Wednesday, March 18, 2026

03/18 Links Pt2: Amid Anti-Semitism Wave, Europe Calls in the Military; The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard; October 7 report will remind ‘useful fools’ that Hamas started Gaza war

From Ian:

The Israel Lobby: A Historical Primer
The United States became the second country to accord official recognition to Israel upon its establishment (the Soviet Union was the first), but in the new state’s early years, when it had the greatest need of outside support, America provided very little. In Israel’s War of Independence against the five Arab armies that invaded it in 1948, the American government did not supply it with weapons. (The Israeli army did obtain some American arms through nongovernmental channels.) In the Anglo–French–Israeli 1956 war with Egypt, Washington forced Israel to withdraw from positions it had gained in the fighting. In its sweeping victory over three Arab countries in June 1967, Israel relied on French, not American, arms.

Not only did Israel not receive American help when it was most needed, as the events after the 1956 war demonstrate, American Middle Eastern policy did not always favor Israel, the efforts of the pro-Israel lobby notwithstanding. In 1981, the lobby and the Israeli government strongly opposed the sale of a sophisticated Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, fearing that it would be employed in ways that would undermine Israel’s security. The sale went ahead anyway. In 2014, the lobby and Israeli government (and a majority of the American public) opposed the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA). That deal also went forward.

American foreign policy worked to Israel’s advantage when and because the two countries’ domestic political values, and more important, their strategic outlooks, were aligned. More often than not, they were. During the Cold War, Israel acted as a bulwark against pro-Soviet countries and movements in the Middle East; and in that region, Israel stood out as the lone democracy.

In the post–Cold War period, it has retained both distinctions, becoming the major regional opponent—and by far the most effective one—of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has, since its inception in 1979, threatened America’s allies and interests in the Middle East. Indeed, Israel qualifies as the most valuable ally of the United States in the sense that, unlike America’s many other allies, it has actually fought and won wars against the adversaries of the United States and has done so while not asking or expecting American troops to fight alongside Israelis for this purpose. The joint attack on Iran launched on February 28 demonstrated anew Israel’s high strategic value to the United States.

The American public and, for the most part, the American government have understood and appreciated this, which accounts for the generally pro-Israel tilt of American foreign policy. Both what Israel is and what it has done, and not the supposed machinations of the groups lobbying on its behalf, have inclined Americans to be favorably disposed to the Jewish state. Because of this positive disposition, policies favorable to Israel followed. That is how democracy works.

Still, the critics of the pro-Israel lobby who assert that it differs from other interest groups are correct in one way—although not in the way that they believe. The other such groups have consisted mainly of people with ethnic ties to the country whose interests they were attempting to promote. Similarly, one of the principal pro-Israel organizations, the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is composed mainly of Jews. By far the largest pro-Israel group in the United States, however, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), has a largely non-Jewish, Christian membership. CUFI has supported the Jewish state for reasons related to their Christian faith. A reported 6 million people belong to AIPAC. The comparable number for CUFI is 10 million. In this one respect, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which in every other way is similar to every other ethnic group seeking to influence American foreign policy, and like them a pure product of American democracy, is unique.
The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard
Contrast this to Palestinian Arab identity, which crystallized only in the 1960s. The first formal claim of Palestinian national identity came in 1964, with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization—after Israel’s founding in 1948 but before its territorial expansion in 1967.

The timing raises eyebrows and further questions, some uncomfortable. What makes a person in or around the historic territory of Palestine a Palestinian? Jews, Jordanians, and Israeli Arabs are not Palestinians. The term does not refer to persons descended from people who lived in British Mandate Palestine; if it did, the necessary conclusion would be that there already is a Palestinian state—called Israel. It is not defined as a lack of Israeli citizenship; otherwise Jordanian Arabs would be Palestinians, too. Nor does it mean an Arab living in the territory once called Palestine; Israeli Arabs don’t count. Nor can it have anything to do with living in the territories Israel conquered from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967, since the term was invented before then and is used to demand a “right of return” for Arabs displaced in 1948-49 from present-day Israel.

What is it to be Palestinian, then? It is, as its early popularizers were happy to explain, an Arab whose identity is defined by wanting to destroy Israel. It is the ethno-political fusion of non-Jewish Levantine ancestry with anti-Zionism.

The Egyptian-American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has been one of few scholars willing to state this conclusion plainly. That it takes an Arab to articulate what is clear to see is unsurprising. Polite Westerners and Jews consider the notion of discussing constitutive elements of foreign national identities daunting and rarely worth the payoff. Doing so to legitimize Jewish civil rights while eschewing the universalist mentality of protection for all, further, is quite distasteful. It appears to be a violation of profound liberal commitments, including the equal treatment of all people before law. But it appears that way, as Mansour deftly explains, only because the concept of “identity” obscures crucial differences between the Jewish connection to Zion and the Palestinian connection to Palestine. “The most central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he writes, is that “the absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary, [i]s the central ideological content of the Palestinian identity and its symbols.”

There is a stark asymmetry between Zionism and anti-Zionism. Zionism holds that a Jewish state should exist in the Levant, though not to the exclusion of a non-Jewish state—clearly. It is minimalist and rooted in shlilat ha–golah, negating the exile, by granting Jews self-determination within their ancestral lands. Anti-Zionism, by contrast, is definitionally opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. It is maximalist and rooted in reversing the Nakba, the failed Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1948. This is why Jewish Israelis continue to offer two-state solutions and peace plans, and why Palestinians cannot accept them. And it is precisely that honest assessment that APR seeks to prohibit.

Yet it is neither compassionate nor intellectually honest to give APR an inch. Rather, as Mansour argues, “perhaps the most merciful and responsible course is for the Palestinian identity—as a state-bound ambition—to be gently laid to rest.… The cost of perpetuating a vision that repeatedly descends into cruelty is too high.” It does so not out of boiling frustration or the inequities of uneven Western civil rights regimes, but because it is an identity “written in blood,” as the old PFLP slogan goes. Those who “genuinely care about the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and their neighbors,” writes Mansour, should let Palestinians be Arabs again: “Walk away from the fantasy of ‘Palestine’ and offer every real opportunity for inclusion and a dignified future elsewhere.”

The inapt comparison between IHRA and APR reveals an even greater irony: While Zionism is called a political movement and Palestinianism an ethnic heritage, the opposite is closer to the case. The Jewish relation to the Holy Land is essential and ethno-religious; the ethnic story of the Jews makes no sense without the land. Palestinians’ relationship to the land is essentially political; what makes them Palestinian is that they need all the land. Perhaps that is why APR advocates describe what they seek to prohibit as anything that “defames…Palestinians or their narratives” or even their “allies.” They are trying to erect a force field around a political view—the very accusation they level against Zionists—that just so happens to have ethnic bigotry at its core.

We may wish there were a rough parallelism rooted in “nobody’s perfect” that leaves room for moderation and outward signs of empathy. But the truth is that, in this conflict, there are not two equivalent sides. There are two people with claims to the land; one has control, right of first possession, and has been willing to compromise nonetheless. The other has neither the right of might nor the might of right, yet defines itself by its very identity as eliminationist.

The charade of false equivalence helps no one and nothing except the Western liberal conscience, the terrorists waging a long war against the Jewish state, and sham NGOs that exploit the former to support the latter. And the growing specter of APR, the evil approaching stealthily from the north, makes explicating the charade an urgent and unavoidable task.
Irina Velitskaya: One day, everyone will have this book at the back of their closet
Novelist Omar El Akkad’s new nonfiction book about the Gaza conflict, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” which recently won the 2025 US National Book Award, encapsulates everything that is wrong with the state of political discourse, intellectual culture, and Western elites who favor feeling good about themselves over civilizational survival.

The book was first published one year ago this month. Why write about it now? Because it is still, to this day, the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the category “Middle Eastern Politics,” and #3 in the category of “Democracy.”

So what’s wrong with El Akkad’s heartfelt memoir? Let’s begin with the title itself. It is a naked appeal to peer pressure: If you are not part of the “pro”-Palestine movement now, you inevitably will be some day, and if that glorious day of dawning, God forbid, never comes — if, in other words, you continue to hold out stubbornly for the right of one tiny Jewish state to exist in a world of 56 Muslim-majority states, many of them actual “settler colonial ethnostates” — then you are on “the wrong side of history,” as the balaclava-clad mobs tirelessly proclaim. “Shame on you,” they bellow at their antisemitic demonstrations, those who themselves in their naked hatred feel no shame at all, nor any self-awareness that their actions, which they proclaim with proud self-absorption place them on “the right side of history” are in actuality indistinguishable from that of the average Berliner or Viennese Durchschnittsmensch in 1938.

(Incidentally, the prefix “pro” is in quotes because the recent ceasefire agreement, conspicuously uncelebrated by the demonstrators, and the subsequent murders of Palestinian dissidents by Hamas, also ignored, proved that the protesters were never “pro” Palestine at all.)

The title is, in other words, a form of shaming. It also is incredibly presumptuous, a classic example of the logical fallacy of “begging the question,” or assuming the truth of a conclusion in the premise of an argument. The conclusion, of course, is that “this” — which is to say Israel’s defensive and preventative war against Hamas and jihadist terror — is something that one must be ashamed of before, or perhaps instead of, even considering the arguments that support this assertion.

To be clear, the pivotal “this” in the title is not the barbaric October 7 massacre, nor the attempts by naive or hateful Westerners to justify it or deny it, nor the 18 years of rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli communities that preceded it, nor the stabbings and car rammings and bus bombings of the First and Second Intifadas, nor the massacres of Persians, Christians, Hindus, Druze, Yazidi, Alawites, Jews, African animists, and other minorities by radical Islamist groups currently taking place worldwide.


Seth Mandel: Amid Anti-Semitism Wave, Europe Calls in the Military
Politics is the art of the possible and all that, but it still feels uncomfortable to use the safety of a country’s Jews as a bargaining chip in a fight over the correct number of prison beds.

Yet that is the subject of current debate in Belgium.

On March 9, an explosion rocked a synagogue in Liege. Within the next few days, there were similar incidents in two different cities in the Netherlands. Federal officials and the mayor of Antwerp called for military support for the police who were already tasked with guarding Jewish sites. Time, everyone agreed, was of the essence.

Well, not everyone, as it turned out. Annelies Verlinden is the Belgian justice minister, and she disagreed with Defense Minister Theo Francken and Interior Minister Bernard Quintin. Within the coalition government, Verlinden’s party is demanding that a solution to prison overcrowding be agreed upon before additional security measures are taken. This led to quite a quote from Sammy Mahdi, the chairman of Verlinden’s party: “If one can find a ‘quick fix’ solution for the security problems for the Jewish community, one cannot simply let the security problem in the prisons persist.”

If only there were a quick fix! The whole reason this debate is taking place is because Europe cannot seem to figure out how to keep its Jewish gathering places reasonably secure from anti-Semitic violence. Deploying the military is a last resort and meant to be temporary, both because of the cost and because the country is loath to conclude that societal militarization is the only way Belgium can protect its houses of worship.

I’m sure Verlinden’s concern for prison overcrowding is legitimate and genuine, but counterterrorism isn’t the sort of thing one can just horse-trade away. The government went ahead with the security plan by having the federal police commissioner invoke a rule that enables him to call in the army when the police are stretched beyond capacity during a crisis.

Verlinden apparently found out about the end-around from the media, and was furious. So was Mahdi: “In a five-party government, you cannot simply do as you please.”

The unseriousness here is astounding. It is not unprecedented for Belgium to deploy the military amid a rise in anti-Jewish terrorism, though it has been a decade since the last time it was done.
Michigan synagogue shooter poses with the same rifle he used just HOURS before the attack
An image of the Michigan synagogue shooter posing with the same rifle he used to cause pandemonium in an attack last week has come to light.

Lebanon-born Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, is accused of smashing a vehicle packed with explosives into Temple Israel, in West Bloomfield, Detroit, on March 12.

The harrowing photo of Ghazali, proudly holding the gun while pouting and wearing a keffiyeh around his neck, was sent by the shooter to his sister hours before his attack, according to Fox News's Bill Melugin, who first posted the picture.

Ghazali - whose family has links to terrorist group Hezbollah - had written a message in Arabic about seeking vengeance around his body, but the outlet redacted it.

Authorities said Ayman Ghazali drove almost 40 miles from his $315,000 home in Dearborn Heights to Temple Israel in West Bloomfield shortly after noon.

The synagogue complex includes a preschool and childcare center.

More than 140 children, teachers and staff members were inside at the time.

Ghazali rammed a truck through the building's entrance before security guards opened fire.


Anti-Semitism ‘running riot’ in Britain, says Oct 7 survivor
The first edition of the report by the APPG was published just over a year ago, naming for the first time all 18 British nationals killed in Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023.

The second edition, published on Wednesday, also contains details on the experience of British-Israeli Emily Damari, who was held hostage for more than 400 days after the attack.

The report states: “She was forcibly taken at 10.33. During the abduction, she was shot in the hand and her leg. Her dog, Chucha, was later found shot dead in her room.”

The report described how Ms Damari’s mother “tirelessly campaigned for her daughter’s release” and how she was reunited with her family during the January 2025 ceasefire hostage releases.

Lord Roberts, the historian and Conservative peer who leads the APPG, said: “As we continue to uncover yet more horrors, the updated report continues to serve as a permanent memorial and enduring resource for governments, educators, and civil society in order to safeguard the truth against denialism and distortion.

“The purpose of commissioning our report has always been to chronicle the events of October 7 with clarity and meticulous, fact-checking precision, to ensure it is never forgotten, diminished or disregarded by malign forces intent on washing away the true scale of that fateful day.”

A Government spokesman said: “Anti-Semitism is becoming normalised in the UK, but the Government will not stand by whilst this scourge spreads.

“We are tackling anti-Semitism in schools, colleges, universities, and the NHS, and we will continue to work closely with Jewish communities to ensure that our efforts fix this scandal.”
October 7 report will remind ‘useful fools’ that Hamas started Gaza war
In line with previous findings elsewhere, including by the UN’s special representative on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the report states that the desecration of corpses on the day was “widespread”, including mutilation and the booby trapping of bodies with grenades.

Also featured is a 6-page memo found inside a Gaza tunnel, dated August 24, 2022, that explicitly outlines instructions to Hamas terrorists – such as the psychological dimension of the attack through massacres that would be documented and broadcast in real time to instil terror amongst the Israeli public.

Approximately 7,000 terrorists breached the Gaza border in 119 different locations to take part in the large-scale, coordinated assault on 55 distinct sites in Israel.

The massacres left 1,182 dead, including 18 UK citizens, amounting “to one of the worst terror outrages in the annals of history” and the “largest number of UK deaths from a terror attack in the Middle East, and the second highest globally after 9/11,” the report added.

In total, citizens from 44 nations were either killed or taken hostage by Hamas and other groups, and civilians accounted for 73 per cent of the total victims. “The victims were overwhelmingly Jewish Israelis, but the attackers showed no mercy and slaughtered Israeli Arabs and Bedouins without hesitation,” the report notes.

The most represented age group among victims was 18-30, largely due to the attack on the Nova music festival, which accounted for 375 victims.

The oldest person killed was Moshe Ridler, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, who died when Hamas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the door of his safe room, while the youngest was newborn Naama Abu Rashed, who suffered a gunshot wound while still in his mother’s womb and died 14 hours after doctors performed an emergency delivery.

The report further outlines how Gaza-based media outlets and individual journalists operate under Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad influence, with some directly involved in or documenting the attacks. It highlights the dual-use role of media in Hamas’s operational strategy, the report claims.

Lord Roberts said the report serves as a “permanent memorial and enduring resource for governments, educators, and civil society in order to safeguard the truth against denialism and distortion.”

To compile the report, Roberts was supported by a panel of UK parliamentarians who heard from those directly impacted by the attack, including family members of victims and hostages who provided testimony and evidence, academics and military experts. The report also draws on primary footage from GoPro cameras worn by Hamas terrorists and CCTV footage.


Attack on Gail’s reopens anti-Semitism wounds at The Guardian
Dozens gathered outside The Guardian’s glass-fronted headquarters on Wednesday, holding up banners and placards showing Nazis persecuting Jews and calling for an end to what they called “the new hate movement”.

Many also had a more unlikely symbol of protest: coffee cups and bags from Gail’s bakery.

The Guardian has been plunged into a fresh anti-Semitism storm amid claims the newspaper is minimising racism against Jews.

The title is struggling to contain the fallout from an opinion piece published over the weekend that downplayed repeated vandalism of a new branch of Gail’s in Archway, north London.

Founded by an Israeli baker in the 1990s, Gail’s has been targeted by pro-Palestinian activists because its largest shareholder is Bain Capital, a private equity firm that also invests in Israeli defence and cybersecurity firms.

Jonathan Liew, the columnist who wrote the article, described the vandalism of the Archway cafe as “small acts of petty symbolism”, a phrase that has sparked an internal backlash from staff and criticism from politicians.

Eve Kay, a longstanding Archway resident who attended the protest in north London, accused The Guardian of being “caught up in an anti-Semitic, anti Zionist mindset”.


Ireland risks US relationship over its anti-Israel obsession
Six months after the October 7 massacre, Ireland recognised a Palestinian state with no defined borders, functioning government or meaningful expectation that it would cease supporting terrorism. Dublin has also joined South Africa’s “genocide” case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, attempting to stretch the legal definition of genocide in order to secure a guilty verdict. Irish officials have been pressing Brussels to suspend the EU–Israel Trade Agreement and impose sanctions on Israel.

At a meeting of the EPP – the political group uniting centre-right European parties – Fine Gael even voted against a motion condemning the October 7 attacks and calling for the release of the hostages — even though an eight-year-old Irish girl had been kidnapped and held captive for six weeks and the Irish citizen Kim Damti, 21, had been murdered at the Nova music festival.

At the same time, the Irish state has upgraded relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In September 2024 Ireland reopened an embassy in Tehran. Earlier that year Fine Gael, the party of Deputy Prime Minister Simon Harris, who was then Taoiseach, invited the Iranian ambassador to its party conference – but snubbed the Israeli ambassador. Even when it emerged that Hezbollah had murdered an Irish peacekeeper, Private Seán Rooney, there was no political outrage directed at Hezbollah’s paymasters in Tehran.

The cumulative effect has been a collapse in relations with Israel. Jerusalem closed its embassy in Dublin, making Ireland one of the few European capitals without an Israeli diplomatic presence. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar cited a complete breakdown in communication and said Ireland had crossed “every red line”. Deepening ties with Iran while severing them with Israel speaks volumes about the ideological narratives now shaping Irish diplomacy.

Public rhetoric has hardly helped. Former President Michael D Higgins has repeatedly advanced claims widely condemned as defamatory towards Israel, such as that Jerusalem would like “to have a settlement in Egypt”, and used a Holocaust Memorial event to attack the Jewish state. The current president has described Israel as a “terrorist state” built on “Jewish supremacy” and has defended Hamas as “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people”.

Ireland’s hostility towards the Jewish state has become almost a kind of national reflex so intense that ideological blindness now threatens Ireland’s relationship with the US. One is struck by the sheer arrogance of Irish politicians, whose livelihoods will not be threatened by the potential commercial fallout, in attempting to pass something that could prove so harmful to Irish workers.

Ireland must therefore reconsider its relationship with the world and how it views itself. What will the country gain from this, other than a sense of self-righteousness? Why can Ireland not put its own interests first?

One can only hope that Taoiseach Micheál Martin uses his time in Washington to quietly bury this legislation – before Dublin inflicts serious damage to its economy and true national interests.
Yisrael Medad: Why Peter Beinart is wrong about Iran: A misguided view of Israel’s security - opinion
That question could be directed at Peter Beinart following his column in Jewish Currents, published on March 6. Entitled “Iran Is Not an Existential Threat,” it is a prime example of typical Beinart banality. Its subtitle reads, “Iran poses no significant danger to Israel, let alone the US,” leaving Beinart an escape hatch of dilly-dallying over what is “significant.”

I am not at all sure that Steve Witkoff is a source Beinart would respect but, nevertheless, his testimony should be noted. On March 10, he told the media that the Islamic Republic had 460 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60%, which it could have taken to make a “dirty bomb.” He added that, “There is no reason to be at 60%. None. Zero reason, unless you’re pursuing a weapon.”

Witkoff also informed us that to his knowledge, Iran had enough material to make 11 bombs and that it was a week to a week and a half away from military enrichment.

Sardonically, he clarified for all that “Israel is a one bomb country: One bomb takes them out.” Beinart may still not be convinced but he is driven by an ideology, not reason nor facts.

Beinart wrote, “Tehran has merely challenged Israel’s dominance of the Middle East, not its survival.” But as Farshad Roomi of the Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran, published in 2023, “The Shi’ite roots of Iran’s theocracy turned the defense of Palestine and opposition to Israel into an unwavering doctrine.”

Beinart ignores last June’s 12-day conflict. His opinion is that Iran’s “regime… is responding to blow after blow from the US and Israel with what has widely been deemed restraint.” Iran’s Holocaust denial caricature contest is ignored. He avoids the “Death to Israel” chants at rallies across the country, as well as the many publications that make it clear, as Ehud Yaari published in 2015, that Israel must be eliminated as a condition of Iran’s adherence to Islam.
Hamas accuses Israel of targeting police force as group tightens grip on Gaza
Israel has killed nearly a dozen Gaza police officers this week as it steps up attacks on the Hamas-run force that the terror group has used to re-establish governance in areas under its control, according to Hamas figures.

Hamas’s nearly 10,000 police officers have emerged as a major sticking point in talks to advance US President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza. Hamas views them as separate from its armed wing, which is expected to disarm under the plan, and wants them included in a new police force envisioned under the plan.

Israel completely rejects the involvement of any officers with Hamas affiliations and regards all elements of Hamas, including its police, as components of the terrorist organization.

Trump’s plan calls for the Islamist terror group to lay down its weapons and hand over governance to a committee of Palestinian technocrats who would manage Gaza’s police as Israeli troops withdraw. Talks on disarming Hamas have been delayed by the US-Israeli war with Iran, Reuters has reported.


The "Squad" left suffers complete wipeout in Illinois
The left suffered a virtually total collapse in the Illinois Democratic congressional primaries on Tuesday night — even in races where the AIPAC-backed candidate lost.

Why it matters: It's a bad sign for the dozens of insurgent Democrats running in congressional races across the country, both in open seats and as primary rivals to older or more establishment-oriented incumbents.

It's great news for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who is most popular among the moderate and mainstream liberal wings of his party.
Most of the Democratic House candidates who have refused to commit to supporting Jeffries for leader or speaker are leftist insurgents.

Driving the news: Kat Abughazaleh, a left-wing influencer and journalist backed by Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, lost to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss in the closely watched race in Illinois' 9th district.

Biss and Abughazaleh were both opposed by AIPAC, whose proxy Elect Chicago Women spent millions in support of pro-Israel state Sen. Laura Fine, who came in third.
But AIPAC pivoted in the final week of the campaign to focusing its fire on the more pro-Palestinian Abughazaleh than Biss, who was backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Another AIPAC affiliate, Chicago Progressive Partnership, ran ads painting Abughazaleh as a closet Republican and boosting a lower tier leftist in the race, Bushra Amiwala.

A similar story played out in the 8th district, where progressive Junaid Ahmed lost to moderate former Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.), the pick of both AIPAC and crypto and AI-affiliated PACs.

Unlike Abughazaleh, however, Ahmed was supported by both the CPC and Warren, as well as Justice Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a local Democratic Socialists of America chapter.


Zohran Mamdani’s Wife Celebrated Palestinian Terrorists, Including Plane Hijacker, In Social Media Posts From Early Adulthood
New York City's first lady, Rama Duwaji, glorified terrorist violence in a wide range of posts made on social media when she was a teenager and in her early 20s, celebrating members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group and the First Intifada, a Washington Free Beacon review of her old X and Tumblr accounts found.

Duwaji, 28, posted a photo to her Tumblr account in September 2017, when she would have been 20 years old, of the infamous Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled. Under the username "diimashq," she echoed one of Khaled's most famous statements.

"If it does good for my cause, I'll be happy to accept death," the caption read.

Duwaji reposted this photo of Leila Khaled in September 2017 on her Tumblr account with the username "diimashq."

Khaled, a longtime member of the PFLP, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, participated in plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970. Between the two hijackings, she underwent several cosmetic surgery procedures to disguise her identity. In the 1970 hijacking, Khaled threatened to detonate a grenade unless the pilots let her into the cockpit. Today, she is revered by terrorists and their allies as the first woman to hijack a plane.

Duwaji was in her late teens and early 20s when she made the majority of the posts, and the accounts with which she made them appear to be inactive now. They came at a time when she was living in the Middle East. While she is of Syrian descent, Duwaji spent her early childhood in New Jersey. Her family moved to Dubai in 2006, and Duwaji eventually transferred from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar to the school's Richmond campus.

In the posts, Duwaji celebrated other members of the terrorist PFLP as well. In March 2015, when she was 17, New York City's future first lady reposted a tweet on International Women's Day praising the terrorist Shadia Abu Ghazaleh. It shows a photo of Ghazaleh, a leading PFLP figure who participated in the bombing of an Israeli bus and led several other terrorist attacks, posing with a rifle. She was killed in 1968 when a bomb she was building in her home—which she intended to use to blow up a building in Tel Aviv—exploded accidentally.

The late terrorist is considered a "martyr" in Palestinian society and is the namesake of a school in Gaza.

"shadia abu ghazaleh, first palestinian woman to fight in resistance after 1967 occupation #InternationalWomensDay," the post read.

In March 2015, Duwaji reposted a tweet on International Women's Day praising Shadia Abu Ghazaleh.

Duwaji posted another photo on her Tumblr account in December 2017, this one showing a keffiyeh-clad Palestinian sewing a flag.

"Photography: 'A Palestinian demonstrator sews a Palestinian Liberation Organization flag before a protest during the first Intifada', February, 1988," the caption reads.
Mamdani turns St. Patrick’s Day event into protest against ‘genocide’ in Gaza
At a breakfast celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, which he hosted at Gracie Mansion on Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani managed to make it about Palestine.

Former Irish president Mary Robinson was honored at the breakfast, which Mamdani did not eat, as he is fasting for Ramadan. Peter Burke, the Irish enterprise, tourism and employment minister, was also present.

After referencing the Irish struggle for independence and immigrants from the Emerald Isle to New York who faced discrimination, Mamdani praised Robinson for standing “steadfast alongside the people of Palestine.”

“I say this as over the past few years, as we’ve witnessed a genocide unfold before our eyes, there has been deafening silence from so many,” the mayor said.

“For those who have long cared about universal human rights and the extension of them to Palestinians, silence, however, is nothing new, for Palestinians are so often left to weep alone,” Mamdani said.

Robinson said that “while we gather to wish each other good health, we know others are living under the shadow of war and suffering in Iran, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in too many other places.”

“For many Irish people, these realities resonate deeply, as the mayor has said,” she said. “Our own history holds memories of famine, exile and conflict.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) responded to Mamdani’s comment. “Leave it to the New York City mayor to turn St. Patrick’s Day into an antisemitic attack,” he stated. “This guy is a disgrace.”

The American Jewish Committee said the mayor’s “repeated use of the ‘genocide’ accusation against Israel is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.”


California GOP memo warns of ‘America First’ extremist faction
A Feb. 19 internal memo that the California Republican Party gave recently to the Free Press warns of a “radical and divisive iteration of ‘America First’ ideology,” which is gaining influence within party ranks and fueling controversy ahead of a planned March 29 Republican event, with which the party is not affiliated, in West Hollywood.

That radical ideology is aligned with white supremacist podcaster Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” movement and is “directly at odds with the core founding principles of the U.S. Constitution, the California Republican Party, our stated goals of unifying the Republican Party and increasing voter engagement across California and President Trump’s national and foreign policy agenda,” according to the memo.

The memo calls on leaders to “refrain from recruiting, supporting or endorsing candidates who espouse extremist ideology.”

“The ideology is characterized as white nationalist, hostile to constitutional limited-government conservatism, highly critical of MAGA and President Trump and opposing of the civil rights of women, gays and racial minorities,” it says.

The memo cautions the party to be aware that the “strategic goal” of Fuentes and his following is to “take over and destroy the Republican Party from within.”

“Do not unknowingly usher in a Trojan Horse with these views and goals,” the memo says.
Jewish groups slam ‘Nazi-like’ signs at Toronto rally
Jewish organizations are condemning antisemitic placards displayed at a weekend anti-Israel demonstration in a heavily Jewish North York neighborhood as Toronto police probe whether the imagery constitutes hate propaganda under the Criminal Code.

“We are aware of antisemitic signs displayed at a demonstration this weekend at Bathurst and Sheppard,” Toronto Police posted to X on Tuesday. “Hate Crime Unit investigators are consulting with the Ministry of the Attorney General regarding promotion of hatred offences under the Criminal Code.”

The signs, seen Sunday and shared widely on social media, depicted caricatured Orthodox Jewish figures and rats emerging from a Star of David, which groups including B’nai Brith Canada, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto said were “reminiscent of Nazi incitement” and dehumanized Jews.

“At protests at Bathurst & Sheppard, extremists openly made threats of violence, glorified terrorism, and depicted Jews as sub-human — yet no arrests have been announced,” CIJA posted to X in a call to action. “After multiple attacks on our community, many are asking why the law is not being enforced. Toronto Police Service must do better.” The post included a link to send a message to Toronto Police Chief Demkiw demanding a response.

B’nai Brith Canada said that it and CIJA and the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto wrote to Demkiw regarding the antisemitic incident.

“We call on Toronto Police to investigate those responsible for these placards, lay charges under Canada’s hate-propaganda provisions of the Criminal Code, and ensure demonstrations promoting antisemitic hatred are swiftly and decisively shut down as the unlawful assemblies that they are,” the B’nai Brith X post said.


We INFILTRATED Toronto's Al Quds Rally — What We Saw Was TERRIFYING
Rebel News journalist David Menzies reports from downtown Toronto as anti-Israel protesters take to the streets to celebrate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for Al-Quds Day.




Jewish NHS staff reveal antisemitism ordeal to Wes Streeting in emotional meeting
Health Secretary Wes Streeting was left visibly moved as two Jewish women employed in the National Health Service (NHS) told him of their experience of antisemitism in the workplace.

The minister said he felt “ashamed” while hearing their testimony at a meeting last month, adding “we have a real problem” in the NHS.

One frontline medical worker from his northeast London constituency who asked not to be named said some paramedics working in Jewish areas were openly antisemitic: “There’s one guy who works out of a station who says he hates Jews.

“He was reported by a colleague who felt so uncomfortable working with him that she moved to a different station. He was given a promotion.

“From October 8, people were coming into workplaces with cakes in the Palestine colours and putting Palestine flags up.”

She said that an Equality, Diversity Inclusion (EDI) manager had told her that Jews were white and not an ethnicity. In two long training sessions she had sat through on EDI and how to take special care of minority patients, she said Jews had not been mentioned once.

The frontline worker said she had been investigated for her “Zionist beliefs”, including for Instagram posts celebrating Jewish festivals. A black friend who spoke up for her was smeared as a “coconut”, while a supportive Muslim woman was branded a “disgrace to her religion”.

Recalling the mental health toll she suffered, she said she had received calls at 3am from other Jewish NHS staff who were struggling to stay in jobs they loved because of the hate from colleagues. “There are very few people in our Jewish network who haven’t experienced antisemitism. I go into work every morning thinking, ‘What is going to be next?’”

Another constituent of Streeting, an NHS hospital doctor who also asked not to be named, said: “I am too frightened for any of my colleagues to know that I am Jewish.”
Teachers’ union in British Columbia approves motion to back BDS
Delegates to the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) annual general meeting approved a motion on March 16 supporting the anti-Israel BDS movement, the first provincewide endorsement of its kind within the union.

The measure, introduced by multiple local chapters, passed during the union’s 2026 gathering.

During the debate, Palestinian teacher Khaled Shawwash said, “I envision a universe in which children of all faiths, including Muslim, Jewish, Christian, can laugh and play along the shore of Gaza, underneath not the deafening hum of drones, but the songs of the Palestinian sunbirds.”

“Sadly, this is not the universe we are in, but it is one that we can help make possible,” he said.

Attendees displayed slogans such as “BDS Saves Lives” and “BDS Saves Kids.”

Mika Hackner, director of research at the North American Values Institute, told JNS that the measure makes it difficult for students to form their own opinions.

“How can we expect the classroom to be a place where children are free to express their opinions, to change their minds, to think critically and arrive at their own conclusions on complex issues, when our teachers’ unions telegraph their political stances, particularly on controversial issues,” she said.

“Opining on world affairs is not the job of a teachers’ union,” she added. “In doing so, they erode public trust and cheapen their own profession.”
Indiana University’s Muslim Philanthropy Gave Fundraising Advice to ‘Sham Charity’ Bankrolling Hamas
An Islamic think tank at Indiana University has hosted multiple fundraising training events for a Turkish nonprofit that the U.S. government says is a "sham charity" secretly bankrolling the terrorist group Hamas.

The Muslim Philanthropy Initiative, a unit of Indiana’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, organized events in July 2025 and this January with Hayat Yolu Association, an Istanbul-based nonprofit that claims to distribute humanitarian aid to Gaza and other war-torn Muslim areas.

The events were part of the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative’s training sessions to help international Islamic NGOs "refine their fundraising strategies, improve performance, and more effectively advance their missions."

But in the case of Hayat Yolu, that mission allegedly involves secretly funding the terrorist group Hamas.

The Treasury Department sanctioned Hayat Yolu earlier this month as a "sham charity" that has "provided significant material support to Hamas." The group has been "involved in Hamas’ international funding network that enables Hamas to generate external revenue in direct support of Hamas’ military wing" and served as an "operational headquarters, banking and financial hub for the Muslim Brotherhood," according to the Treasury Department.

"The Treasury Department will not allow Hamas to misuse the charitable sector for its violent aims, and we will continue to target these networks wherever they operate," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week.


In near unanimous vote, San Diego City Council passes IHRA resolution
The San Diego City Council voted 8-1 on Tuesday evening in favor of a resolution adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred. The vote came after about six hours of public comment and discussion.

Liat Cohen-Reeis, director of the antisemitism task force at StandWithUs San Diego, told JNS that “the Jewish community feels heard and justified after tonight’s IHRA vote.”

“Today we saw the very best of the democratic process,” Sara Brown, the American Jewish Committee’s San Diego regional director, told JNS. “We saw an open and, at times, very hard-to-hear discussion, a very robust discussion, with those speaking for and those speaking against the resolution.”

“I’m a San Diegan,” she said. “This is America’s Finest City saying, ‘We’re not going to take any antisemitic hatred in our city,’ and I am inspired by that.”

Stephen Whitburn, the council member who proposed the resolution, said during the meeting that “for far too many Jewish families, including thousands who live right here in San Diego, antisemitism is not an abstract concept.”

“It is something they live with every single day,” Whitburn said at the meeting.

He added that he appreciated those who spoke out in support of free speech, and the council should protect that right. But he believes that the resolution protects free speech. “This definition makes a point for allowing for criticism and allowing for context,” he 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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