08/31 Links Pt2: RNC chair Dem majority a: ‘Direct threat to the Jewish community’; Hollywood celebrities are backing a terrorist murderer; Michigan AG tells Jewish Dems to put ‘needs of world’ ahead of ‘our own survival’

From Ian:

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner: Hollywood celebrities are backing a terrorist murderer — read the facts

These were not fictional villains in a screen-adapted comic book tale — they were real terrorists with real victims.

And one of the victims was an American citizen.

That is the problem with the Marvel campaign. These are limousine liberals at their most comfortable: wealthy, privileged and insulated from the consequences of the causes they champion.

They have spent their careers playing superheroes, but appear to know remarkably little about the history they are now trying to rewrite. They sit comfortably in their movie studio trailers and pronounce moral judgments on a bitter conflict in which they have no personal stake and, judging by this campaign, very little understanding.

They do not have to stand before the widows — the parents and orphans of the five people whose murders resulted in Barghouti’s convictions — and explain why their loved ones’ killer should be released. They simply sign a petition.

And now they have something bigger to answer for, because a candidacy is not a pardon; it’s a promotion.

Barghouti drew the most votes in Fatah’s central committee elections in May.

Everyone involved can do the arithmetic: The plan is to run him from a prison cell, win, and dare the world to say a democratically elected murderer should remain incarcerated.

What do you think? Be the first to comment.

But before the Marvel justice league starts drafting its victory statement, they should do something remarkably simple: Read the documents.

Acknowledge the five people he was convicted of murdering.

Then explain to their millions of followers why those victims should be written out of the story while Barghouti becomes its hero.

Hollywood can manufacture superheroes. It cannot manufacture innocence — nor can any election.

And a man convicted of murdering five innocents cannot be transformed into a statesman because the red-carpet revolutionaries have decided to make him one.

Israel, the DEI exception to 'everyone': How the music industry lost its moral compass

Peace-building musical collabs such as Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa's Arabic show, Jarak Qaribak (“Your Neighborhood is Your Friend”), were canceled as a result of the BDS Movement. The project involved musicians from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq - the kind of cross-collabs generally praised by the arts & culture.

While peace-building performances become unacceptable, shouting hate speech and antisemitic libels through a mic when accepting an award on stage becomes celebrated as an act of cool resistance; what is being contributed to these foundational DEI values of the music industry? Because where does political accountability end and collective punishment of a people as a whole begin?

By 2025, over 400 musicians had joined a geo-block boycott to make their music unavailable in Israel, calling their campaign ‘No Music for Genocide’. The name itself invites an uncomfortable question. If No Music for Genocide is really a principle rather than a geographical preference, where were the comparable mass geo-blocking campaigns and cultural boycotts as Sudan or Iran descended into mass atrocity?

Challenging their objective, I posted a few very politically correct words on my LinkedIn, the point of which was ‘Boycotting musicians and fans in Israel will not free Palestine’.

Exclusion, hate, and polarization didn’t really seem like the way to go for me as a music executive who believed in dialogue and listening to each other.

I’d lead my own panel for five years at Amsterdam Dance Event on the subject of DEI, so I believed in ‘talking about the hard stuff’. Then followed the wave of hate, antisemitic libels, and threats from industry professionals employed by major labels, publicly traded tech companies, and places of work with codes of conduct specifically prohibiting them from publicly attacking ‘fellow colleagues’.

'I believed... safety, dignity, inclusion applied to everyone'
The proof remained, indeed, in the pudding.

I believed that the principles we spent years building - safety, dignity, and inclusion - applied to everyone.

Radical inclusion, it seemed, had added an exception: it did not apply to people born in a particular country, or to Jews and Israelis. A counterculture that once challenged the boundaries of society was now policing the ideological boundaries of its own. Glorifying terror under the banner of DEI was dubbed ‘resistance’.

DEI's own conviction of righteousness and one-sidedness expanded rapidly, well organized, and well funded. By then, the contradiction became impossible to ignore.

And perhaps Damon Albarn provides the simplest counterexample. Albarn has hardly been silent about Palestinian suffering or his criticism of Israel. Yet after Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, he called the episode a ‘spectacular misfire’ and spoke instead about wanting to work with musicians in both Palestine and Israel.

It really should not be revolutionary to suggest that one can advocate for Palestinians without demanding the cultural exclusion of Israelis. Isn’t this exactly what music was supposed to be for?

What started as an industry-wide commitment to safety had developed into ideological gatekeeping: diversity but under political uniformity. Inclusion, except when the artist was born in Israel.

Freedom of expression, unless the expression comes from Boy George or another ‘wrong person’. And #MeToo, except if you were a girl dancing at 6:29 a.m. at the Nova festival.

To quote a house classic: If music is the answer, the answer cannot be less cultural contact. It has to be more. Because when we try to make music morally pure, we destroy precisely the thing that made it morally valuable: its ability to bring together people who would otherwise never meet.

The Loophole in "Death, Death to the IDF"

That is the element a stadium field and a cordoned riverside protest both managed to avoid, while a shared public highway outside a gig was not. Weeks after disclosing the Kentish Town charge, the Met announced that organisers would, for the first time, be made responsible for speakers’ hate speech at future protests, and that it was reviewing with the CPS “language… previously advised [as not meeting] the threshold”. An acknowledgment, in effect, of the gap it kept running into.

None of this requires bad faith on the Met’s part, or a plan on Robinson-Foster’s. Everything is explainable by a comparison of reach, not culpability. Robinson-Foster is documented saying the words on number occasions, including at Alexandra Palace, Glastonbury, Amsterdam, and the Embankment. Each performed or broadcast to a crowd in the thousands, one to a live, nationally watched BBC stream; the phrase has since acquired its own Wikipedia entry. His own public response to the Glastonbury backlash was to mock “crying” critics rather than dispute what the words meant.

The Kentish Town defendant is alleged to have repeated the same six words, that single night, a number of times, on a small loudhailer. He reached, cumulatively, a demonstration of dozens on one residential street. But the Kentish Town defendant had clearly defined victims, which Robison-Foster did not..

If the harm the law exists to address is the spread of a chant calling for the deaths of people who are, for most Israelis, their children or themselves, it is not obvious that the more repetitive but contained allegation did more of that harm than the far less repeated but internationally amplified fact. That the defendant with the smaller reach is the one facing trial, while the man whose performances actually spread the phrase abroad has been cleared twice and gained rather than lost from it, looks less like a corrupt system than a badly drawn one.

The Public Order Act is highlighted as measuring proximity, not scale: it catches a chant however few times it was said, provided somebody was standing close enough to be frightened by it, and lets the same words through however many times repeated, provided the crowd chanting back is large enough, sympathetic enough, or simply on the right side of a river.

The gap between impact and proximity leaves one wondering if the real problem is a weakness in the law. Chanting for the death of anyone is distinctly uncivilised, an invasive cultural meme that should be resisted rather than absorbed. If not, whose death shall be heralded next, leaving one wondering, when shall it be my own fair turn.

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08/31 Links Pt1: Durban’s legacy: How NGOs helped mainstream anti-Israel hatred; Protesters mark 2 years since recovery of 6 slain Gaza hostages; Egypt's Dangerous Palestinian 'Unity' Project to Legitimize Terrorists

From Ian:

Brett McGurk: No, Iran is not winning: In Act IV of the war, it’s losing its leverage in Hormuz

Tehran may seek to fight its way out of this noose. Its strategy through the first three acts was clear: threaten commerce in the Strait, raise energy prices globally and gasoline prices in the US, increase global economic pressure and ultimately force Trump to back down, particularly with midterm elections approaching.

Iran has also targeted the energy infrastructure of the Gulf states and could do so again. Its proxy force in Yemen, the Houthis, have threatened to shut down commerce through the Red Sea with Iranian missiles and drones.

All that would mean resorting to the same tactics from the early acts of the war. Strategically, it has not worked for Iran. The Gulf states are not happy with the war, but most do not support giving in to Iran’s extortionist demands in the Strait. Iran’s attempts to close the Strait with drones and mines are also now — for the first time — failing.

So, I would not discount the risk of an Iranian escalation as the economic pressure builds. But it may not be enough at this stage to reduce that pressure. Trump appears far more committed than Iranian leaders apparently presumed.

Breaking point
Iranian leaders and many Western analysts project immunity to pressure. Iran will never surrender its nuclear program or the Strait of Hormuz. Or its terrorist proxies around the region.

That’s something we all must accept as a fact of life in the Middle East, according to Tehran.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi argued last week that the blockade and sanctions pressure are “bound to fail” just as all other campaigns, he said, had failed to change Iranian policy.

I used to hear the same thing from experts about ISIS, when I was leading the campaign to defeat the group. And Hamas, when negotiating to free the hostages held in Gaza.

In fact, everyone has a breaking point. Iran thought it had found Trump’s. Trump may yet find theirs. It’s too early to call.

Not the last act
This contest in some form may last through the end of Trump’s presidency and beyond. It’s been ongoing for nearly five decades.

The earlier acts in this war were mired from the US side by shifting and ill-defined objectives, widely careening positions, and inconsistent statements.

But Act Four seems different. The US military has a clear objective as outlined this week by the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper. It is enforcing the blockade on Iran and facilitating the movement of commercial traffic.

The objective for the US should be similarly well-defined. Iran must abandon claims on the Strait and give up the nuclear enrichment program. Until then, this will be the new status quo.

And that status quo — perhaps for the first time since the war began — now favors Washington, not Tehran.

No Exit, No Trap By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
When the regime decided to hold up shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, however, the “trap” claim took off. Trump, went the argument, could neither free the strait nor leave it in Iran’s grip. He had been checkmated.

It was around this time that I began to worry, as it became clear that the administration had not gamed out this possibility before the war. And Trump had made it well known that he despised the idea of deploying American ground forces. Even with the strait threatened by Iran, the U.S. could prevail so long as the commander in chief chose to take the steps that were needed to do so.

Soon, instead, Trump decided on negotiations to end the fighting. And that’s when he really did stumble into a trap—because he’d decided that he wanted out. Trump wanted to escape the consequences of the aborted war and his responsibility to win it—and he let the Iranians know.

That was all it took. Through months of off-and-on talks, Iranian negotiators would keep the U.S. trapped by refusing to grant any American conditions that might let Trump walk away from what had become a terrible mess. So long as the U.S. was looking for an exit, we’d remain paralyzed.

If the tide now seems to be turning in the U.S.’s favor, it’s because we started looking for solutions. Currently, the U.S. naval blockade of Iran is in effect to freeze the regime’s maritime and energy exports. At the same time, we’re now only one week into Operation Economic Outcast, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s campaign to “sever every economic lifeline” that the regime has—and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has admitted that it’s already working.

The start-and-stop war has been going on for six months, and the U.S. has stumbled in a number of unforeseen ways. It still can. But there’s one critical mistake that Trump should now know to avoid: prioritizing an American exit over an American victory. In order for the U.S. to prevail, we must keep up the current economic war on the regime. This means enduring the inevitable rise in oil prices and the concerted media campaign focusing on the increased hardships imposed on ordinary Iranians. Both have already begun, but neither of these are traps unless Donald Trump decides they are.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Egypt's Dangerous Palestinian 'Unity' Project to Legitimize Terrorists

The real question, however, is: Unity with whom, and against whom?

Why is Hamas being treated as a legitimate political organization rather than a terrorist group that needs to be disarmed, dismantled, and removed from power?

Egypt, a key ally of the United States, should be asking these questions. Instead, Cairo appears to be doing exactly the opposite.

The Trump Administration and the Board of Peace might make clear to Cairo that Hamas cannot be both a terrorist organization that needs to surrender its weapons and a political partner invited to negotiate the future of the Palestinians. One approach eliminates Hamas. The other rehabilitates it.

Even more alarming are reports of a possible electoral alliance involving former Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan's Democratic Reform Current, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – all terrorist groups that do not recognize Israel's right to exist.

What possible role should these terrorist organizations have in Palestinian elections or a future Palestinian government?

If Egypt welcomes the designation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, why is it simultaneously trying to give Hamas – which emerged from the same organization – renewed political legitimacy?

The Trump Administration would do itself a great service to tell Cairo that Palestinian reconciliation cannot include organizations that retain weapons, embrace terrorism, and seek the destruction of Israel. There is no need to unify the Palestinian ranks around Hamas. There is a need immediately to remove Hamas from those ranks.

Egypt should be using its considerable influence not to persuade Fatah to reconcile with Hamas, but to pressure Hamas and other terrorist groups to surrender their weapons and permanently leave the Palestinian political arena. A politically rehabilitated Hamas, still armed and still committed to its Islamist ideology, will only strengthen the very ideological current that the Egyptian government has spent more than a decade trying to suppress.

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"Pro-Palestine charity" sells T-shirt calling Israel "Holocaustic, pedophilic, rapist" and worse than Nazis. Ho hum.

A Manchester(UK)-registered Palestinian aid charity called Sun of Freedom isays that this is its best-selling T-shirt:

The entire text says:

ISRAEL IS A

GENOCIDING

HOLOCAUSTING

PEDOPHILIC

RAPIST

SEX TRAFFICKING

ORGAN & LAND STEALING

CHILD MURDERING

TERRORIST

APARTHEID ETHNO-STATE

THAT OUTSHAMES THE MOTHER FUCKING NAZIS

& YOU WESTERN CUCKS BEND THE KNEE FOR IT ALL.

They also sell a T-shirt featuring the Hamas inverted rape triangle, and the words do more than I can ever do to show that when they say "resistance" they mean "murdering Jews."

The charity itself claims to work with "trusted Gaza partners" to distribute aid. They never say the names of these "trusted" organizations. 

They are a registered charity but too new (January 2026)  for their finances to be public. 

Chances that the money goes to Hamas one way or another are pretty high.

They are such lovely people!

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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)

 

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08/30 Links: The Resurgence of Antisemitism Is a Warning to Every Democracy; The world’s double standard toward Israel is prejudice dressed as principle

From Ian:

The Resurgence of Antisemitism Is a Warning to Every Democracy

One of the most dangerous mistakes Western democracies are making today is to treat antisemitism as a problem that concerns only Jews. It does not. Antisemitism is a symptom of a deeper civic and moral disorder. The resurgence of antisemitism across Europe and North America should be understood as an early warning signal for every democracy.

Today, public debate increasingly rewards emotional certainty over intellectual honesty. In such an environment, antisemitism flourishes wherever complexity is replaced by slogans, wherever individual responsibility gives way to victimhood, and wherever democratic societies lose confidence in the universal principles that once sustained them.

The events of October 7, 2023, revealed how quickly parts of public discourse became unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between the deliberate murder of civilians and the political narratives constructed to justify it. Many public institutions appeared unable to make a basic moral distinction, excusing the deliberate murder of civilians.

Antisemitism has historically provided societies with a ready-made explanation for complexity. It transforms uncertainty into certainty by offering a familiar culprit. The responsibility of democracies is to preserve the moral distinction between criticism and dehumanization.

Criticism examines decisions. Dehumanization questions the legitimacy of an entire people and denies a nation's right to exist. Opposition to specific Israeli policies too often portrays the very existence of the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate. Once that boundary disappears, antisemitism presents itself as virtue.

The most important question facing democratic societies today is not how much they sympathize with Israel. It is whether they are still capable of making elementary moral distinctions. Can they recognize the deliberate murder of civilians for what it is? Can they condemn terrorism without immediately searching for explanations that diminish personal responsibility?

A society that remains confident in its principles does not hesitate before condemning the massacre of civilians. A society that has lost confidence in its own values begins by asking whether the victims somehow deserved their fate.

The strength of a democracy is measured by its willingness to defend moral principles even when doing so is uncomfortable, unpopular, or politically costly. A society that cannot defend the dignity of its smallest minority will eventually lose the ability to defend the freedom of everyone.

Amb. Alan Baker: The world’s double standard toward Israel is prejudice dressed as principle

There is another disturbing dimension to this phenomenon: the increasingly blurred line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

It may be legitimate to criticize Israeli policies, but when Jews throughout the world are held collectively responsible for Israel’s actions; when Jews are physically accosted, Jewish institutions are attacked because of events in the Middle East; when Jewish students are intimidated; or when Jewish communities are told that they must condemn Israel to prove their moral legitimacy, something far more sinister is taking place.

The old accusation from time immemorial that Jews are responsible for society’s problems has simply acquired a modern vocabulary and is now accompanied overtly by violence and intimidation.

The question therefore must be asked: Why Israel? Why the Jews? Why this extraordinary obsession?

Perhaps the answer lies in both political and social convenience. Israel is a small, identifiable and highly visible target. It is easier to mobilize public anger against a democratic state than against authoritarian regimes whose governments control information and suppress dissent. It has always been easier to mobilize anger against Jews, especially in Europe. The fact that history is repeating itself with vengeance is reason for utmost concern

But convenience cannot justify hypocrisy.

Those who genuinely believe in human rights, international law and the protection of civilians should apply those principles universally. They should condemn terrorism regardless of its perpetrators, defend civilian life regardless of nationality, and demand accountability from all states, organizations and societies that violate fundamental norms.

Israel should be judged by the same standards as every other country – not by lower standards, but certainly not by impossibly higher ones.

The alternative is not justice. It is prejudice masquerading as principle.

Israel will continue to face criticism. That is part of being a democratic state. But criticism becomes unacceptable when facts are deliberately distorted, history is erased, responsibility is inverted, and an entire people are demonized.

The time has come to ask the uncomfortable questions – and to insist on honest answers.

For if Israel and the Jews are blamed for everything, sooner or later we must ask whether the problem lies not with Israel or the Jews, but with those who have made blaming them their political reflex.

Greece to sign $3.6b. Israeli air defense deal, creating 'Achilles Shield' against Turkey and Iran

Greece is set to sign a $3.6 billion defense deal with Israel on Monday in Tel Aviv, a major agreement that will provide Athens with a multilayered air defense system against potential threats from Turkey and Iran.

The agreement, negotiated over three years, will become the largest defense export deal in Israel’s history.

A Greek delegation will sign the agreement with Israel’s Defense Ministry to purchase air defense systems valued at $3.6 billion, slightly below earlier estimates. The deal will provide Greece, for the first time, with an integrated, multilayered defense network.

Most of the funds will go to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, which will supply Greece with David’s Sling systems designed to intercept heavy rockets and ballistic missiles, as well as mobile SPYDER systems designed to counter unmanned aerial vehicles and drones.

Israel Aerospace Industries will provide the Barak MX system, which is designed to defend against aircraft and missiles.

Project 'Achilles Shield'
The agreement also includes a national-level command-and-control center to operate the systems and manage launches, similar to the system used in Israel. The center will incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities.

Greek companies are expected to receive about €700 million of the deal’s total value as subcontractors for Rafael and IAI.

The project is known in Greece as “Achilles Shield” and will include deploying SPYDER batteries on Greek islands, including popular vacation destinations visited by many Israelis.

The largest defense export deal in Israel’s history to date was IAI’s first export sale of the Arrow 3 missile defense system to Germany, worth $3.5 billion, signed in 2023. Greece is already a major Israeli customer

Elbit Systems announced a $2.3 b. deal with a foreign customer this year, according to reports from the Persian Gulf, while Rafael signed a framework agreement with Romania this year to sell SPYDER systems worth $2 b.

Greece has already become a major customer of Israel’s defense industry, purchasing Spike missiles and SPICE precision-guided bombs from Rafael, Rampage missiles from Elbit Systems and IAI, and Heron 2 drones from IAI.

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Palestinian historian finds a way to claim even Mizrahi Jews as not real Jews

We all know about the bogus Khazar theory, that Palestinians and other Arabs use to claim that Ashkenazic Jews are not really Jews but were converts from Khazaria.

But that theory only works with Ashkenazic Jews. Most Israeli Jews have ancestors who lived in the Middle East, not Europe, so Palestinians need to be delegitimize them, too.

Enter Palestinian historian  Dirgham Faris.

He claims that the Mizrahi Jews were descended from a similar mass conversion event, that of the Himyars in the fourth century.

He admits that the Jews came from the region - but Palestinians are the descendants of the Jews:

 “Yes, Palestine is the cradle of the Jewish religion, where the Jewish religion reached its peak during the Hellenistic (Greek) period, specifically after the Maccabean Revolution.”

He asked: “What is the relationship between the occupying Jews and the ancient Jews in Palestine? What is the relationship between the remnants of the Himyarite Kingdom, which converted to Judaism in 384 AD, and the remnants of the Khazar Kingdom, which converted to Judaism in 850 AD, and Palestine?”

Fares said: “The ancient Jews are our ancestors. The Palestinian people are an extension of the original inhabitants from the Stone Age until now.”

He added: “Most of us converted to Islam after Judaism and Christianity, and therefore everything on and under the land of Palestine is an integral part of our cultural heritage, and it belongs to the Palestinian people.”

(The Himyar kingdom was a Jewish kingdom for a time, but  it was conquered by Christians and any converted Jews there almost certainly became Christian afterwards. Interestingly, a few wealthy Himyar Jews did get buried in Israel but there is no record of a mass influx of Himyar Jews through the rest of the Middle East after the kingdom was defeated.)

So when Israeli archaeologists discover yet another proof of ancient Jews in Palestine, Faris just pretends that they were the ancestors of Palestinians. 

I guess the Palestinians wrote the Jerusalem Talmud and those rabbis all converted to Christianity while they composed it and then to Islam. Sure.

The synagogues found in the Galilee, the yeshivas in Tzippori and Tiberias and Yavneh and Caesarea, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and Resh Lakish - all of them are part of "Palestinian" heritage.

From everything I can tell, virtually the only Palestinians who really do trace their heritage to ancient times are the Christians who indeed did convert from Judaism. Most of the Muslims not only immigrated - they proudly did so, as most Muslim Palestinian families happily trace their ancestry to Arabia or Yemen or another Gulf country. 

Here is a case where history is twisted to fit a political goal. Which is pretty much how Palestinians look at all history. Usually Palestinians even deny any Jewish connection to the land; Farsi realized that this made them all look like idiots by claiming that every single piece of thousands of architectural finds are fake, so he changed the rules to say - sure, they are Jewish, and our ancestors, but Jews are fake Jews. 

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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)

 

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08/29 Links: How Ireland succumbed to ‘radical chic’; Maher blasts academics for trashing Western civilization – and Israel; Tucker Carlson Keeps Turning Up in Foreign Agents' Paperwork

From Ian:

How Ireland succumbed to ‘radical chic’

his growing alignment of pro-Palestinian activism with Irish republican sentiment does not just affect foreign policy; it damages what the writer and strategist Eoghan Harris calls ‘the decent pluralism of Middle Ireland’. It is helping to revive political beliefs that left thousands dead and were thought to have been laid to rest.

While Sinn Fein is not benefiting electorally from this phenomenon as much as it might wish, its core messages and slogans are increasingly normalised. And as those with real memories of the violence grow older, a younger generation is being encouraged to sentimentalise the past. Everyone is entitled to remember their dead; the danger, though, is that Irish republicans are simultaneously seeking to erase everyone else’s dead from the narrative, whether victims of 7 October or of IRA terror.

In this febrile environment, there are growing demands for an Irish unity poll, despite the destabilising effect this would have in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein recently pressed the new Northern Ireland Secretary, Chris Bryant, for an ‘orderly transition into a unity referendum and constitutional change’, presenting it as if it were a done deal. The implication was that only the final, finer points of detail remained to be sketched out. Some commentators now even suggest that Sinn Fein should boycott the devolved assembly unless the UK agrees to a border poll. Bryant’s response – ‘I am not starting the poll now, or this week, or this month, or, I will suggest, this year’ – will only encourage Sinn Fein to push the matter further.

As for the other political parties in Ireland, far from standing firm against this radical drift, many are flirting with these new forces to help secure votes. Politicians involved with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, parties which had historically built hard constitutional bulwarks against republican violence, have also been guilty of peddling anti-Israel rhetoric. It has pushed the centre of gravity further to the left and accelerated the very radicalism these parties once sought to contain. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, if the allegations facing that young woman at the border are any guide.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: How my ancestor dealt with anti-Semitism

I was once guilty of contra-establishmentarianism myself when I told an interviewer my Jewish family who escaped from Russia in 1903 were peasants with straw in their hair. When it was out, my mother phoned. ‘My father,’ she said passionately, ‘was descended from ten generations of scholars.’ ‘But they were poor!’ I insisted. ‘They escaped in a haycart!’ ‘There… was…. no… straw!’ she said. ‘Please correct this!’ I told my next interviewer that even in the shtetls of Lithuania, we were the Establishment.

My mother was always concerned by my over-ambitious projects: ‘Writing Jerusalem is far too stressful for you! You need nourishing food and luxuriant sleep.’ ‘What do you suggest?’ I said. ‘GIVE THE MONEY BACK!’ she said. In her view, my frailties qualified me only for the life of a hothouse valetudinarian. She wouldn’t have approved of my new book, The Cauldron. ‘Montefiore is walking on hot coals,’ confirmed the Times reviewer, ‘in this panoramic history of the Middle East.’ Sadly my mother is dead, but she was right about everything: from now on I am taking her advice.

My ancestor Moses Montefiore, a British magnate, knew everyone from sultans to tsars in the Victorian era. In the 1820s, he befriended Muhammad Ali, Turco-Albanian ruler of Egypt. When Mohammed Ali’s son Said visited London, he stayed with Moses, thanking him with a monumental silver decoration (now in the V&A). Said later built the Suez Canal. Those were interesting times when Islamic rulers could send their sons to stay with Jewish friends. Nowadays, I admire how Moses coped with anti-Semitism. Attending a royal dinner, a bigot denounced him: ‘I just visited Japan which I loved because Japan has no Jews and no pigs!’ ‘Then you and I should go to Japan together,’ answered Montefiore. ‘So they have one of each.’

Why is Hollywood campaigning to free convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti?

With millions facing hunger and displacement in Sudan, dissidents enduring prison and torture in Iran, and thousands of political prisoners languishing in Myanmar’s jails, the world is hardly suffering from a shortage of worthy humanitarian causes.

Yet some of the biggest names in the movie business have decided that what the world really needs is the release of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian terrorist and convicted murderer serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison.

More than 20 actors associated with Marvel films have joined the “Free Marwan” campaign demanding his release, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, and Cate Blanchett.

After years of pretending to save the world while wearing capes, armor, and assorted forms of spandex, these Marvel veterans have settled on a new real-life mission: securing the freedom of a man convicted of directing terrorist attacks that killed innocent people.

The celebrities say they are concerned about Barghouti’s imprisonment and alleged mistreatment, while the campaign they have joined portrays his trial as illegitimate and politically motivated.

Barghouti convicted of five murders
The trouble is that Barghouti is not in prison because Israel objected to his politics.

In 2004, the Tel Aviv District Court convicted him of five murders stemming from three terrorist attacks, as well as attempted murder and membership in a terrorist organization. He was sentenced to five consecutive life terms plus 40 years.

The attempted-murder conviction involved a failed car-bomb attack near Jerusalem’s Malha Mall.

Nor was Barghouti some peripheral political figure who happened to get swept up in the violence of the Second Intifada.

He was one of Fatah’s most powerful leaders in Judea and Samaria, headed its Tanzim terror group, and, the court found, exercised authority over the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which carried out suicide bombings and shooting attacks.

The judges ruled that Barghouti issued orders to kill through the Brigades and found that he supplied terrorist field units with money and weapons through close associates.

The consequences were brutal. A January 2002 shooting near Givat Ze’ev, the judges concluded, was carried out on Barghouti’s instructions. The victim, Yoela Chen, a mother of two, had stopped at a gas station while on her way to a family wedding. Gunmen opened fire on their car, killing Chen and wounding her aunt.

Barghouti was also convicted for his role in the June 2001 murder of Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a Greek Orthodox monk from St. George’s Monastery in Wadi Kelt, who was shot while driving on the Jerusalem-Ma’aleh Adumim road.

And Barghouti also authorized the March 2002 terrorist attack at Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant, where the gunman opened fire on diners. Yosef Habi, 52, of Herzliya, and Eli Dahan, 53, of Lod, were killed, as was Salim Barakat, a 33-year-old Druze police officer from Yarka who confronted the attacker. Thirty-five others were wounded.

Hollywood has long specialized in suspending disbelief. But asking us to suspend it about Barghouti’s five murder convictions may be its most ambitious production yet.

The “Free Marwan” campaign portrays Barghouti as a symbol of Palestinian unity, and some supporters have gone so far as to compare him to Nelson Mandela.

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

From Ian:

Leading Sephardic & Mizrahi Organizations Challenge New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” Over Erasure of Middle Eastern Jews

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

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

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

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

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

What we ask
We are not asking to be tolerated as exceptions to an ideological rule. We are asking to be recognized as what we are: peoples of the region. We ask that New York Magazine acknowledge that its framing excludes the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa except on ideological terms, and renders the region’s other non-Muslim peoples nearly invisible; that future coverage of SWANA communities include Mizrahi and Sephardic voices as we actually are, which for the great majority of us means Zionist, alongside the other erased non-Muslim indigenous voices of the region; and that your editors meet with representatives of the undersigned organizations to discuss how that happens.

Brendan O'Neill: The disgusting bigotry of blaming Israel for anti-Semitism

In a suit and tie on one of his hours-long, soul-eating livestreams, Piker said that ‘if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel mind you, but against American Jews’. There it is. Plainly put. In all its neo-fascist horror. If you’re an American Jew and you’re pro-Israel, you risk attack. Your alignment with that ‘genocidal’ entity is putting your own life and limb at risk. How about being a good Jew and saying ‘Fuck Israel’?

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

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

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

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

Let’s put it like this. I support Israel. I call myself a Zionist. I don’t think anything like a genocide has been committed in Gaza. I want Hamas to be destroyed. And yet I have never been racially abused on the streets or seen any of my cultural institutions protested or graffitied. We all know why: I’m not a Jew.

Jonathan Tobin: El-Sayed’s antisemitism is the issue; not Hasan Piker

Indeed, the trouble goes beyond El-Sayed’s own long record of antisemitic positions and troubling comments about violence against Jews, even while continuing to claim that he wants to protect them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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08/28 Links Pt1: Durban: A milestone in the new antisemitism; Israel lauds Finland’s decision to end UNRWA funding; Syria: Turkey's New Battleground Against Israel

From Ian:

Secret, direct channel between Israel and Hamas credited for enabling Jan. 2025 hostage deal

Israeli television on Friday reported further details about this week’s revelation of the direct channel of communication between Israel and Hamas during the recent Gaza war, which a source quoted by the network said played a critical role in securing the release of some hostages.

The channel was established in August 2024, according to Channel 12 news, shortly after Hamas operatives executed six Israeli hostages abducted during the October 2023 massacre that sparked the war, after sensing Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip approaching their tunnel.

There was considerable frustration in the Israeli security establishment after that incident, leading to the conclusion that a direct channel of communication was needed with Hamas and that mediating countries Egypt and Qatar could not be solely relied on.

A channel was set up between a senior Shin Bet official — on behalf of agency chief Ronen Bar — and senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad. The report did not detail how the sides established direct contacts, which were approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, who at the time served as deputy to Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar.

The communication between the senior Shim Bet and Hamas representatives took place strictly over the phone, with dozens of calls taking place between them. Bar would listen in on them in real time.

A source familiar with the channel said it was used to neutralize many “landmines” in the hostage talks.

But they also devolved into shouting matches, with each side arguing over names, and Israel making clear which Palestinian security prisoners it would not release under any circumstance, according to the source.

The source claimed the direct channel run by the Shin Bet was also essential for overcoming obstacles set by Qatar, “which did not supply the goods and became a disruptive element.” The Shin Bet sparred throughout the war with fellow intelligence agency Mossad over who should mediate, with the Shin Bet favoring Egypt while the Mossad preferred Qatar, which has hosted Hamas leaders and is a leading patron of the Gaza-ruling terror group.

The source familiar with the Shin Bet channel credited it for for getting Hamas on board with the deal that was eventually reached in January 2025, during which dozens of both living and slain hostages were freed in small batches in return for boosted humanitarian aid to Gaza and over 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners held in Israeli prisons.

“[Steve] Witkoff got Netanyahu on board. We got Hamas on board,” the source claimed in reference to US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, who was hailed at the time for helping sway the premier after a “tense” meeting in Jerusalem.

As part of the January 2025 deal, the sides also agreed to hold talks on a second and third phase that would include the return of all hostages, end the war, and ensure a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, but the truce collapsed after the first stage. In October that year, another US-backed agreement was reached to end the war that saw Palestinian terrorists release all the remaining captives.

Legal expert defends IDF rejection of World Central Kitchen strike investigation - interview

On April 1, 2024, the IDF mistakenly killed seven international food aid workers working for the World Central Kitchen (WCK).

Last week, the IDF probe admitted that its surveillance officials misidentified the WCK security officials as Hamas members.

While acknowledging the gravity of its error, the chief military prosecutor of the Military Advocate-General (MAG) Corps determined that, notwithstanding serious failures in the process that led to the assessment that Hamas operatives were traveling in the vehicles, the decisions of the commanders did not raise reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct.

The IDF therefore decided not to open a criminal investigation.

Following this announcement, in a joint statement the foreign ministers of the UK, Australia, and Canada said the decision not to pursue criminal investigations was “shameful.”

“They just say it’s a shame that Israel hasn’t brought criminal charges – they don’t specify what is shameful about it,” Dr. Brian L. Cox told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. A very thorough assessment, no evidence of war crime

Cox retired from the United States Army in 2018 after 22 years of service, including seven years as a military lawyer. He is now a senior fellow at Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Canada, and he taught international law at Cornell Law School from 2019-26.

Cox told the Post that it makes sense for Israel to not pursue criminal charges because they have done a “very thorough assessment based on all the evidence they can gather, and they’ve reached the conclusion that this wasn’t a war crime.”

From an International Humanitarian Law (IHL) perspective, this case is “really straightforward,” he noted.

“If the personnel involved believed they were attacking Hamas fighters and not WCK humanitarian workers, then it wasn’t a war crime. And that’s just a doctrinal application of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) distinction rule.”

Cox added that militaries can prosecute for violation of use of force policy, but then it would have to be “really egregious, a wanton disregard” of policy, which was not the case here.

While the IDF chose not to open criminal investigations, it did remove several officers from their positions, and others were formally reprimanded, an outcome that Cox said would have been exactly the same if the incident had involved the Australian, UK, or Canadian military.

Cox pointed out that a “double standard” is being applied to the IDF here.

“Just because there was an allegation that has been leveled against Israel, the expectation is that the IDF will initiate a criminal prosecution. That expectation doesn’t exist for any other military, including the three countries that signed this joint statement.”

When a soccer league honors ‘martyrs,’ the world should stop turning a blind eye

Soccer is a game that connects us all, until it comes to terror
Rarely is it something that we connect with terrorists, hatred, or incitement, unless it comes to the Palestinians.

I have watched the magic of Messi and Ronaldo over the years, and I remember back in 2018 when all of Israel, including me, was super excited to welcome Messi and his team as Argentina came to play Israel in June 2018.

It was their final friendly match before heading to the FIFA World Cup in Russia.

I was seriously trying to get tickets for that match, but something utterly repulsive happened: the game was initially set for Haifa but was moved to Jerusalem because of security concerns and threats against Messi.

This was because a well-known terrorist was so furious about this match that he actually encouraged people to burn pictures and jerseys of Messi, and incited them to violence or to do anything possible to stop that match from happening. Yes, you heard that right.

This terrorist was living the high life, in the fast lane instead of sitting in an Israeli jail where he belongs!

His name is Jibril Rajoub, and believe it or not, he is the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) soccer federation. Are we really surprised?

He was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Israeli military court for throwing a grenade at an Israeli army truck, and while in prison he learned to speak Hebrew, studied politics, and joined Fatah, eventually becoming a prominent prisoner and leader among his incarcerated comrades and terrorist friends.

He was unfortunately released in the Jibril Agreement prisoner swap and deported by Israel to Lebanon, due to his active role in organizing the First Intifada, where nearly 200 Israelis were murdered.

He lives and breathes hatred for Israel, which is why he went absolutely mad in 2018 when the national team of Argentina was planning to come to Israel.

Thank goodness, FIFA actually suspended him from official activities for one year due to his vile incitement to hatred and violence in calling on soccer fans around the world to burn jerseys and pictures of Messi.

His pathetic appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to have that suspension removed was rejected.

He has a long record of vile incitement and anti-Semitic statements, which, among others, included saying that the Jewish people deserved the Nazi genocide perpetrated against them. Additionally, he openly declared that if the PA possessed a nuclear weapon, it would use it against Israel.

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Australian judges have found a loophole in antisemitism: Just call the Jews “Zionists”

An Australian court has come up with a remarkably convenient rule for deciding whether something is antisemitic. If someone says that Jews control the media and politicians, that can be antisemitic. But if he says Zionists control the media and Israel controls politicians, apparently that is just criticism of a political ideology.

That distinction appears in a recent New South Wales judgment, Farhat v Commissioner of Police, where Justice Fagan devoted a surprising amount of space to defining antisemitism and explaining why hostility toward Israel and Zionism should generally be regarded as something categorically different from hostility toward Jews. There are plenty of issues with his analysis, but perhaps the most revealing one comes from an earlier Australian case that he relies upon, Wertheim v Haddad. And the example he quotes from that case practically demonstrates why his theory doesn't work.

In Wertheim, a Muslim preacher had talked about media outlets owned by “Zionist entities,” referred to “Zionist backed media agencies,” and said that right-wing politicians supported Israel because “Israel holds their leash.” These are among the oldest and most recognizable structures of antisemitic conspiracy theory. The only significant difference is that the word “Jew” has been replaced by “Zionist” or “Israel.”

Yet Justice Stewart, deciding Wertheim, drew a sharp distinction. According to the passage quoted approvingly by Fagan, the statements concerned “Israel, the IDF and Zionists,” rather than Jews, and he explained that “disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group.” That sounds clean until you look at what was actually said. “Jews control the media” is an antisemitic trope, but “Zionists control the media” becomes criticism of an ideology. “Jews control politicians” is an antisemitic trope, but “Israel holds politicians on a leash” becomes criticism of a foreign government. Apparently antisemitism can be disinfected with a thesaurus.

Worse, the preacher had said explicitly antisemitic things earlier that very same day. Stewart found Haddad to have conveyed that Jews are conspiratorial, treacherous and scheming; that Jews love money; that Jews control banks; and other classic antisemitic ideas. The court ultimately characterized those lectures as “fundamentally racist and antisemitic.” But it separated them from the "Zionist" lecture by bizarrely claiming it was to a different audience. Yes, an antisemite can and would change his language to different audiences, that doesn't cleanse the statements. 

Yet Australian judges think so.

The problem is that antisemitism has never been defined simply by whether the noun Jew appears in the sentence. Antisemitic ideas have structures, stereotypes and recurring conspiracy claims: secret Jewish power, Jewish control of governments, Jewish manipulation of the media, Jewish financial domination and Jews operating through hidden networks. A speaker can express those exact ideas while substituting another word for “Jew.”

That is how dog whistles work, and to claim dog whistles aren't bigoted because of a simple word substitution is bizarre, to say the least.

Fagan then takes Stewart's distinction and turns it into something approaching a general theory of antisemitism. In Farhat, he argues that Israel and the Jewish people are “in every material respect different things” and therefore hostility toward Israel cannot simply be equated with hostility toward Jews. He repeatedly invokes anti-Zionist Jews and Jewish organizations as evidence that hostility toward Zionism cannot inherently constitute hostility toward Jews.

The first proposition is trivial: Israel is obviously not identical to every Jew in the world. But the conclusion does not follow. A synagogue is not identical to the Jewish people either. Neither is a Jewish school, a Jewish cemetery, Hebrew, the Star of David or a kosher supermarket. Attacks on any of them can nevertheless be antisemitic because antisemitism can target Jewish collective institutions, symbols and identities, not merely individual human beings carrying a label saying JEW.

Israel presents the same analytical problem on a much larger scale. It describes itself as the Jewish state, was created as an expression of Jewish national self-determination and is understood by both its supporters and its enemies as a Jewish collective entity. That does not mean criticism of Israel is antisemitic; of course it isn't. It means the question cannot be answered simply by saying Israel isn't Jews.

Nor does the existence of anti-Zionist Jews settle anything. Fagan repeatedly relies on the fact that some Jews oppose Zionism or harshly condemn Israel, as though this proves that anti-Zionism occupies an entirely separate conceptual category from antisemitism. But members of a group can endorse prejudicial ideas about their own group, and no characteristic needs to be shared by 100 percent of Jews before hostility toward that characteristic can be relevant to antisemitism. Most Jews do not observe Shabbat; that would hardly prove that attacking Jews for observing Shabbat has nothing to do with antisemitism.

This is precisely why the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, which Fagan criticizes, emphasizes context. IHRA explicitly says that ordinary criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, but it also says that antisemitism can include targeting Israel when it is “conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” and gives as an example the use of “symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism” to characterize Israel or Israelis. It separately identifies conspiracy claims about Jewish control of “the media, economy, government or other societal institutions” as classic antisemitic allegations.

The Wertheim quotation used by Fagan is almost a perfect illustration of why those provisions exist. If someone says that Zionists secretly control media outlets and that Israel keeps politicians “on a leash,” the relevant question is not simply whether Zionist and Jew are dictionary synonyms. They aren't. The relevant question is whether an old antisemitic conception of Jewish power has been transferred onto “Zionists” and Israel.

This is the central intellectual failure in both judgments. They treat antisemitism as though it inheres principally in the explicit word Jew, rather than in ideas, stereotypes and conspiracy structures about Jews. That is not how antisemitism works, and historically it has never been how antisemitism works.

Antisemites have always adapted their vocabulary to the political environment around them. “Hebrews,” “Semites,” “cosmopolitans,” “Rothschilds,” “globalists” and now “Zionists” can function in different contexts as direct references, euphemisms, dog whistles or perfectly legitimate descriptive terms. You determine which one is being used by looking at the claim being made, not merely at the label attached to its subject.

The very word “antisemitism” illustrates the absurdity of this approach. Wilhelm Marr popularized the term in the nineteenth century precisely as part of an effort to recast Jew-hatred in supposedly racial and scientific language rather than as a crude religious attack on Jews. “Semite” was itself a substitute label for Jews.

By these judges’ logic, we would have trouble recognizing even antisemitism as antisemitic because the word itself does not say “Jew.” That is exactly the problem: Jew-hatred has always adapted its vocabulary. The relevant question is not which noun the antisemite chooses, but what ideas and stereotypes he is expressing.

Courts ordinarily understand this principle perfectly well. Racism and prejudice are routinely inferred from context, coded language, patterns of conduct and the targeting of particular institutions or communities. Nobody seriously believes that prejudice disappears whenever the speaker avoids saying the protected group's formal name. Yet that is remarkably close to the framework these judgments are constructing for antisemitism.

Once courts establish the rule that antisemitic tropes stop being antisemitic when the word “Jew” is replaced by “Zionist,” they haven't clarified the definition of antisemitism. They have written its easiest evasion manual.

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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)

 

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08/27 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Britain’s moral depravity; The Nexus of the Ruffalo Problem; Bondi Beach unveils mural in memory of Chanukah terrorist attack victims

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Britain’s moral depravity

Israel is entitled, in law and in any moral universe, to determine its own borders against an enemy that’s determined to destroy it.

It’s outrageous to single out Israel alone for this kind of imperious and punitive treatment. No such campaign is waged against, say, Turkey for having invaded Cyprus and divided the island from the Greeks by Turkish occupation.

It’s even more outrageous since the United Kingdom is principally responsible for the whole rotten history of the never-ending Middle East conflict.

That’s because, when it was the Mandatory power in pre-Israel Palestine, Britain tore up international law. It went back on its binding undertaking to settle the Jews alone in the land of Israel and instead tried to divide the land by offering much or most of it to the Arabs.

This was an early “two-state solution,” minted by perfidious Britain as a reward to the Arabs for their genocidal aggression in attempting to exterminate the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people. Rewarding terror merely incentivizes yet more of it; and Britain has been pursuing that very same strategy ever since then, repeated now yet again by the Burnham government.

Britain is behaving as if it’s still the colonial master, treating Israel with utter contempt by instructing it to shred its lawful inheritance and expose its people to genocidal assault—and then punishing it for refusing to bow the knee.

British officials have warned, however, that since settlement goods would be almost impossible to distinguish from other Israeli goods, this would inevitably morph into a full-blown boycott of Israel.

Since Burnham and Miliband are playing into a hysterical left-wing narrative of demonic Israel that has consumed not only much of their party but most of progressive opinion, that’s unlikely to trouble them.

Nonetheless, they’re making a very grave mistake because they have overlooked a crucial point.

Britain is highly dependent on Israel for its own security. The United Kingdom has emasculated itself so that it no longer possesses armed forces that can defend the country. From Israel, it gets both priceless intelligence—vital for defending its people against Islamist attack—and cutting-edge military technology.

Yet it is proposing to boycott its key military and security ally at a time when the moth-eaten British lion is facing unprecedented, mounting and immediate threats from Russia and Iran.

Israel might now suggest politely that since the United Kingdom apparently hates the Jewish state so much, it surely won’t want to benefit any further from Israeli intelligence or arms supplies, which will accordingly be drastically curtailed.

What Israel should also say is that Britain’s precious “two-state solution” is profoundly immoral. People who wage a 100-year campaign of mass murder to prevent and then exterminate a legitimate country, while turning down repeated offers of a state of their own because they want to murder yet more of those people and destroy that country, and who indoctrinate their own children to do so in perpetuity, deserve absolutely nothing.

Those like the British government, who have spent the past century rewarding such a program and are now punishing its intended victims, can be described in two words: morally depraved.

Masar Badil was sanctioned for Terrorist Ties — Here Are the Branches Operating in The US

The Masar Badil Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path, a branch of the terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was sanctioned on Wednesday by the US Treasury for terrorism ties, but he organization still maintains a web of smaller groups within the United States.

The US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Masar Badil and executive committee members Zaid Abdulnasser and Rawa Alsagheer due to the organization’s inextricable links with Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Samidoun was jointly sanctioned by Canada and the US in October 2024 for being “owned, controlled, or directed” by the Foreign Terrorist Organization PFLP.

“The organizations share fundraising mechanisms as well as senior leaders and members of their respective Executive Committees,” read the US Treasury statement. Masar Badil and Samidoun Overlapping Leadership

In addition to being executives of Masar Badil, Abdulnasser was the Samidoun Germany coordinator and Alsagheer the Samidoun Brazil coordinator. They joined other Samidoun and Masar Badil officers already being sanctioned by OFAC. Samidoun Europe and Masar Badil executive Mohammad Khatib and Samidoun Madrid coordinator, Masar Badil executive, and Alkarama Palestinian Women’s Mobilization co-founder Jaldia Abubakra had been sanctioned on May 19. It had been noted in the May Treasury press release that Abubakra had “played a key role in establishing a Samidoun partner organization in 2021,” perhaps already hinting then that OFAC was reviewing Masar Badil.

Khatib had in the past been described by Palestinian news outlets as a PFLP operative and spokesman. The PFLP and Palestinian outlets similarly described a chief officer of the Samidoun network, Khaled Barakat, as a leader of the Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. Barakat once publicly represented Samidoun as its leader in statements and petitions, but since the founding of Masar Badil was presented only as that newer group’s head, creating some degree of ambiguity about the relationship between the two groups. His wife, Charlotte Kates, serves as the Samidoun international coordinator. According to a July 19 Institute for the Critical Study of the Society lecture, Kates is also a co-founder of Samidoun and deputy secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. The Canadian citizen reportedly relocated to Lebanon — She faced legal challenges in the wake of her calls of “long live October 7” and support for terrorism in April 2024.

Unlike other major Samidoun network officers, Kates is not sanctioned. Masar Badil is also not the limit of the Samidoun network, but rather the handle for an umbrella of organizations that continue to operate in North America.

In a deleted July Instagram post in preparation for a November conference in Toronto, the organization confirmed that Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network, Nidal, Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at the University of Washington (SUPER UW), Al-Ahrar Palestinian Prisoner Support, and Basel Al Araj Committee were part of Masar Badil North America.

CAIR Removes 9/11 Curriculum Listing Bin Laden’s Manifesto, Following Jewish Onliner Exposé

The Council on American-Islamic Relations quietly revised the September 11th section of its national 2026-2027 back-to-school guide one day after Jewish Onliner published an investigation into the organization’s recommended classroom materials.

The original guide directed educators, administrators and school boards to a CAIR-New Jersey curriculum that listed Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” among its high school resources. By August 26, CAIR had removed its endorsement of and link to the curriculum and added a note claiming that an earlier version “did not go through proper vetting.” Yet CAIR National had promoted the same curriculum in its 2025–26 back-to-school guide.

CAIR did not publicly announce the change, identify who failed to vet the material or say whether Jewish Onliner’s reporting prompted the revision. The recommended curriculum, as featured in CAIR’s 2025-2026 national back to school guide. Credit: CAIR

CAIR Quietly Removes Its Endorsement of 9/11 Curriculum
Jewish Onliner published its investigation on August 25 after reviewing CAIR’s newly released nationwide guide and the materials to which it directed American schools.

The original 9/11 section told readers that CAIR-New Jersey and Teaching While Muslim had developed a “comprehensive” curriculum for elementary, middle and high school classrooms. It said the resource included recommended texts, videos, discussion questions and teaching strategies.

The section concluded:
“Access the curriculum at cair-nj.org/911curriculum and share this resource with educators, administrators, and local school boards.”

This was more than a passing reference. CAIR National explicitly instructed readers to access the curriculum and circulate it among educators, administrators and local school boards.

By August 26, the paragraph and hyperlink had been removed from the online guide. The revised version retains the heading “25th Anniversary of 9/11 and Tools for Classrooms,” but no longer names CAIR-New Jersey, Teaching While Muslim or their curriculum.

The replacement text states:
“Comprehensive lesson plans would address the 9/11 attack itself, the victims and families impacted, and the aftermath of the attack, such as the war in Afghanistan, changes in national security, and the rise in hate crimes and discrimination against American Muslim and perceived-Muslim communities.”

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08/27 Links Pt1: Who Is Really Running Iran?; Why Did Israel Take Over an UNRWA School in Jerusalem?; IDF kill Sinwar bodyguard who took part in Oct. 7 attack

From Ian:

Who Is Really Running Iran?

In late July, Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was finally granted an audience with the country's elusive new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. According to Iran International, citing sources inside the president's office and others, Pezeshkian was driven to an undisclosed location, transferred into a commercial vehicle with tinted windows, and placed beside a man he was told was the supreme leader.

The car was kept in darkness. No handshake was permitted. The encounter was reportedly brief and conducted entirely by voice. Pezeshkian allegedly left wondering whether he had met Mojtaba Khamenei at all.

Iran has a supreme leader whom almost nobody sees, a president who cannot reliably reach him, and a military establishment that increasingly makes decisions in his name. In Iran, where the leader's image is part of the machinery of authority, invisibility creates a vacuum.

The most important leader is Ahmad Vahidi, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He has served as defense minister, interior minister, and commander of the Quds Force, Iran's principal instrument of foreign covert action.

Argentina accuses Vahidi of involvement in planning the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. This allegation places Iran's most powerful military institution under a man associated with terrorism, proxies and covert action as ordinary instruments of statecraft.

Around Vahidi stands a small fraternity of veteran Guards commanders and intelligence officials whose careers stretch back to the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, shapes strategy. Mohammad-Bagher Zolghadr connects the institutions. Hossein Taeb, the former chief of IRGC Intelligence who now heads the Basij paramilitary organization, watches the streets. Together, they are the operating system of the Islamic Republic.

Iran's security establishment captured the decisive institutions of the state. The Guards did not abolish the clerical state; they climbed inside it. They kept its constitution, rituals and religious vocabulary while concentrating practical power in the hands of men with military and intelligence backgrounds. They do not need Iran to win today. They need the West to lose patience tomorrow.

The Best Outcome for Core U.S. Interests Is the Collapse of the Iranian Regime

Twenty years of experience as an American diplomat has made me realize that no amount of diplomatic ingenuity can contain Iran. President Donald Trump is right to resort to an intensive economic pressure campaign, backed by the implicit threat of renewed kinetic action. The U.S. should keep pushing until it gets the best outcome for American interests, the region and the Iranian people: the shattering of the illegitimate regime in Tehran.

I was sent to Kuwait for my first State Department assignment, arriving in 2007 at the peak of Iraq's bloody civil war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps drove much of the violence, building death squads and militias and arming them with IEDs that killed and injured hundreds of U.S. service members.

My subsequent tour in Bahrain coincided with the onset of the Arab Spring protests in 2010. Popular grievances fueled the demonstrations, but Iran exploited the situation, pouring fuel on sectarian tensions. Gulf rulers seized on fears of Iranian interference to justify the Saudi-led intervention that put an end to the protests.

From 2011 to 2013, I coordinated State Department policy for Lebanon - a country hollowed out by decades of Iranian meddling and hostage to Tehran's shadow war against Israel. Billions of dollars of IRGC backing meant Hizbullah outgunned Lebanon's national army and possessed an arsenal of 60,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israeli towns and cities. Iran in 2013 dispatched Hizbullah to shore up the Assad regime in Syria during the civil war, fueling a conflict that led to over half a million deaths.

The mullahs might not have orchestrated Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but IRGC know-how and hundreds of millions of dollars of funding over two decades enabled the rampage into Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, including 46 Americans.

The regime in Tehran bears overwhelming responsibility for the mayhem and misery in the Middle East since 1979, and its hold on power is a dire threat to regional stability. The current showdown is an inevitable result of the Iranian regime's efforts to dominate the region through bullying, blackmail and terror. The best outcome for the region - and for core U.S. interests - is the regime's collapse.

How Tehran Survives U.S. Sanctions

Iran has spent years setting up a complex system of oil sales and clandestine shadow banking that it hopes will sustain its economy and military long enough to outlast the latest U.S. economic assault.

The U.S. naval blockade of Iran's ports has reduced Iranian oil exports to near zero. But Tehran still has 80 million barrels of oil stored offshore in oil tankers, mainly in the waters off Malaysia.

Relying on a ship-to-ship transfer system, sanctioned tankers unload crude onto other tankers in international waters to mask the fuel's origin, then ship the cargo to China.

U.S. sanctions generally aim to cut off targets from the U.S. financial system. But sanctions become less effective if U.S. enemies avoid the U.S. financial system entirely.

Iran's transactions with China are increasingly settled in Chinese yuan, outside U.S. oversight. Iran also uses cryptocurrencies to avoid U.S. oversight.

Moreover, Tehran operates a network of shell companies in hubs including Hong Kong and Dubai that are controlled by Iranian exchange houses. These move Iranian oil proceeds into other currencies.

As Washington sanctions one front company, Tehran simply spins up another.

Iranian Cyber Sabotage Is Targeting U.S. Water Systems

The Iranian regime recently executed a series of targeted digital intrusions against water infrastructure in the U.S. This aggressive campaign focused on the operational technology networks of municipal drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities across 7-12 states.

The primary mechanism of the attacks is the scanning of the public internet for exposed programmable logic controllers, which are specialized industrial mini-computers responsible for managing physical machinery, water flow, and chemical treatment cycles.

A pivotal potential vulnerability exposed during this campaign was the indirect threat to the chemical treatment and safety of the supply of drinking water. If water flow drops significantly at a particular location while automated chemical injectors continue to pump in the disinfectant chlorine at pre-set levels, the concentration of chlorine in that section of the facility can rapidly skyrocket to toxic, highly corrosive levels.

Irrespective of its actual impact, this sabotage event borders on the threshold of biochemical warfare insofar as it was a deliberate attempt to inflict a toxicant on an adversary population. The sabotage was designed to prove that a foreign adversary can silently compromise the safety of both U.S. industry structures and individual Americans' household tap water from thousands of miles away.

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