Wednesday, August 12, 2026

08/11 Links Pt2: On Democracies and Death Cults; What’s the right way to beat the left?; Written Out – The Cultural Erasure of the Jewish People

From Ian:

On Democracies and Death Cults
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. A pathological hostility toward Israel has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and "armed resistance" can be romanticized or excused. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.

Douglas Murray's recent book, On Democracies and Death Cults, confronts precisely this mutation. He argues that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the West has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy and an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians.

His central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition - and that this is controversial - says volumes about what our society has mutated into.

Hamas's objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel's destruction. Hamas's own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.

Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals - girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys' heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Shai Davidai: It’s Time to Stop Playing Defense
Rebutting the “genocide” libel without explaining how Hamas operates from densely populated civilian areas and uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes leaves people without an alternative explanation for the horrifying death and destruction they see in Gaza. Rebutting the “apartheid” libel without explaining how suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks led Israel to construct a security barrier and establish military checkpoints leaves people without an explanation for why those measures exist. Rebutting the “settler colonialism” libel without explaining the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the land and the historical circumstances that produced the modern State of Israel leaves people without an explanation for why millions of Jews live there at all. Asking people to abandon an explanation without giving them another through which to make sense of the world risks creating a hole in their story without offering anything with which to fill it.

None of this means lies should be ignored. Some accusations cause immediate harm and must be answered quickly, clearly, and forcefully. Falsehoods can destroy reputations, influence institutions, inspire violence, and become accepted wisdom if no one challenges them. Defense matters. Yet the moment adherents of American Intellectual Antisemitism force us to debate whether their accusation is true, they have already secured an important victory: dictating what everyone else must discuss.

Playing offense means doing something fundamentally different. It means choosing your own questions rather than merely answering theirs. It means deciding which ideas deserve attention, which values should frame the conversation, and which facts people encounter before someone else tells them what those facts mean. It means telling people who the Jewish people are, why we remained connected to our homeland through two thousand years of dispersion, and what happened during centuries in which we lacked the power to protect ourselves. It means explaining why Jewish self-determination emerged, how Israel became the national expression of an ancient people, and why Jewish sovereignty matters in the first place. Instead of spending all our time explaining what Israel is not, we must tell people what it is. We must stop letting our opponents choose the story and start telling the story we actually want people to understand.

On October 7, 2023, Israel’s defensive systems did what they were meant to do: they detected incoming rockets, calculated their trajectories, and destroyed those threatening populated areas before they reached their targets. Over the months that followed, they intercepted thousands more attacks and saved countless lives. Yet no general would confuse successful missile defense with victory.

What is true about the physical war against Hamas is equally true of the ideological war against American Intellectual Antisemitism. If all you ever do is shoot down whatever your opponent fires at you, your opponent still chooses the targets, timing, and tempo of the war. Correct the lies that must be corrected. Defend the truth that must be defended. Shoot down the attacks that cannot be allowed to land. But never confuse successfully intercepting your opponent’s attacks with defeating the ideology launching them.

Defense can keep you alive. Only offense can change the battlefield.

It is time to stop playing defense.
Ruthie Blum: What’s the right way to beat the left?
Combating radicalization, which has creeped into the zeitgeist despite efforts to keep it at bay, is not simply the demand of the day; it’s an existential imperative for liberal Western democracy and civilization. And though the tendency to sound the alarm on individuals running for office is completely understandable, it doesn’t always achieve the desired results. On the contrary.

Greenwald offered a useful reminder of why. “The 2016 presidential election left no doubt about the exact nature of Donald Trump’s flaming outlandishness, and he stunned the world by becoming the GOP nominee and then president,” he wrote. “Starting years before the 2024 election, Democrats made a full-time job of repeating that Trump was a threat to democracy, a sexual predator, a grifter and a convicted felon, and then he was elected president by a greater margin than in 2016.”

The lesson here isn’t that it’s useless to impugn an opponent. It’s that doing so excessively can backfire badly.

Indeed, the irrational, obsessive maligning of Netanyahu by Israeli leftists and their fellow “anybody but Bibi” travelers didn’t succeed at their mission. Instead, they were pummeled at the ballot box in November 2022, ushering in the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history.

The right should take this into account today. It would also do well to consider another problem that Greenwald elucidated: “When a candidate makes his opponent’s unfitness the central message of his campaign, he also makes the race all about his opponent.”

Exactly.

If the right spends the next two and a half months explaining why Eisenkot, Golan and Abbas are the bogeymen, it will be turning them into the protagonists of the election. You don’t have to be an expert in advertising to grasp that this is a way to build, rather than dilute, their brand.

Greenwald’s prescription is worth noting. “Perhaps the best way to go after a radical opponent,” he suggested, “is to get a jump on offering a compelling vision of your own that competes with the dark one he’s peddling.”

That should be the Israeli right’s strategy. Not letting the left off the hook, but preventing it from becoming the centerpiece—and from disguising itself as the center.


Written Out – The Cultural Erasure of the Jewish People
Somewhere in the past two years, the word “Israeli” started to disappear from menus. Israeli salad became a “chopped salad.” Israeli couscous turned into “pearl couscous.” In more than one place the change came after a complaint, or in expectation of one, the word quietly dropped so that nobody would have to think about where the food came from or who makes it. It is a small thing. A salad is a small thing. But that is exactly why it is worth looking at.

The salad is not really the point. The removal is the point, and the removal is happening in more than one place at once. It is happening on our plates, in our wardrobes, on the world’s maps, and in the record of where we have been. Every time, it is happening to the same people. Jews are being written out. Not argued with. Written out.

I have spent years describing a form of Jew-hate I call erasive Jew-hate. It is the anti-Jewishness that does not so much attack the Jew as delete him. Cultural erasure, the quiet vanishing of Jews and Israel from food and clothing and geography, is its most visible surface and its most deniable one. Each instance looks trivial. Taken together they are a pattern.

On the Plate
The cooking of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, the Mizrahi and Sephardi families who lived across that region for well over a thousand years, is being recast as purely Arab or Palestinian, with the Jewish presence lifted out of it. Falafel, hummus, za’atar and kubbeh are declared authentically Palestinian and then declared stolen. Activist explainers state, flatly, that the very idea these foods could be Israeli is a “myth”, a fabrication invented to launder a theft.

The shape of the claim gives it away. It is not “this food is shared,” which would be both true and beautiful, since Jews and Arabs did live alongside one another and ate from the same pot. It is “this was never yours,” And the Jews who carried these recipes out of Baghdad and Sana’a and Cairo and Casablanca, as they were being driven from those cities with nothing else, are erased twice over. Once from the Arab lands that expelled them, and again from the plate those lands taught them to love.

What happened to those Jews is a matter of record. In the years around the founding of Israel, around 850,000 Jews were driven out of the Arab and Muslim world, from communities that predated Islam and in many places predated Christianity. They reached Israel and elsewhere with their prayers and their recipes, and very little else. The food now being reassigned to the countries that expelled them is, in many cases, the one possession those refugees were able to carry out. To call it stolen Palestinian property is to finish the expulsion by other means. First the Jew is removed from the country. Then the Jew is removed from the dish he cooked there. There is a theft in this story, but it runs in the opposite direction to the one being alleged.

This is not a disagreement about recipes. It is the denial of a people’s presence, served as a question of authenticity. A cuisine is one of the truest records a people keeps of where it has been. To say the Jews have no claim to the food of the lands they lived in for millennia is to say the Jews were never really there. That is the whole message, hidden inside a debate about chickpeas.
Under James Murdoch, New York Magazine Tilts Toward Hamas
James Murdoch just demonstrated that Rupert Murdoch sure was right to fight a protracted legal battle to prevent him from taking over the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

One of the so-called bad Murdochs, James, who betrayed his father by lurching to the political left, on July 8 assumed control of New York magazine, declaring it "the beginning of a new chapter."

The latest issue of New York repeatedly falsely accuses Israel of "genocide" and goes so far as to describe the Jewish state as "the land mass currently called Israel."

The issue was so over the top that it prompted a rebuke even from the CEO of the Anti-Defemation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose organization received a total of $3.5 million from James and Kathryn Murdoch’s private foundation, Quadrivium, between 2022 and 2024, according to Quadrivium tax filings.

The New York magazine article "has too many issues to count," Greenblatt said in a post on X. "Calling for other peoples’ self-determination while labeling the Jewish people’s request for the same treatment as hate is not factual — it[’]s a blatant, disgusting double standard."

A co-founder and former co-chair of Democratic Majority for Israel, Todd Richman, called one of the New York articles "so one-sided that it barely resembles journalism. Israeli restaurants and their owners are portrayed through the narrowest possible lens, while ‘genocide’ is repeated again and again without meaningful context."

"When Jewish and Israeli people are repeatedly portrayed through such a one-sided lens, it has real-world consequences in a city already struggling with rising antisemitism," Richman said.

A staffer at Tablet, Isaac de Castro, called the presentation "batshit."

"If you think this spread was going to be antisemitic and crazy from the cover, believe me it’s ten times worse," he wrote on X.
Commentary Podcast: Hong Out to Dry
It's primary day in Wisconsin, and Francesca Hong is in the spotlight with her history of terrible comments and social media posts, AOC hand-waves "woke 1" and announces IVF treatments, and New York Magazine's antisemitism-infused ode to Middle Eastern food and culture in NYC.


Judge allows ‘pay-for-slay’ lawsuit against PA, PLO to proceed
A federal judge on Monday denied a motion by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that their terrorist-payment programs, dubbed “play-for-slay,” helped induce two Hamas attacks.

The plaintiffs are Stuart Force, father of Taylor Force, an American who was stabbed to death in Israel in 2016, and Israeli-American Hananel Gez, who was wounded in a May 2025 shooting in Israel that killed his pregnant wife, Tzeela, and their infant son, Ravid Haim.

The complaint alleges that the attackers knew their families would receive P.A.-funded benefits if they were imprisoned or killed.

“Pay-for-slay isn’t welfare,” said Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which represents the plaintiffs. “It incentivizes murder.”

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the allegations plausibly described a publicized promise of payment that may constitute substantial assistance under the Antiterrorism Act.

McMahon wrote in her decision that whether the assailants knew of and relied upon the promised payments must be tested through discovery. The defendants must answer the complaint by Sept. 15.
Kassy Akiva: Man Charged With Killing Mom Of Ex-Trump Adviser Is Linked To Series Of Hate Crimes
The man accused of killing the mother of a former top Trump Middle East adviser is believed to be behind a series of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the days preceding her death.

Cara Trager was walking home with her husband in Queens, New York, on May 25 when Dawood Faisal sped through two red lights and crashed into multiple vehicles, sending one into the crosswalk and fatally wounding her, authorities say. The incident happened just two days after he allegedly vandalized the kosher Bagels & Co. restaurant for the second time.

The timing has left Trager’s family questioning whether her death could have been prevented if the earlier antisemitic attacks had been addressed. Instead, Faisal is accused of getting behind the wheel in the heavily Jewish neighborhood, doing donuts in the street, and driving twice the speed limit before triggering the fatal chain-reaction crash.

Trager’s family was already deeply connected to the fight against antisemitism: her son, Eric, was appointed by President Donald Trump as a senior director for Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council from January to May 2025, where he worked closely with Special Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff on Middle East policy and the war in Gaza.

According to authorities, on May 25 Faisal was driving a 2013 Toyota Prius southbound on Francis Lewis Boulevard at approximately 7:48 p.m. when he surpassed 75 mph in a 35 mph zone and ran at least two red lights.

He first allegedly slammed into a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon traveling through the intersection before striking a Nissan Rogue, sending it into the crosswalk where it hit Trager and her husband, Michael, who had been married for 47 years and were walking home from dinner.

Trager suffered severe head trauma and died four days later. Her husband suffered a shoulder injury, lacerations to his hands, and bruising to his face.

After the collision, Faisal allegedly got out of his vehicle and attempted to flee before picking up a stick to fight off good Samaritans who detained him until police arrived.

Video footage from the scene shows Trager face down on the pavement while her husband kneels down next to her along with debris and cars scattered through the intersection.
HonestReporting: What If It's Just Envy? Alana Newhouse on What Israel Has That Nobody Else Does
In 2021, Alana Newhouse wrote an essay called "Everything Is Broken" that named the disease she thought was hollowing out American life: flatness, the demand for frictionless, hierarchy-allergic, instant-everything systems, and the forgetting of what makes any of us distinct.

Five years later, she published the sequel at national scale. "Zionism for Everyone" argues that Zionism is the embodiment of the technology for national renewal, and it's available to anybody. Her hottest take? That most anti-Zionism is running on envy rather than ancient hatred.

Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet, which she started in 2009 and which became, after October 7, the place where Diaspora Jews went to process what had happened. Last year she launched it in print — because Gen Z readers asked her to.

She joins Ben Chertoff to explain why the fight over Israel is not the fight anybody thinks it is.
• Why she says the conversation that looks political is actually technological — and what happened to the West's national distinctiveness in the decades before the internet arrived to accelerate it
• The line that lit up Jewish media, "expressions of disgust are often evidence of envy," and why she reads the fury it caused as proof she was right
• Her answer to Sam Harris and everyone else arguing the word Zionism should be retired: "The Jews and Zionism are not the target. The target here is the West. We are just in the way."
• The four survival tests she says only one Western country currently passes

0:00 — Cold Open & Introducing Alana Newhouse
3:10 — Calling David Garth Every Friday for Six Months
12:26 — Why Gen Z Asked For a Print Edition of Tablet
19:25 — Everything Is Broken: What Flatness Actually Means
28:30 — Zionism as a Technology: Distinctiveness, Vision, Work
34:16 — Does Israel Only Succeed Because It Has To?
36:15 — Disgust Is Envy: Antisemitism as a Symptom
39:41 — The Jews Are Not the Target. The West Is.
48:59 — Four Survival Tests, and Only One Country Passes
52:54 — Each Country Picks Its Musical Instruments
56:16 — A Jewish Costume for Communism
1:16:51 — Know What's Distinct About You, Then Jam On It
How this was made




UKLFI: Natasha Hausdorff on Charity Commission probe of Jewish charities' actions in Judea and Samaria
The Charity Commission has launched a statutory class inquiry into eight charities supporting activities in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, with plans to investigate further charities over time.

The regulator says it is examining how charitable funds are being spent, whether that spending furthers legitimate charitable purposes and whether any regulatory action is required. It has stressed that opening the inquiry is not a finding of wrongdoing.

But international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff questions the Commission's repeated description of the communities concerned as "illegal Israeli settlements". She examines the disputed legal status of the territories, Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention and whether rules concerning the conduct of states can be used to challenge ordinary charitable activity by non-state organisations.

Hausdorff also discusses Professor Eugene Kontorovich's comparative study of settlement activity in other disputed territories and argues that international law does not make supporting a school, medical clinic, religious institution or welfare project unlawful simply because of its location in disputed territory.

The discussion then turns to what Hausdorff describes as a stark contrast in regulatory priorities. She examines the Charity Commission's separate statutory inquiry into Al-Khair Foundation over alleged links with Hamas and asks whether allegations concerning support for a proscribed terrorist organisation are fundamentally different from questions surrounding charitable projects in Judea and Samaria. The Charity Commission's Al-Khair investigation remains ongoing and the allegations discussed in this video should not be taken as findings of wrongdoing.

Finally, Hausdorff considers what the Charity Commission's proper role should be and argues that charity law and regulatory standards must be applied consistently and without political considerations.

Chapters:
00:00 Charity Commission launches inquiry
01:41 What exactly is Commission investigating?
04:39 Are Israeli settlements legally "illegal"?
06:32 Does international law prohibit charitable activity there?
10:31 The contrast with alleged Hamas-linked charity funding
13:41 Due diligence, Jewish charities and consistent regulation


John Ondrasik: The Haters Come for Boy George over Israel. I Know What It Feels Like.
Boy George, the flamboyant British singer, recently released a song entitled "We Will Dance Again." He said he wanted to support his Jewish friends still reeling from the atrocities committed by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Reactions were immediate and overwhelmingly furious.

In December 2023, I wrote and released a song entitled "OK (We Are Not OK)." It was meant to address a broken world where the grotesque Oct. 7 massacre could be celebrated on college campuses.

The song name-checked Harvard, where a student group issued a statement calling Israel "entirely responsible" for Hamas's orgy of murder, rape and hostage-taking.

And I spoke out publicly about the eruption of moral relativism and clear antisemitism that followed the attack.

I know personally the vitriol and death threats now coming for Boy George. I know that few artists of stature will come to his defense. And that he will have to hire more security for his concerts.

What makes Boy George so enraging to the haters is that he, like me, is not Jewish. That fact sends a signal: This is not a religious battle but a moral one. One of good versus evil, without relativity or equivocation.


Arab-Israeli activist files police report against ‘neo-Nazi’ for alleged assault
Israeli-Arab activist Yoseph Haddad told JNS that he filed a police report accusing Dennis Feitosa, a former California congressional candidate, of assaulting him during a debate that the two held about Israel in Las Vegas on Monday.

“I am OK,” Haddad told JNS. “I can’t say the same thing about the neo-Nazi.”

Haddad told JNS that it was “ironic” that he was assaulted two decades to the day after he was hit by a missile and injured in Lebanon on Aug. 10, 2006.

“Twenty years later, I got attacked by a neo-Nazi,” he said. “Crazy.”

Haddad told JNS that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer who took his statement “helped throughout the process, took the full complaint and saw all the videos.”

Video footage of the incident, including footage that Haddad’s fiancée Emily Schrader and that pro-Israel activist Nick Matau shared on social media, showed Feitosa, a podcaster who also goes by “Def Noodles,” and Haddad as guests on the podcast Digital Social Hour. Feitosa calls Haddad, who served in the Israeli military, a “genocidal f**king freak” and grabs his hand forcefully. (Schrader hosts and co-hosts podcasts for JNS.)

Feitosa appears not to let go when Haddad pulls him down to the table. Feitosa comes around the debate table, apparently to rush at Haddad, before others intervene to hold him back.

In the parking lot afterward, Feitosa can be seen in separate footage grabbing Haddad from behind by the neck. Multiple people pull him off of Haddad and hold him down on the ground.

Feitosa ran for Congress as a Republican in California’s 30th Congressional District, but the California Republican Party recruited a different candidate to block him from gaining influence within GOP ranks. The party called him an “extremist influencer,” JNS reported. He lost his primary in June.


Rabbis warn New York mayor Zohran Mamdani his Israel rhetoric is ‘causing harm’
New York rabbis have warned Mayor Zohran Mamdani that his repeated attacks on Israel are harming Jewish New Yorkers and straining relations with the city’s Jewish community.

Ten rabbis from Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Modern Orthodox congregations delivered the message during a private hour-long meeting with Mamdani at City Hall on Monday.

The discussion, convened by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, focused on Jewish safety and the administration’s relationship with Jewish New Yorkers.

But rabbis attending the meeting also directly challenged Mamdani over rhetoric towards Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the Forward.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told the newspaper there was a “uniform sense” among those present that the mayor needed to recognise the effect of his comments.

“Everyone agreed that the current course can’t go on,” Jacobs said. “The way he vilifies Israel, and so constantly, is really causing harm.”

Mamdani has been a vocal critic of Israel and previously pledged to arrest Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister visited New York. He has also encouraged protests against Netanyahu during visits to the city.

Rabbi Rachel Timoner, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, said concerns extended to progressive rabbis who share some of Mamdani’s criticism of Israel.

She told the Forward that while they and their congregants agree with the mayor on many issues and want to work with him, “they have concerns about the way he is speaking about Israel.”

The rabbis reportedly urged Mamdani to acknowledge greater complexity when discussing Israel, Gaza and the West Bank and to highlight Israelis and Palestinians working together.

Rabbi Jon Leener of Prospect Heights Shul, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn, said he told Mamdani about “the lived experiences of Jewish New Yorkers right now”.

Leener, who described himself as a “proud Zionist” who “vehemently” disagrees with the mayor on Israel, said Mamdani’s rhetoric had “contributed to turning up the temperature” while many Jews feel “increasingly vulnerable”.


Revealed: El-Sayed Proclaimed 'Obligation' To Follow Sharia Law Until the Day He Dies
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once declared his sacred "obligation" to follow Sharia law in every aspect of his life until he meets his maker on the day he dies, according to unearthed comments he made to the New York Times in 2009 as a young man buying his first home.

"Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don't want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation," said El-Sayed, who the Times identified at the time as a 24-year-old medical student and Rhodes scholar who had just taken out a "Sharia-compliant" mortgage to purchase a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor.

Sharia, or Islamic religious law, sets strict rules for living that include harsh restrictions on women and gruesome, medieval-era forms of criminal justice. Sharia law also prohibits the paying or earning of interest, a restriction that has led some banks to offer special mortgages for devout Muslims, like El-Sayed, which tack onto the principal what a typical borrower would pay in interest across the life of the loan.

The young El-Sayed's expression of lifelong devotion to Sharia law takes new meaning following his narrow primary victory last week and raises the question of how much Sharia law continues to guide him.

El-Sayed has played a delicate balancing act on the campaign trail when it comes to his personal faith. While he has embraced his status as a Muslim man before voters, the progressive Democrat often frames his faith in broad brush strokes to avoid specifics. In October 2025, for example, El-Sayed told Religion News Service that his faith "orients me to try and be a better person" and to "treat people — all people — with dignity and humanity and respect."

But El-Sayed has bristled when pressed on the topic of Sharia law. During his failed 2018 campaign for Michigan governor, El-Sayed denied ever saying he was "Sharia-compliant" during an interview with the Jewish conservative journalist Laura Loomer—a strong critic of Islam—before cutting the interview short and scolding his staff for not stopping it sooner.

El-Sayed also rejected allegations that he intended to subvert the Constitution and implement Sharia law. A documentary about his 2018 gubernatorial bid shows him telling the filmmakers not to shoot a bookshelf in his home that contained the Quran and controversial works about Islam, including Cutting the Fuse, a 2010 book that argues that suicidal terrorism is driven by foreign military occupation, not Islamic extremism.


David Miller’s win is not our loss – it is the law protecting even repugnant beliefs
This isn't a novel rule invented for Miller. Islam is a protected belief; a preacher inciting violence in its name is not exercising it, he's committing an offence. Belief in a united Ireland is protected; advocating a bombing campaign to achieve it never was. Antizionism, the belief that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, is now confirmed as protected in exactly the same way. Calling for, or promoting, violence to bring that about is not, and nothing in the Miller judgment says otherwise.

Which is why what I watched happen in Filton on July 23 worries me more than the judgment itself. At a blockade of the Elbit Systems factory, protesters chanted "Smash the Zionist settler state." I have a recording of the police Bronze Commander explaining, live and on the record, why no action would follow: "Antizionism has been held to be a protected belief under the Equality Act 2010… this is a view which can be legally heard and expressed where violence is not incited." He drew a direct comparison to the decision not to charge Bob Vylan over "Death to the IDF" at Glastonbury.

That is a misreading of the very principle it invokes. "Smash the… state" is not a description of a belief; it is, on any ordinary reading, an instruction. A chant doesn't become lawful merely because it sits downstream of a protected belief. The Miller litigation itself draws the line exactly at the point where expression tips into promoting violence. If officers are treating "antizionism is protected" as a blanket exemption for whatever language is used to express it, rather than asking whether that specific language crosses into incitement, they are getting the law wrong, not applying it cautiously. That is an error worth naming every time it happens, through the proper channels: complaints, the College of Policing, the courts if it comes to that.

Here is what should actually give British Jews comfort. If antizionism clears the bar as a protected belief, then Zionism does too, and without serious argument. The belief that Jews, like other peoples, have a right to self-determination in a state of their own easily satisfies the same test. And under the Public Sector Equality Duty, in the very Act that protects Miller, every police force, council and public body must eliminate discrimination against people for holding that belief, advance their equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between Zionists and everyone else. Not merely tolerate our existence at the edge of someone else's demonstration.

The Equality Act wasn't written to make antisemitism respectable, or to give an anxious officer cover for not wanting to pick a side. It was written to protect belief on all sides, and to hold a hard line at violence on all sides. Miller's win shouldn't be read as our loss. Applied honestly, and evenly, it's a floor under all of us. The only real question is whether the people enforcing it, on a picket line in Filton as much as in a tribunal room in London, are willing to hold that line, rather than quietly move it.


Mauthausen museum slammed over visitor’s anti-Israel shirt
The museum in charge of preserving Austria’s foremost Holocaust memorial site, Mauthausen, on Monday faced criticism for its handling of an incident Friday it deemed a “provocation” concerning Israel.

In the Aug.7 incident, a Jewish visitor to Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial confronted a male wearing a shirt bearing the slogan “Free Palestine” and the portrait of Palestinian terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, whose 1978 Coastal Road attack in Israel resulted in the death of 38 people, including 13 children.

In a statement, the museum did not address or mention the terrorist’s portrait, appeared to criticize what it called “the vociferous reaction from one female visitor” and stopped short of criticizing the act of the male visitor, whom the statement described as a participant of an “anti-Fascist youth camp.” The museum’s statement said it was “desirable” for political debates to take place there.

David Roet, Israel’s ambassador to Austria, criticized the museum on X on Monday.

“The Mauthausen Memorial states that freedom of expression must not violate the dignity of the victims. And yet it happens again. At a time when antisemitism is raising its head in ways not seen for generations, this principle must have meaning,” he wrote, adding: “A concentration camp is not a stage for political provocation.”

According to Roet, “For 3 consecutive years, pro-Palestinian political messages, flags and signs have entered the official commemoration of Mauthausen’s liberation.” Mauthausen is among the places that “must remain beyond today’s political battles, he said.

The Museum’s statement included a reference to “provocations that do not constitute criminal offences,” though it did not say whether this referenced the male or the female’s actions, or both. “Our staff had not noticed this whilst supervising the large group,” the museum wrote about the shirt.

“We treat all visitors with openness and respect their right to freedom of expression and the diversity of opinions, provided that these remain within the bounds of the law, do not promote anti-Semitic, racist or generally discriminatory views, and do not undermine the dignity of the victims,” the museum’s statement read. It did not say whether it regarded the male’s actions as falling within these boundaries.

Mauthausen Memorial serves “as a backdrop for contemporary political conflicts,” the statement said. “In the spirit of reflecting on the significance of the past for the present, this is also desirable at such sites and is in line with the principles of historical-political education.”


Poll: Only 23% of Americans comfortable discussing Israeli-Palestinian conflict without fear of reprimand
Only 23% of Americans feel “very comfortable” sharing their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “without fear of reprimand,” according to a survey released on Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The quarterly National Speech Index, designed by FIRE and conducted by the Dartmouth Polarization Research Lab, surveyed 1,000 Americans from July 7-20. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The poll found that 31% said they feel somewhat comfortable discussing the conflict, while 31% said they are not very comfortable and 14% are not comfortable at all.

Asked how comfortable they were sharing their views about the war in Iran, just 29% of respondents said they were very comfortable.

Respondents were also asked how often in the past month they had watched what they said or censored their comments, questions or words, with only 8% saying they had done so nearly every day, while 32% said, “occasionally, a handful of times.”

“Ideally, everyone should be comfortable expressing their opinions about key topics of debate, but most Americans don’t appear to feel that way,” said Nathan Honeycutt, FIRE’s manager of polling and analytics.
Jews, 4% of Massachusetts residents, targeted in 83.3% of commonwealth’s religion-bias hate crimes in 2025
Of the 114 hate crimes in Massachusetts in 2025 that were based on religious bias, 95 incidents, or 83.3%, targeted Jews. Muslims were targeted in 10 incidents, or 8.8%, according to a website funded by a U.S. Justice Department grant.

In 2024, 132 (84%) of 157 religion-based hate crimes in the commonwealth targeted Jews and 10 (6.4%) targeted Muslims, and in 2023, 105 (74.5%) of 141 religion-based hate crimes were anti-Jewish and 5 (3.5%) were anti-Muslim, according to the site, to which the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security directs the public to view crime data.

JNS asked the office of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, last month for 2025 hate crime statistics. “The 2025 data is typically published in the fall after it is reviewed and finalized,” a spokeswoman for Healey told JNS.

In July 2025, the commonwealth said that for the first time in nearly 35 years, there were more recorded anti-Jewish than anti-black hate crimes in Massachusetts in 2024, part of a “troubling” 20.5% increase in antisemitic hate crimes that year.

In 2025, 114 incidents targeted black people, or 20% more than the number of antisemitic hate crimes.

The Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 U.S. Religious Landscape Study Interactive Database estimates that about 4% of Massachusetts adults are Jewish and 2% are Muslim. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 10.2% of Massachusetts residents are black and another 4% are two or more races.

That means that in 2025 in Massachusetts, a Jew was about 370% likelier to be the victim of a hate crime than a Muslim was, and 112% more likely than a black person to be targeted in a hate crime.
Almost 20% of hate crimes in Seattle this year targeted Jews, who are an estimated 1% of city’s metro area
JNS reported on Monday that from Jan. 1, 2023 until Jan. 31 of this year, Jews have been targets of 9.1% of hate crimes in Seattle. On Tuesday, the city released its crime statistics from Jan. 1 until July 31 of this year, and the picture became considerably more dire—more than 115% worse—for Seattle Jews.

Of the 66 hate crimes that Seattle recorded in the first seven months of this year, 13 (19.7%) have targeted Jews.

Jews make up about 1% of those who live in the Seattle metro area, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study.

From January to end of July, 7.2% of all of the 511 hate crimes, crimes with what Seattle calls “bias elements” and non-crimes that involve bias which the city has recorded targeted Jews, according to official city data.

Of the 259 crimes with “bias elements,” which the city uses to refer to crimes in which the bias is a secondary motivation, in Seattle so far this year, 11 (4.2%) targeted Jews, and 13 (7%) of the 186 bias incidents have targeted Jews, Seattle data suggests.

Official Seattle statistics indicate that conditions are less dangerous for Arabs and Muslims in the city. According to Pew data, Muslims make up 2% of the Seattle area, or about twice the Jewish population.


Former hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen returns home to perform songs he composed in Hamas captivity
Former hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen took to the stage Monday night to sing nine songs he composed in his head during 498 days of Hamas captivity in Gaza.

There were songs about his wife and daughters, one of whom was born while he was in captivity. He wrote about his fear that his young family hadn’t survived the October 7 Hamas onslaught — in fact, he didn’t know they were alive until mere days before his release on February 15, 2025.

An audience of 3,000 people sat in near silence, often softly weeping, as Dekel-Chen, now 38, spoke about his love of music and how songs carried him through his ordeal from his first days in a hospital in Khan Younis. His desire to relate his saga through the music he composed made for a concert like no other.

Onstage, he dubbed the performance “Captivity in Lyrics.”

“I’m not a singer,” Dekel-Chen said with a grin at the start of the show. “Let’s lower expectations.”

He informed the audience that not all the songs were sad, and to expect some funny moments and opportunities to dance.

That was all true.

Dekel-Chen and a band of eight musicians and three backup singers were joined by several household names from Israel’s music scene, including Idan Raichel, Hativka 6 and Marina Maximilian — musicians who helped Dekel-Chen bring his songs to life over the year and a half since his release.

Throughout, however, it was Dekel-Chen — a slim, bearded young father in jeans, a man who worked in the nonprofit world before October 7, and reportedly often had grease on his hands from tinkering in the kibbutz garage — who led the show.

The lyrics of each song were displayed on a giant screen at the back of the stage, interspersed with photos of Dekel-Chen and his family, both before and after October 7. Former hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen performs the songs he composed in captivity, on the lawn of Kibbutz Nir Oz, as part of the Israel Festival on August 10, 2026 (Orit Pnini)

Dekel-Chen spoke frankly about the Shabbat morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Kibbutz Nir Oz, a community of 400, burning and murdering people in their homes, eventually killing 47 people and taking 76 hostage. The wider invasion on October 7 saw thousands of Hamas-led terrorists brutally murder some 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, and abduct 251 hostages to the Gaza Strip.

Only six homes on the kibbutz were left unscathed after the onslaught.





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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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