My last post described how UPI reported on Israel's defeating Jordan in the battle for Jerusalem in 1967. But the joy felt by Jews and many others was not reflected in the international community.
Here's a news story from later that month, when Israel officially declared Jerusalem to be one city. The United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, the Vatican and much of the UN scrambled to denounce the move.
For nineteen years, Jordan controlled the holy places. A Muslim nation had full control over Christian and Jewish holy sites. Jordan explicitly denied Jews from entering the city even though the armistice agreement specifically demanded open access to holy spots.
For those nineteen years, the international community was largely silent. The Vatican didn't condemn Jordan's annexation. The UN never called for the open access agreement to be enforced despite numerous complaints by Israel.
But when Jews took over control - and actually implemented free access to all holy spots by all (except for Jews to visit their own holiest site on the Temple Mount) - suddenly the world warned Israel that this was terrible, that a Jewish state could not possibly act responsibly when the Muslim state had already shown it had no interest in keeping Jerusalem open.
The hypocrisy was blatant, including from the State Department. And the hypocrisy persists today, every time anyone demands that Jerusalem goes back to the "status quo," by which they mean the anomalous 19 years when the world's Jews were banned from the city.
Since this is Yom Yerushalayim, here is the UPI article filed when Israel reunited the city during the Six Day War.
Holy City of Jerusalem Reunited
By ROBERT MUSELJERUSALEM, (UPI)—A Jew in a paratrooper’s uniform blew a triumphant blast on a ram’s horn at the Mandelbaum Gate today and signaled the fall of Jordan’s old section of the holy city to Israeli forces. For the first time in 20 years Israelis prayed at their wailing wall.
There was fighting, bloodshed, prayer and joy. Shortly after the old city with its shrines of Christendom fell to the Israelis and the sound of sharp fighting died away, Israel’s one-eyed Gen. Moshe Dayan rode into the town.
He went to the wailing wall and offered prayers. Hundreds of troops, dirt-caked, sweaty, tired, stood silently in prayer at the wall which is the only remnant of the ancient temple of Jerusalem.
As Dayan, the new Israeli defense minister, toured the streets, he rode past burned-out vehicles and on one street, three Jordanian snipers lay face down, captives of the Israelis.
Some Jordanian wounded were taken to the Israeli sector of the city for treatment.
There was no immediate estimate of damage to shrines. But there was a hole plainly visible in the 16th century Lion’s Gate.
Israelis drove around joyfully in streets forbidden to them since the partition of the holy city into Jordanian and Israeli sectors.
Flags of Surrender
Some rode in Jordanian cars and trucks. One Israeli with a grin from here to here toed through the streets with a big picture of Jordan’s King Hussein stuck on the radiator.
White flags hung like limp pennants from Jordanian homes. The Israelis had broadcast appeals to show the flag of surrender and slowly the residents did so.
The Israelis said they were doing everything possible to protect the physical treasures of the holy city.
A large number of Israeli soldiers was stationed near the Mosque of Omar, sacred to Islam.
I watched the Israelis pound the Jordanian last-ditch defenders who had sited their guns in the Christian quarter of the old city and around the Mount of Olives.
“We appealed to them to stop firing, using an Arabic language appeal on a loudspeaker,” an Israeli officer said.
But I heard the vicious chatter of machinegun fire and saw smoke and flames rise from the old section which holds the sacred shrines of Christendom.
Then Israeli jet planes and tanks combined to pound the Jordanian positions outside the old city into submission. Israeli troops, who had surrounded the Jordanian half of Jerusalem for two days, closed in.
A few minutes later the Mandelbaum Gate opened and the division of the Holy City ended after 20 years. Whooping Israelis claimed it would never be divided again.
“Once And For All”
Again and again they chanted that the old section, sacred to Jews for 3,000 years, was “once and for all in our hands.”
Elderly men, some with the prayer shawls of orthodox Jews surged up to the gate and asked permission to enter the old section to pray at the Wailing Wall, the only remnant of the ancient Temple of Solomon.
Young soldiers returning from battle advised them to stay put. Sniper fire still crackled in the ancient narrow streets.
But bearded paratroop Gen. Shlomo Goren, chief chaplain of the Israeli Army, raised a Shofar (rams horn) to his lips at the Mandelbaum Gate. He blew it mightily to announce Jews could once more worship in the City of David at the Wailing Wall.
Israel’s capital exploded with excitement.
Men, women and children who had withstood two days of Jordanian shelling that injured more than 500 persons and destroyed or damaged 1,000 homes poured into the streets and applauded the troops returning victorious through the gate.
Through the gate, in the old section, in the final moments before victory, I had to duck frequent bursts of sniper fire and mortars crunched nearby.
“Keep your head down,” shouted Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, vice mayor of Jerusalem, a veteran with a limp from his soldiering in the 1948 war with the Arabs.
He dropped down beside me and we cautiously looked over a wall just as an Israeli plane scored a direct hit on a Jordan position outside the old city, sending up clouds of black smoke.
After the massive protests in Jewish neighborhoods across New York City over the past few days, I think a lot of people genuinely do not understand what something like that actually feels like for the people living there, so I want to try to walk you through it.
You wake up in the morning and see a message in the community WhatsApp chat. Maybe it’s from the local Jewish council. Maybe it’s from your congresswoman. It’s a warning that there’s going to be a protest in your neighborhood that night.
You open the flyer and see men in keffiyehs holding rifles, militant imagery plastered across something the media will later describe as a “demonstration.” The address is around the corner from your house. The flyer never explicitly calls for violence, but you’ve seen the videos from the last one and the one before that, and you already know there is a very real chance this is going to turn ugly.
Your first thought is your family.
A few months ago, you bought a firearm and locked it in a safe in your bedroom, away from the children. You know that if the day ever comes where you actually need to use it to defend your family, then something has already gone catastrophically wrong, and even if you survive that encounter, there is a very good chance the legal system in a city like New York will spend years trying to destroy your life afterward.
There is not much you can do, so you put your phone away and go to work, spending the entire day trying to keep your mind off what is waiting for you back home.
On the drive home, traffic suddenly stops. Streets are blocked off and police cars are everywhere. Sirens are flashing on every corner. And you remember that your neighborhood is about to be flooded with hundreds of people screaming about intifada and resistance while politicians and reporters insist this is all perfectly normal political expression.
You get home before the kids.
One by one they walk through the door while you keep checking the window to make sure they made it back safely. Your oldest tells you the principal made an announcement warning students not to walk or bike through a certain area after school, but refused to explain why, probably because nobody wants to be to explain to a group of Jewish children that there will be a mob outside their neighborhood later that night chanting slogans that openly glorify violence against Jews.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), released new background material in May 2026 documenting secular pro-Palestinian extremism across Germany, a heterogeneous movement comprising decades-old organizations and groups formed after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, united by their denial of Israel’s right to exist and anti-Jewish agitation disguised as political criticism.
The intelligence service identifies key actors, symbols, and protest patterns, warning that secular pro-Palestinian extremists use Israel-hatred and antisemitism as a bridge between Islamists, German and Turkish left-wing extremists, and Turkish right-wing extremists.
The BfV documents how extremist actors in the scene have appeared in protest activity that has included anti-Israel and antisemitic content, riots, and attacks on police, journalists, and counter-protesters, especially in Berlin
Key Extremist Organizations
The BfV material describes terror-linked and extremist networks, including people from the PFLP milieu and former Samidoun actors, as continuing to influence Germany’s pro-Palestinian extremist scene.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
According to the BfV, people from the milieu of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an EU-designated terrorist organization since 2002 whose members helped hijack Lufthansa Flight 181 “Landshut” in 1977, have regularly helped organize anti-Israel rallies, particularly in Berlin.
The Marxist-Leninist organization openly advocates armed struggle to establish a Palestinian state “within the borders of historical Palestine,” meaning Israel’s complete elimination through what it calls ending “Zionist occupation.”
Samidoun – Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network
Germany banned Samidoun, on November 2, 2023, after the group celebrated the Hamas massacre as “resistance.” Founded in 2011 by PFLP members abroad, Samidoun demands release of Palestinians imprisoned for terrorism links and provides propaganda support to the PFLP, Hamas, and the Turkish terrorist group DHKP-C.
Before its prohibition, the network was documented to have exploited pro-Palestinian demonstrations and social media for recruitment, fundraising, and spreading disinformation.
BDS and Affiliated Groups
The BfV says BDS-linked groups in Germany have used antisemitic narratives, participated in anti-Israel demonstrations after October 7, and, in some cases, are now assessed as confirmed extremist endeavors. The agency interprets the BDS call to end occupation of ‘all Arab lands’ as a demand for ‘all of Palestine’ and, therefore, the end of Israel’s state existence
The report notes that extremist individuals without formal organizational membership have become key mobilization drivers through extensive social media reach, repeatedly disseminating hate messages and violence calls that fuel radicalization and willingness to use force.
Britain is experiencing a surge in antisemitism, yet much of the public discussion about how to respond to it avoids the central issue driving it. Today’s antisemitism is overwhelmingly rooted in hostility towards Zionism, sustained by false claims about Israel and the war in Gaza. This hostility only makes sense, it only inflames the imagination, because it is everything that has sustained Jew-hatred for millennia, culminating in the Holocaust. It’s effectively the same thing with the same target, even if it has a different new fancy name. Until this reality is openly acknowledged and confronted, declarations of opposition to Jew hatred will continue to fall short.
The sharp rise in antisemitic incidents is not occurring in a vacuum. Nor is it driven simply by ignorance or longstanding prejudice. It is being fuelled by a sustained campaign of disinformation about Israel, Gaza, the IDF and Hamas, and by the moral licence that these narratives grant to those who believe “Zionists” are legitimate targets.
Public figures and institutions frequently express opposition to antisemitism, often sincerely. But these declarations increasingly ring hollow because they fail to engage with how antisemitism actually manifests in Britain today. Statements of concern alone achieve little if there is no willingness to address what is motivating the hostility.
That motivation is frequently explicit. When the extremist group Ashab Al Yamin claimed responsibility for the arson attack on Kenton United Synagogue, it justified the attack by describing the shul as “one of the centres of Zionist influence in the British capital”. Its supposed crimes included hosting a “Kenton for Israel” group, holding events such as “Shabbat for Israel”, and singing Hatikvah. A typical synagogue in suburban London was attacked because it was considered too Zionist. If Kenton United is too Zionist then all of us are and therein lies the point.
Kenton was not an isolated case. Finchley Reform Synagogue and Hatzola have both been targeted for similar reasons. In one particularly stark example, a former synagogue that is in the process of being converted into a mosque was also subjected to an attempted arson attack. A local man interviewed by the BBC expressed confusion: “That synagogue has been turned into a mosque, so I don’t know why someone would petrol bomb it.” The answer lies in the way “Zionism” is now treated not as a political belief but as an inherent moral stain, one that clings to places and institutions even after Jews themselves have gone.
This obsession with “Zionist influence” is viral. Punk artist Bobby Vylan, best known for chants of “death to the IDF” at Glastonbury last year recently took to YouTube to claim that the British Department for Education had been “captured by Israeli forces”. He went on to ask what hope there was of resisting “growing Zionist influence” if even the education system was not free of it. The language is familiar to anyone who understands antisemitism: claims of capture, control and hidden power, updated for a modern audience.
Outside Parliament, activists now regularly gather during Prime Minister’s Questions to distribute fake banknotes headed “Bank of Zionism”. They hold placards depicting senior UK politicians branded with the same slogan and unfurl banners calling to “End Zionism control of UK Politics”. At larger demonstrations against Israel, chants such as “Palestine is Arab” and demands for “Intifada revolution” are common. These are not calls for peace or coexistence. They are declarations that deny Jewish self‑determination entirely and frame violence as justified or even necessary.
The same assumptions are increasingly tested in the courts. Palestine Action, a group that has attacked British defence firms, banks, insurance companies and even a law firm, argues that such actions are justified because these institutions are allegedly complicit in Israeli “genocide”. Whether or not the group is ultimately proscribed, the underlying premise often goes unchallenged: that extraordinary action against “Zionist” entities is morally virtuous.
This brings us to the question many remain unwilling to confront. The claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is false. It does not meet the legal definition of genocide, it is not supported by the facts on the ground, and it is contradicted by serious analysis of Israeli military intent. Yet it is repeated endlessly with absolute moral certainty. That matters, because genocide is not just another accusation. It is the ultimate crime, and once it is accepted as fact, almost anything becomes permissible in response.
Wes Streeting is convinced he can directly challenge and confront the rise of sectarian politics, increased division, and rising antisemitism in the UK as Prime Minister, allies have said.
Streeting resigned as Health Secretary in a move aimed at pressuring Keir Starmer to accept that his time as Prime Minister should come to an end.
Aides said they believe the Ilford North MP would prove to be a more effective communicator if given the chance to lead.
In his resignation letter, Streeting criticised the “drift” at the top of government and told the Prime Minister it is “clear” he will not lead Labour into the next election.
While he praised Starmer’s “many great strengths” and “courage and statesmanship on the world stage,” Streeting continued: “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”
Jewish News understands that last week’s election results in Redbridge—where Labour held on to the council, beating back the challenge posed by the Jeremy Corbyn-backed pro-Gaza independents—convinced Streeting of the need to attempt a move to replace the PM.
Although Labour suffered significant losses to the Greens and Reform UK elsewhere, Streeting became convinced that effective communication was key to tackling the advance of extremist politics in the country.
Colleagues in Redbridge confirm that Streeting played a “very active” role in the local elections, attending meetings on campaign messaging and taking part in regular door-knocking to listen to local voters for months leading up to the May 7 poll.
Streeting also featured in a couple of online videos urging locals not to vote for the pro-Gaza independents.
In one video, he told residents to remember that they were participating in a vote about Redbridge, “not the UN Security Council.”
As for what had made these many Palestinian perpetrators and spectators so happy—well, it’s a dark document. But the patterns are worth pointing out.
Some of the images studied by medical experts and catalogued with the investigating committee:
“The body of a young man lying on a sidewalk outside a concrete public shelter on Route 232, with severe burn injuries concentrated in the groin area.”
“A young woman with her insides protruding out of the groin area.”
“The body of a female victim with what appears to be a gunshot wound to the groin area.”
“The bottom half of a female body with bleeding in the groin area.”
The report is full of such accounts. The above are from victims who were found at the site of the Nova music festival. The scenes were similar at kibbutzim. One typical example: “On October 13th, first responders discovered two abused bodies in a destroyed home, one of them naked. The rescue efforts are documented in several videos and images that are archived with the Civil Commission. One of the first bodies found was that of a female victim. The body appears to be completely naked. Her ankle had been tied with a thick black chord. According to witnesses who provided testimony to the Civil Commission, the body had several nails driven into her lower abdomen and groin area, as well as a metal or plastic object embedded in the groin area.”
Pages and pages and pages of this stuff. Children shot in the face, victims decapitated and dismembered with hoes and shovels.
One video shows a terrorist yelling “God is great” while standing over the dead body of a woman who is naked from the waste down.
In one disturbing crime scene, a man was found “with his genitals cut off, and next to him, the body of a woman, holding his cut-off genitals, in what appeared to be a staged display to humiliate the victims.”
Again, this report is nearly 300 pages long, and it is full of such documented atrocities.
Jew-hatred strips the humanity from whatever it touches. There is nothing else like it.
It’s often said that all Left-Islamic unions inevitably end as 7th century theocracies—the Islamic Revolution in Iran is frequently cited as an example here. Yet Soviet—and Chinese, for that matter—history suggests otherwise. The USSR ruthlessly eradicated Muslim religiosity within its borders—and with it, the terrorist fervor. these days, its former Central Asian “republics” are the most moderate Muslim states—even if they are populated by tribes also found in the neighboring Afghanistan.
The Eurasian behemoth’s post-Soviet experience with Chechnya is far less rosy, of course, but even that relationship is currently stable. When religious violence does take place, the authorities squash it with gusto. Responding to the 2024 terror attack in a Moscow suburb, Russians did not hesitate to adopt every measure at their disposal, including—very publicly—torture. The world shrugged. It’s not just that the Kremlin knows about that Gaza pit bull, Russians are, stereotypically, natural dog trainers.
Russia already quietly resettled over a thousand Gazans, mostly in the Muslim regions of Chechnya and Dagestan. They don’t need to take all two million of them—just a sizable number, proudly and publicly. In doing so, they will set an example to the world. In the aftermath of the Ukraine war, Russia has a reputation to salvage—and I can’t think of a better way to approach it than by aiding Palestinians.
If necessary, Trump can sweeten the deal for Putin in Ukraine. It’s hard to see how American interest would change should the border between Russia and Ukraine move in either direction. America does have interest in Middle East peace and global commerce.
If Ukrainians are forced to shake hands on something not entirely to their liking, they can think of it as a payback for centuries of Cossack genocide. Not to mention that the turn of the century pogroms, mostly perpetrated in what is now Ukraine, prompted the creation of political Zionism. The way Zelensky, likely in coordination with Qatar, recently accused Israel of trading in stolen grain echoes the ugliest stereotypes. Perhaps Ukraine would like to resettle a few thousand Gazans?
A simple majority of Gazans want to leave and a plurality have been wanting to leave even before Israel brought the war home. They prefer comfortable Western countries where their clans have already grown roots, but Russia is almost the West and Muslim communities there are numerous. The way Russians today began thinking of themselves as Eurasionists, presupposes a multi-ethnic imperial dynamic that embraces Islam.
Some would object to the measures I am proposing, even calling it, inaccurately, “ethnic cleansing”. Most of them are the same people—and there are many who share that opinion these days, particularly on the left and among the young—that claim that Jews don’t need Israel because Joseph Stalin founded a homeland approximation for us on China’s border. That would be the so-called “Jewish Autonomous Region” of Birobidzhan. It turns out, they support not just ethnic cleansing—a gulag.
Why not create a Palestinian Autonomous Region in Siberia, right next to the Jewish one? This way the two Semitic nations can live peacefully side by side, under the watchful eye of their Russian brothers. Granted, the Jewish settlement of the Far East never took hold so there is hardly a Yid left in Birobidzhan. And there is no shortage of uninhibited land in Russia regardless. And many Muslims in Russia’s capital.
This of course is a crazy idea. But “crazy” is another way of saying “extraordinary” and the Trump Administration is already thinking in these terms.
Half of Gaza is now living in tents; not even their neighbors on the Strip are willing to shelter them. Considering that most terror tunnels are still usable and Hamas is still around, at some point Israel will have to finish the job. Will anyone think of the humanitarian emergency?
Given the current regional power arrangement it’s highly unlikely that Gazans can can be deployed as proxies against Israel anyway—so why bother maintaining them as such? Russia might want to keep that conflict frozen, but it’s highly unlikely that they will be able to thaw it.
Some kind of resolution to the crisis is two years overdue. Right now, time is not on Russia’s side. They may need to settle the conflict quickly and they will accept American demands. Maybe even rejoin the civilized world.
The U.S.-Israel strikes on the Iranian regime are definitive military responses to 47 years of religiously-fueled terror carried out by the world's foremost radical regime of the modern era. This formidable challenge to the West is compounded by the Free World's hesitation to acknowledge the jihad Iran has waged against Israel and the U.S.-led Western alliance since 1979.
Tehran and Washington are both playing for time in a war of economic and strategic attrition. The Iranian regime aims to buy time to rearm its Islamic resistance forces. The Islamic Republic's approach is underpinned by its apocalyptic and radical brand of Twelver Shi'ism.
Some 500 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had received training in Iran under direct IRGC Quds Force supervision before Hamas's invasion and massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In the early days of the war, the IRGC's English-language social media output aimed to dismantle the pro-Israel coalition. The Tel Aviv-based firm Cyabra identified more than 40,000 inauthentic accounts originating largely from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Researchers determined that one in four accounts posting about the war were inauthentic, the largest foreign influence operation against U.S. opinion in the digital era.
The strategic effect has been to invert the moral architecture of the conflict. Hamas, its sponsors, and its supporters have framed jihadist violence as legitimate resistance. To judge their impact, at least 20 countries have recognized "Palestine" since April 2024, including the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, and Portugal.
In August 2025, senior Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad asserted that the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel paved the way for the Western recognition of a "Palestinian state," convincing the world that defeating Israel "is now possible." A Harvard-Harris poll found that 51% of Americans aged 18-24 agreed that Palestinian grievance justified the Oct. 7 killings.
American and Israeli military and counterterrorism gains of the past two years are only partial. The ultimate battle is for the hearts and minds of the Free World. Â The West requires strategic patience, resilience, and determination to overcome jihad's "forever war."
Washington, May 14 - Political analysts aligned with Dan Bilzerian, James Fishback, and other Tucker Carlson-endorsed firebrands expressed profound bafflement Tuesday at the stubborn refusal of American voters to reward what they described as “unprecedented online momentum” generated by devoted supporters in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad.
“Every day our metrics show millions of engagements from accounts that are clearly organic Americans who just happen to post at 3 a.m. Pakistan Standard Time and spell ‘Israel’ with seven additional letters,” said a visibly perplexed strategist for Bilzerian’s long-shot congressional bid in Florida’s 6th District. “The ratio game is off the charts. Yet when the actual ballots are counted, it’s like those passionate voices vanish into thin air. We’re mystified.”
Bilzerian, the influencer-turned-candidate known for posting shirtless photos with automatic weapons and thoughtful geopolitical takes such as “kill Israelis,” has amassed impressive X impressions thanks to what his team calls a “highly motivated diaspora of freedom-loving patriots” in South Asia. Similar patterns have emerged around Fishback’s gubernatorial campaign, where Tucker himself declared that “pretty soon all winning Republican politicians will talk like this” — a prophecy that, so far, has manifested mostly in retweets from accounts whose bios feature both the Pakistani flag and Adolf Hitler.
Campaign insiders say the discrepancy between digital dominance and electoral irrelevance is “deeply concerning for democracy.” One Fishback aide, speaking on condition of anonymity while refreshing engagement stats, noted that their candidate’s clips routinely rack up hundreds of thousands of views from users who type “Based” in Urdu script and then disappear the moment poll workers in Florida ask for ID.
“How do you explain robust support from people who can’t legally vote in U.S. elections translating into zero primary wins?” the aide asked, gesturing at a wall covered in heat maps of bot activity. “We have Pakistani teenagers ratio’ing Randy Fine and Byron Donalds into oblivion every night, yet on Election Day the turnout from that crucial demographic is mysteriously low. It defies every model we’ve built on Grok and Telegram.”
Experts within the movement insist the phenomenon cannot possibly reflect actual American sentiment. “Real voters are out there,” insisted a Bilzerian surrogate. “They’re just too busy liking posts to fill out mail-in ballots. Or maybe the Zionist deep state is suppressing the IP addresses of true patriots. Either way, the hordes are real. The numbers don’t lie — except when they do, in which case it’s still someone else’s fault."
Before the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof's piece alleging that Israeli forces train dogs to assault Palestinian prisoners, the claim had been circulating in other outlets for weeks. During that period, I asked an AI whether it was scientifically possible. The answer was no — for physiological and behavioral reasons specific to how dogs work, reasons that canine experts confirmed publicly once the Times story went viral. It seems like a reasonable thing to check before publishing. Neither Kristof nor the many layers of editors above him thought to ask it.
Why not?
The easy answer is bias — that the Times is hostile enough to Israel that it accepts ludicrous claims from Israel's detractors while applying normal evidentiary standards to everything else. Bias is certainly part of the story, and it shapes reporting in ways invisible to the reporters doing the shaping. But it doesn't fully explain the failure, because bias alone would still leave a careful editor asking whether the central claim was physically possible. The more unsettling explanation is that the question genuinely never occurred to them.
And the dog question was only the most obvious one nobody asked. Any competent reporter who wanted to test these allegations — not spike them, test them — could have found a random Israeli prison guard. Not one handed over by an NGO with an agenda, but a Yosef Shmo willing to talk anonymously, who could have described how many policies these claims would violate, how many cameras are mounted throughout the facility, how rigidly procedures are followed, and how many people — the dog trainer, the handler, multiple guards on multiple shifts — would have to maintain a coordinated silence for the story to hold together. If that guard said yes, he'd seen it or believed it was happening, that would be real corroboration. If he said the claims were institutionally impossible, the story would have to reckon with that. Kristof gathered fourteen accounts from people who had every reason to make these allegations and consulted no one with institutional knowledge to test whether the allegations were structurally coherent. No editor stopped to ask whether he had tried.
This is where the standard critique of bad journalism stops: the reporter only sought confirming evidence. But the problem runs deeper than confirmation bias, which is usually framed as a question about the reliability of sources — is this person telling me the truth? The prior question, the one that confirmation bias analysis skips, is whether the claimed facts are even possible given everything else we know about how the world works. A prison is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies run on procedure, documentation, and the path of least resistance for the people inside them. Any claim requiring dozens of institutional actors to coordinate ongoing misconduct in silence, across shifts, over months, without a single incident report or leaked photograph, fails a test that has nothing to do with the credibility of any individual witness. The question is architectural, and it comes before the question of testimony.
Most people are never taught to ask it — and this is an alarmingly underexplored gap.
The science of persuasion has been industrialized for a century. Edward Bernays founded modern public relations in the 1920s by applying Freudian psychology to mass persuasion, with the core insight that people respond to images, fears, and tribal identity far more reliably than to argument. Everything since has been refinement and acceleration: the tools now backed by neuroscience, behavioral economics, and surveillance data that tracks every click. Social media algorithms can identify what you are susceptible to before you have consciously formed an opinion, and the manipulation is personalized, optimized, and delivered at a scale Bernays could not have imagined. Online news aggregators watch which stories you click and adjust what they show you accordingly. Every major platform is engineered for maximum engagement, which turns out to mean maximum emotional activation. All of it is designed to move you before you have a chance to think.
Human beings have not kept pace.
There are questions a careful reader should bring to any claim. How reliable is this source and what do they want from me? Is the claim is falsifiable or constructed to absorb any objection? What frame is doing the argumentative work the evidence cannot? What assumptions underlie the reasoning and do they correspond to reality? What are my own biases are and are they are pulling me toward a conclusion I want rather than one I have earned?
There are books on critical thinking, but it has never been
These questions form a coherent discipline that has never been named or systematically taught. Philosophy departments teach formal logic, abstractly, to students who sought them out. Journalism schools teach sourcing and verification, which operate entirely downstream of the questions above. Law school does some of this for a small fraction of the population. No institution owns the skill of evaluating claims in real time, under conditions of uncertainty and motivated pressure. It falls through every crack in the curriculum from elementary school through graduate education, and nobody notices the gap because the gap has no name.
Meanwhile the persuaders have had a century's head start, and their tools improve every year.
I am planning a series of articles that will work through those questions and more — what they are, why they matter, and how to make them habitual rather than effortful. The goal is a practical toolkit for the reader who would prefer not to be the last person in the room to ask whether dogs can actually be trained to do that.
We have never been taught how to think clearly while those who want to manipulate us have been taught, expensively and continuously, how to convince us that their narratives are reality. The first step toward closing that gap is recognizing that it exists.
The third greatest number of antisemitic incidents on record were reported in the U.S. in 2025. Of the 10 states with the most incidents reported, Texas ranked eighth, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League.
Harris (Houston), Dallas and Travis (Austin) counties accounted for 65% of the incidents reported in the state with Houston accounting for nearly 25% of incidents statewide.
In Houston, 67 incidents were reported, including bomb threats and synagogues being threatened, according to the report.
We know that Texas is a heavily Republican state, so I was wondering if these counties were red or blue in 2024.
Texas has 254 counties. 242 are Republican. And all three of the major counties with the most antisemitic incidents voted for Harris in the 2024 elections.
To be sure, the Democratic counties are also the most heavily populated counties. Those three counties make up 29% of Texas' population.
But 29% being responsible for 65% of the antisemitism is still way out of proportion. I don't know the breakdown of the remaining 35% of incidents.
This doesn't mean that there is no right-wing antisemitism, of course. There is way too much. But isn't it interesting that most of the antisemitic incidents in Texas come from three of the few Democratic counties?
UPDATE: A Democratic-leaning fan makes a good point: 90% of Texas Jews live in those three counties, meaning that the 65% statistic could be interpreted as fewer incidents per (Jewish) capita than in the Republican sections. Just goes to show that the same numbers can lead to different conclusions, which is related to a future project of mine!
Ayear before October 7, 2023, reshaped the political landscape, we founded a nonprofit organization called Antisemitism Watch. The decision followed decades of reporting on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and years of chronicling daily antisemitic incidents. What became unmistakable over time was not simply persistence, but normalization—antisemitism embedding itself across wide swaths of society with diminishing resistance.
In a Newsweek op-ed in which we announced the launch, we wrote that “few contest that antisemitism—history’s oldest hatred of a religious and ethnic group—has had an unmatched post-Holocaust resurgence.”1 The data confirmed record numbers of anti-Jewish attacks across the United States, Canada, and Europe, while social media accelerated newer conspiracies blaming Jews for everything from the slave trade to COVID-19.2, 3
Even then, our concern was not only the scale of antisemitism, but the way it was being confronted. The most prominent institutions tasked with addressing it were doing so selectively, not consistently. The Anti-Defamation League had diluted its core mission by repositioning itself as a more generic anti-hate organization and, in practice, mostly focused on right-wing antisemitism while giving a free pass to anti-Jewish hostility from the political left.
In the months following the October 7 attack, antisemitism shed its inhibitions.
What distinguishes this moment is the collapse of stigma. Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence.
This normalization is not diffuse, but has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels. The progressive left frames Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, a country of inherent injustice. That creates an atmosphere in which hostility toward Israel is cast as an ethical obligation. And for many on the left—and their Muslim activist allies—the distinction between Jews and Israelis frequently collapses.
On parts of the populist right, antisemitism has reemerged through the architecture of conspiracy theory. Jews are cast not as oppressors, but as puppet masters—orchestrators of migration, finance, media narratives, and foreign entanglements. The vocabulary differs from that on the left, but the structural function is identical: Jews are assigned exceptional and malign agency.
Prince Harry has weighed into Britain’s antisemitism crisis for the first time, warning that Jews are being made to feel “unsafe” in their own homes as hatred spreads across the country.
Writing in the New Statesman, the Duke of Sussex said Britain was facing a “deeply troubling rise in antisemitism” and warned that “silence is not neutrality” when extremism is allowed to flourish.
In one of the strongest interventions yet by a senior royal on the issue, Harry wrote: “Jewish communities – families, children, ordinary people – are being made to feel unsafe in the very places they call home.”
He added: “Because hatred directed at people for who they are, or what they believe, is not protest. It is prejudice.”
The prince said recent “lethal violence” in London and Manchester had brought the crisis “into sharp and deeply troubling focus”, as he urged Britons not to confuse legitimate criticism of events in the Middle East with hostility towards Jews.
Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow, north-west London, where an attempted arson attack caused minor smoke damage to an internal room but no injuries or significant structural damage.
Harry warned that anger over Gaza risked spilling into anti-Jewish hatred on British streets, saying: “Nothing, whether criticism of a government or the reality of violence and destruction, can ever justify hostility toward an entire people or faith.”
The Duke also appeared to reference his own past controversies, including wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party in 2005, admitting he was “acutely aware” of his “past mistakes”.
He writes: “I am acutely aware of my own past mistakes – thoughtless actions for which I have apologised, taken responsibility and learned from.”
The prince insisted antisemitism and other racisms all “draw from the same well of division” and must be confronted with “the same resolve”.
John Lithgow has said he is “thrilled” that the Olivier Award-winning play Giant, in which he portrays British author Roald Dahl, will screen in cinemas around the world.
The Mark Rosenblatt debut play premiered in London’s West End in 2024 and went on to collect three Olivier Awards – including best new play and best actor for Lithgow’s portrayal of the children’s author as he grapples with whether to make a public apology.
The play will screen in more than 900 cinemas across 18 countries, including the UK, US, Canada and Australia, from November 2026.
Lithgow said: “In my 53-year, 25-show career on Broadway, I’ve rarely experienced the kind of audience response that we feel night after night with Giant.
“Mark Rosenblatt has written a play of extraordinary intelligence and humanity, and with every performance I can sense the audience wrestling with its questions in real time.
“This is the unique power of theatre at its best. I’m thrilled that our production will now reach movie theatres around the world, allowing even more people to experience the urgency, impact and emotional force of this story.”
Filmed live at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London, the cinema release features the original West End cast comprised of Lithgow as Dahl and Elliot Levey as British publisher Tom Maschler – a role which won him the best supporting actor Olivier Award.
Aya Cash also stars as publisher Jessie Stone alongside Rachael Stirling who plays Dahl’s wife, Felicity Dahl, Tessa Bonham Jones as housekeeper Hallie and Richard Hope as handyman Wally.
The play was transferred to New York City’s Broadway for a 16-week run from March through to the end of June.
Anti-Zionism is many things, including humorless and anhedonic. I often watch news coverage of anti-Israel activism and hear the voice of Carol Burnett’s mean old Miss Hannigan in Annie: “Do I hear happiness in here?”
There is almost nothing in the world quite as campy as the Eurovision song contest, but instead of getting into character and enjoying the shtick, Europeans are whining year-round about the participation of Israelis. This year, the contest even tried changing the rules to prevent Israel’s entrant, Noam Bettan, from matching the Jewish state’s past competitiveness.
Even that didn’t work as planned, since Bettan has now at least qualified for the finals. Four idiots got themselves tossed out of the audience for protesting Bettan’s existence on this earth yesterday during his performance. The Irish public broadcaster not only boycotted this year’s contest but is refusing to even air it on TV.
After all, if you allow people to watch Jews sing, who knows—it could lead to mixed dancing. Before you know it, impressionable children may be using offensive language, like “Israeli couscous.”
And so, no singing. No dancing. No watching, singing, or dancing. It’s like Footloose with keffiyehs.
What about art? If we can’t have music because the Jews have music too, can we look at pictures? Here I will refer you to the New York Times’ subheadline on an article about the Venice Biennale, the prestigious art expo: “The hottest exhibitions at the world’s major art exhibition were shuttered on Friday as part of a pro-Palestinian demonstration.”
Is that not the tagline of our times? More from the Times:
“When the final preview day opened at 10 a.m., dozens of visitors flocked to Austria’s pavilion, where Florentina Holzinger’s performance ‘Seaworld Venice’ which includes numerous naked performers, had drawn hourslong lines all week. They found the pavilion closed, with a sign outside saying that ‘some team members have decided to participate in the strike.’
“Some of the other buzziest exhibitions at this year’s event, including those by artists representing Belgium, Egypt, Japan, the Netherlands and South Korea, were also shut. Signs outside some of those pavilions read, ‘We stand with Palestine.’”
No dancing, no singing, no art, no immodest mer-people. All “for Palestine.” If only they would do something for the Palestinians instead of doing nothing “for Palestine.”
Yesterday, Israel showed remarkable parliamentary unity: A bill was sponsored by members of the governing coalition and of the opposition, and it received zero “no” votes as it passed easily.
What was this magic bill? It was a piece of legislation to approve the establishment of a special court to handle trials against participants in the October 7 slaughter. And, crucially, the trials will be public and televised.
The bill, applauded Justice Minister Yariv Levin, represents “one of the most important moments of the current Knesset. One can feel that we are doing the right thing by finding a way to unite at this moment, even though we are on the eve of elections and despite all the disagreements that exist.”
Indeed it was an opportune time to come together. This morning’s report on Hamas’s campaign of sexual violence was the result of a painstaking, yearslong investigative process. And now the terrorists captured alive on that day will have their day in court for the whole world to see.
The world needs to see it because, especially in the West, its key institutions rallied to the side of the slaughterers. They need to see what they support. But more important, the world needs to be shown what our enlightened professors, elite student bodies, progressive government officials and activists, and the rest cheered.
It will take place in a courtroom, where evidence can prevail. It will be in stark contrast to the fake international courts infamous for their corruption and lawlessness. And it will put to shame the way Westerners have tried to conduct their own trials through op-ed pages and manosphere podcasts.
According to the Times of Israel, only judges who are qualified to sit on the supreme court or are distinguished international jurists of similar qualifications will be on the 15-judge panel. Each case, meanwhile, “would be heard by three judges — one of whom would be a retired district court judge — while a five-judge panel would hear proceedings involving multiple defendants. Appeals would be heard by all 15 judges.”
Ironically, this fixation is being eagerly reinforced by contemporary Russian propaganda, whose messages are echoed across America’s emerging red-brown, anti-Israel conspiracist consensus. These include old Soviet tropes equating Zionists with Nazis; the now-familiar claims that Israel controls Washington and pushed the United States into war with Iran; allegations that Israel is persecuting Christians; and the use of Epstein-related code words for Jews, such as the “Epstein coalition,” as documented by Israeli scholar Nati Cantorovich.
When progressive California Rep. Ro Khanna found common ground with former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene over opposition to the “Epstein class,” champagne corks likely popped in Kremlin propaganda offices. A democracy that chooses to believe that a country the size of New Jersey controls its political system has already lost confidence in its own institutions. Center-left British journalist Lewis Goodall exemplified this mindset recently when he remarked, “Israel is in the driver’s seat, and we—Britain, Europe, the United States—are powerless to determine our fate.”
It’s easy to dismiss such comments as ridiculous, but they carry real consequences. They are demoralizing and disempowering: Why even bother voting if Bibi Netanyahu controls everything? They are also corrosive. Demonization of Israel has long served dysfunctional and tyrannical regimes as a tool to divert attention from their own failures. By importing these ideas into their own democracies, Western elites are helping dismantle them from within. With American elites circulating such brain-rot under the guise of political analysis, America’s adversaries score easy victories in an ongoing campaign of psychological warfare they never stop waging.
Yet anti-Zionist vigilance inevitably turned against the Kremlin leadership itself. One group of Soviet “patriots” warned that Brezhnev’s government was under Zionist occupation and that its anti-Zionist campaign was merely a cover. Why else, they asked, would the country continue to slide into economic decline, moral rot, and alcoholism? The explanation was predictable: The Jewish wives of senior officials were enabling Zionist manipulation from within.
Some of the leading Zionologists themselves succumbed to the logic they had helped institutionalize. Convinced that Zionists were plotting revenge against him for exposing their machinations, Valery Yemelyanov—author of the infamous tract Dezionization, first published in Arabic in 1979 in the Syrian newspaper Al-Ba’ath on Hafez al-Assad’s orders—came to see his wife as the weak link. He murdered and dismembered her with an ax, then burned her body at a nearby construction site. He spent six years in a psychiatric hospital. At his trial in absentia, his supporters claimed he had been framed by Zionists—the real perpetrators of the murder.
It should be clear by now that what is taking shape in American public discourse is in no way a conventional political disagreement over the rightness or real-world effectiveness or this or that Israeli policy. It is the normalization of a way of thinking that flattens reality into a single, self-confirming narrative that has always led to the same place: the mental and political unraveling of the societies that embrace it.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that it no longer belongs to the fringes. It has moved fully into mainstream and, having crossed the aisle from left to right, creates the impression of a shared, bipartisan consensus around a modern American version of “the Jewish question.”
Societies that have gone down this path—the USSR, Arab states, Iran—do not emerge stronger, more confident, or more just. They become more paranoid, more dysfunctional, and more prone to turning against themselves. America has not been such a society until now. The question is whether it still has the power to stop.
Amnesty International published a new report yesterday accusing Israel of "war crimes of wanton destruction and collective punishment" for striking at least thirteen high-rise buildings in Gaza City between September and October 2025. The report claims its satellite imagery, video verification, and sixteen resident interviews reveal "a chilling pattern of deliberate destruction... without requisite military necessity."
We know where this is headed. we've seen it before. Amnesty will assume anything Israel says is a lie, anything Gaza residents say is the truth, cherry pick Israeli statements to imply wanton destruction is the goal, and base its legal analysis on this set of false evidence.
The Katz tweet problem
Amnesty leans heavily on social media posts by Defense Minister Israel Katz as evidence that the strikes served no legitimate military purpose. The report quotes his September 8 post — "Today, a massive hurricane will hit the skies of Gaza City and the roofs of the terror towers will tremble" — and his September 14 post about the Islamic University going "soaring to the heavens," characterizing their tone as "celebratory and gleeful" proof of punitive rather than military intent.
The problem is what Amnesty chose to quote and what it chose not to. Katz's September 8 statement also included a direct warning to Hamas: "This is a final warning to the Hamas murderers and rapists in Gaza and in luxury hotels abroad: Release the hostages and put down your weapons – or Gaza will be destroyed and you will be annihilated." That's not proof of wanton destruction. That's wartime rhetoric, the kind of ultimatum issued in every modern conflict. More importantly, Amnesty consistently omits a word Katz used repeatedly: terror. He called these "terror towers," not apartment blocks. On September 5, he said "the first evacuation notice has been delivered to a high-rise terror building in Gaza City before an attack." On September 13, Katz described the Burj al-Nur as a "terror tower." After a single day's operations he announced "25 terror towers destroyed." Amnesty quotes the theatrical language while systematically excising the substantive claim embedded in it that these towers housed terror infrastructure.
A social media post is not legal documentation of military intent, and Amnesty knows this — which is why, when the rhetoric serves their argument, they treat it as evidence, and when it undermines their argument, they omit it. The IDF's own statement before the campaign began said it "conducted comprehensive intelligence research and identified significant Hamas terrorist activity within a wide range of infrastructure in Gaza City particularly in high-rise buildings." Amnesty dismisses this as unsubstantiated without engaging its substance. Because Amnesty assumes Jews are liars.
The Islamic University case
Amnesty cites Katz's September 14 tweet about the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) as paradigmatic evidence of ideological rather than military motivation. This is interesting, because the evidentiary record on the IUG is not in dispute — it's publicly documented across decades.
The IUG was founded under the direct influence of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas's founder. Senior Hamas figures have held teaching and administrative positions at the university throughout its history — Ismail Haniyeh served as secretary of its board of trustees and chairman of the student council, while Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of Hamas's founders, taught medicine there. The university has publicly stated it was proud that its employees were also Hamas military operatives, and even published obituaries for graduate students and lecturers who died as fighters. After the 2021 conflict, Yahya al-Sinwar told IUG academics that thanks to them and their colleagues with academic degrees who worked in the resistance, Hamas's rockets had achieved "unprecedented precision and capabilities."
This is a public declaration by the head of Hamas that the university's faculty had improved weapons systems. After October 7, the IDF stated Hamas had used the IUG as "a training camp for weapons development and military intelligence." In June 2024, Hamas terrorists gathered at a building on the IUG campus to launch anti-tank missiles at Israeli troops — the IDF struck it after conducting aerial surveillance. An Israeli army spokeswoman told the Chronicle of Higher Education that university facilities were used by Hamas to develop and store weapons, including Qassam rockets. FDDWikipedia
Amnesty's report presents Katz's September 14 tweet about the IUG as evidence of "eliminating incitement" — a legally insufficient rationale — while offering no engagement with any of the above. Amnesty's characterization of the IUG evidence is not a research failure. It is a selection failure.
The methodology conceals a category error
Amnesty's Crisis Evidence Lab "analysed satellite imagery and verified more than 25 videos" and found "no evidence of military use" at the buildings it examined. This is the core of their claim, and it contains a fundamental methodological problem.
Open-source video verification reveals what is visible at the moment of a strike. Hamas does not operate visibly. Its intelligence-gathering equipment is installed inside buildings, not on the roof for satellite observation. Its command-and-control nodes and weapons storage are by design undetectable from the outside. The IDF confirmed, in the case it publicly acknowledged, that it "struck a tower used by Hamas for surveillance" and that "Hamas operatives planted explosive devices in the area near the building, as part of preparations for the army's upcoming offensive." That is military activity. It does not show up in Amnesty's open-source verification because open-source verification cannot see inside buildings.
Amnesty's methodology, in other words, is structured to produce the conclusion it publishes. Absence of visible fighters in verified video does not mean absence of military use. It is idiotic to even make that claim. An organization with Amnesty's resources and legal expertise understands this distinction. They write up their faux legal analysis anyway.
The Hamas baseline problem
What Amnesty's report omits is as significant as what it includes. The phrase "Hamas embeds military infrastructure in civilian buildings" appears nowhere in its analysis as a structural consideration. Yet this is not a contested claim — it is a documented operational doctrine, confirmed by finds across hospitals, mosques, schools, and universities throughout the war. Hamas has exploited universities for terrorist purposes throughout the conflict: Israeli forces found a tunnel under Israa University, discovered weapons and a tunnel at Al-Azhar University, and Hamas repeatedly returned to the Islamic University to reconstitute itself after prior strikes.
An honest investigation of Israeli strikes on high-rise buildings would ask: given Hamas's established pattern of militarizing civilian infrastructure, what standard of evidence should be required before concluding that a building had no military use? Amnesty's answer, operationally, appears to be: it is impossible. Sinwar's praising IUG for its military contributions are apparently not enough evidence for Amnesty. Since open-source imagery doesn't include a big sign saying "HERE IS A HAMAS WEAPONS LAB" with an arrow pointing to it, Amnesty's methodology will always produce the same finding regardless of actual facts on the ground: Israel is guilty and Hamas is innocent of using human shields.
The report isn't proof of Israeli war crimes. It is clear proof that Amnesty wrote its conclusion before the report was written, and then wrote the report to only include facts or half truths that support their conclusions.
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Speaking of human shields, this Lawfare article describes how the UN has ignored Hamas use of human shields altogether, and how this results in more death. Amnesty does the same.
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