Saturday, August 29, 2026

08/28 Links Pt2: The disgusting bigotry of blaming Israel for anti-Semitism; Four men plead guilty to arson attack on Jewish ambulances in London; Former Gaza hostage Elkana Bohbot welcomes birth of new daughter

From Ian:

Leading Sephardic & Mizrahi Organizations Challenge New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” Over Erasure of Middle Eastern Jews
What Zionism actually is to us
Our communities lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for over 2,500 years, before the emergence of Islam. In the twentieth century, close to one million Jews were driven from the Arab and Muslim world, frequently under laws that criminalized Zionism itself. In countries throughout the Arab world Zionism was made a capital offense, over 3,000 Jews were imprisoned, and Jews were stripped of citizenship and property as “Zionists”; across the region, families were dispossessed, imprisoned, or forced to flee under duress. In the political Zionism of the 20th century, we asserted our own indigeneity after living for millennia as second-class and, finally, exiled citizens of the lands of our birth. The movement your feature files alongside xenophobia and Islamophobia is the reason hundreds of thousands of those refugees had somewhere to go, and the reason their descendants, today the majority of Israel’s Jewish population, exist as communities at all. To renounce Zionism as the condition of belonging to a SWANA community is to demand that Jews disavow our own survival. Being Jewish or Zionist is not in opposition to being from a geographic region. For most of us, the two are how we are still here.

The cuisine your feature celebrates makes the point vividly. Food is one of the truest records a people keeps of where it has been. The dishes in your pages were also carried out of Baghdad, Sana’a, Cairo, and Casablanca by refugees who left with little else and they survive as living traditions rather than museum pieces because those refugees had a country to carry them to. Your food coverage goes further still: it prints, without comment, a featured restaurant’s menu map on which Israel does not appear at all, retitled “Discover Palestine,” and it refers in the magazine’s own editorial voice to “the land mass currently called Israel.” It reports, with evident satisfaction from one interviewee, that Israeli-owned restaurants are now retreating behind the euphemism “Mediterranean” some, by your own account, after vandalism. A feature devoted to the pride of naming oneself openly treats the return of Jews to concealment as a development to be savored. That is the second moral inversion.

The label “Arab Jew”
Your feature applies the label “Arab Jew” without qualification. Most Mizrahi Jews reject it and in current usage it functions largely to sever Jewish identity from Israel. The Tunisian-born sociologist and philosopher Albert Memmi answered the label half a century ago, responding to Muammar Gaddafi’s offer to welcome Jews back as “Arabs like us” after they had been brutally ethnically cleansed. He acknowledged the nostalgia the phrase evokes, then wrote: “We would have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandon the idea, it is because over the centuries the Moslem Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty.” The identity was refused to us when we lived in Arab lands. It is now conferred on us in New York, without our consent, because it is politically convenient: an “Arab Jew” is a Jew whose story can be told without Israel. The great majority of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews were never asked whether we accept the label. Instead, your writers located the small minority who embrace it, presented them as representative, and left the rest of us to discover that our identity had been defined by others on our behalf. That is not inclusion. It is a curated exception, deployed to suggest the community has been consulted when it has not – erasure presenting itself as representation.

October 7 as a date without victims
In your feature, October 7th appears repeatedly and always as a calendar marker for what came after it, never as an event with victims of its own. It was carried out by Hamas, an organization whose founding charter is openly genocidal, calling for the destruction of Israel and invoking Islamic scripture commanding the killing of Jews, and whose record of violence runs in every direction: against Israelis in massacre and hostage-taking, and against Palestinians themselves, from the executions of political rivals in its 2007 seizure of Gaza to its ongoing torture and killing of dissidents. On October 7th, 2023 some 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251 taken hostage, communities were burned, and sexual violence was documented – none of it acknowledged, even in passing, in thousands of words that date an entire cultural renaissance to that morning. Your readers might never learn that among the towns invaded that day including Ofakim, Sderot, Netivot are some of the most heavily Mizrahi communities in Israel: descendants of the very refugees from Morocco, Iraq, and Yemen whose food and music fill your pages. The people of the region were both among the murdered and among the murdered’s mourners, and your feature could not spare them a single sentence. A “SWANA community” whose “shared beliefs” in anti-Zionism require total silence about Jewish suffering and about the genocidal intent and movement that inflicted the tragedy of October 7th is not practicing solidarity with Palestinians. It is practicing antisemitism. That is the third moral inversion.

“We are not asking to be tolerated as exceptions to an ideological rule. We are asking to be recognized as what we are: peoples of the region.”

What we ask
We are not asking to be tolerated as exceptions to an ideological rule. We are asking to be recognized as what we are: peoples of the region. We ask that New York Magazine acknowledge that its framing excludes the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa except on ideological terms, and renders the region’s other non-Muslim peoples nearly invisible; that future coverage of SWANA communities include Mizrahi and Sephardic voices as we actually are, which for the great majority of us means Zionist, alongside the other erased non-Muslim indigenous voices of the region; and that your editors meet with representatives of the undersigned organizations to discuss how that happens.
Brendan O'Neill: The disgusting bigotry of blaming Israel for anti-Semitism
In a suit and tie on one of his hours-long, soul-eating livestreams, Piker said that ‘if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel mind you, but against American Jews’. There it is. Plainly put. In all its neo-fascist horror. If you’re an American Jew and you’re pro-Israel, you risk attack. Your alignment with that ‘genocidal’ entity is putting your own life and limb at risk. How about being a good Jew and saying ‘Fuck Israel’?

Even for the Dem elites who cosied up to Piker in the demented belief that he would breathe life into their knackered brand, his ‘What do you expect, Jews?’ schtick has proven too much. Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat and House Minority leader, didn’t hold back. ‘The malicious claim that American Jews are inviting violence against themselves is dangerous and anti-Semitic’, he said. He continued: ‘There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate.’ Even Abdul El-Sayed – the Dem candidate for the US Senate in Michigan who’s been rubbing Piker like a genie’s lamp of stardust and ‘authenticity’ – has distanced himself from Piker’s mad comments.

I have no sympathy with these arse-covering Dems. For if they can hear and read, they would know that the pondscum idea that Jews invite violence upon themselves by backing Israel has been a rancid belief of the Islamo-left for years. Others who are a tad more morally sophisticated – ‘tad’ being the operative word – don’t berate Jews themselves but instead say the Jewish State is the problem. As that most one-eyed basher of Israel – Owen Jones – said in defence of Piker: ‘It is an obvious undeniable fact that Israel’s actions are fuelling anti-Semitism.’ When a middle-class canceller says something is ‘obvious’ and ‘undeniable’, it’s usually neither.

Let’s put this evil bullshit to bed once and for all. First, as already mentioned, the descendants of other nations that have committed far greater crimes than Israel’s are not being attacked day and night – why not? Next, explain this: why did violent Israelophobia – which is just Jew hatred in drag – precede what you call ‘the genocide’ but which most normal people call the Israel-Hamas War? It’s almost as if Jews in Europe and America are being attacked for the goddamn racist hell of it rather than because of the ‘Gaza genocide’. Finally: what happened to the great woke sin of victim-blaming? Why is it victim-blaming to say blacks invite racism upon themselves through their ‘bad behaviour’ but fine to spout the same regressive drivel about Jews? Singling Jews out for a species of moral judgement that is applied to no other race on Earth – if only there was a word for that…

Let’s cut to the chase: it isn’t Israel’s behaviour that is endangering the world’s Jews – it’s the Islamo-left’s lies about Israel’s behaviour. It is their treacharous bastardisation of a war as a ‘genocide’, and their libellous branding of civilian casualties as ‘baby killing’, that has resuscitated the wheezing zombie of Jew hatred. The desecrators of synagogues and destroyer of Jewish lives have all yelled ‘Genocide’ and ‘Child murder’ these past three years. Their violent hatred was fuelled not by Israel’s war against the Islamofascists of Hamas but by the Islamo-left’s viral, fascist-adjacent misinformation about that war.

Let’s put it like this. I support Israel. I call myself a Zionist. I don’t think anything like a genocide has been committed in Gaza. I want Hamas to be destroyed. And yet I have never been racially abused on the streets or seen any of my cultural institutions protested or graffitied. We all know why: I’m not a Jew.
Jonathan Tobin: El-Sayed’s antisemitism is the issue; not Hasan Piker
Indeed, the trouble goes beyond El-Sayed’s own long record of antisemitic positions and troubling comments about violence against Jews, even while continuing to claim that he wants to protect them.

Over the course of the last year, growing numbers of Democrats and liberal pundits have embraced a raft of blood libels about Israel and the Jews. The big lies that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” in Gaza, imposed starvation there or is an “apartheid state” rather than the Middle East’s only democracy, have been widely embraced not only by extremist podcasters like Piker, but by vast numbers of Democratic officeholders and many, if not most, liberal pundits at supposedly respectable publications and broadcast networks.

Democrats have accepted the centerpiece argument of El-Sayed’s primary campaign about stopping the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby from “buying” Congress as a legitimate argument. Many, if not most, are no longer willing to accept campaign donations from it even if they remain supporters of the Jewish state.

Democrats may think that Piker’s comments justifying violence against Jews for supporting Israel go too far, which is embarrassing for them because he is linked to one of their main midterm hopefuls. But many, if not most, agree with the podcaster and his friend, El-Sayed, that there is something unwholesome or even wrong for Jews and other like-minded Americans to organize and seek to use the same tools employed by all advocacy groups to persuade voters to support their position.

The fact is that hatred for Israel—and the targeting of mainstream liberals for being insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state—has been a decisive factor in victory after victory in 2026 primaries for candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America or their allies.

Embracing blood libels
Democrats, including their leaders, like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who are supposedly pro-Israel and concerned about antisemitism, have already demonstrated that they are willing to tolerate it if it comes out the mouth of a fellow Democrat like El-Sayed. Not even his invocation of traditional tropes—singling out Jews for opprobrium by mainstreaming blood libels about Israel, and claims that Jews are using their wealth to manipulate policy against American interests—was enough to get them to disavow his candidacy. Nor did his rationalization of a terror attack on a Michigan synagogue.

Nor should we have expected them to, since such hateful discourse has long since been normalized among political liberals in the post-Oct. 7 world, where Israel is now the main focus of hatred from the left. Anti-Zionism, which seeks to strip Jews of rights that no one thinks to wish to deny any other people, is indistinguishable from antisemitism. But it is now kosher among Democrats, rather than, as it used to and should be, a belief that should be relegated to the fever swamps of the far-left and the far-right.

Seen from that perspective, Piker is not a distraction from the real issues or a red herring being highlighted by Republicans to sabotage a Democratic candidate. He is entirely relevant to a key issue being debated across the country.

The willingness of Democrats to let their party be hijacked by a far-left faction and its allies whose hatred for Israel and the Jews is at the core of their woke belief system is the real issue. In so allowing—whether out of moral cowardice or a conviction that partisan loyalties and opposing Trump and the Republicans is more important than fighting antisemitism—they have created a moral dilemma for themselves.

The only way to salve their consciences is not by criticizing Piker or persuading El-Sayed to distance himself from him. It’s by disavowing El-Sayed and every other antisemitic candidate who camouflages his extremism by playing the part of a loyal Democrat who seeks to defeat Trump and all his works and allies.

If they won’t do that, they should stop pretending they care about opposing Jew-hatred and simply embrace their party’s new identity as the political expression of modern American antisemitism.


Four men plead guilty to arson attack on Jewish ambulances in London
Hamza Iqbal, Rehan Khan, Judex Atshatshi and Saif Ali pleaded guilty in the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, in London, to destroying or damaging property while being reckless about whether they would endanger people’s lives, London’s Metropolitan Police said.

The men, who range in age from 18 to 20, were remanded in custody after a hearing on Friday and are expected to be sentenced next spring.

On March 23, at around 1:30 a.m. local time, the ambulances, which were parked near a synagogue in London’s heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood, were set on fire. The Met said the fire caused significant damage and that the four were arrested after an investigation by its counter-terror unit.

The Community Security Trust, which provides security for the U.K. Jewish community, welcomed the guilty pleas.

“This was an appalling antisemitic act against a volunteer ambulance service providing emergency medical assistance to people of all backgrounds across north London, simply because those ambulances belonged to a Jewish charity,” the trust said.

Prosecutors said the attack caused about $1.3 million in damage. The four ambulances were destroyed.

A fifth defendant, Subhan Ahmed, 18, pleaded not guilty to assisting an offender and was released on bail under strict conditions. He is expected to stand trial in January.


Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism ends with Bondi rabbi’s plea for action
Since February, the commission has heard from Australian Jews, including students, academics, teachers, healthcare workers, artists and many others, who have described their experiences of antisemitism.

University leaders, politicians, community and religious organizations, police, intelligence officials and experts on extremism and social cohesion have also given evidence.

The commission was tasked with examining the extent and causes of antisemitism in Australia. This includes extremism and radicalization, and how antisemitism affects Australian Jews. It also examined what governments and institutions can do about it, how institutions have responded to antisemitism, whether the Bondi attack could have been prevented and how Australia can better protect social cohesion.

Some evidence about Bondi has been heard privately because it could affect national security or the criminal case against the surviving alleged attacker.

The commission is expected to present its findings in December.

However, Commissioner Virginia Bell said she would delay handing in her final report so as not to take away attention from the anniversary of the Bondi terror shooting, The Guardian reported. The initial date for turning in the report was no later than December 14, 2026, the day of the Bondi attack.

“I fully understand that concern and to avoid that distraction I have asked for a short extension of the term with a view to the submission of my final report on Friday the 18th of December,” she said, according to The Guardian.

The Guardian also reported that there was public pressure, including from Jewish Liberal MP Julian Leeser, to extend the commission’s hearings in order to hear from more key witnesses.

“Many significant Australian voices will have been left unheard and critical players not put on the stand,” Leeser said.

Senior security leaders in Australia also signed an open letter on Wednesday to extend the commission’s reporting date. Those who signed included a former governor-general, retired military heads and the former heads of the secret intelligence service.

“The speed with which the royal commission has been forced to conduct its hearings has not allowed detailed review of the rise of antisemitism, Islamist and other forms of extremism in Australia,” the letter said.

Ulman noted that Australia is at a “crossroads” and must choose what it will tolerate, defend, and stand for.
Full Text: At closing of commission, rabbi urges an Australia where Jews can be safe
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, Chabad Director of Bondi, who lost his son-in-law Rabbi Eli Schlanger in the December 14, 2025, Bondi Beach massacre, was the last to testify to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, on August 26, 2026. This is his statement.

Thank you Commissioner for allowing me the honour of providing a closing statement today.

While Chabad of Bondi’s written submission provides our detailed reflections and recommendations, I stand before you this afternoon and speak from my heart, as a father and as a rabbi of the Chabad of Bondi community for forty years.

At the heart of the Chanukah story is a decision to return.

More than two thousand years ago, after a period when Jewish practice had been outlawed, the Jewish people returned to their Temple in Jerusalem (of which the Western Wall was a part) and found it desecrated.

They cleared the Temple. They rebuilt the altar. And then they lit the Menorah – a symbol of the ‘Eternal Light’, being G-d’s unending presence.

The miracle of Chanukah is that only a single jar of pure oil could be found in the desecrated temple; only enough for one day, and yet, it burned for eight days until more oil could be sourced. But before there was this miracle, there was a choice: to return, to rebuild, and to bring light back to a place that had known darkness.

Commissioner, as this Royal Commission draws to a close, Australia too faces a moment of decision. Over these past months, you have carried a solemn burden: listening to the pain of a community, examining the health of our society, and helping chart a path forward. I thank you for this.


NYPost Editorial: Treasury is 100% right to crack down on activists masquerading as charities
Left or right, taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize political activism they oppose, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is drafting plans to ensure they don’t by revoking tax exemptions from bogus political “charities.”

As The Post’s James Franey reports, Bessent and the IRS are taking a hard look at the conduct of up to a dozen or so high-profile lefty nonprofits — including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations — with an eye toward possibly revoking their tax-exempt status.

That could mean a $165 million windfall in new tax payments from these groups — and, more important, end taxpayer subsidies for dubious or even rancid political activism. Should activists be forced to pay their 'fair share' of taxes?

“The woke left wants to ‘tax the rich,’ but these same lefty groups will do anything they can to avoid paying their own taxes, including breaking the law,” snarked one source familiar with Treasury’s plans. “It’s hypocrisy at its finest.”

To qualify for a 501(c)(3) tax exemption, nonprofits typically must operate “exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes”; they’re expressly prohibited from excessive lobbying or promoting “propaganda,” legislation or political candidates’ campaigns.

Treasury is reportedly looking to treat nonprofits that are political activists in disguise as businesses or political machines for tax purposes, as per the law.

That’s appropriate. Open Society, after all, famously uses its billions to fund groups that back far-left causes — including criminal-justice reforms, climate change, legal privileges for illegal immigrants, DEI and more.

Why shouldn’t it have to pay its “fair share,” rather than force other Americans — most of whom object to much of its agenda — to pick up the tab?

CAIR, too, spends much of its time and money slamming a key US ally, Israel. That’s not political?

It’s also been accused of having ties to Qatar and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial.


Tucker Carlson’s Conversation with a Palestinian-American Christian Features Numerous Problems
Introduction
In a recent episode of The Tucker Carlson Show (“Israel’s Purging of Christians From the Holy Land and the Plot to Keep Americans From Noticing”), Tucker Carlson interviews Dr. Fares Abraham, a Palestinian-American who was born in Bethlehem and is the founder of Levant Ministries. Like other episodes of his show, this conversation features inaccurate suggestions, misrepresentations, misinterpretations of biblical texts, distortions of historical incidents, and the promotion of a biased organization. The episode:

Inaccurately suggests:
The Jewish State prevents Messianic believers from immigrating to Israel.
The Jewish State prohibits Christian preaching about Jesus in Israel.
Israeli Christians are going extinct.

Misrepresents:
The connection of contemporary Jews to ancient Jews in the land of Israel.


Christian Zionism by:
Mischaracterizing a phrase associated with a Christian clergyman.
Generalizing about Christian Zionists wanting an exclusively Jewish Holy Land.
Misidentifying Christian Zionism as a heresy.
Suggesting that building a Third Temple is a central motivator of Christian support for the State of Israel.

Israelis as consistently seeking to acquire Palestinian land.

Palestinian Christians by suggesting they uniformly seek peace.

Misinterprets biblical texts by:
Inaccurately suggesting that the Abrahamic covenant is conditional.
Inaccurately suggesting that Jesus repudiated every Jewish national, political, and territorial expectation.
Inaccurately suggesting that the biblical promise’s scope’s expansion negates a territorial Israel.
Inaccurately suggesting that Scripture attests to the spiritualization of the land of Israel.

Distorts historical incidents:
2023 – Church of Saint Porphyrius
2025 – Taybeh Church

Promotes the biased Breaking the Silence organization.
The Daily Wire’s Pints with Aquinas Show Host and Guest Misrepresent Christian Zionism and Present a Distorted Picture of Israel
Introduction
In a recent episode of his show, “The Truth About Hell Every Christian Should Know,” The Daily Wire’s Pints with Aquinas show host, Matt Fradd:
Inaccurately suggests a belief that the resumption of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem constitutes an eschatological sign is incompatible with Catholic teaching.
Omits Catholic leaders and intellectuals who affirmed that such a belief is consistent with Catholic teaching.
Ignores non-dispensationalist and non-millenarian forms of Christian Zionism.

Fradd’s guest, Dr. Ralph Martin, a Catholic theologian, author, and president of Renewal Ministries who previously taught at Sacred Heart Major Seminary:
Inaccurately suggests the Jewish nation as a whole is to blame for crucifying Jesus.
Questionably suggests the New Testament applies such terms as “hard-hearted” and “stiff-necked” to the whole Jewish nation.
Ignores cautionary words from the Catholic Bishop of Scranton against employing an anti-Jewish trope.
Presents a distorted picture of the Jewish State and Israeli society by describing them in only negative terms.

Both Fradd and Martin:
Omit a Jewish religious attachment to the land of Israel.
Cast doubt on the legitimacy of the State of Israel while excluding its positive functions.


‘Free the world from Jewish supremacy’ NHS doc denies support for Hamas
Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, 32, pleaded not guilty to four counts of expressing support for a proscribed organisation at the Old Bailey on Friday.

She also denied one count of stirring up racial hatred in written material, and a further count of using words that were threatening or abusive.

According to the charge sheet, the social media comments were posted between July and December last year.

The court previously heard she wrote: “I don’t condemn Hamas. I don’t condemn October 7,” and “I condemn the existence of Israel” in a post on July 23.

On December 31, it is alleged she wrote: “Free the world from Jewish supremacy.”

It was previously heard that on the second anniversary of the October 7 attack, she allegedly posted an image of a bulldozer along with text reading: “Glory to the Palestinian resistance.”

Aladwan was arrested at her home in Pilning, south Gloucestershire, and charged with the six offences on March 26.

She appeared at the court via video link on Friday to enter not guilty pleas.

The defendant will face trial at Bristol Crown Court from March 15 next year.

She was granted continued bail.
‘Produce weaponry for jihad’ – Cambridge’s Islamist professor | spiked podcast
Connie Shaw, Tom Slater and Fraser Myers discuss the Cambridge don who joined an Islamist terror group, the unravelling of the Green Party and Birmingham’s fatwa on the England flag.


'Let us have our peace': Fearing disruption at Ground Zero, 9/11 families ask Mamdani to stay away
Mamdani's attendance would be disrespectful due to who he supports, husband of victim says
Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace Catherine was among those killed by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001, told the Post that Mamdani’s intention to attend the ceremony was “a slap in the face... Not because he is Muslim – because of who he supports. He represents values that are not ours.”

Florida real estate agent Galante was responsible for launching a petition last month, alongside other family members of those murdered on 9/11, calling for Mamdani to be excluded from the 25th-year memorial events on account of his association with extremism and refusal to condemn antisemitism.

According to the petition, concerns have been raised about Mamdani’s public positions, including a perceived reluctance to “clearly and unequivocally condemn phrases such as ‘globalize the intifada,’ which many interpret as endorsing or normalizing violence.”

Further, the mayor’s “associations with individuals whose public statements or records are viewed by family members as dismissive of American institutions or insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies,” the petition read.

It also noted that Mamdani’s own father penned a book shortly after 9/11 in which he said that suicide bombers should be “understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” Mamdani has previously said that his father has been influential in shaping his views.

The mayor has also praised Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named as an alleged co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and served as a character witness for the Blind Sheikh, Omar Rahman, who was convicted in 1995 of plotting terror attacks against the United States.

More recently, Mamdani appointed Ramzi Kassem, who previously represented Ahmed al-Darbi, a man convicted in an al-Qaeda tanker bombing plot, as New York City’s chief legal counsel.

The petition has gained over 93,00 signatures in less than a month, as well as hundreds of comments, many of which are from survivors or family members.

“For 9/11 families, this is not simply a public ceremony; it is a deeply personal day of mourning,” Galante wrote. “The presence of individuals whose words or associations are perceived as conflicting with the solemn purpose of the event risks detracting from that focus and causing additional pain.”

Mamdani acknowledged the petition by saying he will attend the ceremony and “proudly honor the families” by standing alongside them at Ground Zero.

“I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home, and frankly, by all of us who call this country home.”

Galante told the Post that “the memorial is like our house, because it’s where our loved ones died. Everyone knows someone that was lost.”

He said the “right thing” would be for Mamdani to respect the families’ wishes and not attend. “But there is nothing else we can do,” Galante added.

Monica seconded Galante’s concerns about the area being, in a sense, hallowed ground, and the potential that Mamdani’s presence will addle the families.

“If the families are going to be upset, I have a problem with that because I don’t want them to be upset. I want them to go there and have their time. And if they’re disrupted, we lose sight of why we’re there, and that’s not good,” she said.

“My idea for the 25th [year since the attack] is for us to go there and commemorate our loved ones, and thank God we can still do that – not be in a political war with someone or having to worry about some of these families feeling that [Mamdani is] affiliated with people that killed our loved ones. That will stress them out and make them angry, and I don’t want anger at the memorial.”

“The memorial needs to be a sacred and hallowed space where there is peace. It’s got to be peaceful. And already I see families are getting upset, and I don’t like that. It really bothers me,” Monika went on to say.

She noted that the question of Mamdani’s attendance had recently become a religious matter too, with US Catholic League president Bill Donohue writing an open letter to Mamdani “respectfully [requesting] that he not attend the 9/11 ceremony.”

Donohue noted that, as mayor-elect, Mamdani did not attend the Veterans Day Parades, and as mayor, did not attend the Israel Day Parade.

“Given that this is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and that your presence would clearly be divisive, that is why there is a petition seeking to stop you from going. It would be best for everyone involved if you skipped this event,” Donohue wrote.

In addition to the emotional needs of the families, Monica spoke of her own needs to grieve and mourn, which she said she cannot do if she is taking care of and advocating for the others.

“Because there’s such contention going on and anger, I can’t mourn properly. I can’t mourn when I have a family member who’s crying or angry. I’m not going to be able to have my own peace because now I have to worry about those families who are going to come to me and be crying and upset.”

Her final message to the mayor? “Just let us have our peace.”

“Don’t stress out these families. Don’t be arrogant and go because you feel like you should go because you’re being defiant now. That’s wrong.”

“Just respectfully say: ‘I see what’s going on. I am the mayor. I’ll take it into consideration. I’m not going to take it personally. Let them have their time.’”

“That’s it. Simple.”


Justice Department appeals dismissal of Jew-hatred lawsuit against Harvard
The U.S. Department of Justice is appealing the dismissal of its antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard University, seeking to revive a case in which the government wants to recover nearly $1 billion in federal grants over the university’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students.

The department filed its appeal on Thursday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, challenging U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns’s Aug. 13 dismissal of the case.

The lawsuit, which the federal government filed in March, alleges that Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to adequately address antisemitism and discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The government alleges that students were harassed, assaulted and intimidated on campus and that Harvard failed to enforce its rules against those responsible.

The Justice Department is seeking to compel Harvard to comply with Title VI and recover federal funds it says the university received while violating the law. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Harvard was set to receive more than $2.6 billion through active grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to the Justice Department.

Mark Goldfeder, director of the nonprofit National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the strongest argument on appeal may center on the distinction between stopping future violations and recovering money already paid out.

“The judge assumed the government could sue to get back funds Harvard drew during the violation years, then threw that claim out because nothing happened after the government’s notice letter,” Goldfeder said. “But recovering past funds is backward-looking by definition, and notice always comes after the violation it describes.”

He said that under Stearns’s reasoning, the government could have little practical ability to recover money already paid to a university for past Title VI violations.

“The Supreme Court has said for forty years that recovering money drawn on broken funding assurances is collecting a debt,” Goldfeder told JNS. ‘A debt does not vanish because the debtor behaves once the letter arrives.”

Stearns ruled that the government had not sufficiently shown that Harvard remained in violation of Title VI after the university was formally notified of the allegations in June 2025.

The judge described the incidents cited by the government as “too isolated and episodic” to establish “a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.” He noted that the lawsuit focused largely on incidents from the 2023-24 academic year and cited only three incidents from March 2025.

Goldfeder told JNS that he believes Stearns got it wrong.

“Congress never wrote an ongoing-violation requirement into Title VI. The court invented one,” he said. “And this is the same judge who found in 2024 that Harvard ‘failed its Jewish students.’ Two years later those findings rated a footnote, and the United States got four pages.”


Author who urged Palestinians to ‘kill the Jews’ appears on BBC Arabic
A BBC Arabic report on the impact of Israel’s war against Hamas on cultural life in Gaza features an author who once posted on social media urging Palestinians to “kill the Jews”.

A second contributor to the same item had previously written a post calling on God to “deal with the Jews”.

The BBC have been informed of the duo’s antisemitic history but have refused to remove the item from online.

The Corporation’s stance appears to be at odds with the commitment by BBC executive Jonathan Munro to address concerns over contributors appearing on the Arabic service.

Critics claim this latest case suggests the BBC’s Gaza coverage does not meet “basic standards of sound journalism”.

The nine-minute segment was first broadcast last year and is entitled: “Thought, Culture and Books - the Silent Victims of the Gaza War.”

Airing claims that Israel has targeted “intellectual life in Gaza” where Palestinians are “forced to burn books to light fire”, it features “intellectual and novelist” Yousri Alghoul.

The self-described “storyteller” talks about how the war has left books “torn apart”, and claims that schools, universities and libraries have been “targeted” by IDF bombs.

He also claims that for want of other fuel, Gazans have forced to resort to using books for fires, adding that he was “forced to burn my memoirs”.

Gaza Municipality Public Library chairman Raed Alwaheidi is also featured in the segment, which tells how the facility is unable to receive visitors and has only a small part up and running.

He says: “Culture here is a thing that is far from political issues, and we are not affiliated with any political side.”

He adds the work in the libraries concerns “culture, literature and thought”.

The social media history of both men includes antisemitic posts, research by US-based pro-Israel media watchdog, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera) reveals.

On October 13, 2015, after simultaneous bus stabbing and car ramming attacks across Israel resulted in the killing of four civilians and a further 26 injured, Alghoul tweeted: “O people of the West Bank... Kill the Jews. Before you are the gas cylinders, the gasoline, the screwdrivers, the cars, the buses, the tractors and the trucks – terrify them.”
Meta, TikTok remove AI-generated account that released anti-Israel song
Meta, the Facebook and Instagram parent company, and TikTok removed a “singer” generated by artificial intelligence that recently released a song called “Palestine Will Be Free,” after the Combat Antisemitism Movement reported the account, the nonprofit told JNS exclusively.

“Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to manufacture hate at scale,” Sacha Roytman, the nonprofit’s CEO, told JNS. “Anyone with a laptop can now build a fake persona, grow an audience with harmless content and then weaponize that trust to spread antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda.”

The “singer” account, which went by the name of Gideon Smith, had drawn a “following through positive, feel-good content and then flipped the switch to push anti-Israel messaging to the audience he manipulated,” Roytman said.

According to a report that CAM shared with JNS, the persona garnered some 155,000 followers on TikTok and 42,000 on Instagram. The account has more than 11,000 subscribers and more than 6,405 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Smith is depicted as a “Midwestern, right-leaning American who publicly defends Islam and the Palestinian cause,” per the report. The account does not disclose that it is generated by artificial intelligence, according to the nonprofit.

JNS reported in January that many appeared duped by an artificial intelligence “Rabbi Menachem Goldberg,” who had 100,000 social-media followers. The Instagram and TikTok accounts for that “rabbi” appear to have been removed.

“Gideon Smith” released songs titled “Media Lied About Islam” and “Palestine Will Be Free.” The latter and its promotional captions “focus on dead children, grieving mothers and American responsibility,” according to the nonprofit’s report.

“They call on Americans to end their alleged complicity in what the account states categorically is a Palestinian genocide being carried out by Israel,” the report states. “This transforms a positive message about religious tolerance into emotionally absolute political persuasion.”


Plans for business park atop site of former Nazi labor camp sparks anger in Austria
A few crumbling concrete blocks in an overgrown field are all that remains visible of what was once a sprawling Nazi forced labor complex around the Austrian town of Leobersdorf.

Now, plans to build a business park on the site of the former Mauthausen concentration camp, including a cold storage warehouse and branch of the discount supermarket chain Lidl, have sparked anger in the Alpine nation, which long neglected to address its Nazi past.

“For me, it’s a sad feeling, because a place burdened by history is being built over, sacrificed to the economy,” Erich Strobl, head of a local campaign to preserve part of the site, told AFP.

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Weinberglager complex was used for thousands of prisoners of war and forced laborers.

It later included the Hirtenberg subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp — Austria’s second-largest women’s camp.

Around 400 women, mainly from the Soviet Union but also from Italy and Poland, were imprisoned at the Hirtenberg subcamp between September 1944 and April 1945 and forced to manufacture infantry munitions at a nearby factory complex.

Although some factory ruins survived, the camp barracks and most other structures were gradually demolished, repurposed or destroyed after the war.

But Bertrand Perz, a historian specializing in the Mauthausen camp, told AFP the Hirtenberg site remains “historically important,” partly because “women prisoners in Mauthausen have been marginalized in the culture of remembrance.”

Plans to build a business park on the plot about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Vienna, including on land that once formed part of the concentration camp, were first revealed in 2024.


Israel-Cyprus-Greece power grid connection gets US backing
One of the biggest concerns during any escalation with Iran is damage to critical infrastructure in general and energy assets in particular. Consequently, Israel has been working in recent years to promote the interconnector project to link up its electricity grid to Cyprus and Greece and from there to the rest of mainland Europe.

However, Turkey's opposition to the project has led to delays to date, preventing actual development of the plan which was launched in 2022, to actually lay underwater electricity cables between the countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. Recently, after a long period of delays, the project received significant support from the US and France.

A US State Department spokesperson said, "The US supports energy security and cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean, including through the Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center, The Trump administration remains committed to strengthening key energy partnerships that enhance global energy security and promote a safer and more prosperous future, with energy security for the US and its partners."

On Capitol Hill, US lawmakers called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the US International Development Finance Corporation to support the interconnector.

The call came after French infrastructure investment firm Meridiam signed an agreement earlier this month that made it the majority shareholder in the interconnector development company. Greece's electricity transmission company, ADMIE, remains a strategic partner in the project.
VW CEO confirms Iron Dome production talks
Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume held meetings this week at the company's plants around the country to present streamlining plans to workers and unions and discuss the cuts needed to overcome the German carmaker's financial troubles. As passed of these meetings he confirmed for the first time that Volkswagen is in talks to save the factory in Osnabruck by using the plant for military production.

"We are currently examining if and in what way we can participate in a future potential industrial solution for the Osnabruck site," said Olef Lies, minister-president of Lower Saxony, according to the "Wolfsburger Allgemeine."

According to the report, the federal government will also take part in establishing a new partnership that will manufacture Iron Dome parts at the plant, and a memorandum of understanding has already been signed with Rafael to produce parts for Iron Dome and other missile interception systems. "Talks are at an advanced stage," it was reported.

Representatives of the trade unions at the plant have also expressed optimism over the past 24 hours, according to the report, which did not name the Israeli government company and spoke of a "future of continued production" at the plant, which produces convertible models for Volkswagen until the end of 2027 and is expected to close if an agreement is not signed.

The involvement of the state and federal governments is supposed to solve problems for Volkswagen, which is hesitant to define itself as one that enters the arms production business. The Qatari investment fund, which holds 17% of Volkswagen shares, has also expressed opposition to the plan in the past.


'The real victory': Former Gaza hostage Elkana Bohbot welcomes birth of new daughter
Former Gaza hostage Elkana Bohbot and his wife, Rivka, announced the birth of their daughter in a Friday Instagram post.

In an Instagram post, Bohbot shared a photo of himself, his wife, and the newborn baby in the hospital. Alongside the photo, he included a passage from the book of Psalms, thanking God.

Bohbot was released from Hamas captivity on October 13, 2025, after spending more than two years in tunnels under Gaza. As part of his recovery, he published a book titled 738 Days in Hamas Captivity, where he recounts his story of survival.

President Isaac Herzog congratulated the couple, passing on his best wishes.

"The real victory!" he wrote in a post on X/Twitter.

"We wish you and your entire family good tidings as you raise her with tranquility, happiness, health, and love."

Head of Yisrael Beytenu, MK Avigdor Liberman, also congratulated the couple on the birth of their new daughter.

"May you raise her in peace and with lots of love. The entire nation of Israel is thrilled together with you."

Former Hamas hostage marries her partner in Tel Aviv
On Thursday, Former Gaza hostage Emily Damari married her partner, Israeli food influencer Danielle Amit, in Tel Aviv.

The couple had gotten engaged in January 2026, one year after Damari was released from Hamas captivity.

The couple was joined by numerous other former hostages at the wedding, including Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher, Liri Albag, Danielle Gilboa, Omer Shem Tov, Keith and Aviva Siegal, and Gali and Ziv Berman.





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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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