Friday, January 16, 2026

01/16 Links Pt2: Our duty to British Jews; A Century of Rewarding Palestinian Terror; West Midlands Police chief retires following Maccabi fan ban scandal

From Ian:

Our duty to British Jews
We must be clear about this hatred’s source: a toxic alliance between the nihilistic ‘decolonial’ campus left that views Israel as the embodiment of everything that it despises, and Islamist influence in Muslim communities where anti-Semitic tropes too often go unchallenged. Britain cannot be a successful multifaith democracy if Islamist ideology is not exposed and challenged. Islamic organisations found to be peddling extremism must be shut down. Immigrants who espouse Islamist views must be deported.

Those in civic life, too, must be exposed and challenged when they fail to protect minorities. Bodies such as the National Education Union must be forced to confront open anti-Semitism within their ranks – a culture that normalises bigotry must be rejected with the full force of the law. The NHS is not so short of staff that it must keep employing those guilty of anti-Semitic behaviour. Many doctors found guilty of espousing violent hatred of Jews find themselves suspended, but far fewer are struck off, despite the obvious risk to Jewish patients.

The problem goes right to the top. Keir Starmer pledged to do ‘whatever it takes’ to tackle anti-Semitism following the Heaton Park synagogue attack. Yet he celebrated the release of an Egyptian activist who it later emerged had once said that ‘we need to kill more’ Zionists. Starmer had been un-aware of the comments; for British Jews, it all suggests their security is an afterthought.

Resisting anti-Semitism at home means fighting it abroad. Britain should be doing everything it can to assist Iran’s protestors. The Islamic Republic is the world’s leading sponsor of attacks on Jews – from its support for the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, to its funding of ‘anti-Zionist’ NGOs and television channels. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is believed to operate in Britain, surveilling dissidents, intimidating campaigners and even planning kidnappings. Yet No. 10 confirmed this week that it would not proscribe the organisation, which would make it illegal to support the IRGC.

What begins with Jews does not end with them. Countries that become unsafe for Jews – the Spain of the Inquisition, Germany in the 1930s, Russia in the past decade – are those where freedom eventually dies. Never Again is not a platitude, but a promise we must keep for all our sakes.
Lahav Harkov: Fight Harder
Review of 'As a Jew' by Sarah Hurwitz
Hurwitz dedicates a significant portion of her book to defending Zionism and Israel, and she calls her avoidance of the topic in Here All Along a “cop-out.” She blames herself for having wanted to spare the controversy and avoid acknowledging the importance of Israel to today’s Jews and the justice of its existence. But she still makes sure to broadcast that she’s not one of those Zionists. She’s “appalled by Israel’s current right-wing government; sickened by the racism and extremism of its most senior government officials; horrified by radical settler violence…deeply troubled by Israel’s ongoing military occupation…anguished about the war in Gaza with its devastating casualties and destruction.”

This kind of virtue-signaling is not surprising from a former Obama staffer, even one who has immense Jewish pride and who has engaged in serious self-examination on the matter and hopes to encourage other Jews to do the same.

Hurwitz repeatedly refers to her political “side,” facetiously and in scare quotes, when distancing herself from the left because of its weaknesses on anti-Semitism. She admirably takes on some liberal Jewish shibboleths, as when she expresses “a feeling of loss” about how Reform Judaism chose to discard Jewish spirituality. She is correct to question whether those who pursue social justice as the true core of Judaism are implying that their “existence as a Jew is valid because it benefits people other than Jews.”

As a Jew is peppered with reminders, however, that Hurwitz is willing to distance herself from liberal axioms only up to a point. She writes that she doesn’t mean to dwell on Christian anti-Semitism—and one can grant her that it is, historically, very important—but she mentions the Soviet-inspired and Muslim-dominated anti-Semitism of our current discourse only glancingly.

Hurwitz is reminiscent of the talented British-American writer Hadley Freeman, who wrote the book House of Glass, about how her family survived the Holocaust. It could have been a classic, if only she hadn’t larded it with constant references to President Donald Trump being a fascist. In As a Jew, Hurwitz lays her incomplete self-examination bare by essentially blaming rising anti-Semitism in America on Trump.

Hurwitz says that she was first struck by the anti-Semitism of her side of the aisle during the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. But more than once she makes the argument that “this rhetoric from the far left came in the wake of a wave of alarming rhetoric and violence from the far right, particularly during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.” While the spike in online anti-Semitism in 2016 was undeniable, and while there has been an alarming increase in anti-Semitism, or at least a willingness to accept it, by influential right-wing figures in 2025, data unambiguously show that anti-Semitism in the U.S. started to rise sharply in 2014, when the first wave of Black Lives Matter riots began and when Hurwitz was still working for the Obama administration.

As a Jew is well written and thoroughly researched, and worth recommending to the people Bret Stephens called “October 8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and suddenly realized that a lot of people hate us. It’s really not a book for people who came to that realization long ago and have knowledge of Jewish history beyond a 101 class. Perhaps, in her third volume, Sarah Hurwitz will follow the logic of her own arguments, take account of her own experience at the Federation General Assembly, and go to battle openly with the enemies she refuses to engage with directly in the pages of As a Jew.
A Century of Rewarding Palestinian Terror
Palestinian Arabs have been fighting Jews violently in the Holy Land for more than a hundred years. The strategy has hardly brought them success, but they have retained it, in part because anti-Jewish mayhem brings them political rewards from important foreign actors.

Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities were innovative - the attackers livestreamed their actions with Go-Pro cameras - but they also fit an old pattern. Hamas said it was defending Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, and named its attack "al-Aqsa Flood." In the 1929 Hebron massacre in British Mandate Palestine, the Arab rioters, who killed nearly 70 Jews, likewise screamed that they were defending al-Aqsa. Linking the two episodes is the killers' sense that massacres of civilians are politically beneficial.

British officials condemned the rioters in 1929 for pitiless murder, and then tried to mollify them. They failed. The consequences of their appeasement effort remain with us today. In Britain, the 1929 riots energized anti-Zionist forces, who interpreted the inhumanity of the bloodletting as a sign of the vehemence of Arab grievances.

High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor, the British-appointed governor of Palestine, proved far more eager to accommodate than to punish those responsible. He favored radical policy changes to remedy Arab complaints against the Jews and pressed for these changes as necessary to prevent future riots. As a result, the threat of more riots became the mainspring of Palestinian Arab diplomacy and this intimidation campaign succeeded. Colonial Office experts proposed backing away from the Balfour Declaration.

The parallels to the current war in Gaza are obvious. People around the world did express horror at the murders, rapes, mutilations, and kidnappings of men, women, and children by Hamas on Oct. 7. Yet very little time passed before many of these same people argued that the key to preventing future terrorism of this kind is to placate the Zionists' enemies - by recognizing Palestine as a state, endorsing untrue reports of famine in Gaza, and accusing Israel falsely of "genocide."

As in the aftermath of the 1929 riots, rewards for savagery will increase, not decrease, the likelihood of future terrorist violence. This lays a foundation for another century of self-defeating Arab anti-Zionist belligerence. The rewards can be expected to empower the more hateful and oppressive elements in Palestinian Arab politics, making peace with Israel harder to achieve.
The Nazi War Criminal the Arab World Protected
Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia provided a stage for the lethal operations of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Jerusalem's Grand Mufti.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he had orchestrated anti-Jewish pogroms in the Land of Israel, and during World War II, he managed German propaganda to the Muslim world and developed strategies to mobilize Muslim minorities across the Soviet Union and the Balkans for the Third Reich.

In Yugoslavia he helped raise three Waffen-SS divisions composed entirely of local Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

These units perpetrated horrific war crimes - massacring Serbs and Jews, incinerating entire villages with their inhabitants still inside, carrying out systematic rape, torture, and pillage.

When the war concluded in 1945, Yugoslavia's liberated government moved to investigate the Mufti's role in Nazi atrocities, formally listing him as a war criminal and petitioning a UN special committee for his extradition.

Al-Husseini's allies throughout the Arab world unleashed tremendous pressure and threats that forced Yugoslav authorities to retreat from extradition demands.


Defending Israel with David Harris- Arsen Ostrovsky on Bondi Beach
David Harris is joined by international human rights lawyer, social media influencer, and Bondi Beach survivor Arsen Ostrovsky. Arsen recounts his harrowing ordeal at Bondi, as he was shot in the head, millimeters from death, not knowing if his family nearby was safe from the shooters' rampage.


Reject the hate speech laws - AJA on 2GB with Luke Grant
AJA CEO Robert Gregory joined Luke Grant on 2GB to discuss the so-called 'hate speech' laws which the Albanese Government is attempting to rush through.

Many in the Jewish community are opposed and AJA is calling on all MPs to reject the laws.


Jihadi preacher linked to Bondi gunman releases children’s cartoon
Sky News can reveal notorious jihadi hate preacher Wissam Haddad plans to target young children with his preachings, releasing a cartoon and suggesting more similar content will be coming.

Haddad, who also goes by the name Abu Ousayd and has been linked to surviving Bondi gunman Naveed Akram, has also posted a fresh video spreading antisemitic tropes and conspiracies about Jews in the wake of the terror attack, despite a Federal Court order being made against him last year.

Haddad released a 47-second cartoon featuring an animated version of himself, wearing what appears to be a Palestinian keffiyeh, on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, which is popular among terror and hate groups.

Accompanying the video, which was re-published by jihad and terrorism threat monitor MEMRI, Haddad reportedly comments on Telegram that this was a “new project” and a “test run”.

The cartoon is mainly set in a classroom with young children, and opens with an animated Haddad telling viewers, “Welcome to learning with Abu Ousayd”.

“Today we are learning about Tawheed, knowing that Allah is one,” Haddad says in the clip.

“Tawheed means believing that Allah has no partners. There is no one like him, we worship only Allah.

“As Muslims, we don’t worship a man or an idol or a man-made system, we worship only Allah. We never obey anyone if it means disobeying Allah. True freedom is him alone. So remember, there is only one god, Allah. Love him, trust him and obey him.”

Alleged Bondi terrorist Naveed Akram was a known follower of Haddad’s, and had been captured on film “spreading the message” and handing out pamphlets for the Haddad-linked Street Dawah Movement at Bankstown train station, in Sydney’s southwest, as a 17-year-old in 2019.


Writers’ block at the Adelaide festival
Since the Oct. 7 massacre, antisemitism has surged around the world at levels not seen since the 1930s, including in Australia, where incidents have risen 5.5 times, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Chants such as “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada” are not harmless slogans. They are calls for violence with real-world consequences—consequences made painfully clear on Bondi Beach. As New South Wales Premier Chris Minns observed, “There has to be a recognition that words have consequences.”

Yet more than 180 writers pulled out of the festival in solidarity with Abdel-Fattah. Accusations included the death of freedom of speech, the so-called denial of Palestinian voices and predictable allegations of racism, even though Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation had nothing to do with her ethnicity and everything to do with the content of her posts.

The irony is hard to miss, given that she supported calls in 2024 to rescind the invitation to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is Jewish—a move that was ostensibly rejected by the board, but which, in fact, led them to cancel his appearance by citing “timing” issues, according to Friedman.

Ultimately, this year’s festival was canceled amid numerous resignations and a reshuffling of the board.

Yet within days, the board apologized and then fully retreated—retracting its original statement and inviting Abdel-Fattah to appear at next year’s festival.

And just like that, the fleeting moment of moral clarity was gone.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Back in February 2023, I noted that the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, a supposed festival of ideas, had instead become a festival of hate. Of the roughly 200 writers appearing that year, seven were billed as being from “Palestine” and none from Israel.

Some of those writers had used some of the most vile antisemitic language imaginable. Israel was described as an “abomination.” Jews were likened to Nazis. Israel was accused of deliberately infecting Palestinians with COVID-19, while “Zionists” were said to possess an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood and land.”

Still, amid this violent and dehumanizing language directed at Israel and Jews, there were no moral crises, no mass resignations and no boycotts. The festival proceeded with little interruption.

Far from being about the free exchange of ideas, the Adelaide Writers’ Week festival remains what it has long been: an exercise in political grandstanding and virtue-signaling. Marketed as an exploration of truth, those responsible for its programming have decided that some truths—particularly those involving the deliberate targeting of Israel and Jews—are too inconvenient to be explored at all, and so, must be blocked from the outset.
Australian arts festival apologizes for disinviting Palestinian writer who lauded Oct. 7
A major Australian arts festival has apologized to a Palestinian Australian writer after disinviting her over her support for Hamas, endorsement of violence against Israel and backing for the elimination of the Jewish state, sparking a controversy that forced the cancellation of this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week.

The Adelaide Festival Board on Thursday retracted the decision to bar academic and novelist Randa Abdel-Fattah, inviting her back for next year’s event and apologizing to her “unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her.”

The board on Tuesday cancelled the writers’ week, a premier Australian literary event and part of the Adelaide Festival, after 180 international and Australian authors boycotted it over Abdel-Fattah’s ban. The writers’ week director, the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, said she could not be party to silencing a Palestinian author.

The festival’s original board resigned in response to the backlash. Abdel-Fattah accepts apology but says it’s no ‘quick fix’

“Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance, Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short,” the new board said in a statement.

Abdel-Fattah accepted the apology “as acknowledgement of our right to speak publicly and truthfully about the atrocities that have been committed against the Palestinian people,” but said in a post on X that “it is not a quick fix to repair the damage and injury inflicted.”

She said she would consider the invitation to the 2027 event in Adelaide, South Australia.
ABC fails to question controversial author on October 7 praise after festival apology
The ABC failed to ask a single question about Randa Abdel-Fattah’s record of inflammatory statements, including her praise for Hamas’s October 7 massacre, during a radio interview on Friday morning.

After the Adelaide Festival board issued an apology and promised to re-invite her in 2027, the writer appeared on ABC radio to celebrate what she called a vindication.

But the ABC radio host Sally Sara avoided the subject at the core of the controversy.

There were no questions about her refusal to condemn Hamas, her insistence the group is not a terrorist organisation, or her public celebration of the October 7 attack.

The ABC did not raise her Facebook profile change to an image of a Hamas hang-glider the day after the massacre – which was widely interpreted as celebrating the horrific day.

Or her previous statements demanding that spaces be made “culturally unsafe” for Zionists, a group that includes the overwhelming majority of Jewish people.

‘Hypocrite’: Randa Abdel-Fattah calls for the de-platforming of Zionists
Nor did the ABC mention her past lines such as “To hell with you all. Every last Zionist. May you never know a second peace in your sadistic miserable lives."

The interview instead focused on her reaction to the festival’s apology.

At one point in the interview, she was allowed to attack criticism of her declaration that Zionists had "no claim or right to cultural safety".

She insisted on Friday she had "never called for Jewish people not to have cultural safety" despite a large portion of Australian Jews supporting Israel's right to exist.

“Every single Jewish group has a right to cultural safety, but political ideologies cannot use cultural safety as a shield from criticism," she said on the ABC's Radio National Breakfast on Friday.

“I’m fed up with the way my words have been deliberately and maliciously mischaracterised to paint me as an antisemite, when I have never, never, never used antisemitism against Jewish people.”

Once again, she was not pulled up on her claim.


Wave of state legislation supporting Israel, fighting Jew-hatred in new year
State legislators in Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, South Dakota, Arizona, Mississippi, New Jersey, Iowa, West Virginia and Rhode Island introduced at least 23 state laws calling for local governments to refer to “Judea and Samaria” rather than the “West Bank,” mandate Holocaust education, define Jew-hatred or create task forces on antisemitism.

Eight states have introduced legislation on Judea and Samaria recently, according to Yigal Dilmoni, co-founder and CEO of American Friends of Judea and Samaria. “What we are seeing today is the result of a combination of long-term educational efforts and a significant shift in both Israeli and American reality,” he told JNS.

In recent years, Dilmoni’s group and elected leaders from Judea and Samaria have led “extensive educational and public-awareness initiatives across the United States,” in order to provide “accurate, fact-based information about Judea and Samaria as the biblical heartland and historical homeland of the Jewish people,” he told JNS.

They have also tried to explain the region’s importance to Israeli security and to counter efforts by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to “erase the biblical and historical truth of the Land of Israel,” he said.

The new U.S. state-level legislation is a “reaffirmation of biblical truth and historical integrity,” he told JNS. “These legislative efforts also provide an opportunity for open public discussion, deeper education of lawmakers and a powerful message to younger generations about the true historical roots of the region.”
Antisemitism Is Not Just Wrong. It’s Stupid.
Stupid carries the gravitas of a schoolyard fight.

“A stupid person doesn’t have much intelligence or imagination, and they go through life making decisions that seem to lack all common sense,” according to a dictionary definition. “If you’ve got a brain but you don’t use it, you might be a bit stupid.”

Only a stupid person would decide to hate Jews. It’s stupid to hate people who have done so much for the world. It’s stupid to hate a country like Israel that contributes a lot more than its fair share to help humanity. And those brilliant academics who hate Israel? They’re also stupid.

We’ve never made the case for stupidity because we’re too busy trying to understand our haters. But what has all this understanding gotten us? We assume that if we can explain the hatred, somehow, we will reduce it. It hasn’t worked out that way. Still, we keep dissecting and analyzing and looking for new ways to explain Jew-hatred, new ways to make the same moral case against the world’s most stubborn hate virus.

With stupid, there is no case to make.

Stupid doesn’t need arguments. It conveys instantly the shock and ridicule that Jew-hatred merits. It diminishes the hater. Its borderline vulgarity denotes well-deserved contempt for those who hate Jews. Its finality suggests a people that doesn’t need to argue or defend itself.

Of course we’ll never stop analyzing and trying to understand. That’s what Jews do. But our fight can use some freshening up. A “Hating Jews is Stupid” campaign would be a bold start. We would tell the world exactly how we feel about the haters who hate us, branding the haters with a crushing truth.

Jew-haters deserve to know they’re stupid.
West Midlands police chief allowed to retire after Maccabi Tel Aviv match scandal
The Chief Constable of West Midlands police has been allowed to retire instead of being sacked, 48 hours after the Home Secretary said she had lost confidence in him over the force’s handling of evidence ahead of a football match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv last year.

Craig Guildford, who has served as Chief Constable since December 2022, was widely blamed after serious questions emerged relating to evidence used by WM Police to justify banning all Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from November’s Europa League tie. On Wednesday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she had lost confidence in the senior police boss after a “damning” watchdog review showed “confirmation bias” and a “failure of leadership” in West Midlands Police.

The decision to ban all fans of the Israeli club from attending the match at Villa Park was made by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG), led by West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council, and was largely based on a WM police report relating to clashes which had happened in Amsterdam in 2024 when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax. However, that report was subsequently found to contain serious discrepancies compared with what police in Amsterdam said had happened, and in one case was found to have relied on an AI tool which hallucinated another Maccabi Tel Aviv match which had never taken place.

Guildford had given evidence on several occasions to Parliament’s Home Affairs select committee, with many of its MPs increasingly frustrated by what they felt was significant obfuscation by senior members of the force. On Wednesday, after Mahmood, an MP for a Birmingham constituency, officially declared she had no confidence in Guildford, a number of her senior Cabinet colleagues – including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy – called for him to go. Mahmood also announced that she would be moving to restore Ministerial power to sack police chiefs when deemed necessary – a power which had previously been removed by the then-Conservative government in 2011.

There were widespread concerns that the decision of the Birmingham SAG, as well as the drafting of the police report, had been heavily influenced by local pressure from elements within the city’s Muslim community. It emerged that local police had been aware of efforts to track Maccabi Tel Aviv players while they were in the city, but that officers reporting on the situation around the game had been advised to avoid making that information public for fear of further inflaming the situation.

The response from the Jewish community in the wake of Guildford’s retirement decision, announced by West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster on Friday, was mixed.

Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies, said: “the Home Secretary and politicians across all the main parties for the clear stance they have taken on this matter, including the work of the Home Affairs Select Committee and HMIC in getting to the facts. After this debacle, we support proposals for the power to sack Chief Constables to be restored to the Home Secretary.

“Strong working relationships with the police are vital to the security of Jewish communities locally and nationally. We are ready to work with the local Jewish community, the Chief Constable’s successors, and the government, to restore confidence that this episode has so seriously eroded.”


Unpacking Cuba's Ties with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and U.S. Pro-Palestine Groups
The recent U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has highlighted Cuba’s subversive role in the region and its ties to adversaries of the United States. Cuba, a longtime ally of Venezuela’s socialist regime, reports that 32 of its military personnel were killed during the U.S. military operation while serving as Maduro's security detail in Caracas under a Cuba–Venezuela mutual defense agreement.

This incident underscores Cuba’s six decades of supporting international terrorism—extending from Cold War-era training camps for Palestinian terror operatives to contemporary coordination with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian intelligence, while simultaneously training American activists who have influenced anti-Israel protests on U.S. campuses. The 1960s–1980s: Cuban Training Camps for Palestinian Terrorists

Cuba’s support for Palestinian terrorists dates to the 1960s, when Fidel Castro framed Palestine as a pillar of Third World revolutionary solidarity. In January 1966, Castro hosted the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana, publicly linking Cuba to the Palestinian cause. By 1968, Cuba sent military instructors and advisors to Palestinian bases in Jordan to provide guerrilla warfare and counter-intelligence training.

Between 1976 and 1982, the CIA estimated that approximately 300 Palestinian terrorists were training in Cuban camps at any given time, with the training camps estimated to be capable of handling at least 600 to 800 guerrilla trainees each year between 1983-1985.

ICAP's Alleged Links to Cuban Intelligence
According to the Washington Times, Cuba’s Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP)—the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples—has alleged ties to Cuban intelligence services. ICAP’s activities include coordinating international pro-Palestinian activism. Founded in 1960 by Fidel Castro and under direct intelligence oversight, ICAP has ties to approximately 2,000 partner organizations in 150 countries, with roughly 800 partners in Europe and 77 U.S.-based groups linked through the National Network on Cuba.

In 2022, approximately eight months before Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack, ICAP invited Al-Tajammu to formalize links between Latin American solidarity networks and Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, as reported on in the Washington Times. Al-Tajammu is a pro-Iran coalition that includes Hezbollah, the Houthi movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the PFLP.


Michigan event to feature daughter of convicted Hamas fundraiser
A panel discussion on the “Holy Land Five” scheduled for Jan. 17 in Grand Rapids, Mich., will feature the daughter of one of the five Palestinian-Americans convicted in 2008 for providing material support to Hamas.

Nida Abu Baker, daughter of Shukri Abu Baker, “will share her story and recount the decades of struggle to free her father and his colleagues in the Holy Land Foundation—the largest Muslim nonprofit in the U.S. that was targeted with trumped-up material support for terrorism charges,” event organizers stated.

Five officials of the foundation, nicknamed the “Holy Land Five,” were convicted in Dallas in November 2008 on “108 charges of funneling $12.4 million to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization,” according to Canary Mission.

“These convicted terror financiers are celebrated as heroes by a growing network of anti-Israel activists who portray them as humanitarian workers wrongfully imprisoned,” the watchdog group stated.

The event, hosted by Palestine Solidarity Grand Rapids, will also feature Tom Burke, a socialist leader whose home was raided by the FBI in 2010 on suspicion of offering material support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Zena Ozeir, an activist with the U.S. Palestinian Community Network who lists on her LinkedIn that she is an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan.

Organizers of the event stated that Ozeir “will talk on the legal aspects of the case,” which they described as “of utmost importance for activists facing legal challenges for their free speech and advocacy for Palestine.”


Does the NEU have a problem with Jews?
Talk of ‘working with students’ takes on a new significance when set against the NEU’s plans, announced last spring, to train members in how to ‘advocate for Palestine’ and to bring the ‘Palestinian struggle’ into schools. A workshop had been arranged by the union to instruct teachers in ‘educational approaches that capture the history of the Palestinian struggle’ and which are ‘aimed at strengthening the movement for Palestinian liberation’. In this context, campaigning against a planned visit from a local MP becomes a means for activists to bring ‘the Palestinian struggle’ into the classroom and offer children a one-sided and negative account of Israel’s history.

A previous success had emboldened Bristol’s NEU members to take action in response to Egan’s visit. Last July, Cabot Learning Federation (CLF), the multi-academy trust that runs the Bristol secondary school, shamefully stopped a speaker from an Israeli-owned cybersecurity company from addressing its summer conference after pressure from union members. Michaela Wilde, the NEU branch secretary for the schools in the CLF, boasted about having had both speakers turned down: ‘Don’t mess with NEU in CLF, we are not here to play’, she wrote on Facebook. Meanwhile, Bristol NEU also took to Facebook to celebrate Egan’s cancellation, ‘as a win for safeguarding, solidarity, and for the power of the NEU trade-union staff group, parents, and campaigners standing together’.

Even before this, on the very day after the 7 October 2023 pogrom in southern Israel, Saima Akhtar, the trust’s inclusion and diversity co-ordinator, took to social media to tell her followers that ‘Palestine is fighting back’ in a ‘war against [its] oppressors’. The day after thousands of people were slaughtered at the hands of Hamas, Akhtar instructed people to ignore ‘media attempts to paint Israel as a victim’.

Despite the pogrom in Israel and the subsequent sharp rise in reported incidences of anti-Semitism in British schools, at no point has the NEU reached out to support Jewish teachers or offer solidarity to Jewish union members. But perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, Daniel Kebede, head of the NEU, was himself filmed addressing a rally organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2021, and proclaiming: ‘It’s about time we globalise the intifada.’

The bigotry in the NEU is there for all to see: no expensive lawyers or lengthy inquiries are needed. The problem is that from Kebede down, so many union members are consumed by loathing of Israel, they are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge what’s in plain sight.


How Breads Bakery in New York became a target of anti-Zionist union activism
Breaking Breads is pushing toward such divestment. However, the bakery’s leadership has its own strong support. Tal Shuster, co-chair of the Israeli-American Council (IAC), told me: “Once we heard about it, we contacted the owners. We know them both and offered them any type of help they want. If it’s to come and be a customer, wonderful. To come and volunteer and help them in the kitchen? We told them the entire community will be there immediately.” Shuster said Breads’ leaders were “grateful” and asked only: “Come to shop here like you do all the time.” New Yorkers have obliged. Last Friday, The Times of Israel’s Luke Tress tweeted a video showing how “hundreds turn[ed] out to support Israeli-owned Breads Bakery on the Upper West Side”.

For now, Breads Bakery remains union-free. That won’t change without bakery leadership recognising the union or pro-union employees approaching the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a secret ballot election and winning a majority of votes. There would still be limits to union power, though.

National Jewish Advocacy Center CEO Mark Goldfeder told me: “There are some mandatory subjects of bargaining, like wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment, but these [other demands] do not fall under that category.” Put differently, a union couldn’t determine bakery customers or causes the bakery supports.

Employers can lawfully discipline employees “refusing to do assigned work or engaging in partial/intermittent work stoppages that the NLRB treats as unprotected” or “public disparagement that isn’t framed as part of a labour dispute or is ‘so disloyal, reckless, or maliciously untrue’ that it loses protection,” Goldfeder explained. However, NJAC Associate Director Ben Schlager warned discipline would “invite an avalanche of litigation”, saying “reassignment, rather than termination, would be the safer course”.

Goldfeder flagged another potential “legal snag”: “If ‘don’t cater Zionist events’ is applied as a proxy for refusing service to Jews, Israelis, or Jewish communal events, the bakery could create exposure under” both federal and New York City law.

As for what this episode foretells, Former Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, tweeted: “This is going to spread. This is not spontaneous. This is part of an effort to marginalise Jews and Israel.” It certainly looks like part of the ongoing effort to do exactly that.

Goldfeder is sceptical that this could become a trend, calling it “too legally problematic”. Schlager, however, sees American Labor already “becoming bolder and more willing to advocate for causes outside of typical wage and hours issues”.

Either way, Jews, Israelis, and their friends still have recourse. Use it. Insist laws be enforced fairly and patronise targeted Israeli and Jewish businesses.
How anti-Zionist rhetoric became a political brand at Missouri
The anti-Israel rhetoric at the University of Missouri is not happening in a vacuum. It reflects a larger national pattern, one that becomes clearer when examined alongside the rise of politicians like Zohran Mamdani, the recently inaugurated mayor of New York City.

Mamdani’s platform represents the mesh point between Democratic Socialism and the umbrella organizations associated with anti-Zionism, which has blazed across North American campuses. The patterns he established reflect the behavior of the university’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YSDA), where statements blaming Israel for the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and invoking “occupation” and “apartheid” have become commonplace.

Why is this bad? Considering the fact that these student groups aren’t trying to win any major elections, they have had the freedom to express their opinions in ways that Mamdani has not.

Missouri’s YDSA chapter has been radically persistent with its staunch anti-Zionism, and there seems to be a mixing with members of the now-inactive chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, whose president was recently placed on probation for harassing a pro-Israel student. YDSA often projects the genocidal chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and has a history of pushing blatant misinformation about Israel.

Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza post-Oct. 7, the group has consistently covered shared campus spaces with overly inflated casualty figures meant to demonize Israel that not even Hamas can try to justify. The Gaza Health Ministry (or Hamas propaganda machine) that YDSA frantically spews claims that not a single person has died of natural causes in more than two years.

This campus behavior underscores the risks associated with similar rhetoric when adopted by elected officials.

If Mamdani is to govern with the same attitude toward the Jewish state and pro-Israel/Zionist community as YDSA, the consequences for many of his constituents will be cause for concern. It should be obvious why a mayor of America’s largest Jewish community, who legitimizes rhetoric denying Jewish peoplehood and Israel’s right to exist, poses a direct harm to Jews in New York City.


London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires
Twenty-five years after it was founded, Wikipedia stands as an unrivalled achievement. Not only is it the single largest collection of information in human history, it has also built a stellar reputation for reliability in a digital world awash with lies and deception.

For this reason, new AI tools have begun to carry the site’s contents far and wide. Chatbots and AI-generated search summaries – which are rapidly transforming the way people get their information – both use Wikipedia as a key source.

Now, we can reveal Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.

The firm in question is Portland Communications, whose founder Tim Allan is now the director of communications for Keir Starmer. And it has been busted once already for this practice, which is in breach of the British PR professionals’ code of conduct.

But after the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: “No one said, ‘We should stop doing this.’ The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught.”

Portland’s subcontractors have polished the public image of Qatar by burying references to critical reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup, according to the firm’s insiders. They have also obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen; scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and promoted one side of Libya’s post-Gaddafi government over the other.

Often, however, their changes were more subtle: burying bad press under descriptions of a client’s philanthropic work or swapping out critical news references with something more positive.


Afghan man 'rammed car into German crowd, killing girl, two, and her mother and injuring dozens more': Driver 'with "religious motivation" muttered "Allahu Akbar" afterwards', murder trial hears
An Afghan man went on trial in Germany on Friday accused of ramming a car into a crowd in Munich last year, killing a two-year-old girl and her mother and injuring dozens.

The suspect, partially identified as Farhad N., 25, faces two charges of murder and 44 of attempted murder, with prosecutors saying he acted out of a 'religious motivation' and expected to die in the attack.

The vehicle rampage in February 2025 was one of several deadly attacks linked to migrants which inflamed a heated debate on immigration ahead of a general election that month.

Farhad N. is accused of deliberately steering his car into a 1,400-strong trade union street rally in Munich on February 13.

The vehicle came to a halt after 75 feet 'because its front wheels lost contact with the ground due to people lying in front of and underneath the car', according to the charge sheet.

A 37-year-old woman and her young daughter were both hurled through the air for 10 metres and sustained severe head injuries, of which they died several days later.

Prosecutors have said Kabul-born Farhad N. 'committed the act out of excessive religious motivation', and that he had uttered the words 'Allahu Akbar', meaning 'God is the greatest', after the car rampage.

'He believed he was obliged to attack and kill randomly selected people in Germany in response to the suffering of Muslims in Islamic countries,' they said when he was charged in August.
Boy accused of terror plot wrote some at his school ‘should be shot’, court told
A teenage boy accused of plotting a terror attack on local synagogues wrote in his journal how some pupils at his school “should be shot”, a court has heard.

Police found an “arsenal” of weapons, including a crossbow, knives, a gas-powered air pistol and airsoft rifles, when they raided the 16-year-old’s home in Northumberland, Leeds Crown Court has heard.

Army bomb disposal experts as well as chemical, biological and radiation specialists were called to the scene after home-made explosives were discovered, the court heard.

Jurors were shown images of the boy’s bedroom, in which counter-terror police found a replica SS-style cap, a full-sized skeleton with a mask and posters in support of the banned neo-Nazi organisation called The Base.

Police also found matches and nails taped closely together, as well as a spent shotgun cartridge which had been filled with a white powder.
Archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, pioneer of Temple Mount research, dies at 81
Iconic Israeli archaeologist Gabriel “Gabi” Barkay died on Sunday at age 81 after a long illness. He was well known for his pioneering work on soil from the Temple Mount and for his discovery of one of the oldest fragments of the biblical text ever found.

Considered by many to be among the giants of his generation, Barkay’s willingness to employ nontraditional research methods and his maximalist approach to some issues in following the Bible as a historical source also drew criticism from some scholars.

“It’s a great loss. He really left a very big void in the archaeology world,” said archaeologist Zachi Dvira, who worked side by side with Barkay for two decades in co-directing the Temple Mount Sifting Project. “His approach is something that I don’t think we will find in the next generation of archaeologists.”

Barkai was born in Hungary in 1944, where his family was hunted down by the Nazis. He moved to Jerusalem with his parents at the age of 6, and the city became his lifelong mission.

“He was like the top expert of the archaeology of Jerusalem, but also in all aspects of the city’s history,” Dvira told The Times of Israel in a phone interview. “If you were with him in Jerusalem, he would tell you the story of every street and corner.”

Barkay pursued his degrees at Tel Aviv University and worked under the greatest founders of Israeli archaeology, including Yigael Yadin, Benjamin Mazar and Yohanan Aharoni. Prof. Gabriel Barkay, co-director of the Temple Mount Sifting Project, May 30, 2019. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)

According to Dvira, Barkay had a prodigious memory and could provide information on an endless number of artifacts, periods, events, and typologies on the spot.

“He was like a biblical archaeology and Jerusalem archaeology Google,” he noted. “Anyone who wanted to find information on a certain topic or item and could not find it would come and consult with him.”

Ultimately, it was this encyclopedic knowledge that brought the two together.

Dvira had first met Barkay in 1998 while he was studying at Bar-Ilan University and was impressed with the passion the late researcher revealed, not only for archaeological excavations and scientific results, but also for those behind them, their stories and their personalities.

“He loved people,” Dvira said.




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

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