2026 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, July 06, 2026

The Human Rights Asterisk for Jews

In June 2026, a group of human rights and humanitarian professionals calling itself EiGHT delivered a submission to Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism, drawn from the first-hand accounts of more than seventy people inside the world’s major rights and aid organizations — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, Oxfam, and others.

Its sixty-three pages are the first extensive insider account of how the sector operates when the subject is Jews.

The findings are consistent across organizations, functions, and continents: complaints about antisemitism produce no consequences; retaliation and non-disclosure agreements used against staff who raise them; Jewish employees excluded from the discussions that concern them; senior leaders publicly modeling hostility toward Israel and Jews; and methodological failures in published work that propagate outward through media, academia, and the courts into public life.

Running through all of it is a single institutional habit. On matters touching Israel and antisemitism, the sector applies its own principles — universalism, neutrality, evidentiary rigor — with a slant. Complaints of antisemitism trigger debates over definition rather than investigations. Israeli and Jewish victims receive systematically less attention and empathy than victims in comparable contexts. Antisemitism, alone among bigotries, is treated as uniquely disputable and politically inconvenient.

The report gathers this evidence overwhelmingly from the inside: its Slack channels, its dossiers, its leaked emails and its exit interviews.

That’s bad enough. But as we’ve seen over the years, it is not surprising — because that is how these organizations and their top officials act towards antisemitism in their public pronouncements as well. These organizations, whose entire warrant is the equal moral standing of every human being, cannot condemn an attack on Jews the way they condemn an attack on anyone else. The condemnation, when it comes, arrives with an asterisk. The clearest proof is in the cases where the condemnation is real.

On 18 November 2014, two Palestinians murdered four worshippers and wounded eight at a synagogue in West Jerusalem. Amnesty International’s statement opened exactly as a human rights statement should: “Nothing can ever justify such an abhorrent attack on worshippers in a synagogue. The deliberate killing of civilians must be utterly condemned.” That is a flat condemnation, and it demonstrates that Amnesty is entirely capable of producing one for murdered Jews.

Having produced it, Amnesty spent the rest of the statement taking it back. Within three paragraphs the document had pivoted to Netanyahu’s promised “heavy hand,” to punitive house demolitions, to collective punishment, to “a spate of unlawful killings of Palestinians,” to settlers attacking olive harvesters, and it closed on the demand that Israel hold accountable “anyone who attacks civilians on either side.” 128 words to condemn the attack; 330 words to warn against how Israel might respond.

A massacre of Jews at prayer had become an excuse to denounce the Jewish state.

Another statement, a year later on 20 November 2015, followed the same architecture.

It opened cleanly — “there can be no justification” for the attacks, “deliberately attacking civilians is contrary to one of the most fundamental principles of international law and can never be justified” — and then folded the murdered Israelis into a ledger that ran through house demolitions, “a pattern of unlawful killings by Israeli forces,” extrajudicial executions, and settler attacks, balancing the dead against the conduct of the state they belonged to.

In both statements the clean condemnation is real, and in both it is a hand extended and then withdrawn. It’s a real shame about the victims, but there are two sides to every story!

Now look at the condemnations Amnesty produces when the victims are not Jews. When a white nationalist murdered fifty Muslims at prayer in Christchurch in March 2019, Amnesty widened the frame — to Islamophobia across Europe, to Le Pen and Farage and Brexit, to Trump and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The widening ran entirely toward the killer’s side, enlarging his guilt into a movement’s, and it never once paused to weigh the murdered worshippers against the conduct of any government they belonged to.

When two men murdered a migrant stopping for water near El Paso in 2022 — having, they said, mistaken their victims for wild animals — seventy human rights organizations signed a letter that named the dead man and the children he left, traced the killing to a “dangerous trend” of white-supremacist violence, invoked the El Paso massacre three years earlier as precedent, and demanded the government answer for the policies that let such violence “thrive.” The state conduct they criticized was the state’s failure to protect the victims.

Every widening ran on the victims’ behalf.

Only when the victims are Jews does the scope of the condemnation get narrowed, not widened. It includes a “but,” implicit or explicit. That is the asterisk.

The asterisk cannot be explained by the identity of the attacker, and the proof is Pittsburgh. In October 2018 a white nationalist — the sector’s least ambiguous villain, the figure it condemns without hesitation for Christchurch and El Paso — murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue.

Unni Karunakara, former international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, responded that blame “must be shared by Zionists like Netanyahu for enabling white nationalists like Trump.” The post was later deleted; the EiGHT submission preserves the screenshot. An attack with no Israeli policy anywhere in its causal chain — a synagogue in Pennsylvania, a gunman animated by hatred of a Jewish refugee agency — was routed back to Netanyahu regardless.

The perpetrator was precisely the kind the sector condemns cleanly. The asterisk appeared anyway, because the only constant it tracks is the identity of the victim.

Amnesty’s own conduct confirms that the asterisk is a choice rather than a reflex. In the middle of that Christchurch essay, the author pauses to recall Pittsburgh: “when a white supremacist entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot dead 11 worshippers.” The reference is clean — named killer, named crime, no pivot, no balancing paragraph. Amnesty can narrate the murder of Jews without an asterisk when the murdered Jews are a supporting example in an essay whose subject is the suffering of Muslims.

The plain condemnation is available. It is withheld only when the Jews are what the story is about.

The report documents a second form the asterisk takes, and Kenneth Roth performed both forms in a single morning. Twelve hours after two gunmen murdered fifteen Jews at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in December 2025, Roth — who ran Human Rights Watch for thirty years — posted that “attacks on civilians are never justified regardless of the cause,” a sentence that enters a cause onto the scale in the same breath it condemns the attack.

Twenty-two minutes later he attacked Netanyahu for connecting the massacre to Australian policy, spending his one substantive invocation of antisemitism that day on defending the “genocide and apartheid” charge against Israel from any association with the killing of Jews. And within days he was attacking Australia’s antisemitism envoy for “cheapening the concept” of antisemitism by linking anti-Israel protest to the murders.

There are the two flavors of the asterisk in one man’s response to one atrocity: the Jews had it coming, and the Jews are too sensitive about it. Both place the Jewish victim, rather than the killer, as the problem in the sentence.

Condemning antisemitism, when it happens, always carries a qualifier — either the Jews provoked the attack or the Jews are exaggerating it — and both qualifiers do the same work, which is to withdraw from Jews the flat, unconditional defense that a human rights organization exists to extend to everyone. Not one Jew can read what Amnesty or Ken Roth or Unni Karunakara writes and think, “they are on our side.” Because they aren’t.

Just as EiGHT documents internally, these “human rights” leaders must be dragged kicking and screaming to write half-hearted public condemnations of Jews being murdered, and even then they must always add that one caveat - don’t forget the Jews are just as bad, too.

Read together, the private evidence and the public evidence describe one movement, deciding case by case and attack by attack that the Jews don’t quite deserve the same presumption of human rights that all other people do.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The New York Times published a piece this weekend on Wikipedia's many enemies. AI companies are scraping it. The MAGA right is smearing it. The US government is hectoring it. Authoritarian regimes are locking up its editors. Through it all, we're assured, Wikipedia remains a bastion of objectivity — "beloved," "credible," a "trustworthy source," per CEO Bernadette Meehan, who gets to make her case in her own words at length. Only crackpots have a problem with Wikipedia, we are reliably told.

There's just one problem with that framing. Wikipedia itself has admitted its Israel-related articles were hijacked.

For at least two years, reporters and bloggers — Aaron Bandler at the Jewish Journal and then JNS, the pseudonymous Wikipedia Flood blog, Ashley Rindsberg at Tablet — documented what Rindsberg dubbed the "Gang of 40": a network of editors who racked up 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 Israel-related articles, rewriting the opening line of "Zionism" to say the movement wanted a Jewish state with "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible," stripping Hamas's charter references to the destruction of Israel, deleting Israel as the origin of the Jewish people from the article on Jews. This wasn't a fringe accusation. In January 2025, Wikipedia's own Arbitration Committee — the "Wikipedian Supreme Court," in the site's own description — banned eight editors from the topic area by name, six identified with the pro-Palestinian side (Selfstudier, Nableezy, Nishidani, Levivich, Iskandar323, Makeandtoss) and two with the pro-Israel side (BilledMammal, AndreJustAndre). More sanctions followed this year, including an indefinite ban for an editor called TarnishedPath in the weeks before the Times piece ran, with a University of Haifa researcher calling it "an important, if overdue, step."

That is Wikipedia, using its own procedures, concluding across multiple cases that its own coverage of Israel had been captured by organized editors. Even after the bans, Wikipedia let the disputed "as few Palestinian Arabs as possible" line stand — an administrator froze it in the article's lead for a full year, shielding the banned editors' preferred wording from challenge until they could appeal. Wikipedia did the same thing to the title of another page, freezing debate over the name "Nuseirat rescue and massacre" — which accuses Israel of a massacre for a hostage-rescue raid — so that no one could even discuss changing it until August 2026. And it wasn't content to let these articles sit quietly in the archive: Wikipedia's own editors linked the "Gaza genocide" article in the "In the news" section of the site's main page, the highest-traffic real estate on one of the ten most visited websites on earth, putting an accusation Wikipedia's own arbitration process was simultaneously investigating in front of millions of readers a day.

This should be the single most relevant fact to a story asking whether Wikipedia's neutrality is a settled matter or an open question, and the Times left it out entirely. Instead, the Times lists a set of critics and files them all under one label: Elon Musk, Ted Cruz, David Sacks, Tucker Carlson, "and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001" — five names, one sentence, one bucket: "the MAGA right." Most of them would object to that label. None of them would say they mean the same thing by their criticism. Musk thinks Wikipedia is "Wokepedia." Sanger, an actual co-founder who wrote much of the site's original neutrality policy, has spent years arguing the site abandoned it. Those are not the same complaint, and lumping them together does exactly what it's designed to do: it lets the reader dismiss all five with one word instead of engaging any of them.

Sanger's case is the giveaway, because the Times itself knows better. Eleven days earlier, on June 25, it ran an entire article on Sanger's ban — his "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity" proposal, the procedural vote that got him banned "indefinitely" days later, his own furious response that he'd been blocked "by the 'consensus' of a mob" with "no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury." That piece treated him as a serious subject worth understanding on his own terms. This piece drops him into a list next to Tucker Carlson and moves on. Nothing about Sanger changed between June 25 and July 5. What changed is which narrative he was being used to serve.

And the criticism of Wikipedia isn't new, and it certainly isn't MAGA. The ADL spent months documenting the same "Gang of 40" pattern the arbitration committee eventually acted on — a report the Times never mentions. Wikipedia's own editors, for their part, responded to the ADL's findings by voting the ADL "generally unreliable" specifically at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism, while keeping it "generally reliable" everywhere else, including on hate groups and extremism. The administrator who closed that vote wrote that the ADL has "a habit... of conflating criticism of the Israeli government's actions with antisemitism." Think about that: Wikipedia's own governance apparatus adopted, as an official sourcing rule, the argument that criticism of Israel is being mislabeled as antisemitism — while Wikipedia's own arbitration committee was simultaneously banning editors for exactly the kind of rabid anti-Israel distortion the ADL had flagged. Wikipedia disqualified the messenger while acting on the message. You wouldn't know any of this reading the Times piece, which treats Wikipedia's reliability as a foregone conclusion rather than a subject with an actual paper trail. (An earlier interview with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales last November likewise doesn't even touch on the anti-Israel bias as he defends its entries on topics like abortion and how well opposing editors work together.)

Maybe the reason the Times can't see any of this is that it suffers from the same affliction it's covering for. A newsroom that already shares Wikipedia's general politics — anti-Israel by reflex in places, reliably left of center, comfortable treating its own instincts as neutral — isn't equipped to notice when an institution built on the same instincts calls itself neutral too. It isn't hiding the evidence. It doesn't register as evidence, because the lens producing Wikipedia's judgment calls is the same lens the Times used to write the story.

This matters well past Wikipedia's own pages, which is what makes the Times' AI section so thin. The piece frames artificial intelligence as a threat to Wikipedia — chatbots "gorging on a data buffet," "polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia." This has some truth to it, but it doesn't mention the real danger from AI.. Nathan Marcus, a former Education Department civil rights official, told JNS that what's frightening isn't just how many people rely on Wikipedia, but that AI models "rely so heavily on it" too — the site can "launder accusations" from anti-Israel sources and "turn them into encyclopedia entries," which then "become the basis for AI-generated materials that become the basis for all sorts of education, indoctrination and decision-making." A ruling like "the ADL is generally unreliable on antisemitism where Israel is concerned" doesn't stay contained to one article once a model has trained on it — it becomes background assumption, repeated with the same confidence as any other fact the model learned. An article asking whether Wikipedia deserves the trust it's given had every reason to ask what happens when that trust gets inherited automatically by the tools answering a growing share of the world's questions. It asked instead whether the AI companies are treating Wikipedia fairly.

Either way, this is a case study in why the Times has bled the trust it used to have. The information was sitting right there — the arbitration committee's own bans, the ADL report, the Times' own reporting on Sanger three weeks earlier. The paper had everything it needed to write the piece its own headline promised: a real look at a real controversy over Wikipedia's objectivity. It chose not to. That's not an accident of space constraints. It's an editorial decision, made by editors, about what the story was allowed to say.

Which puts the Times in exactly the position it's describing. Wikipedia's article on Zionism isn't biased because facts are biased. It's biased because a group of editors decided what counted and what didn't. The Times' article on Wikipedia isn't biased because facts are biased, either. It's biased because a group of editors decided what counted and what didn't. This is the same failure of hubris, with both Wikipedia and the NYT insisting that their own policies inoculate them from bias, that blinds them to the bias itself.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/05 Links: How Israeli Society Reacted to Oct. 7; When Medical Journals Sell Hate Propaganda; Natasha Hausdorff: How the West's own laws are being used to destroy it

From Ian:

How Israeli Society Reacted to Oct. 7

Micha Popper, 78, professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Haifa, said, after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, "We were going crazy, thinking: What can we do? So we drove down to [Kibbutz] Kfar Azza [a few days later]."

"This was during the early days. Everything was in ruins, they had just removed the bodies. We started to clean the refrigerators in the dining hall, to work in the fields - we helped physically with whatever we could, and we were in contact with the army personnel who were in charge of the work there. We decided to go anywhere where help was needed."

"I saw that there are masses of people here who simply couldn't stand by. That wherever there is a problem, they are there. It floored me."

"Everything worked excellently, without the need for meetings, through spontaneous activity that was carried out by talented, take-charge people who came up with ideas of their own."

"And they did it masterfully, with the aid of other skillful individuals: locating missing people; establishing schools and daycare for the people evacuated from their homes; farming; providing psychological assistance to and employment for the evacuees; helping businesses."

"Israelis are problem solvers. Give them a problem and they'll know how to handle it. And then there is the ability to improvise, implement and be creative. That has to do with our history, with survivability."

"And then there is familyhood, which is part of the willingness to step in and carry the burden together."

"There was a woman who understood algorithms, data, and she suggested an idea to locate missing persons with the aid of photographs taken by the [Hamas] terrorists, who filmed everything with their body cameras. To look for all sorts of signs - like a stain on a shirt."

"She brought in a high-tech person and a few other people, and together they created things that don't exist anywhere in the world. After three days it was already up and running. The Israel Security Agency called; they wanted what the group had invented."

"There were plenty of initiatives like that, of people with vision, creativity and knowhow in their fields. No one waited for anyone."

"I saw people coming in private cars to transport equipment to wherever it was needed. I saw CEOs, well-known people who had already retired, companies that donated money. It was like they were all on steroids; people didn't sleep."

"Having so many go-getters is something you don't see anywhere in the world."

Gerald Steinberg: When Medical Journals Sell Hate Propaganda: The Lancet Crosses the Line (Again)

The ramifications of The Lancet’s role in this campaign should disturb anyone who takes science, medical ethics, and professional accountability seriously. It is also, more broadly, another step toward the normalization of silencing among doctors and health providers — actions that have become distressingly common among academics, including medical schools. The central involvement of once respected humanitarian NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders highlights the processes by which these structures have been hijacked by small groups of anti-Israel activists.

Horton has a long history of abusing his position and The Lancet to publish pseudo-scientific articles filled with false accusations against Israel, including an “An Open Letter for the People of Gaza,” a heinously propagandistic screed. Two co-authors had sent emails to other medical professionals under the subject line “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix” that promoted a video featuring white supremacist leader David Duke and other antisemitic materials.

In 2014, following many calls for Horton’s removal, he suddenly appeared before an audience of Israeli doctors and expressed contrition, declaring he was hurt by the accusations of antisemitism and of abusing his position as editor of the medical publication.

But now, Horton and The Lancet have reverted to earlier form, joining in a campaign led by fringe NGOs that singles out Israel for opprobrium and vicious demonization. Once again, the abuse and lack of accountability is blatant.

In response, Horton repeats his standard claim that professional journals should not be “neutral” or hide their “moral outrage,” in this case, triggered by Israeli actions in Gaza following the October 7 atrocities. But this argument collapses in the absence of any criteria or review processes for the ostensibly moral claims and the evidence ostensibly behind them. Instead, moral outrage is simply an excuse for abandonment of scientific principles — and systematic discrimination and bias targeting Israel in general, and medical professionals in particular.

Neither The Lancet nor the NGOs pushing this campaign have called for boycotts of medical associations in the many countries involved in actual — as distinct from invented — ethical violations, for example, Russia, Iran, Sudan, and China.

The credibility of scientific publishing depends precisely on the ability to distinguish between evidence-based claims and ideological advocacy. By erasing that distinction, this once respected journal is transformed into another platform for orchestrated discrimination and demonization.

The responsibility for ending such abuse rests first and foremost with the publisher, Elsevier, and its corporate framework, which has already allowed Horton to control this platform for far too long. The lack of oversight and accountability, and the stain resulting from the trashing of medical ethics has spread throughout Elsevier’s network of publications and other activities. The time to pull the plug on this farce is long overdue.

Doctors Without Borders plagued by deep-rooted antisemitism, anti-Zionism, NGO Monitor says

Antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and other expressions of hostility are “deeply rooted” within Doctors Without Borders (MSF), claimed NGO Monitor in its new report “Documenting the Antisemitic Organizational Culture of Doctors Without Borders.”

The report documents MSF’s internal staff conversations and culture regarding Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the personal experiences of Jewish staff members within the organization.

Based on these many testimonials by MSF insiders, NGO Monitor says it is “clear that antisemitism and anti-Israel bias are widespread in MSF’s organizational culture and are expressed by both top officials and lower-level staff.”

One testimony is from former MSF Secretary-General Richard Rossin, who, on July 13, 2024, told Canada’s National Post that the ideological bias against Israel “was perceptible around the beginning of the 80’s.”

“Antisemitism within MSF began under the cover of anti-Zionism. It [the ideological shift] cannot be fixed. How can you fix antisemitism, which is not an opinion but a mental disease?” Rossin said.

MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team
The National Post wrote, “Rossin recalled his experience in 2010 on a mission to Uganda when an MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team dispatched to help. Rossin remembered it as an episode of ‘one-way empathy,’ where prejudice had poisoned the MSF team’s ability to cooperate with Israel in their shared goal of helping civilians. He feels these same issues continue to plague MSF’s mission in Gaza today.”

NGO Monitor also draws on the words of Alain Destexhe, a doctor with MSF in the 1980s and its Secretary-General in the 1990s. In an October 2025 interview, Destexhe stated: “I think now MSF in Gaza is really taking the side [of] Hamas and against Israel. Americans need to know that Doctors Without Borders is not anymore the organization that it was 15 or 20 years ago. It has become a biased, partial and militant organization.”

“MSF is lying, MSF is partial, MSF is biased, and MSF is an accomplice of Hamas.”

MICHAEL GOLDFARB, who is Jewish, spent 15 years at Doctors without Borders US. He told The Jewish Chronicle of London in March 2026 that “European colleagues freely told me, knowing I am Jewish, that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.”

“You see extreme ideological fervour – Israel as a Nazi state, Jews as the oppressive, colonial, white supremacists, Zionism as Nazism,” Goldfarb said. “Nothing meaningful has been done to address antisemitism, to show solidarity with Jewish staff, or call out this hate. That creates a permissive environment in which it flourishes.”

A biting Palestinian cartoon criticizing Egypt during the World Cup

Egypt's World Cup coach Hossam Hassan waved a Palestinian flag on the pitch after his team’s victory over Australia in the World Cup, saying he was dedicating it to both Egyptians and Palestinians.

Palestinians are celebrating Egypt's victories, Egyptians are celebrating their supposed love of Palestinians.

One Palestinian cartoonist sees through the hypocrisy.

Dr. Alaa Al-Laqtah portrayed a Palestinian child climbing the barbed wire fence between Gaza and Egypt, his feet bloodied, crying, as he waves an Egyptian flag to celebrate. The caption says "The people of Gaza are cheering the Egyptian national team."

The world sees Arab "solidarity" with Gaza and ignores the reality: no one wants to actually help Gazans who want to leave. Egypt's wall to Gaza is much larger and more elaborate than Israel's. From the start of the Gaza war, Egypt and Jordan vowed not to let any Palestinians who wanted to flee Gaza to be allowed in their territory.

But Arab media, including most Palestinian media, don't want to rain on the "solidarity" parade, even though it is a joke. In fact, most people sharing the cartoon do not seem to realize the irony behind it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Israeli Arabic site Makan reports:

The Jewish community in the German capital, Berlin, expressed its anger over a Palestinian art project scheduled to take place over the weekend in the Neukölln district, arguing that it links the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust by using sites dedicated to commemorating Jewish victims killed during the Nazi era.

The project, titled “Walking with Gaza Monologues,” is an initiative organized by the “Ashtar” Theater in Ramallah. It involves taking participants on a tour, using an audio guide, among the copper “stumbling blocks” planted in the sidewalks of the neighborhood streets, which commemorate the Jews who lived there and perished in the Holocaust, while at the same time the participants listen to testimonies and monologues of residents of the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Elio Adler, a prominent figure in Berlin's Jewish community, described the project as an affront to the memory of Holocaust victims and demanded its immediate cancellation. He stated that the "stumbling blocks" are not merely urban elements or public symbols of suffering, but each one bears a person's name and address and commemorates a Jewish life lost during the Holocaust. He argued that using them in this context conflates Israel's war against Hamas with the memory of the Holocaust.

Adler called for an immediate halt to the tours, demanding an investigation into how public funds reached the project and for action to be taken against those responsible, noting that the event, in his view, contradicts the principles that emphasize the privacy and centrality of Holocaust remembrance in Germany.

This is truly outrageous, and even more so if it is funded by German public funds.

I could not find this story in any German or English language outlet at this time. But Dr. Elio Adler is a leader of the Berlin Jewish community, Ashtar is a Palestinian theatre company, and they have sponsored "The Gaza Mono-logues" worldwide together with dozens of local theatres since 2010, updating it periodically.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/04 Links: America at 250: Why Washington’s promise to US Jews still matters; 1,000 days after Oct. 7, the Jewish people stand proud; 'Hijacked his name': US genocide institute faces probe amid Israel attacks

From Ian:

250 years of America: The alliance that safeguards the free world

Not just interests
Some believe that the closeness between Israel and the United States stems solely from geopolitical considerations. There is no doubt that shared interests matter, but they do not explain the depth of the relationship. The deeper reason is that Israel and America are perceived, by their friends and enemies alike, as representing a similar idea: human liberty, moral responsibility and the belief that man is created in the image of God.

It is no coincidence that regimes and movements that hate the Jewish nation also tend to hate America. And with almost the same consistency with which hatred of Jews has served as a moral test for societies, hatred of America has also become a moral test of nations, regimes and individuals. Despite all its flaws, America alone stands between democracy and the rise of tyranny around the world, and so it is no surprise that among tyrannical regimes and their defenders, America and Israel are so often identified as one and the same enemy.

This is not only because the United States stands alone behind Israel; the United States has also given generously to various Arab states, and at several critical moments even supported Arab regimes (such as Nasser’s Egypt in 1956) against Israel itself. This hostility stems largely from the fact that America and Israel continue to strive toward a moral ideal higher than themselves: the belief that liberty is not only a right but also a moral responsibility granted by God, and that a nation’s strength is measured not only by its power but also by its values. This is also why the two non-Muslim countries that have suffered the most casualties from Islamic suicide bombings are the United States and Israel.

An alliance that must never be taken for granted
For precisely these reasons, neither Israelis nor Americans can afford to take their alliance for granted. The special relationship between Israel and the United States is founded on far more than defense agreements, military assistance or intelligence cooperation. Above all, it rests on cultural, moral and spiritual foundations that have been built over more than four centuries, from the voyages of the Mayflower and the Arabella to the New World, through Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and into today’s Oval Office.

This is why the relationship between the United States and Israel has endured crises, changes of administration, and political disagreements for nearly eight decades. It is also why it has the strength to withstand the challenges of the future.

As America marks a quarter millennium of independence, and Israel continues to fight for its security and its right to exist, we should remember that the alliance between Jerusalem and Washington did not begin in 1967, nor even in 1948. Its roots run far deeper.

They are anchored in an ancient book given in the wilderness of Sinai thousands of years ago, a book that found a home at the very heart of the American story. That is why this alliance is greater than any administration, deeper than any disagreement, and longer-lasting than any political cycle. As long as both nations remain faithful to those values, they will not only secure their own futures, but also strengthen the very foundations of the free world.

Happy Independence Day, America. And thank you.

America at 250: Why Washington’s promise to US Jews still matters

As America celebrates Independence Day and the 250th year of our Republic, it is worth recalling one of the founding promises that has distinguished our nation from the beginning.

In 1790, president George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, assuring a small community of Sephardi Jews that the Government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Those words were no mere courtesy. They were revolutionary.

The Jews who received Washington’s letter were descendants of families expelled from Spain and Portugal, driven from one refuge to another across Europe, the Caribbean, and the New World. They knew what it meant to live only on sufferance, forever dependent upon the whims of princes and magistrates.

Washington offered something radically different: not toleration bestowed by a sovereign, but equal citizenship secured by law.

Americans of every faith, he declared, would stand not as guests but as equal members of one republic. Each would “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

America at 250: The triangular relationship between US, Israel, and Jews is at risk

The weakening relationship with the US, Israel, and American Jews

But strength does not last forever. A sober look at this triangular relationship shows that each of its sides has weakened in recent years.

On the Washington-Jerusalem axis, American public support for Israel has declined significantly and worryingly.

Significant parts of the Democratic Party now voice sharply critical positions toward Israel, while even among younger Republicans, the once-instinctive warmth toward Israel can no longer be assumed.

On the Washington-American Jewry axis, changes are also evident. Waves of antisemitism from the fringes of both the American right and left have raised the fear that the golden age of American Jewry may be coming to an end.

Finally, on the Jerusalem-American Jewry axis, cracks are visible as Israeli governments have failed to invest sufficiently in cultivating the vital ties between the two branches of the family.

The gaps between an American Jewish public that tends toward liberalism and an Israeli society that tends toward conservatism are growing wider. The unfortunate facts are clear: Israel’s position as a central anchor of identity for North American Jewry is no longer what it once was.

The government formed after the elections will need to think anew about how to strengthen each side of this triangle.

This will require renewed investment in bipartisan support in Washington, serious engagement with younger Americans across the political spectrum, and a deliberate rebuilding of trust between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

The resilience of “we, the Jewish people” depends on the success of this effort.

07/03 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The fateful question for Diaspora Jews; Why two Jews left London for the Jewish State; 70+ NGO staffers allege antisemitism, lack of accountability in new report

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: On its 250th birthday, Jews mustn’t abandon the fight for America

If Jewish life is unsafe in America, it will be unsafe everywhere. And that will impact Israel as well. That’s why it is essential that, rather than giving up or giving in to hysterical talk about the end of American liberty and even the end of American Jewry, we must recommit to the fight to roll back the woke tide on the left and its antisemitic echo on the right—and to defeat it.

This may be a generational struggle in much the same way that leftist efforts to impose these false beliefs on the United States were one. But it is a battle that is necessary to fight—not just to save American Jewry, but to save the canon of Western civilization on which our freedoms rest.

The contempt for traditional patriotism and belief in the truth that the American republic—flawed though it might be—is a force for good in the world has already been made clear by left-wing elites. But as discouraging as this discourse may be, it is a reminder that the stigmatizing and targeting of Jews is part and parcel of the same struggle that other Americans are engaging in. America is and always has been exceptional. But it will only remain that way so long as a broad cross-section of its citizens—Jews and non-Jews, liberals and conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans—are willing to stand up against the woke forces seeking to traduce its founding values.

The appropriate answer to attacks on Jews is not flight or a call to shelter in place. Jews must speak up and not abandon the streets or the public square to the antisemites and woke mobs. The rejoinder to anti-Jewish violence and intimidation is for Jews to act in the most quintessential American way possible: to arm themselves and make it clear that they will not be intimidated or silenced.

Those who hate the founding principles of the United States, in addition to its Jewish residents, may seem to be on the ascent, as election results in various Democratic Party primaries have shown. But they are wrong about the end of American greatness or the need to transform it into some pale reflection of Marxist or Islamist concepts. And as dire as the situation may seem at the moment, these enemies of liberty may be sealing their own fate with their attempt to foist antisemitic extremists on a country that is inherently moderate and where Jew-hatred of this type has always been confined to outliers rather than the mainstream.

Faith in the good sense and decency of the American people may seem like a forlorn hope when you witness the ability of figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to affect the future of American democracy. But those who bet against America have always been shortsighted suckers. Right now is no time to doubt that this will continue to be the case.

On this 250th Independence Day, rather than writing off America, we should be embracing it all the more enthusiastically and pledging to defend it against those who wish to tear it down. The alternative is not merely unthinkable; it’s an abandonment of Western civilization, and all that decent people hold dear.

Happy birthday, America! Even on your worst day, we still believe in you, and we know you’re worth fighting for.

Melanie Phillips: The fateful question for Diaspora Jews

More profoundly, Zionism is not a political cause. The religion of Judaism is itself inseparable from the land of Israel. Judaism consists of the belief by the Jewish people that they were given a Divine command to create a particular kind of society in the land that was promised to them.

Jewish religious liturgy is studded with countless references to Zion, the ancient Hebrew name for the land. Zionism, which emerged as a discrete political movement in the 19th century, is thus intrinsic to Judaism.

Of course, Jews who aren’t religiously observant are still Jews, just as are Jews who are anti-Zionist. But in Judaism, the people, the faith and the land are inextricably connected. Trying to pluck Zionism out of Judaism is to destroy it by plucking out its heart.

So, attacking the Jewish world is to attack the West; attacking Israel and Zionism is to attack Judaism.

Many Diaspora Jews won’t acknowledge this because the implications are too devastating. Especially in America, where the majority of Jews have signed up to anti-Jewish liberal ideologies, many of them will therefore dump Israel.

Observant Jews will remain loyal, and more of them will move to Israel. A number of progressive Jews, meanwhile, are agonized. Finding that their erstwhile comrades have now turned viciously against them over their support for Israel’s existence, they feel like politically homeless Jewish orphans.

It’s now more than 1,000 days since the terrible events of Oct. 7. During that traumatic period, which is still far from over, Israel has changed. It has returned to the biblical ideal of the heroic Jewish warrior nation.

This isn’t just because of its astounding military and intelligence prowess, or the awesome bravery of its fighting forces.

It’s also about its moral courage. It’s about the way it surmounted the devastating shattering of its security; the trauma of seeing so many of its precious and beautiful children fall in battle; the nightmarish return of the unspeakable shadow of the Holocaust, from whose ashes it had somehow emerged.

It’s about how it stared down disaster, demoralization and death, determined instead to fight for life—the life of its people in their ancient home.

Israelis fight to live because they passionately love what they are. They aren’t conditional Jews or Jews with trembling knees or confused Jews with hyphenated identities.

They are Jews who are made whole and complete by the land of Israel. They triumphantly reaffirm every single day what Judaism is: the faith and culture of a people created through a sacred covenant in their own land.

Oct. 7 and its aftermath forged the Israeli spirit anew in iron. Oct. 7 and its aftermath left Diaspora Jews terrified and uncertain about what they are.

The Israelis are fighting for the life of the Jewish people. Can Diaspora Jews say the same?

Why two Jews left London for the Jewish State

"A terrorist just tried to stab Jews at my work" - This was the text Joseph received in January 2024, moments after a Muslim terrorist walked into his local Kosher supermarket in London and tried to stab Jewish shoppers. The only reason no one was killed was because a heroic worker held the terrorist off with a shopping cart until his arrest.

The attack itself was terrifying, but what followed was worse. The perpetrator, Gabriel Abdullah, was arrested, charged, and convicted - but didn’t serve a day in prison. To Jews, the message was clear: Britain tolerates violent antisemitism.

A few months later, Joseph experienced this ‘tolerance’ firsthand when an antisemitic mob surrounded and threatened him, as seen in the video below. The police were present, but instead of intervening, they just watched.

For Alex, the turning point came during the 2014 Gaza war. That year, Alex and Joseph began filming Palestinian protests together, and he quickly realized the antisemitism they were witnessing wasn't an aberration; it was the tip of the iceberg.

While the spike in antisemitic incidents in the UK was alarming, it was what Alex saw in France that truly disturbed him. During the 2014 Sarcelles riots, a synagogue was besieged, and Jewish-owned businesses were targeted in scenes reminiscent of a darker era, signaling a complete collapse of public order for the Jewish community. Witnessing the speed at which this hatred manifested in France, he concluded that it was a contagion: the turmoil he saw in Paris would inevitably reach Britain, and the patterns established in London would eventually reach America and Canada.

The Ratchet Effect
After the conflict ended, Alex identified a recurring pattern he termed the ‘ratchet effect.’ During the conflict, antisemitic incidents surged, but with the toxic combination of social media and changing demographics, the baseline of hatred never retreated to previous levels after the conflict ended - it just ratcheted up. He realized then that this was a cycle without a ceiling. From Gaza and Lebanon to the catastrophe of October 7, each flare-up has made these incidents increasingly violent and uninhibited.

As the number of attacks on Jews increased, the British authorities consistently failed to protect Jewish citizens. The failure reached a nadir during the May 2021 Gaza war; on the same day that Islamic extremists were hunting Jews on streets with a police escort, a convoy of cars drove through Jewish neighborhoods with a megaphone, calling to rape Jewish women. No one was jailed for these offenses.

07/03 Links Pt1: Why the Lancet study suggesting a far higher Gaza death toll is deeply flawed; Operation Entebbe, 50 years on: The rescue that reshaped Jewish history; Israel accuses Turkish FM of incitement to genocide

From Ian:

Why the Lancet study suggesting a far higher Gaza death toll is deeply flawed

Dramatic outliers like this are a clear red flag, and according to the survey's own design, catching this kind of problems was supposed to happen during fieldwork. In our critique, we pointed out that it didn't: neither Gaza9 nor Gaza3 was flagged as an outlier during the data collection.

In response to our critique, the authors dispute this and claim that these anomalies "were visible from early in the survey and actively discussed." However, the paper itself contains no indication that the anomalous data were flagged to field workers or supervisors as they emerged. Instead, the discussion of the Gaza9 anomalies appears only during the analysis phase, when the authors calculated violent death estimates, after all survey data had already been collected.

As part of that analysis, they also estimated the effect of excluding Gaza9, noting that doing so "does substantially lower our estimate for the size of the MoH undercount." Only then do the authors report looking into the reason for the outlier, writing: "So, we investigated further and found that three PSUs [survey sampling areas] covered by this team were in shelters that give special preference to families that have lost members during the fighting…"

And that after-the-fact analysis covered only Gaza9's mortality numbers. Nowhere in the paper are Gaza9 or Gaza3 identified as having unusual demographic profiles – smaller households and far fewer children – which should have also been flagged as anomalies. The paper does discuss demographics, but only to show that the data set as a whole doesn’t match what's known about Gaza's population overall. That is a different claim entirely: it says nothing about whether any specific team's results were completely out of line, which is exactly the question Gaza9 and Gaza3 raise.

Rather than address that gap, the authors try to downplay the importance of these imbalances by pointing to their use of statistical weighting – a procedure meant to adjust the results, so the full data set matches the population's known characteristics. However, while weighting can correct some small deviations, it cannot repair a situation where a handful of teams produced vastly different results. It's a bit like putting a band-aid on a structural crack: it may make the surface look more even, but it does not repair the underlying problem and doesn't clarify why the problem wasn't addressed early on.

The authors further suggest that the Gaza9 results may reflect a "genuine spatial concentration of violence". However, the data show that Gaza9 consistently reported higher mortality than other teams operating in the same areas. In at least one particularly clear case, Gaza9 reported deaths in 10 out of 20 households, while another team working just a few buildings away reported none. Such a discrepancy is difficult to reconcile with any claim of a “genuine spatial concentration of violence”.

Differences of that magnitude cannot plausibly be explained by local variation. If location were the primary factor, teams operating side by side would be expected to report broadly similar results. Instead, the discrepancies appear to track the teams, not the locations – pointing to a problem with how the data were collected rather than where they were collected.

The bottom line
The survey's headline claim – that the Ministry of Health undercounted deaths by roughly 35 per cent – rests on the assumption that the sample represents the population. The study’s own data say it doesn't. Fieldwork repeatedly seems to have departed from the sampling plan, a small number of teams drove a disproportionate share of the results, and those same teams produced demographic profiles unlike the wider population. Remove their data, and the gap largely disappears within the survey's own margin of error.

This isn't some technical nitpicking for its own sake. What's at stake here is a dramatic claim that got treated as settled fact – cited, repeated, and stretched to cover deaths it never actually measured – when, in fact, the sample behind it was just too broken to support it.

UN COI Report Discredits Itself With Claims About IDF Quadcopter Attacks On Minors

The June 18 Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (COI) report, alleging that the Israeli military deliberately targeted Palestinian children as part of a strategy to commit genocide during the October 7 War, is based heavily on fantastical beliefs, presumptions, and speculation about Israeli military technologies and tactics that severely discredit the document’s conclusions. In the first in a series of articles on the claims, the COI’s allegations about fleets of firearm-equipped quadcopters demonstrates the unreliability of the report.

COI Commissioner Srinivasan Muralidhar explained to CNN in a Saturday video interview that the “strongest evidence” that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was deliberately targeting children was “a combination of quadcopters, sniper rifles, and drones.”

Yet the arguments regarding these quadcopters are also the elements that most cast doubt on the veracity of the report.

Many of the alleged incidents highlighted as evidence in the COI report involved the ostensible use of quadcopters equipped with rifles and sniper rifles to target children, claiming that of 168 minors reported to the COI killed or wounded by gunshots between November 2023 and July 2025, 70 were supposedly shot by quadcopters. Anonymous doctors reportedly told the COI that there was a consistent pattern of children seeking treatment from quadcopter gunshots. One doctor reportedly estimated that, within two weeks of her tenure in a hospital, she supposedly saw around five children shot by quadcopters.

Firearm Quadcopters are Uncommon
The chief problem with the underlying claim that serves as the basis of much of the COI report is that firearm-equipped quadcopters are simply not in service to the extent that would match the supposed widespread pattern. Prototypes for firearm-equipped quadcopters exist, but there is no evidence for widespread deployment in Gaza. To the contrary, the use of firearm-equipped quadcopters is rare enough that Gaza deployment veteran IDF soldiers consulted with by HonestReporting had never seen or were unfamiliar with such a platform. Military analyst Andrew Fox also wrote in 2024 that his sources within the IDF indicate that the weapons were not in widespread use by the Israeli military.

Cube-Shaped Bullets
Perhaps the most implausible claim about the armed quadcopters is that they shoot cube-shaped pellets. Muralidhar told CNN that cube-shaped pellets were used by armed quadcopters in at least one instance. The report asserted that the supposed ammunition was designed to cause superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. The quadcopter models mentioned in the report are equipped with standard firearms adapted for the drones. These firearms operate in a manner unlikely to facilitate cubed projectiles. This, along with the ballistic aerodynamic issues for such a projectile, make them unlikely to exist.

A celebration of Jewish American history from 1926

From the Buffalo Jewish Review, July 30, 1926.

The Jews in Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

BY HAROLD BERMAN

At this time, when the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is being celebrated, the role of the first Jewish settlers in the early history of the country is of particular interest. The part played by the Jews in the life of the nation up to the time of the Declaration of Independence is dealt with in this series, the present dealing with the Hebraic influences on the Pilgrim Fathers and the growth of the Jewish settlement in Rhode Island, founded on the broad basis of religious freedom and outstanding for its tolerant attitude to all sects.—THE EDITOR.

It is a fact, too little known to most people, that the Pilgrim Fathers, the real founders of the American Commonwealth, and the builders of this now so mighty and free nation, were animated by the old Hebraic spirit that they had imbibed from their daily and attentive perusal of the Old Testament. The Pilgrim Fathers, in their revolt against the Church and Governmental authorities in the homeland, which revolt drove them to seek asylum first in the more hospitable Holland and afterwards to cross the Atlantic in search of a new home, drew their inspiration from the Books of Moses and the Prophets. And when, after much peril and hardship, they finally did reach a haven of safety, they set about to organize their new life on the old Judaic pattern.

In the writings of the time, the Pilgrims frequently refer to themselves as “Christian Israel,” James I, their persecutor, is “Pharaoh,” the Atlantic was the “Red Sea” that they had crossed in order to reach the “New Canaan,” to get to America. “Whither the Shekinah had guided them through the sea.” “Hebrew mortar,” says Lecky, “cemented the foundations of American democracy,” while the historian John Fiske affirms that “the same ethical impulse which animated the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel their commanding influence in the world” has also influenced the early American colonists.

And later on, when fate had ordained it that the colonies should undergo the test of fire in the days of the Revolution, to prove their heroism and devotion to the country of their birth or adoption by their action of self-sacrifice and daring that such luminous pages in the annals of the period form.

What is said above is especially true of the Rhode Island colony.

It was the great privilege of Israel of old,” reads the foreword to the 1658 revision of the Pilgrim Code, “and so was acknowledged by them, Nehemiah the 9th, 13th. That God gave them right judgment and true lawes and accordingly wee can safely say that wee have had an eye primarily and principally unto the aforesaid Platforme.” “Ye Judicals of Moyses,” says Bradford, “are immutable and perpetual.”

The sentiment in the American colonies being such, it stands to reason that the Jews, suffering from persecution in all Christian countries at that time and undergoing actual martyrdom and untold tortures in some of them, should seek asylum in the colonies planted by a freedom-loving people in a land situated on the further side of the wide ocean, far, far removed from the flames of the Inquisition and the ferocity of persecuting rulers and fanatical populaces. And so we find Jewish settlers in practically all of the thirteen American colonies; a greater number in some of them, a lesser number in others, but everywhere forming a highly intelligent and active element, contributing of their best to the economic and cultural development of the growing settlements.

For this broad-minded attitude, so much in contrast with the narrow-mindedness and intolerance that characterized the neighboring Puritan Colony of Massachusetts, the founders of Rhode Island received not a little of scolding and reprobation, it is true. Cotton Mather, the great Massachusetts Divine, refers sneeringly to the new colony as “the common receptacle of the convicts of Jerusalem and the outcasts of the land.” But this sneering did not at all deter Roger Williams and his noble-minded associates from proceeding with their task of establishing on the American continent one little spot that shall serve as a haven of refuge and safety for all men, irrespective of the creed that they profess or even the absence of any. This was an attitude centuries ahead of time, an ideal not yet entirely translated into life even in our present day.

No sooner did the news of the founding of the Rhode Island Colony reach the Jews of New York, still subjected to many lurking restrictions and annoyances at the hands of its Dutch rulers, than an active movement began amongst them for emigration into the new colony. In 1657 quite a few of the New York Jewish settlers left for Rhode Island, and there were presently augmented by the arrivals from Brazil the West Indies and other points. In 1755 (before the N. Y. exodus), the Jewish Community of Newport, R. I., counted 40 families. Their number increased with the passing of time, and with the growth of the town as a commercial center.

How important Newport was considered commercially in Colonial days can be learned from a perusal of contemporary documents, the records of the customs entries of that and other ports, as well as by reading the pages of subsequently-written history. “He was thought a bold prophet,” says the historian Eggleston, “who then said that New York might one day equal Newport.”

Among the earliest known and most active Jewish settlers of Newport were Jacob Rodriguez-Rivera and his son-in-law Aaron Lopez. Rodriguez-Rivera arrived at Newport in 1743, while Lopez came in 1748. Both were exceedingly enterprising and active men of business, contributing not a little to the industrial and commercial prosperity of the rising settlement. It is a matter of record that of the 150 vessels engaged in general trade at Newport at this period, Lopez owned not fewer than 30—or 20 per cent. Jacob Rodriguez-Rivera was extensively interested in whaling, in the manufacture of candles (of which he had in operation no fewer than 13 factories at one time), in the manufacture of whaleoil and other widely-used products. Indeed, the extent of Rivera’s traffic in these necessities was such that his sway extended to practically the entire New England region, so that it had been facetiously remarked by some students of the period that the true progenitor of the Oil Trust was not John D. Rockefeller, but Jacob Rodriguez-Rivera of Newport, and the oil thus monopolized was not the modern petroleum, but the oil extracted from the blubber of the whale. Its ramifications, however, Inter-Colonial in their scope, affecting the inhabitants of most of the New England colonies.

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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Free Beacon reports:

The internal chaos roiling the Committee to Protect Journalists deepened late Wednesday, when the embattled advocacy group’s board of directors—under fire for the anti-Israel bias of several members, including the vice chair—voted to affirm that "organizations affiliated with militant groups" meet the criteria of a legitimate journalistic outlet "provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect."

The CPJ’s board voted 17 to 1 in favor of keeping this contentious definition, according to one person familiar with the situation, with Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote. The CPJ’s influential list of "Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War," which has been used by news organizations to discredit Israel’s war effort, contains dozens of names of military operatives for Hamas and other terror groups.

This sounds principled — do not presume a journalist is acting as a combatant unless they are holding a gun. But it betrays an ignorance of how war works.

A spotter is a person whose entire job is to watch enemy positions and movements and relay what he sees to the fighters who will act on it. The ICRC's Interpretive Guidance on Direct Participation in Hostilities treats that activity as combat. Section V.2.(c) lists "the identification and marking of targets, the analysis and transmission of tactical intelligence to attacking forces" among the acts that constitute direct participation in hostilities, stripping civilian protection. The Guidance's own worked example, in footnote 103, is a civilian who repeatedly peeks into a building where enemy troops have taken cover in order to indicate their location to attacking forces; the ICRC concludes she has directly participated in hostilities, because what mattered was the importance of the transmitted information to the execution of a concrete military operation. A person whose only observable act is watch-and-report loses protection under the framework built to protect civilians.

That is for a civilian. All the more so does this apply to a member of a militant organization who reports to a media outlet that is also part of the military. It would be naive in the extreme to presume that a person whose entire salary is paid by, and whose allegiance is entirely to, a terrorist group is only observing enemy positions rather than relaying them. It is even more naive to think that the militant news outlet is not relaying information to their own bosses who are holding the guns. Journalists who belong to Hamas use even more effective tools of combat than a traditional spotter - they can openly operate with a camera (with a telephoto lens) that displays, in real time, video of the enemy position over the Internet directly to Hamas leaders.

The United States DoD Law of War Manual (§5.8.3.1) names the spotter as a paradigm case of direct participation, alongside relaying target intelligence and guiding forces to a target, and no one can plausibly accuse the DoD Manual of violating international humanitarian law — it is the codified practice of the world's most-scrutinized military and it lands in the same place the ICRC does. Two frameworks built from opposite starting points, the humanitarian and the operational, agree that transmitting tactical observation to a fighting force is combat.

The CPJ just handed Hamas and every terrorist organization a gift. Terrorists need only issue every spotter a 'Press' jacket, and CPJ will protect them by policy. The global journalism apparatus that follows CPJ standards has made itself an accessory.

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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Asser Levy, the American Jewish Hero who Fought the Antisemitic Peter Stuyvesant

In September 1654 a French frigate put twenty-three Jewish refugees ashore at New Amsterdam, and a few weeks earlier a handful of Jewish traders had arrived from Amsterdam on their own account. These were the first Jews in what would become the United States.

Holland was the most liberal nation in Europe towards its Jews. Sephardic Jews owned houses among the wealthiest Amsterdam merchants, worshipped openly, and held a real if deliberately limited form of city citizenship. For most of the medieval centuries a Jew in Christian Europe could not own land, making the Jew a licensed guest rather than a rooted member of any place. Amsterdam was where that rule had bent. The Jews who sailed for Manhattan already knew what a measure of equality felt like, and they meant to keep it.

On Manhattan they met a governor determined to take it away.

Most Americans who know the name Peter Stuyvesant at all know him as a peg-legged Dutch official from a Washington Irving story. What the record shows is a man who tried to keep the Jews out of the colony entirely and, failing that, spent years working to make their lives there untenable, and who was candid about why. When the refugees landed he wrote to his employers in Amsterdam for permission to expel them, calling the Jews a “deceitful race” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” who should be required “in a friendly way to depart” before they could “infect and trouble this new colony.”

New Netherland was a commercial venture of the Dutch West India Company, whose directors in Amsterdam answered to profit and to their own shareholders, a number of whom were Jews. When Stuyvesant asked to expel the refugees, the directors refused him, citing the “considerable loss” the Jews had suffered in the fall of Dutch Brazil and the “large amount of capital” that Jews still held in Company stock. They ordered him to let the Jews “travel,” “trade,” “live and remain” in the colony. This handed the small Jewish community two things a royal colony never would have: an appellate authority above their local tormentor that could be moved by commercial interest, and a written grant of rights they could hold the colony to. Every fight that followed, they fought on that ground.

And fight they did. Stuyvesant would move against them, the community would appeal over his head to the same directors, and the community would win. When he forbade them to trade at Fort Orange and on the Delaware, confining their commerce to Manhattan, they cited the Company’s own grant that they might trade “like other inhabitants,” and the directors reversed him again. Having failed to expel them, he had tried to fence in their livelihood, and that failed too. This was a community that knew its rights and pressed them forcefully.

In the fall of 1655, with the colony ordered to arm against the Swedes on the Delaware, the council ruled that Jews would not stand guard alongside the other townsmen, citing the “disinclination and unwillingness” of the Christian militia to share a guardhouse with “the aforesaid nation.” In place of service the Jews would pay a special monthly tax, sixty-five stivers a man. It was a tax laid on Jews alone, dressed as an exemption from a duty they had been forbidden to perform.

Asser Levy, a butcher who had only recently arrived, refused to pay, along with Jacob Barsimson. He petitioned instead to be allowed to stand guard like everyone else, or else be released from a tax charged only to Jews for an exclusion they did not ask for. The council held its line and told the two men they were free to leave the colony if the arrangement displeased them. Levy did not leave, and within a year and a half the record shows him standing guard like any other burgher.

The colony still refused to let Jews own real property, blocking Salvador d’Andrada’s purchase of a house he had won at public auction, and here the community pressed the point they had already won. In a March 1656 petition the Jews noted that if they were taxed and burdened like other burghers, they should “enjoy the same liberty allowed to other burghers,” to trade and to own land. Obligation and right were two halves of one thing, and a government that wanted the first could not forever withhold the second. That is the moral logic of citizenship, argued from the floor of a Dutch trading post more than a century before Jefferson wrote a word of it.

Levy again was in the forefront. In April 1657, when the city made burgher status a precondition for trade, he appeared in court two days later to demand it, resting his claim on the very guard duty the colony had first tried to deny him. He kept watch and ward like any burgher, he said, and held a burgher’s certificate from Amsterdam besides. The court, taken aback that he would ask, refused him and referred the matter up to Stuyvesant and the council, who reversed it: Jews would be admitted as burghers of New Amsterdam.

Levy went on winning. When the city licensed him as a sworn butcher in 1660, the oath of the office required slaughtering hogs; Levy asked to be excused on religious grounds, and the magistrates agreed.

In 1662 Levy became the first Jewish landowner in North America, with a house on Stone Street in what became New York City.

By 1664, when the wealthiest inhabitants were called on to lend the city money against the English threat, Levy was the only Jew among them, and he lent his hundred florins with the rest.

In 1673, he sued the City Weigher, Dietloffson, for “affronts” — probably antisemitic remarks. The court decided in Levy’s favor. That’s a Jew in colonial New York suing a city official for what was likely an antisemitic insult and winning.

What the Dutch records show most of all is Levy in court, again and again, arguing his own cases and mostly winning them. His tireless fighting for Jewish rights earned him respect among the Christians. Property in dispute was placed in his keeping. Christian merchants named him executor of their wills. When a Jew ran into trouble with the authorities in Connecticut, Levy intervened and got the fine remitted, and the court recorded that it did so “as a token of its respect to the said Mr. Asser Levy.” A man who had refused to accept second-class terms, and who forced colonial courts to treat him as an equal, ended up trusted rather than despised. The fighting was what earned the respect.

We’ve discussed the importance of Washington’s letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, where he said "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” But the Jews were not granted those rights in pre-Revolutionary America. They earned them. And Asser Levy was one of the leaders in that fight.

Louis Marshall saw this clearly when he wrote about Levy for the Buffalo Jewish Review at America’s sesquicentennial in 1926. He said that the records of Levy’s civic victories were “more potent in their consequences than those won on the bloody fields of battle.” He was right: a battlefield victory secures a country while a courtroom victory of Levy’s kind defines what kind of country it will be. Equality in America was not handed to the Jews as a gift of the founding. Some of it was already theirs before the founding, because men like Asser Levy had walked into court and fought for it.

Drawn from Louis Marshall’s “The Ascent of American Israel” (Buffalo Jewish Review, July 30, 1926) and Samuel Oppenheim’s “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664” in the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Stuyvesant’s 1654 letter to the Amsterdam Chamber and the Company’s 1655 reply survive in the Dutch colonial records; the Asser Levy entry draws on Leon Hühner’s biography.

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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)