Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 02, 2026

04/01 Links Pt2: Do not look away from the rising fires of Jew hatred; Three arrested inc. Pakistani teenager over Golders Green firebomb attack; Herzog: ‘Spirit of our people’ has always prevailed

From Ian:

Do not look away from the rising fires of Jew hatred

Can we all agree this is madness? How can it be that, as a child here, it almost never crossed my mind not to be openly and fearlessly Jewish, and yet I now wait in trepidation for the day one of my young children returns home from school or an outing, asking me to explain Jew hatred?

In just the past few weeks, a branch of Gail’s bakery in Archway was vandalised because it was founded by an Israeli Jew (who is no longer involved in the business), and then the incident was belittled in the Guardian. A report into campus anti-Semitism revealed that one in five students would refuse to live with a Jewish peer. An inquiry had to be launched into anti-Semitism in schools. Meanwhile, down in Margate, an art exhibition titled ‘Drawings Against Genocide’ depicts Israelis and Israel Defence Forces soldiers as demons, murderers and baby-eaters. Artist Matthew Collings claims the work is not anti-Semitic, merely ‘anti-Zionist’. Thank goodness he cleared that up!

This is what we’re up against. Anti-Semitism has had a rebrand and, honestly, activists have done a fantastic PR job. Say whatever you like about the Jews and carry out as many petty acts of anti-Semitism as you please – as long as you take care to use today’s euphemisms of ‘anti-Zionism’ or ‘Israel criticism’, you’ll get away with it.

Despite all of this, I still believe that the vast majority of Britons are not anti-Semites, and that growing numbers are sickened by what they see. Unfortunately, too many of our non-Jewish neighbours are looking away when they should be staring into the flames, as we are forced to do.

The Jewish community does not have the privilege of looking away. While I can shield myself from terrifying video footage of anti-Semitic murder and destruction, I cannot avoid reckoning with the daily reality of life for Jews in Britain today.

This week, Jews celebrate the festival of Passover, when we recall how Moses led us to freedom from slavery in Egypt. It is one of our most important festivals. It celebrates the privilege of not just freedom itself, but also the ability to live freely as Jews. It is a message that has always resonated strongly with me. But this year I find myself asking: when does living with unease become living in fear? In the past, I always believed myself to be truly free, as a person, as a Jew. Today, I’m not so sure.

Seth Mandel: How the Jewish Community Can Fight Tokenism Without Self-Destructing

Since October 7, anti-Zionist politicians and political institutions have relied more than ever on a specific tactic to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism: putting liberal and leftist Jews front and center and using them, essentially, as human shields.

This puts the global Jewish community in a bind. How do we call out this rank tokenism without allowing the debate to descend into an intra-Jewish fight that leaves the politicians unscathed but the Jews further fragmented?

The answer is to focus most of our ire on those responsible for pitting the Jews against each other. Obviously, Jews who allow themselves to be used in this manner are not without agency and therefore their actions can and should be criticized—just without losing sight of the way political systems historically take advantage of Jewish infighting.

Sometimes, the institutions that deserve to come under withering rhetorical fire aren’t political in the classic sense. Take the media. A couple of months ago, I noticed something reading the stories about Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s trip to Australia after the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre.

The Guardian headlined its story: “Isaac Herzog’s four days in Australia left him ‘energised’. For the Jewish community, some saw solidarity while others felt ‘serious angst’.”

The article claimed the trip brought “significant disquiet within Australia’s Jewish community.”

Commenting in favor of Herzog’s visit were the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. The ECAJ is the umbrella organization of Australian Jewry that represents over 200 Jewish organizations. The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which is listed as a territorial body of the ECAJ, oversees 55 such Jewish organizations.

The quotes from officers of these two organizations, therefore, can be reasonably said to represent Australian Jewry.

On the other side, being quoted against Herzog’s visit was… something called Jewish Voices of Inner Sydney. The leftist organization does not have much of a footprint and appears to have launched in 2024. Judging by its occasional forays into the public discourse, I can say with some confidence that it has a membership of at least 25 people. As of this writing, it has a whopping 126 followers on Facebook. It is a complete nonentity.

To say that it was unethical of the Guardian to frame its story this way based on some As-a-Jew garage band is to understate the point. The one person from this group the Guardian quotes hardly seems worth spending much time and energy on. The Guardian, on the other hand, is an influential tool of anti-Zionist agitation and ought to be subjected to heaps of scrutiny before anything it writes about Jews and Judaism are to be treated with a grain of seriousness or credibility.

The Guardian uses liberal Jews as human shields, and until it can prove that this has changed, it should be branded as such. Make the paper the primary target.

NYPost Editorial: This is a Democratic Party push to expel Jews from public life

The Democratic Party’s growing antisemitic wing is out to blacklist support for Israel, or at least the nation’s main pro-Israel lobbying and political action group, AIPAC.

Never mind that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spends far less than other interest groups: Climate-obsessed California billionaire Tom Steyer, a prime AIPAC-denouncer, has spent much more on campaign donations all by himself these last few years.

But such is the power of Democrats’ hard left that delegates to the Democratic National Committee’s April meeting will debate a resolution that first condemns “the growing influence of dark money and corporate-backed independent expenditures in Democratic elections” but then singles out only AIPAC as “undermining public trust in democratic institutions.”

But AIPAC isn’t “corporate-backed” or “dark money”: its SuperPAC donors, all successful American individuals, are completely open about who they are and what they support.

The same cannot be said about the real dark money spent on American politics, most of which — about $1.2 billion — supported Democrat candidates and issues in the last election cycle.

04/01 Links Pt1: Trump claims Iran 'no longer a threat' in update on Operation Epic Fury; Iran's Danger Must Be Judged by "Unacceptable Risk," Not "Imminent Threat";

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Yes, This Is Your War, Too

But whatever the administration decides to do, what isn’t viable is for Americans and our allies to pretend that they can be indifferent to the outcome of the war. When someone like Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, says, “This is not our war,” the appropriate response is: Are you serious?

In June, Pistorius’s boss, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, acknowledged that Israel’s attack that month on Iran’s military and nuclear sites was “dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.” Has something changed in his government’s strategic calculus about the threat Iran poses, other than its overriding opposition to the Trump administration?

In January, the United Arab Emirates announced in no uncertain terms that it would not allow its airspace, territory or ports to be used for an attack on Iran. The declaration was a transparent effort to insulate the Emirates from Iranian reprisals. For its pains, Iran has since hit Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other Emirati targets, military and civilian, with at least 433 ballistic missiles, 19 cruise missiles and 1,977 drones.

Now the governments of Spain and Italy are replicating the Emirates’ strategy, barring the U.S. from using bases (and, in Madrid’s case, its airspace) for attacks on Iran. Do those governments think they’ll be spared Tehran’s furies should they one day come into range of Tehran’s missiles? For that matter — given Trump’s ambivalence about the war in Ukraine — do Europeans think the administration is more likely to support NATO in the event of a Russian attack when NATO has been so hostile to American efforts to defang Iran?

For Americans, especially those who often oppose the administration, the question is whether our distaste for this president should get the better of our strategic judgments about the threats Iran poses. In The Wall Street Journal recently, the lawyer David Boies, a prominent Democrat, noted that if Trump had failed to act, “his successor would have been left with an even more dangerous choice than his predecessors left him. Three or four years from now, the Iranian missiles now hitting Iran’s neighbors could be hitting Berlin or London, perhaps even New York or Washington.”

If Democrats can’t bring themselves to support Trump, they can at least support policies that will make the strategic choices for the next Democratic president easier rather than harder.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” is a line widely attributed to Leon Trotsky. If that’s the case — and history tells us it is — shouldn’t you be interested in winning it, too?

Iran's Danger Must Be Judged by "Unacceptable Risk," Not "Imminent Threat"

Did Iran pose an imminent threat to the U.S.? "Imminence" is not a precise or objective term that presidents should employ only if intelligence experts endorse it. In national security affairs, it is almost always debatable. Besides, "imminence" is not the right concept for deciding whether and how to respond to a grave threat from abroad.

To grasp why it is not right, ask yourself: When did the Sep. 11 attack become imminent? When did the attack on Pearl Harbor? When did Russia's invasion of Ukraine? When did the Holocaust? When did the threat of British tyranny that justified the American Revolution? The concept of "imminence" offers no useful guidance for confronting complex threats of this kind.

Is a threat imminent when the enemy becomes hostile? Only after they perfect the means to attack us, or only after the enemy puts them in motion as part of an attack? Does it matter if the enemy appears unstable or ideologically fanatical? Does it matter if the enemy's means of attack are apocalyptic - nuclear weapons on long-range missiles, for example?

The relevant concept is unacceptable risk, not imminent threat. Presidents have the duty to decide whether a foreign threat poses risks that require a U.S. response. They have the responsibility to decide whether a threat is grave enough - and no means short of war can reduce the risk to an acceptable level - to make war necessary.

As a rule, only an imminent threat justifies police officers' use of deadly force. But is it sensible to import that concept into national security affairs today, when a country like Iran calls over decades for "Death to America," commits numerous murderous aggressions, and devotes enormous resources to developing terrorist proxy networks, nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles?

You can still download two EoZ Haggadot to print before the Seder!

My brand new philosophical/analytic Haggadah, At Ptach Lo, recently reviewed at Times of Israel:

At Ptach Lo is a bold and intellectually demanding work that reimagines the Passover Haggadah as a sophisticated philosophical system. It challenges readers to rethink familiar rituals, confront difficult truths, and see themselves as active participants in an ongoing historical and moral narrative.

Full English and Hebrew with 45 essays showing a side of Jewish thought you may not be aware of, built into the Haggadah. $20 for the PDF.

My original Zionist Haggadah, Hayinu K'Cholmim, has also been revamped and updated.

It includes many commentaries from major rabbis of religious Zionism, relating the Exodus with the rebirth of Israel. Full English and Hebrew. $12 for PDF.

Chag kosher v'sameach!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Last week in Sydney, Candy Berger arrived at her brand-new bagel shop in Paddington to remove the brown paper covering the freshly renovated windows. She had been excited to finally share the new space with the public. Then she saw the swastika.

Investigators determined that the symbol had been etched into the glass on March 21 — while the windows were still papered over, weeks before Lox in a Box was scheduled to open.

It turns out there is a wave of attacks on....bagel shops.

In London last February, Gail's Bakery in Archway had its windows smashed and its facade spray-painted with "reject corporate Zionism" and "boycott." In December 2024, the iconic Brick Lane Beigel Bakery in London — a local landmark operating for decades — was targeted with a swastika on the mural next to its facade. In Miami in June 2024, Holy Bagels & Pizzeria was spray-painted with "Free Palestine" and "Stop Genocide" — the fourth time the owner's kosher bagel shops had been hit since October 7. In Berkeley in March 2024, "Israel baby killer" was stenciled in the spot where customers line up outside Boichik Bagels — despite the business having made no political statement of any kind. In Queens in November 2024, a man entered Bagels and Company, demanded employees remove Israeli flags, and threatened to burn the building down. In Detroit in August 2024, the entire staff of the Detroit Institute of Bagels walked out to protest the owner's Jewishness and his supposedly "Zionist political leanings." And in Paris in 2019 — years before October 7, before anyone had heard of "decolonization" as a rationale for spray paint — "Juden" was painted on the window of a Bagelstein shop in the old Jewish quarter. The French League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism displayed that photo alongside an image of a Berlin shop marked identically in 1938.

Why are so many bagel shops the target of vandalism? What can they possibly have in common that upsets so many people?

Clearly, bagels are a colonialist food.

Or consider the alternative explanation, which happens to be true: the bagel is arguably the most successfully assimilated Jewish food in the Western world. It completed the full journey — from the pushcarts of the Lower East Side and the ovens of Krakow to every supermarket, every airport kiosk, every brunch menu on earth. It shed its ethnicity somewhere around 1985. The everything bagel with lox and cream cheese is now as generically American as the hot dog, and Gail's — the London chain with the Israeli co-founder — has 170 locations across Britain selling to people who think of it as simply a nice place to get coffee and a pastry.

The bagel stopped being Jewish. It became just food.

Antisemites are putting the Jewish back on it.

This is te deliberate re-Judaization of a food that had been successfully integrated into the broader culture. Bagels represent Jewish success in the West, and that is what makes them arrestable targets antisemites who pretend to be "anti-Zionist."

Every owner in every case above told the same story. None had taken a political position. Boichik's Emily Winston said, "It feels very bullying here — if you don't wave the Palestinian flag, it's not okay and you're a bad Jew. But if you wave a Palestinian flag, then it's okay, because it's not that we dislike you because you're Jewish, but because you're not pro-Palestine."

Jews who dare own bagel shops must pass a purity test to determine if they will or will not be targeted. It is essentially mob-style tactics but instead of shaking down the shop-owners for money they are demanded to turn against their own people - or else.

The historical template is not subtle. Federal Judge Roy Altman, who came to the Miami shop to help scrub off the graffiti, said it plainly: "My grandparents went through the 1940s in Europe, and this is how it started — spray painting Jewish businesses."

The 1938 Berlin shop had "Juden" painted on its window not because its owner had done anything. Jews were collectively responsible for whatever Jews were accused of in that moment.

The specific accusation changes. The targeting logic does not.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/31 Links Pt2: Israel’s sniveling classes are in the minority; The Sham of 'Disarming' Hamas; UN Sends Billions to Islamic Terrorists Who Kidnap its Staff

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Israel’s sniveling classes are in the minority

In other words, outside the curated echo chamber of the likes of Seroussi, Israelis are doing what we always do: debate, grumble and persevere—raising families at the highest rate in the Western world, and managing, against all odds, to sustain an upbeat mood under the constant strain of having to defend against enemies bent on wiping us off the map.

Seroussi’s woe-is-me theatrics aside, Israel ranks eighth on the latest World Happiness Report. Evidently, the citizens polled neglected to align their answers about their overall well-being with the gloom and doom emanating from left-wing Hebrew-language TV studios.

Not only that. Surveys indicate that an overwhelming majority of Israelis back the war against Iran and its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon—despite having spent the past month running to bomb shelters throughout the day and wee hours of the night.

Seroussi and her fellow moaners are free to view things differently. They’re also at liberty to depart for what they imagine to be greener pastures abroad.

Such prerogatives are among the many options taken for granted by the sniveling classes. You know, the people who tend to omit a certain inconvenient phenomenon for Jews, regardless of their political persuasion: the explosion of antisemitism in New York, London, Paris and just about everywhere else.

It’s open Jew-hatred that would have seemed unfathomable not long ago, though probably not to Seroussi’s grandparents.

Jonathan Tobin: Gavin Newsom and the Democrats’ Israel problem

Simply put, there is a broad consensus within Israel that stretches from left to right on these issues. That consensus views a Palestinian state, such as the one that existed in Gaza prior to Oct. 7 in all but name, as an invitation to future slaughter and perpetual war. It also understands that the only option available to them with respect to Iran, as long as it is governed by fanatical Islamist theocrats, is a fight to the finish.

Seen from that perspective, it makes even those Democrats who claim to be supporters of Israel, though bitterly opposed to its government, like Newsom or even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, as not merely out of touch with the realities of Israeli politics but also with their own voters. Such candidates may try to finesse the issue, as Newsom and Shapiro are trying to do, by declaring their support for Israel while avowing perpetual opposition to Netanyahu and Trump. But even if you take Netanyahu out of the equation, there is no conceivable government that could emerge from the next Israeli election that would have policies on two states or Iran that any almost any Democrat outside of an outlier like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa) could support. And as far as the left-wing base of the Democratic Party is concerned, all Israelis and their American supporters—be they Jewish or Christian evangelicals—are backers of the mythical “genocide” and “apartheid.”

And that is why Israel is a land mine that Democratic presidential contenders understand can blow up their ability to reach their party’s activists who are the key to winning primaries and the nomination.

The two parties move in different directions
It’s true that there is also a vocal anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic faction on the right that is unhappy with Trump’s pro-Israel policies. But it is clearly a minority with most Republicans, including the MAGA base. Most are enthusiastic supporters of Israel and of Trump’s stands, including the current war on Iran. And that has also placed Vice President JD Vance, the putative champion of the Tucker Carlson anti-Israel wing of the party, in a very uncomfortable position. He and his staff are reduced to leaking their unhappiness with Netanyahu, as well as their hopes about brokering a deal with Iran, to left-wing publications like Axios.

The anti-Israel right may think that it can reverse the GOP’s pro-Israel stance if Vance wins the presidency in 2028. But their problem is that unlike the situation on the other side of the aisle, the Veep’s coolness to Israel and the conflict with Iran is making that prospect far less of an inevitable occurrence than it seemed just a few months ago.

But for Democrats, the trend is moving in the opposite direction.

The best that supporters of Israel can hope for from a Democratic presidential candidate going forward is exactly the sort of dodge Newsom has just demonstrated—by talking out of both sides of his mouth. He signaled acquiescence to the “apartheid” and “genocide” blood libels while saying he supports a mythical Israel that has, like the few remaining liberal Zionists, learned nothing from Oslo, the events of Oct. 7, or Iran’s role in fomenting terror and war. Some “moderate” Democrats may think that trying to thread the needle in this way will allow them to be acceptable to both left-wingers and Jewish donors. That’s a sham that increasingly fewer opponents or supporters of Israel will accept.

Yisrael Medad: ‘The Three Cs’ and company

The person on the other side of that conversation was Robert Emmet Patrick Barron, a theologian who serves as bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. In a follow-up post on X, he was more explicit in his opinion about Boller.

He wrote on March 20: “Boller … has called out myself and other Catholic members of the commission for not defending her. This is absurd. Mrs. Prejean Boller was not dismissed for her religious convictions but rather for her behavior at a gathering of the commission last month: browbeating witnesses, aggressively asserting her point of view, hijacking the meeting for her own political purposes.”

He also clarified the Catholic position on matters of “Zionism.” For Barron, the State of Israel has a right to exist, though the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism. He ended, writing: “To paint herself as a victim of anti-Catholic prejudice or to claim that her religious liberty has been denied is simply preposterous.”

These people, righteously raging their Christianity, may be suffering from a form of persecutory delusion. That mental and psychological framework has led them willingly to be accused of irrationality as an element of modern-day martyrdom. They feel, for some strange reason (unless it’s all about the greenbacks), that being in a minority—one that is ridiculed—is actually “proof” of the truth of their convictions. They are pig-pen delighted to exist in their unique in-group status as champions of an outlier view of Jews.

Owens, and specifically, Boller, display the obvious new convert fervor that forces them to be so overtly extroverted in their disgust of fellow Christians and hate for Israel and Judaism.

Social psychology researchers have found that people can form self-preferencing in-groups, even if they are in a significant minority position. In doing so, while experiencing feelings of exclusion, they nevertheless achieve a higher awareness of their identity. In the case of “The Three Cs,” this perception excites them and provides a form of self-justification. They resist the obvious evidence of their irrationality and reject sensible, contrary logical arguments that disprove their beliefs.

And why do we not hear what Carlson, Boller and Owens have to say about the actions of Arab terror groups and Islamist countries against Israelis and Jews? Or about the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands? Why the dichotomy? Why sound the one note?

The danger is that their lack of any real success—beyond temporary media fame and, possibly, fortune—is that their anger only increases. While all they are doing is talking, the true evil is emboldening all those others who hate, channeled through computers and online instruments.

03/31 Links Pt1: Hegseth: Iranian Missile Strikes Fall to Lowest Level, ‘Widespread Desertions’ Squeeze Regime’s Fighting Force; Israel ends all defense deals with France

From Ian:

Lessons from the Iran War

The centers of gravity on both sides of the Iran war are holding up under military pressure: Iran's command and control, its domination of a still-cowed population, ability to block shipments out of the Gulf, and its missile and drone stocks; the U.S., Israel, and Arab states' internal cohesion, weapons stocks, and despite considerable oil and gas price increases.

Neither side is displaying a decisive collapse of will, with Gulf Arab states so far demonstrating both resilience and defiance of Iran. There will not be a collapse of will by the Israeli government and population. For Israel, this conflict, correctly, is existential and the costs so far are easily bearable. Under such conditions, the conflict likely will shift to negotiations with or without a ceasefire.

Iran is a cause more than a state, although it presents as both. Its attacks on civilian targets in neighboring states seeking to remain neutral, and targeting of international oil supplies, have revealed the regime's nature. The region will never be really at peace unless either the very nature of the regime changes into that of a normal state, or it is stripped of all capability, in perpetuity, to project power through nuclear weapons, drones and missiles, terrorists and proxies.

Iran is able to prioritize its ideological mission of regional domination and religious orthodoxy over its own population, economy, and even military losses in a way most normal modern states cannot. It's hard to break the iron will of ideological states at almost any pain level.

Israel's extraordinary military success both offensive and defensive, the Israeli people's resilience, and its intelligence capabilities in this conflict give it dramatic dominance in the region, building on its previous success with the help of others decimating the Iranian proxy network. But it does not have the strategically mobile ground forces to decisively defeat Iran or other distant foes.

Iran's current strategy is simply to keep shooting with whatever is left of its not inexhaustible but very large weapons stocks until the pain on Gulf states and the American public, diminishing American and regional partners' own weapons stocks, and events elsewhere force the U.S. and Israel to end operations, with or without a face-saving formal understanding with Iran.

John Spencer: What Are Iran’s Centers of Gravity and How Are They Being Attacked?

The United States and Israel are not simply working through a list of targets in an effort to destroy Iran’s military piece by piece. They are applying pressure across multiple parts of the same system at once. Production, command, naval capability, sensing networks, infrastructure, and support networks are all being hit in ways that reinforce each other.

That is what a center of gravity approach looks like in practice. Not a single decisive strike, but a series of actions that collectively make it harder for the system to function, adapt, and recover.

Clausewitz’s warning about dispersion still applies. Effort should be concentrated. But concentration does not always mean a single point. It can mean sustained pressure against the elements that give the enemy its strength.

There is also a dimension of modern war that Clausewitz could not have fully imagined. The ability to strike not just the system, but the individuals who animate it, at scale and with precision. Today, the United States and Israel are not only degrading infrastructure and capabilities. They are systematically targeting the leadership that commands them. Political leaders, military commanders, and those responsible for missile forces, naval operations, nuclear development, and proxy networks. This is not incidental. It follows the same logic. If the center of gravity is the regime’s integrated ability to generate and sustain coercive power, then removing the leadership that directs and coordinates that system directly attacks its function and its will. It introduces paralysis, disrupts continuity, and signals that no part of the system is protected.

And even then, the outcome is not automatic. War is a contest of will. Striking a center of gravity is not about destruction alone. It is about compelling the enemy to do your will through the use, or threat of use, of force, including military action, sanctions, and the removal of critical capabilities the regime sees as vital to its survival.

If the campaign is successful, Iran’s critical capabilities are degraded or destroyed, and there is a real possibility the effects of the war will be visible in decisions, not just damage. That could include Iran handing over its nuclear material, accepting intrusive inspections, ending the program in a way that cannot be easily reversed, halting missile development at scale, reducing or ending support to proxy forces, and abandoning the use of the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of coercion.

Those outcomes are the measure. Anything short of that may represent significant damage. It may even look decisive in the short term. But Clausewitz would caution against confusing damage with success.

IRGC Opposes Negotiations with U.S.

Contacts between Iran and the U.S. are intensifying, Israel Hayom has learned.

In Washington, officials believe that Iran's economic and military distress will push Tehran to accept the 15-point American proposal within a matter of weeks.

Negotiations are currently being conducted by a handful of senior Iranian leaders still in place, alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

The main obstacle remains the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The U.S. has demanded guarantees that the entire leadership, including the Guards, accept the terms.

At this stage, the Iranians have been unable to provide such guarantees because of the fierce opposition of Mohammad Vahidi, the Guards' current commander, to the very existence of negotiations. In the United Arab Emirates, Iranian financial assets have been frozen, with the intention of using them as compensation for the damage caused by Iranian attacks.

The media refuses to acknowledge Muslim antisemitic attacks

At 2 a.m. on September 27, 2024, a University of Pittsburgh student was walking through Oakland when a group of men spotted something around his neck: a Star of David necklace. That was enough. They called out slurs. They argued for four minutes. Then one of them punched the student in the face.

The university's campus safety alert described the suspects as males, ages 20 to 24, between 170 and 200 pounds, two of them over six feet tall. The mainstream press described the perpetrators as "a group of men."

A rabbi in close contact with the victim said they shouted "Free Palestine" and "F— Jews," details that surfaced in the Jewish press but not in most coverage.

I found one news story at the time that gave more information that may reveal exactly what kind of attackers they are:

Suspect #1 – Male, aged 20-24, about 6 feet tall and 170 pounds, brown complexion, dark hair and a beard, wearing a white t-shirt and a gold chain.
Suspect #2 – Male, aged 20-24, about 5 feet 8 inches tall and 170 pounds, brown complexion, dark hair and a beard, wearing an orange shirt.
Suspect #3 – Male, aged 20-24, over 6 feet tall and about 200 pounds, brown complexion, dark hair and a beard, wearing a dark-colored zippered hooded sweatshirt.

Then came eighteen months of silence.

Last week a federal indictment was unsealed. Six men are now charged:

Their names are Muhammed Koc, Omar Alshmari, Abraham Choudhry, Emirhan Arslan, Ali Alkhaleel, and Adeel Piracha.

They don't sound like white supremacists.

Every outlet runs the names — the indictment forces that much — then moves directly to the legal charges, a generic ADL statement, a generic Jewish Federation quote, without a word about who these men are or what tradition of thought produces young men who cannot let a Star of David pass without confrontation.

The names are printed. The question the names raise goes unasked.

The indictment fills in what the press would not. The defendants said things like "I hate Jews, and I hate Israel." Afterward, in a Snapchat group called "No Saving for the Love of God," one asked: "was it the white boy who had the Israel chain?" When the FBI came calling, a defendant asked Snapchat's AI chatbot what the charge for lying in court is. The chatbot answered: perjury. He lied anyway. When a witness asked Koc directly whether he attacked the victim for talking back or for being Jewish — "Please do not say bc he was Jewish" — Koc didn't deny it. He responded: "An FBI investigation over a busted lip."

Everyone understands, at some level, that Muslim antisemitism exists. Iran targets Jewish institutions across multiple continents. The Arab world has embedded antisemitism in state media and school curricula for decades. Surveys show over 90% antisemitic attitudes in many Muslim majority countries. Hamas's founding charter is an antisemitic manifesto with a military budget. At the macro level, Islamic antisemitism is fully acknowledged.

It just never seems to apply to specific cases or specific attackers.

The double standard has two sources, operating in opposite directions.

From the Left, the problem is ideological. The progressive framework for antisemitism is built on whiteness and power — prejudice flowing downward from the privileged to the oppressed. A Muslim attacker breaks that model. He belongs to a designated victim class. So the hatred gets reframed: he was angry about Gaza, reacting to occupation, expressing solidarity in an unacceptable way. The attacker becomes a victim of context. The Jewish student becomes collateral damage in someone else's narrative.

From the Right, the silence is more cynical. Anti-Muslim sentiment runs strong on the far Right, but it's generic — immigration, terrorism, cultural threat. Calling out Islamic antisemitism specifically would require treating Jews as genuine allies against a common enemy, and that is not the coalition the far Right wants to build. There is also a deeper discomfort: the antisemitism of the Pittsburgh attackers and the antisemitism lurking in corners of the far Right share more ideological DNA than either would care to admit.

The victim is abandoned from both directions.

What community would produce people who say "I hate Jews, and I hate Israel"? Nobody will ask.

The answers matter, because antisemitism is not a single undifferentiated hatred that generic condemnation can reach. Far-Right antisemitism, progressive antisemitism, strands of Black nationalism, Louis Farrakhan-style hate, and Islamic antisemitism all emerge from completely different, often mutually contradictory assumptions about Jews. The white supremacist sees Jews as a racially alien force corrupting Western civilization. The far-Left activist sees Jews as the vanguard of colonial oppression. Islamic antisemitism draws on a theological and cultural tradition that predates Israel by centuries and has nothing to do with settlements or occupation, whatever its current political packaging.

Each requires a different diagnosis and a different response. Lumping them under "hate has no place here" does not counter antisemitism: it performs concern while avoiding the work. A response calibrated to white supremacy will miss Islamic antisemitism entirely. A response designed to placate progressive sensibilities will explain it away before it can be named. And Holocaust education doesn't make most Muslim youth more sympathetic towards Jews but instead prompts them to hate Jews more.

The worst part of ignoring specific Islamic antisemitism in attacks in the West is that it signals permission. When six men attack a Jewish student, shout that they hate Jews, coordinate a cover-up, and are met with coverage carefully constructed to ask no questions about their background — what is communicated to the next group of young men who see a Star of David at 2 a.m.? Not that the world is watching. Not that their community will be held accountable. The systemic antisemitism that led to that point will not be the subject of anguished op-eds or soul-searching in the Muslim community.

CAIR-Pittsburgh, which claims to oppose antisemitism, sure didn't issue any statement about this - but it condemned another attack against a Jewish Pitt student earlier in September 2024 when the attacker was clearly not a Muslim.

That is not accountability. It is the architecture of impunity.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard released a propaganda video showing they shooting rockets at Israeli and American targets.

A decal was placed on one of the rockets, with a Quranic verse about Mary and then an additional, non-Quranic verse, saying, "In revenge for all Christ's suffering."

Quran 4:157 explicitly says the Jews did not kill Jesus. While the first verse is Quranic the call for revenge to Jews for killing Jesus has nothing to do with Islam.

Iran is trying to get Christian antisemites on their side in this war.

Arabic sites and social media reporting on this understand the message clearly, saying that the IRGC caption accompanying the video says, "This missile is revenge for Christ and his mother Mary for what they suffered at your hands, O Jews."

Antisemites are being increasingly recognized as an important influential bloc by many on the Right, the Left and the Muslim world. Ten years ago they subtly pushed antisemitism, now they are trying to curry favor with antisemites to join their cause and not the others.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/30 Links Pt2: No one can deny it now: anti-Zionism is an ideology of hatred; Feminism’s Jewish Problem; The disturbed mind of the anti-Israel activist

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neil: No one can deny it now: anti-Zionism is an ideology of hatred

Actually, it was even worse than that. Over the weekend, Polanski aimed his ire not at those Green activists spouting Jew hate on WhatsApp but at a Jewish journalist who had the temerity to interview members of his family about the Green Party’s possible adoption of a ‘Zionism is racism’ policy. Polanski himself is Jewish and the fine journalist Nicole Lampert found that some of his relatives think he is taking the Greens in a very dark direction. They said it would be devastating for Britain’s Jews if the Greens decreed that ‘Zionism is racism’ – a policy they didn’t get around to discussing in the end at their party conference this weekend. Polanski accused Lampert of ‘parasitic behaviour’ – oof – and she swiftly found herself on the receiving end of a shitshow of hate from all those ‘good guys’.

So, a recap. Green activists referred to Jews as an ‘abomination to this planet’. The Green Party is considering adopting a policy singling out Jewish nationalism as racist. Polanski called a Jewish journalist ‘parasitic’. And, going back further, the Greens’ deputy leader, Mothin Ali, made excuses for the anti-Semitic barbarism of 7 October 2023, as did other Greens. Can we say it now – that the Green Party has a very serious problem with that most ancient of bigotries?

The Israelophobic left loves to say: ‘But Polanski is a Jew! How can you say the Greens have a problem with Jews?’ Here I will merely cite the words of Ms Lampert, who has been fighting the Jews’ corner in British journalism for many years. Polanski uses his Jewish heritage, she wrote in the Telegraph, to ‘kosherise the rampant Jew hatred in the Greens’. It’s a devastating line, and one it is increasingly hard to disagree with: that Polanski’s historic role is to provide the middle-class adherents to the new Socialism of Fools with a get-out-of-jail card. They point to his Jewishness as proof of their righteousness even as they engage in truly hateful behaviour against that ‘abominable’ people.

‘We’re not anti-Semitic, we’re anti-Zionist’, they’ll say. The irritation of Greens for Palestine at having to say Zionist rather than Jew surely explodes that crap once and for all. But more to the point, what do people mean when they say they’re anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic? All I hear is: ‘I don’t hate Jews, I just want to deprive them of a right enjoyed by every other people and bring about the destruction of their homeland so that they will once again be scattered across the Earth.’

I’m sick of pussyfooting around this: if you dream of the Jewish nation’s destruction, and chant for the death of Jewish soldiers, and demonise Jewish nationalism as uniquely barbarous, then you have a problem with Jews. It might take 10 years, maybe 30, perhaps longer, but I am confident we will one day look back at the people who said, ‘I’m an anti-Zionist’, in the same way we look at those who said, ‘Round up the Jews’.

Is it time to retire the term antisemitism?

Synagogues are not embassies. Chanukah celebrations are not military installations. Museums are not government offices. These are Jews, living their lives, thousands of miles from Israel. Jews murdered in the name of anti-Zionism.

If this is anti-Zionism, then anti-Zionism does not stay in Israel. It does not confine itself to policy debates or territorial disputes. It follows Jews wherever they are. It attaches itself to Jewish identity itself.

At that point, the distinction collapses. Anti-Zionist, in practice, means anti-Jewish. And there is a deeper reason for that, one that goes beyond contemporary politics.

“Zion” is not merely the name of a modern state. The prophet Isaiah records God’s words: “And I say to Zion: You are My people.” Zion is not just a place. Zion is a people. And so, anti-Zionist, according to the Bible, means anti-Jewish. Tragically, it is almost unsurprising when Jews are attacked across the globe in the name of anti-Zionism.

So let us stop pretending. Let us stop arguing over whether anti-Zionism is or is not antisemitism. Let us simply call it what they call it: anti-Zionism.

Let it include every Jew who has been targeted, harassed, attacked or murdered under the banner of opposition to Zion.

Because if anti-Zionism consistently manifests as hostility toward Jews, if it repeatedly finds its targets not in government offices but in Jewish communities, if it aligns itself with violence against Jews across continents, then it has already answered the question.

We were looking for a word that means anti-Jewish. They have given us one.

If changing the label from antisemitism to anti-Zionism helps expose the scope and nature of what is happening, then perhaps it is a worthwhile exercise. Not because it resolves the debate, but because it sharpens it.

In the end, the question is not what we call the hatred. The question is whether we are willing to see it clearly. Words matter, but reality matters more.

Call it antisemitism. Call it anti-Zionism. The victims know no difference. And neither, it seems, do those who target them.

The disturbed mind of the anti-Israel activist

Collings’s turn from Britpop-loving centrist dad to an uncloseted Israelophobe took him into Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, and then straight out again. He was adopted as the parliamentary candidate for South West Norfolk in 2019. Within a day of his selection, he was suspended from the party for having dismissed allegations of anti-Semitism in Labour as a ‘witch-hunt’, and for calling the late chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, a ‘hate-filled racist’. He also shared conspiratorial diagrams on social media, purporting to reveal the ‘influence’ of Jewish businessmen on British politics. That’s right – Collings took things too far, even for the Corbynistas.

The Margate exhibition is laughably titled Drawings Against Genocide. The artworks look childish and this is deliberate. Collings is trying to strip away all artifice to let the unalloyed feelings shine out. The trouble is that, in letting us see directly into his soul, what we see there is repulsive.

Collings would no doubt argue that his ‘art’ is in the tradition of the anti-Vietnam War art of the 1960s radicals, like Michael Sandle’s Mickey Mouse at the Machine Gun (1972) or Leon Golub’s paintings of torture and killing, even though his Margate show is entirely misanthropic and hate-filled.

Some have called for the exhibition to be banned, but that would be a mistake. On the contrary, Matthew Collings has done us a great service by showing us the disturbed mind of the anti-Israel activist. It is good that we all see the depravity that lies at the heart of this movement.

03/30 Links Pt1: Confronting Jihad's Forever War; The Big Ugandan Bear Hug; Trump considering operation to extract Iran's enriched uranium; Michigan synagogue attack was inspired by Hezbollah

From Ian:

Confronting Jihad's Forever War

The U.S. has confronted seemingly implacable ideological enemies before - and won. The lessons of Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Reagan's Cold War strategy point to a common principle: overwhelming force, credible will, and the imposition of unsustainable costs ultimately prevail.

Iran has not surrendered. Its proxies continue to launch missiles and drones. Its parliament invokes jihad. This is the behavior of a regime that does not process war through the same conceptual framework as does the West. The question policymakers must answer is not why Iran keeps fighting - but what kind of pressure will finally make continued fighting more costly than stopping.

One of the most consequential failures of Western strategic analysis has been treating the Islamic Republic's rhetoric as theater. It is not. Its leadership has articulated - with remarkable consistency across four decades - a vision of global, divinely ordained, open-ended struggle against Western civilization. Since 1979, Iran's Islamic Republic has called for "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."

The Karbala Paradigm functions as the Islamic Republic's operational code for conflict. In 680 CE, Imam Hussein ibn Ali - grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Shiite Imam - rode with 72 followers into the plains of Karbala. He was surrounded by a vastly superior Umayyad army. He was offered a choice: submit to the Caliph Yazid, or die. He chose death. His followers were massacred. For Shiite Islam, this was the foundational moral event of the faith - proof that righteous resistance is sacred even when it leads to annihilation.

Any signal that Washington will negotiate the terms of Iran's nuclear program or proxy network - rather than their elimination - will be read as confirmation that the forever war is working. Yet, America does not want a forever war. Neither do Israel, the Gulf states, or the broader community of nations. The theology of jihad is formidable. The martyrdom culture of Karbala is real. But it is not more formidable than American resolve has proven to be.

The Islamic Republic has built its resistance strategy on the assumption that the West lacks the strategic patience and political will to sustain pressure long enough to defeat the regime. Now there is a narrow window to prosecute a historic change. We need to make clear - through action, not rhetoric - that the forever war will end Iran's revolution before it ends ours. The Islamic Republic's leadership has told us explicitly what they intend. The only remaining question is whether the U.S., Israel, and the West have the moral and strategic will to confront this messianic jihadi phenomenon and to defeat it.

Amb. Michael Oren: The Outcome of the Iran War: A Victory or a Pause before the Next War?

On Tuesday night, as U.S. President Donald Trump declared victory over Iran during a press conference, my family and I took shelter in our safe room. Despite the close partnership between Washington and Jerusalem, and the historic cooperation between the U.S. military and the Israel Defense Forces, America and Israel are living in entirely different realities.

From an American perspective, the near destruction of Iran's military capabilities, damage to its nuclear infrastructure, and the elimination of senior leadership can be framed as a victory. For Israel, the standard is far stricter. Any outcome that allows Iran to rebuild its nuclear and ballistic programs, retain enough enriched uranium for multiple nuclear weapons, and continue supporting terrorist proxies is not a victory. It is a pause before Israel is forced to fight the same war again, possibly alone.

During negotiations, Iran may accept principles in theory, then stall, dilute and avoid implementation in practice. We have seen this pattern before. The 20-point Gaza plan stalled when Hamas refused to disarm. The risk now is that Iran follows the same path, agreeing in principle while preserving its core capabilities. Israel cannot afford that outcome.

Israel must press for clear, enforceable guarantees before any agreement takes shape. Not vague assurances, not frameworks, but concrete commitments that address the core threat. At the same time, Israel must act with urgency, both in Iran and in Lebanon, to shape the strategic environment before diplomacy locks in outcomes it cannot reverse.

In Allied Campaign, Mission to Kill Top Iranians Fell to Israel

As U.S. and Israeli military commanders met to map out war with Iran, they deliberated over how to divide responsibility for an array of targets.

It was clear from the outset that one grim mission would belong to Israel: hunting and killing Iran's leaders.

Israel has pursued this assignment with ruthless efficiency, killing Iran's supreme leader in the opening salvo of the war and more than 250 other "senior Iranian officials" since, according to the Israeli military.

The campaign relies on an apparatus that Israel spent decades building but transformed over the past several years to achieve new levels of lethal proficiency.

Senior Israeli military and intelligence officials cited a proliferation of sources and surveillance capabilities inside Iran - regime insiders recruited to spy for Israel as well as cyber-penetrations of thousands of targets including street cameras and payment platforms.

These and other streams of data are being scoured by a new, classified artificial intelligence platform programmed to extract clues to leaders' lives and movements.

Israel's targeted killing tactics - bombs planted months before being detonated, drones capable of slipping into apartment windows, and supersonic missiles fired from stealth fighter jets - have been honed by years of conflict in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Asked why the mission of targeting Iran's leaders was assigned to Israel, a senior Israeli security official cited its experience and expertise, saying: "There was a need to target them. And we could do it."

When ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was accused of sexual assault, his plan was to blame the Jews

I keep shaking my head at this story as reported by the New York Times:

For more than a year, the operations of the International Criminal Court have been left in limbo amid global crises as the institution has investigated sexual harassment allegations against its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.

That case has reached a critical juncture. A team from the United Nations has investigated the allegations at the court’s request. Their findings were then reviewed by a panel of judges who evaluated the evidence.

Though the U.N. investigators found evidence that Mr. Khan engaged in “non-consensual sexual contact” with a woman on his staff, the judges determined unanimously that the evidence did not meet the legal standard for misconduct. The New York Times obtained a copy of the judges’ report, which summarized the investigators’ findings but did not include the full document.

So they proved that he engaged in sexual abuse - but that isn't enough to remove the person who is the highest authority for what is legal in the entire world?

The insanity gets even worse:

The legal bar for finding misconduct when a disciplinary action is in question is “super specific and very strict,” Mr. Jimenez Martinez said. But it aligns with what has been used in disciplinary proceedings for other high-ranking officials at various United Nations agencies.

Meaning, the UN is a place where you can sexually harass women and get away with it. You know, the same people who tell nations what is and isn't moral.

A description of the U.N. investigation in the judges’ report states that the woman who made the allegations was working under Mr. Khan as a special assistant at the time.
In her interviews with investigators, according to the judges’ description, she described escalating sexual overtures from her boss: First over-familiarity during a work trip to London, then touching in his office that turned into instances where “he would grab and paw at her breasts, try to access her pelvic area, and suck on her ear or neck.”
Eventually, according to her account, that progressed to sexual activity, both in his office and later on work trips. “The power dynamic between them meant that she could not say no to Mr. Khan,” the report says she told investigators.

It appears that the progressives who run the international legal system don't believe women.

But this small detail tell you all you need to know about the situation:

[I]n early May 2024, Mr. Khan fretted that the allegations would wreck his career, witnesses told the U.N. investigators. One witness said Mr. Khan initially did not offer a defense, but jumped at the “lifeline” of an alternative narrative when another colleague present said he “suspected whether Mossad played a role behind the scenes,” the report said.

In other words:

Seriously, the entire UN system must be dismantled.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

There is a pattern of the IRGC mixing civilian and military assets - making civilian casualties almost inevitable

On February 28, the first day of the US-Israel campaign against Iran, American forces struck what intelligence maps showed as IRGC facilities in two southern Iranian cities. Both strikes hit civilian structures that had been converted from military use a decade earlier and were no longer legitimate targets. The deaths — 175 in Minab, at least 21 in Lamerd — were tragedies. The US military has acknowledged investigating both as apparent targeting failures driven by outdated intelligence.

But the outrage directed exclusively at the United States is obscuring a harder question: how did two active IRGC compounds come to have schools and volleyball training halls embedded within their original perimeters in the first place?

Lamerd compound with sports hall

The New York Times visual investigation claims that a US Precision Strike Missile — a weapon making its combat debut — struck a sports hall in Lamerd, killing at least 21 people, including children at volleyball practice. An active IRGC compound sits directly adjacent to both structures. Satellite imagery shows the civilian facilities have been walled off from the compound for at least fifteen years.

As I analyzed after the Minab strike, that school had an identical history: originally built inside an IRGC naval compound, physically separated by a fence around 2016, but still architecturally and logistically part of the same rectangular installation. The school was built to serve the children of IRGC personnel. Every building hit on the first day of the war — school, clinic, military complex — had been IRGC property in the not-too-distant past. The US was working from outdated maps that reflected this older reality.

That's a serious US military failure. It's not, however, the only story here.

International humanitarian law prohibits using civilians as shields for military assets. The IRGC and its proxies have a well-documented record of this in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza — positioning missile stockpiles in apartment buildings, running command centers beneath hospitals, storing weapons in schools. The intent is to deter strikes by raising the civilian cost, and to generate propaganda when civilians die anyway.

Minab compound with school and clinic

What happened at Lamerd and Minab is structurally different, and in some ways more troubling. The IRGC didn't move military assets into a civilian neighborhood. It converted buildings within its own military compound into civilian use — a school, a clinic, a sports hall — while keeping the compound's core military function active. The civilian population moved toward the military target, rather than the reverse.

The practical effect under IHL is the same: civilians die near legitimate military objectives. But the mechanism creates a distinct problem. In classic human shielding, a military actor makes a deliberate, visible choice to co-locate with protected persons — a choice that can at least theoretically be documented and condemned. In the IRGC model, the ambiguity is baked in structurally over years, through civilian-use conversions that look, on paper, like benign community development. The IRGC runs schools and clinics as part of its vast socioeconomic empire anyway. No one needs to issue a cynical order to "put a school next to the missile base." The school was always going to be next to the missile base because the IRGC is simultaneously the missile base and the community institution that builds schools.

This brings us to a point that has gone almost entirely unaddressed in the coverage. The United States designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in April 2019 — the first time in history that a component of a foreign government received that designation. The EU followed suit on January 29, 2026, less than a month before the February 28 strikes. Both designations rest on the same finding: the IRGC doesn't merely support terrorism as a policy instrument — terrorism is foundational and institutional to what it is.

This designation has a structural implication that Western media analysis habitually ignores. When an organization is designated a terrorist entity in its entirety, the normal civilian/military distinction that IHL assumes — two separate categories, with a bright line between them — ceases to apply in the way international law imagines. The IRGC runs construction companies, schools, clinics, sports facilities, housing developments, and one of the largest parallel economies in Iran. It does all of this not as a separate "civilian wing" but as the same organization that builds ballistic missiles and directs proxy terrorist networks across the Middle East. There is no internal wall.

Iran's primary proxy provides the clearest articulation of this doctrine in its own words. For years, Western governments — particularly in Europe — tried to distinguish between Hezbollah's "military wing" and its "political wing," sanctioning the former while engaging the latter. Hezbollah's leadership found this transparently absurd and said so repeatedly.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the military/political distinction an innovation — using the Islamic legal term bid'a, meaning an illegitimate departure from established practice — and stated that sanctioning only the military wing would have no practical effects, because Hezbollah had no such internal divisions. His deputy and current head of the organization Naim Qassem was more direct: "In Lebanon there is one Hezbollah, named Hezbollah. We don't have a military wing and a political wing." In 2013, Nasrallah mocked the British government specifically, saying the military/political distinction was "the work of the British" and sarcastically proposing that Lebanon's next government ministers should come from "the military wing."

Hezbollah is explicitly doing what Iran tells it to do. The organizational logic Nasrallah described — no internal separation between military and civilian functions, a single leadership council overseeing everything from parliamentary activity to armed operations — is the IRGC model exported. And it's not a coincidence that IRGC compounds in Iran look the same way from the outside: a school here, a clinic there, an intelligence headquarters in the center, all originally part of the same perimeter.

To be precise about the legal implications: none of this made the Minab school or the Lamerd sports hall legitimate targets. Civilian facilities are protected under the laws of armed conflict regardless of their history or proximity to military objectives. The US military's use of maps that hadn't been updated in a decade to reflect these conversions appears to be a failure of the precautionary measures IHL requires before striking. But we cannot dismiss out of hand that parts of the "civilian" structures may have also used for military purposes, the way Hamas took over sections of hospitals. Those investigations should proceed without political interference.

What IHL does say — and what has been almost entirely absent from the coverage — is that parties to a conflict are prohibited from placing military objectives in the vicinity of civilian objects, or using the presence of civilians to shield military sites from attack. The IRGC's pattern of building civilian facilities inside active military compounds, for the families of military personnel, within the same rectangular perimeter, with the same organizational structure that explicitly rejects any civilian/military distinction, is a textbook implementation of this prohibited practice — just executed slowly, structurally, and years in advance rather than on the eve of a strike.

The tragedy at Minab and Lamerd is that the IRGC's long-term strategy of deliberate ambiguity worked exactly as designed.