” all “Zionists,” marking them as “fascists” “Trumpians” and “White supremacists.”

In doing so, it transforms Jewish affiliation, descent, or solidarity into the basis for political hostility. Antizionist violence—such as the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgirm, outside an AJC event in Washington, DC—then gets reclassified as “political violence,” safely distanced from the moral and legal domain of hate. This allows antizionism to bypass the prohibitions of hate speech while authorizing racial violence. A totalizing political fault line runs straight through the category of Jewishness, reconfiguring it as a locus of threat, which is itself one of the drivers of genocidal violence.
How Social Media Has Transformed Israel's Global Image
According to the 2025 Nation Brands Index released in December 2025, Israel ranks last among 50 countries surveyed for the second consecutive year, this time recording a 6.1% drop in its overall score - the steepest single-year decline in the index's history.

The study notes that respondents now direct criticism not just at Israeli government policies but at Israeli people as a whole, viewing them as "toxic" - a finding that may also explain rising antisemitism worldwide.

Israel's struggling international image reflects fundamental changes in how information is mediated, processed, and understood in the digital age. Social media scrolling creates rapid, emotional, superficial engagement, while reading encourages linear thinking.

Israel's most pronounced reputation collapse is among those aged 18-24, who view Israel through an entirely different lens than older generations, who maintain more favorable views. This reflects a fundamental difference in how they consume information.

This younger cohort was born into anti-establishment thinking across the political spectrum, and a media environment that flattens all knowledge into emotional soundbites. Complex historical narratives compress into emotionally charged memes optimized for rapid sharing. The misrepresentation of Israel predates social media, which has merely accelerated these distortions.

Influencers accumulate millions of followers because of how they look, speak, and make complex topics feel simple - not due to information quality. A 10-minute video explaining nuanced historical context cannot compete with a 30-second emotional appeal. Israel cannot win by insisting on deeper engagement with complex realities; the medium won't allow it.
Is AI giving biased, antisemitic info? Here's how you can fight it
The antisemitism that is skyrocketing around the world, from America to Australia, is not only the explicit, aggressive kind that is impossible to miss.

There is also more subtle antisemitism that operates quietly, through repetition, omission, and framing, through what is emphasized, what is softened, and what is left unexplained.

You may be frustrated that not enough is being done about the first kind, which governments must tackle better. But the good news is you can have an impact on the second kind from the comfort of your own home.

Once you understand how Artificial Intelligence (AI) actually works, it becomes difficult to read its answers the same way again. What often appears as balance or neutrality is the product of accumulated bias, learned quietly from the world AI was trained on.

It is this quieter, structural layer that increasingly shapes how events are narrated and understood. And those narratives no longer circulate only through headlines or social media. They now feed AI systems that millions of people rely on to make sense of the world.

Students ask AI to explain Israel. Journalists consult it for background. People turn to it to make sense of terrorism, war, Israel, and other global events.

The answers often sound calm, composed, even authoritative. But that tone can be misleading.

AI does not evaluate truth. It reflects the information environment it is trained on.
Algorithmic Siege Warfare: How Coordinated Anti-Israel Networks "Break the System"
The real-world impact of these tactics is measurable. According to the 2025 Nation Brands Index, Israel ranks last among 50 countries surveyed, with the steepest decline among 18-24 year-olds. A new analysis from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) explains this generational vulnerability. Younger audiences consume information through platforms that favor rapid emotional engagement over depth, making them particularly susceptible to the algorithmic manipulation tactics JISS documented.

JCFA surveys reveal up to 35% of Americans under 45 support Hamas’s false claims even when explicitly told the source. Social media has transformed how knowledge circulates—complex historical narratives compress into emotionally charged memes optimized for viral sharing, while nuanced context struggles to gain traction.

The manipulation extends beyond grassroots campaigns. Both analyses document coordinated state-level information warfare: Iran creates fake news websites and deploys bot networks; Russia and China amplify anti-Israel content through state media; Qatar’s Al Jazeera serves as a major platform for anti-Israel messaging. Strategic Response: Fighting Back in the Digital Arena

Both institutions agree traditional public diplomacy has failed because it was designed for a different media environment. Their recommendations focus on tactical adaptation:
Immediate Actions:
Mobilize influencers who understand platform mechanics and create emotionally resonant, visually compelling content
Build rapid response capabilities to counter viral misinformation before narratives solidify
Produce short-form educational content optimized for platform algorithms

Structural Changes:
Collaborate with social media platforms to fix algorithmic vulnerabilities that enable coordinated manipulation
Expose adversaries’ information warfare operations and coordination networks
Provide training and resources for pro-Israel content creators to compete in the attention economy

Together, these analyses expose a systemic vulnerability in how democratic societies process information—one that any adversary with smartphones and coordination can exploit. The challenge isn’t whether we approve of this transformation, but whether we’re prepared to defend truth using the same algorithmic mechanics that weaponize it.
Transcripts show Brown University gunman planned attack months in advance
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday released transcripts of video recordings in which they say the gunman who carried out last month's fatal mass shooting at Brown University and later took his own life had admitted to planning the attack months in advance.

The four videos recorded by the suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, were discovered during a search of the storage locker in Salem, New Hampshire, where he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot on December 18, ending a six-day manhunt, the prosecutors said.

Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who had attended Brown two decades ago as a doctoral student in physics, slipped into an engineering building on the Ivy League campus on December 13 and opened fire with a handgun, killing two students and injuring nine others, according to police.

Authorities later determined that after fleeing the Providence, Rhode Island, scene of the Brown attack, Valente killed a physics professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a separate shooting at his home outside Boston.

Valente and the slain MIT professor Nuno Loureiro had once been classmates in Lisbon, authorities said after linking the two shooting incidents. But investigators have yet to offer a motive for either case.
Prof who threatened Jewish journalists keeps UC Davis job after claiming vile post was satire
An assistant college professor who sparked national outrage after posting that Jewish journalists “fear their bosses but they should fear us more” on social media will keep her job — following a nearly two-year investigation by officials at UC Davis.

Jemma DeCristo, who teaches American Studies and identifies as a black trans woman, posted on X on October 10, 2023 — three days after Hamas’s attack on Israel — threatening “Zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misiniformation” and their children.

The post included a knife and blood-drop emojis and quickly drew condemnation once it circulated widely after Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, took to calling DeCristo out on X.

DeCristo, however, claimed that the post was intended as satire, not a literal call for violence. She said it was “intended broadly to mimic and parody the tone of multiple October 10 posts, articles and statements by senior Israeli officials and journalists which [she] had seen dehumanizing Palestinian children in particular.”

DeCristo has not taught a class since October 2023 but has earned herself a place on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist — which claims to unmask radical professors.

UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May suspended the faculty member without pay for one academic quarter.

“We reject all forms of violence, calls for violence and discrimination, as they are antithetical to the values of our university,” the university told The Post.


Iran protests leave 36 dead, rights group says
The death toll in growing anti-regime protests in Iran reached 36 on Tuesday, according to a rights group, as opposition media reported that massive street demonstrations completely swamped Abdanan, a Kurdish city in the western part of the country.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that 30 protesters, four children and two members of Iran’s security forces have been killed in the unrest, which since starting on Dec. 28, according to HRANA, has spread to over 280 locations in 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces. The group also said that authorities have arrested more than 2,000 people.

Nationwide protests, the largest in three years, have erupted in anger over soaring inflation and a plunging currency, with the rial falling to a record low of 1.46 million to the dollar on Tuesday. The protests have widened to include calls to overthrow the Islamist government in Tehran. Strikes have also been a part of the movement.

In Abdanan, opposition-linked sources reported that protestors shouted slogans such as “Death to Khamenei!” and “Death to the dictator!”

Opposition channels reported that security forces cut electricity to the city, with no effect. Law enforcement units retreated to the roof of the police station, where videos circulating online show officers pleading with protesters not to attack them.

Protesters also looted and set fire to branches of the Ofog Korush retail chain, a symbol of corruption linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which describes itself as a “democratic political coalition founded in Tehran in July 1981, which has steadfastly sought an end to religious dictatorship and promotes a free and democratic Iran based on its platform.”


Hateful NYC sex offender threatens to kill Jews, NYPD cops and feds: DA
A deranged sex offender with a slew of prior arrests threatened to kill Big Apple Jews, federal officials and NYPD cops in a series of disturbing social-media posts, authorities said Tuesday.

Nathan White, 54, seethed, “Imma kill ALL you FILTY ZIONISTS!!! I CURSE ALL of YOU, AND DEATH will come to YOU soon by ME MF!!!” in one of five screeds he posted on his public X account between Nov. 7 and 9, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said.

The accused bigot also boasted that he pummeled an Israeli on a Big Apple train.

“I BEAT THE SH??!! Out of an Israeli on the NYC subway, how REAL is THAT, HUH?? JEWS, SMD!!” White wrote using the handle “BXsniper,” according to court papers.

“AND that includes the FEDS & NYPD. I WILL KILL ALL YOU MF!!!”

White was arrested Nov. 10 and indicted Monday in Queens Supreme Court on felony hate-crime charges such as making a terroristic threat as a hate crime and other raps, including making a terroristic threat and aggravated harassment.

It’s not the first time he was arrested. The alleged hate-filled maniac was convicted for a 1987 sexual assault, according to online records.

After getting out of prison, he racked up at least six more arrests, police said.
Berlin man indicted for antisemitic knife attack against man with star of David necklace
A Berlin man was charged for trying to stab a person wearing a Star of David necklace in June, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office announced.

The 29-year-old suspect allegedly encountered the victim wearing the necklace and a shirt also emblazoned with a Star of David in Gleisdreieck Park on June 20.

The suspect called the 60-year-old victim a “child murderer” and drew a knife. He then charged toward the victim, stating that he wanted to kill the victim because he had “blood on his hands.”

Three police officers intervened with firearms drawn, preventing the victim from being wounded.

The suspect was charged on Tuesday with attempted dangerous bodily harm and threats, and the prosecutor’s office was treating the incident as motivated by antisemitism.
Canadian Jewish leaders ‘dumbfounded’ after judge lets Holocaust memorial vandal off with time served
Anne London-Weinstein, an Ontario Superior Court of Justice judge, ruled on Jan. 7 that Iain Aspenlieder, a former lawyer for the city of Ottawa who pleaded guilty to vandalizing a Holocaust memorial, is free to go after serving five months in prison. Prosecutors had sought a two-year sentence for Aspenlieder’s crime, which was committed in June 2025.

At the time, Aspenlieder wrote “feed me” in red paint on the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Ontario.

“It’s supposed to be a beacon of education and tolerance, and to honor the memories of all the victims,” Adam Silver, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, told JNS of the memorial at the time.

Aspenlieder pleaded guilty to a charge of mischief for the vandalism in July.

London-Weinstein also ordered on Wednesday that he serve two years of probation; not approach Jewish or Israeli institutions, nor possess guns; and pay a “victim surcharge,” the CBC reported.

Michael Teper, president of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation, told JNS that the charity is “disappointed and angry” about the ruling.
Scots neo-Nazi mother and daughter jailed for violent antisemitic hate crimes
A Scottish mother and daughter who glorified Adolf Hitler, denied the Holocaust and called for violence against Jews have been jailed after admitting a sustained campaign of extremist hate crime.

Shirley Craughwell, 51, and her daughter Hannah Craughwell, 27, were sentenced at Edinburgh Sheriff Court after pleading guilty to offences aggravated by racial and religious prejudice committed between 2021 and 2024.

The case centred on prolific antisemitic activity across multiple social media platforms, including posts praising Nazism, promoting neo-Nazi ideology and calling explicitly for a new Holocaust.

Sentencing Shirley Craughwell, Sheriff Charles Walls said the material she shared was “deeply disturbing,” adding: “The level of hatred, racism and antisemitism expressed by you is deeply disturbing.”

He said her posts went far beyond offensive speech, describing them as “violent and threatening in relation to people of the Jewish faith”.

The court heard that Shirley Craughwell repeatedly praised Hitler, described non-white people as “a different species” and promoted conspiracy theories about Jews, including denial of the Nazi genocide. She also used neo-Nazi symbols and language, including the number “88”, an online reference to “Heil Hitler”.

In a particularly serious aggravation, she encouraged and filmed a young child performing Nazi salutes, later posting the footage online. Sheriff Walls said involving a child in extremist offending significantly worsened the gravity of the crimes.

She was sentenced to 20 months in prison, backdated to 27 November.

Her daughter, Hannah Craughwell, used the online alias “Hannah Hitler” and described Jews as “the devil’s children”, according to material shown to the court. She also shared Holocaust-denial content, racist and transphobic videos, and distributed neo-Nazi propaganda leaflets in her local community.
Popular Israeli restaurant in Lisbon forced to close due to antisemitic targeting, hostile campaign
A popular Israeli restaurant in Lisbon has been forced to close because of the rise in antisemitism, the establishment announced on Tuesday.

Tantura was opened ten years ago by chef couple Elad Budenshtiin and Itamar Eliyahu. Tantura’s menu drew inspiration from various Jewish cuisines to represent the Israeli melting pot.

However, since October 7, 2023, the restaurant has been the target of antisemitic acts. In a statement on Facebook, Tantura said that over the past three years, "with the war and the alarming rise of antisemitism in the world," it has been constantly targeted with graffiti on the restaurant walls, online defamation, hostile campaigns, and boycotts.

"The place that was meant to be a space of connection and joy turned into an arena of daily struggle," the restaurant said, adding that the decision to close is among the hardest they've ever had to make. The restaurant will close on Saturday, the 10th.

In June 2024, the walls and windows were graffitied with "Tantura is a massacre," "Free Palestine" by the group the Collective for the Liberation of Palestine (CLP). The group claimed that a massacre took place in the town of Tantura on May 22, 1948.
Audio bench bearing testimony of Holocaust survivor destroyed, thrown in lake in Manchester park
An audio bench, bearing the testimony of Holocaust survivor Chaim Ferster, was smashed to pieces and dumped in a frozen lake at Salford’s Clowes Park on Wednesday.

Chaim Forsten cheated death at eight concentration camps before moving to Manchester. He dedicated much of his life to speaking to thousands of schoolchildren across the country in the hope that by educating the next generation, the Holocaust would never happen again. He died in 2017.

Salford City Council created the audio bench in 2019 and placed it on the route of his daily walk as a way of paying tribute and preserving his wartime experiences.

However, on Wednesday, it was discovered that the bench had been destroyed, and the bench’s audio box ripped out. A resident reported it to their local councillor, who reported it to the police as a hate crime.

Antisemitism not confined to history books
Chaim's grandson, Marc Fertser, posted on LinkedIn about the incident. "This was not an ordinary bench. It was an audio bench, created so that anyone who wished could sit, listen, and hear my grandfather tell his story in his own words. It was placed in his favourite spot in the park — the place where he would regularly walk with his beloved dog, Blue."

"Seeing it vandalised is painful, not because of the physical damage but because of what it represents. It is a stark reminder that antisemitism is not confined to history books or memorial days. It is present, it is real, and it is increasingly finding expression within our society."

"This post is not about politics. It is not about assigning blame or seeking attention. It is about calling out something that should concern all of us, regardless of background or belief. When acts of hatred are ignored, minimised, or normalised, they do not remain isolated."


Samoa to inaugurate an embassy in Jerusalem in 2026
The Pacific Island nation of Samoa will open an embassy in Jerusalem this year, the country’s prime minister told Christian leaders this week.

The news comes on the heels of similar moves by fellow Oceania nations, including Fiji, which inaugurated an embassy in Jerusalem in September, and Papua New Guinea, which opened its embassy two years ago, and serves to highlight the strength of faith-based diplomacy.

“I [have] instruct[ed] our foreign affairs to start preparation to open an office of Samoa in Jerusalem this year,” Samoa Prime Minister La’auli Leuatea Schmidt said in an address to the Christian leaders, with the flags of both countries in the background.

He noted that Samoa was following in the footsteps of neighboring Fiji.

Israel and Samoa, which have maintained bilateral ties since 1972, have strong, growing relations marked by cooperation in health, technology, agriculture and energy.

The Israeli embassy in Wellington, New Zealand, handles diplomatic relations with the predominantly Christian nation of 220,000 people.

“It is exciting to see another nation give Jerusalem the respect it deserves by deciding to open its embassy in the Israeli capital,” Juergen Buehler, president of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, told JNS on Wednesday. “Like Fiji, the island nation of Samoa has a large Christian population that wants its leaders to stand with Israel on biblical principles. We are optimistic that more countries will follow suit in the coming year.”

Seven countries currently maintain embassies in Israel’s capital: the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.

All other nations that maintain ties with Israel have their embassies in Tel Aviv or its suburbs, due to the political sensitivities of Jerusalem.
Jensen Huang: “Nvidia's team in Israel is incredible. I'll be visiting soon.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered rare insight into the company’s operations in Israel at a press conference during CES 2026 on Tuesday, emphasizing the central role the country plays in the world’s most valuable technology company. Nvidia, with a market capitalization of approximately $4.55 trillion, has been operating in Israel since its $6.9 billion acquisition of networking firm Mellanox in 2019. The acquisition transformed Mellanox’s Yokneam headquarters into Nvidia’s primary Israeli hub, which now employs roughly 3,000 of the company’s 5,000 Israeli staff.

“Our team in Israel is incredible. They're hardworking, they're smart, they're dedicated, they care about the company, they care about their people, they care about the country,” Huang said when asked about Nvidia’s presence in Israel. “The sacrifices they make for each other, for their country, is incredible, and we’ve been very, very successful there.”

Huang highlighted Israel’s role in the development of key Nvidia chips. “Nvidia’s BlueField-4 DPU and three networking components, the ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, NVLink 6 Switch, and Spectrum-6 Ethernet Switch all came out of Israel. So, four out of six chips came out of Israel. Pretty amazing. And maybe next time, six out of six chips.”

The CEO also emphasized the company’s culture and approach to talent management. “Our turnover is incredibly low. You know, it’s probably one or two percent in Israel. People stay for a very long time. We have people in our Israel office who have been with the company for 20-25 years. This is quite an extraordinary thing. Our ability to attract great people is second to none, and our ability to retain them is absolutely world class.”

Huang connected these achievements to Nvidia’s broader corporate philosophy: “We dedicate ourselves to choosing good work for the company to do, that’s one of the responsibilities of the CEO, to choose what kind of work we should be doing and what kind of work we shouldn’t be doing. The quality of the work, the purpose of the company, all of it comes together, and it’s pretty magical in Israel.”


French Jews defend free speech on anniversary of Charlie Hebdo shooting
On the 11th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, the political arm of French Jewry vowed to uphold freedom of expression in memory of the 12 people murdered by jihadists at the satirical magazine’s offices.

“11 years ago, Islamist barbarism attacked freedom of expression by assassinating part of the Charlie Hebdo editorial team. Let us continue to defend freedom of expression without faltering,” CRIF, the umbrella group of French-Jewish communities, wrote on Wednesday.

Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who identified themselves as members of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, murdered 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters because the magazine had mocked Islam and depicted Mohammed.

A friend and accomplice of the brothers murdered four people two days later at a Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in east Paris. A police officer was also killed by the terror cell.

CRIF organizes annual commemorations for all the victims at the Hyper Cacher site, with the 11th scheduled for Jan. 9.




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