08/22 Links: Islamism and the silence of the ‘progressives’; Why is Iran's regime still standing?; Paramount accuses Mark Ruffalo of using antisemitic tropes; China Erases Its Jewish Past

From Ian:

Islamism and the silence of the ‘progressives’

The confusion concerning the right is almost amusing. Islamism is a movement of the reactionary right upon every criterion anybody has yet proposed: theocratic, restorationist, preoccupied with sexual order and the obedience of women; anti-Semitic across the greater part of its strands, and hostile to pluralism as a matter of doctrine rather than of temper. Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979), born in what would become Pakistan, wrote that his Islamic state would bear a resemblance to the fascist and Communist states, and that no man might regard any department of his affairs as private. Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb prescribed offensive jihad in order to establish divine authority over the whole Earth. These are not caricatures assembled by enemies but published positions, argued at length by Islamism’s own principal theorists. They would be astonished to discover that European academics account them ‘progressive’ by default.

That so many liberals, leftists and ‘progressives’ should prove incapable of recognising a reactionary movement unless its adherents happen to be European is a parochialism so profound that it has become invisible to those it afflicts. It rests on the unexamined premise that reaction is a white speciality, and whatever that premise may be, it is not anti-racism.

We have been here before, and recently enough that novelty cannot be pleaded. In June 2020, Khairi Saadallah murdered three men in a park in Reading, 17 days after his release from prison. His defence advanced mental illness. Mr Justice Sweeney rejected it, and found the killings to be terrorism, committed for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause. The men were James Furlong, David Wails and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, three friends who had gone out to enjoy a summer evening in Forbury Gardens. Ritchie-Bennett had lost his husband to cancer six years earlier, while Furlong left a long-term partner. The local Pride organisation knew all three of them. Whether their sexuality had anything to do with why they were chosen was raised at the time and then, by some quiet process of attrition, stopped being raised at all. I too had forgotten their names until the days after the Christopher Street Day attack.

One academic writing on LinkedIn, offered warmly and I am sure sincerely, claimed that when there are atrocities in the Middle East to be marched against, it is Muslims who turn out alongside gay and bisexual and women’s groups, and that all of us ought to bear this in mind. Two things are wrong with that. Firstly, there’s the flippancy of producing it at all within hours of this attack, as though the pressing question were which alliances must now be shielded from the consequences. The second and larger problem is that the claim is not true, except in a few streets in Western Europe. Muslims and gay people do march together in London and Berlin; nobody disputes it. But homosexuality remains a criminal offence across much of the Muslim world, and a capital one in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Brunei and the northern states of Nigeria. A fact about who attends demonstrations in two European capitals has been offered as though it were evidence about a doctrine practised, and enforced, on three continents.

There is worse in the sentence, and I doubt it was intended. Muslims stand alongside gay people, it is stated, as though these were two separate populations, drawn up in ranks against a common enemy, with nobody standing in both. The formulation has nowhere to put a gay Muslim: which is to say nowhere to put the person with more at stake here than anybody arguing about it. Berlin has a queer Muslim congregation, and a mosque founded by a woman who needs police protection in order to run it, and some of those in the Tiergarten on that Saturday night last month will have been both things at once. Nobody decided to leave them out, it is simply that the framework herein has no place for them, so it leaves them out automatically, and it will do so again the next time somebody drives a van into a crowd.

There will be another case of this kind. When it comes, nobody should have to choose between the collective indictment of Muslims and the collective acquittal of Islamism. The first is bigotry and the second is a lie. Name the dead before discussing the electoral consequences of their deaths. State what the murderer believed, who preached it to him and what the authorities already knew. Defend Muslims against reprisals, certainly; but defend also the gay, female, secular, liberal and apostate among them against the reactionaries who claim ownership of their lives. These are not competing obligations and only the dishonest have an interest in pretending that they are.

And do this before the usual people arrive to explain that candour will assist the far right. Nothing has assisted the far right more reliably than the surrender to it of facts that everybody else is too frightened to mention. The next atrocity will be followed by the same liturgy: grief, warning, euphemism, evasion and, finally, amnesia. It need not be. Refuse the first euphemism. Ask the forbidden question before the fanatic supplies the only answer. And when reaction comes disguised as religion, extend it neither the courtesy of silence nor the compliment of lowered expectations. One is not obliged to choose which eye to close. Next time, keep both open.

Before lecturing Israel, Britain and France should look in the mirror

France and Britain like to lecture Israel in the name of Western values. That is precisely why it is time to hold up a mirror to them: Both countries are undergoing profound demographic, cultural and political changes, while political Islam and radical movements are exerting growing influence on public and political discourse. A group does not need to become a majority to influence political parties, elections and foreign policy.

The beginnings of this process can already be seen today, including in the debate over Israel and the Middle East. This does not mean, of course, that every Muslim is an extremist, nor that an Islamist government will take power in London or Paris tomorrow morning. The argument is different: No one can guarantee who will govern either country 30 or 50 years from now, or what values those governments will uphold. Governments change. Nuclear arsenals remain.

Europe, in fact, is currently moving in the opposite direction. France is strengthening its nuclear deterrent and seeking to expand its role in the continent's security. Britain and France are deepening their cooperation, while Germany is moving toward closer strategic cooperation with the French deterrent. But serious security policy does not consider only who controls a weapon today. It must also ask who could inherit it tomorrow.

France and Britain should therefore begin, now, a long, responsible and controlled process that would ultimately lead them to voluntarily relinquish their national nuclear arsenals. Not tomorrow morning, not unilaterally and not at the cost of abandoning Europe's security.

Precisely because such disarmament could take many years, the decision should be made while these countries are still governed by leaders seeking to preserve the liberal and democratic values of the West. Those who wish to defend Western values must also protect the West's most dangerous weapons against the possibility that, one day, they could fall under the control of governments that do not share those values.

Germany bears a particular responsibility in this regard. Germany's commitment to "Never Again" cannot be merely a remembrance of the past. It must also mean an enduring responsibility for the security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

Exactly because Berlin is now deepening its nuclear-deterrence dialogue with Paris, it should lead Europe in asking the question no one wants to confront: Is it wise to build the continent's security for the coming decades around national nuclear arsenals when we cannot know the future political character of the countries that will control them?

Beware Turkish tanks on the Golan

At the moment, NATO cannot afford a complete rupture with a country that controls the Turkish Straits and hosts US nuclear weapons. But at the very least, a "reciprocity standard" should be applied to Turkey. Contracts with that country must be tied to its foreign policy and military conduct.

Human rights standards should pertain to Turkey too. Erdoğan has jailed more journalists, judges, generals, and academics than any other country in the world, including China. He is building 40,000 new jail cells to handle the overload. He is creating an authoritarian system to suit his imperial purposes.

So, Erdoğan needs to be cut down to size, and his madly ferocious foreign and military policies put in a box. American and European leaders who prioritize stability in the region ought to weigh in against Erdoğan's overly ambitious and aggressive schemes.

They should not be censuring Israel when it necessarily acts to drive Erdoğan back from the brink.

Remember: The past three years of devastating enemy attacks on Israel taught Israelis an important lesson – which is the need to maintain a proactive defense posture including strategic ascendancy against enemies near and far.

Consequently, Israel will not return to the containment policies of recent decades that prioritized restraint and diplomacy over enemy degradation and military triumph. This approach allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time; what some Western officials mistakenly called periods of "stability."

That approach blew up in Israel's face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon, and with the march of Iran's nuclear bomb program to near completion and Iran's ballistic missile array to near-annihilation-of-Israel potential.

The lessons Israel has learned apply to Turkey too. From Idlib to Erbil, Israel will attack, if necessary, not defend. It will insist on jihadist-free buffer zones along its borders with Lebanon and Syria. It will not tolerate the placement on its doorstep of equilibrium-breaking strategic weapon systems nor abide the advance of threatening foreign armies and navies.

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08/21 Links Pt2: Maureen Lipman: ‘Universities are grooming a whole generation of anti-Semites’; How Tucker Carlson Mainstreamed the Gaza GenoLIE

From Ian:

Antizionism unites people who disagree on almost everything.

Politics built on grievance and blame can be extraordinarily effective because it offers a simple answer to complex problems: Identify a common enemy and unite otherwise disparate groups against it.

Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University Ruth Wisse asserts that antisemitism and antizionism are unusual among modern ideologies because they are exclusively negative. Even socialism, communism, and totalitarianism promise people something in their attempt to win them over.

Pointing the finger at Jews has a long record, which historians and archaeologists date back to the Jewish Exodus from the Egypt of the pharaohs in the 13th century BCE. But here I want to focus on its modern political forms. These “anti-isms,” as Wisse calls them, turn complicated social, cultural, and political problems into a single story of blame. Their power lies not only in whom they target, but in their ability to create coalitions among groups that may otherwise have little in common.

A useful starting point is Germany in 1879, when Wilhelm Marr founded the League of Antisemites. The German Empire had been created only eight years earlier from 25 states and remained divided by regional loyalties, religious tensions, and political friction.

Marr recast classical religious prejudice against Jews as a secular, pseudo-scientific political movement. He blamed Jewish emancipation and modern capitalism for Germany’s problems and sought to reverse Jewish civil rights and remove Jews from the country. In a fractured society, blaming Jews created a common cause.

The same political mechanism appeared in different settings. In Soviet Russia, the Yevsektsia was established in 1918 by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik government as a Jewish antizionist unit tasked with bringing the Jewish working class into the Soviet system. It closed synagogues, banned the teaching of Hebrew, and prevented traditional Judaism, Zionism, and rival political movements from operating.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, developed a different Islamist political project: removing Western colonial influence from the Islamic world and building government around sharia law. Its core principle is that Islam is both a religion and a state, with social Islamisation progressing from individual piety towards political power and, ultimately, aspiring to reunite Muslim nations under a revived pan-Islamic caliphate.

In 1945, the Arab League was organised as an antizionist league in Cairo, before the creation of the State of Israel. Arab societies had oil, land and large populations, while European imperial powers were exhausted by World War II.

Yet the Arab world remained politically divided and pan-Arabism had failed to unite it. Antizionism and antisemitism became powerful unifying ideas across otherwise competing states and movements and currently remain a unifying thread underlying Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi Islam.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini later popularised the language of “the Little Satan” for Israel and “the Great Satan” for the United States during the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. His stated aim was to first eliminate Israel, then the United States, and then the Western world, accusing it of deceptive and corrupting power that uses political, cultural, and economic influence to weaken Islamic societies.

Poland in 1968 offers another example. Although antisemitism was officially illegal, university protests were blamed on the “Zionists,” and the government purged 13,000 Jews and revoked their citizenship. How did authorities decide who was a Zionist? They targeted Poles with Jewish names. Political belief was not the test. The operative assumption was “Zionist unless proven innocent,” a pattern that has echoes in the treatment of doxed Jewish creatives and academics in Australia in 2024.

Today, coalition-building may be one of antizionism’s most important political functions. At Harvard University October 7, 2023, 33 grievance groups formed a coalition against Israel as it was being attacked by Hamas.

Police officer fired after describing 7 October as ‘resistance’

A police officer has been fired after a misconduct trial found he spent months posting and engaging with antisemitic content, celebrating the deaths of Israelis and describing the 7 October 2023 as an “act of resistance”.

A panel held between 6 and 8 July at the Met’s disciplinary hearing centre at Palestra House on Blackfriars Road, Southwark, heard that PC Mohammed Nizam posted, reposted or ‘liked’ a number of messages and pictures on social media between September 2023 and July 2024.

These include responding to a post from London Mayor Sadiq Khan expressing distress at the terrorist attacks in Israel on 7 October with an image reading “you f***ing w**k stain”; liking a post responding to a Jewish commentator accusing him of continuing to “play the Holocaust card to justify Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza”; liking a post referring to the “Zionist-controlled mass media”; re-posting a post mourning the death of an IDF soldier with “suck it” and re-posting a tweet stating that “Israel controls all the Muslim countries but Gaza”.

According to the trial’s report, Nizam accepted the alleged conduct “without reservation”, explained that his mental health had deteriorated following the 7 October 2023 attacks. He described becoming increasingly distressed by images of violence and the killing of children in Gaza, stating that he felt “incensed” by what he saw online.

He accepted that some of the posts he ‘liked’ were antisemitic, acknowledged that he had not considered the impact of his actions and maintained he is not antisemitic, expressing sympathy for the Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks.

He did accept that several of the comments he made would be deemed antisemitic under the IHRA definition. Expressing remorse, he stated that he deeply regretted the posts and recognised that such comments were wholly inappropriate for a police officer.

Nizam added that since the investigation began, he has undertaken “significant personal reflection and education”, “broadened the sources he consulted, including reading Jewish News daily, attending events aimed at improving understanding of antisemitism” and sought advice from members of the Jewish community.

Additionally, he has contacted the Jewish Police Association, who “provided guidance and recommended materials to help him understand the harm caused by antisemitic content”, attended an online seminar on antisemitism, an event at a synagogue commemorating the Holocaust, and an exhibition displaying artefacts from terrorist attacks.

Officer Nizam said he has deactivated all relevant social media accounts and believes he has undergone “enormous personal growth.”

Washington-Based 501(c)(3) to Host Fatah Terrorist Convicted in 1993 Murder

Palestine House of Freedom, also known as Dar Alhurriya, a federally tax-exempt nonprofit headquartered near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to host an event Thursday with Nasser Abu Srour, a Fatah member convicted of participating in the brutal 1993 murder of an Israeli security officer.

Abu Srour will appear virtually from Egypt, where he has lived since Israel released him in a 2025 hostage-prisoner exchange. The event will run from 6 to 8 p.m. on Aug. 20.

Admission is free, but the registration page solicits “tax receipt eligible” donations to Palestine House of Freedom. The organization also says copies of Abu Srour’s prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, will be offered as gifts in exchange for donations.

The Murder Missing From the Event Description
Abu Srour was serving a life sentence for participating in the January 1993 murder of Haim Nahmani, a 25-year-old officer with Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service.

Contemporaneous reporting said Nahmani was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in an apartment in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood on Jan. 3, 1993. He had arrived to meet Maher Abu Srour, a Hamas terrorist who had been acting as an informant.

Palestinian sources have also independently acknowledged both his affiliation and participation.

A 2023 Arabic-language profile published by the Palestinian Vision Center for Political Development states that Abu Srour joined Fatah, participated in operations against Israelis during the First Intifada and established an armed cell with his cousins Maher and Mahmoud Abu Srour. It explicitly says he “participated in killing a Zionist officer.”

Fatah’s own media outlet has likewise reported that Abu Srour was serving life for participating in the killing of an Israeli officer.

In a 2013 prison interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Abu Srour described himself as a soldier rather than an innocent bystander.

“I was a soldier in the army of Palestine,” he said. “What do soldiers do? They fight.”

Abu Srour added that he had done his part in the struggle and would “continue” through other means. He predicted that, without a diplomatic solution, there would be “a third, fourth, fifth and sixth intifada.”

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08/21 Links Pt1: Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of murdered Oct. 7 hostage, represents victims of terrorism at UN; The Law of Unintended Consequences

From Ian:

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of murdered Oct. 7 hostage, represents victims of terrorism at UN

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of the murdered Gaza hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, represented Middle Eastern victims of terrorism at the United Nations on Friday in honor of the International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism.

"My name is Rachel," she began, "and I will always be the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin."

Her remarks, delivered in the form of a recorded video, sought to call attention to Israeli terror victims, with Rachel sharing the story of her son Hersh, who lost his arm when he was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.

"Hersh will always be my only son," she said. "Hersh will always be my eldest child, and Hersh will always be 23 years old."

She was the first Israeli representative in the role, which has been given to Palestinians in recent years, with her testimony shown alongside those of other terror victims from around the world.

The UN event, held annually on August 21, was established by the UN General Assembly in a 2017 resolution "to honor and support the victims and survivors of terrorism and to promote and protect the full enjoyment of their human rights and fundamental freedoms," according to the UN's website.

Hersh's experience at the hands of Hamas
Rachel described the experiences of her late son at the hands of the Hamas terror organization, as well as her experience as his mother amid his kidnapping, hostage status, and eventual murder.

"My son was executed at close range and returned to me after 330 days," said Rachel. "That body that I had carried in my body for nine months, many moons ago. That body and soul, that I had adored and beheld."

She then discussed the 1932 correspondence at the League of Nations between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the topic of why humans wage war with one another.

"Freud explains that we humans continue to engage in active conflict even though the vast majority of us suffer terribly from this way of existence," she said. "Civilization has to decide whether to rise to the challenge to continually contain our natural tendencies toward war, or to give that slavery of selfish interest to give into it."

"What Freud inheritely is inherently saying is that there are people on both sides of any conflict whose drive toward destruction of the other is exactly the same and therefore, ironically, those destructive entities on opposing sides in fact have more in common with each other than the very people they claim to represent," she continued, noting that the same is true, acording to Freud, for the victims in war, whose motivations are "hope, and life, and love."

John Spencer: U.S. Missile Stockpiles Are Low. Fine. Now Draw the Right Conclusion

This shortage didn’t begin with the current administration or this war. Multiple administrations accepted an industrial base built for low annual demand, narrow production lines, and long lead times. They sized inventories around planning assumptions and war games that underestimated how many missiles a sustained fight would burn. Russia’s war in Ukraine exposed the same weakness in artillery, Javelins, and air-defense weapons. Iran has driven the point home again.

War has a way of revealing bad assumptions. It also reveals the limits of allies who rely on the United States to defend sites they haven’t adequately protected themselves. Iran shifted attacks toward bases and critical infrastructure across the region because those targets offered a better chance of getting through. Those attacks threatened countries that weren’t parties to the war and infrastructure that serves millions of civilians. One missile that penetrates and kills American soldiers is a tragedy. It doesn’t erase thousands of successful interceptions, sustained U.S. strikes across Iran, or American control of Iranian airspace. No missile defense system has ever promised zero casualties.

The proper response is straightforward. Congress needs to fund replenishment and expanded production now. The Pentagon has to move past single-source production, slow contracting, and delivery timelines measured in years. The United States and its allies need layered defenses that use cheaper weapons against drones and lower-end threats, saving Patriot and THAAD interceptors for the ballistic missiles they were designed to defeat. Allies hosting American forces must invest more in their own air and missile defense.

Ending a successful campaign because Iran fired enough cheap missiles to strain U.S. interceptor stocks would teach every American adversary the same lesson: build large missile forces, attack exposed U.S. partners, absorb the punishment, and wait for Washington to lose its nerve. China, Russia, North Korea, and every Iranian proxy would take careful notes.

If the stockpiles are low, fix the stockpiles. Expand the factories. Shorten the production timelines. Buy enough munitions for the wars the United States may actually face, not the wars previous planners hoped it would fight. America should close the weakness Iran exposed and keep pursuing its military objectives. The goal of war is to break the enemy’s ability and will to continue, not to surrender our own when a long-neglected production problem finally comes into view.

Iranians struggle to afford the basics as US ratchets up economic warfare

Tehran’s grocery stores are well-stocked, but many families can barely afford the basics. Unemployment is soaring, and those with jobs are working more hours for money worth half as much as a year ago, putting food, medicine and everything else — except for heavily subsidized gasoline — further out of reach.

“We have virtually given up on many things,” said Ahmad Karimi, 52, a taxi driver and father of two who has been working 15-hour days to make ends meet. “We’re cutting out fruit, we’re cutting out protein, we’ve given up leisure, we even work on weekends.”

Nearly six months into the war with the United States and Israel, the Iranian economy is taking a beating under the force of sanctions and a naval blockade that is making it extremely difficult for the country to export oil, its most valuable product.

Whether this intensifying economic pressure will translate anytime soon into military or political concessions from Iran remains to be seen — but some experts are skeptical. Since the war began, Iran has been attacking oil-rich neighbors and US bases in the region, and disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, its biggest strategic advantage.

Iran is trying to use this retaliatory pressure — which is driving up energy prices globally — to bring the war to an end on the best terms possible. It is pressing for sanctions relief, and seeking enough control over the strait to demand payment from ships passing through to deliver energy and other goods.

The Trump administration — which is stuck fighting over a waterway in a war that was launched to curb Iran’s nuclear program — is now promising to deliver even tougher sanctions to try to squeeze the Islamic Republic into submission. But experts say US President Donald Trump may be underestimating how long Iran can hold out.

Iran has been subject to Western sanctions for years and has become deft at partially circumventing them. It has expanded domestic production, used informal cross-border trade networks, bought restricted goods through third countries, and used a shadow fleet to transport its oil.

“Iran’s resistance capacity not only avoids collapse, it also prevents the economic pain from translating into the political pressure and changes that the US expects,” said Hadi Kahalzadeh, an expert on Iran’s economy at Brandeis University.

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“Gorillion” and “Genocide”: Laundering the Holocaust from the right and the Left

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue recently published an interesting article about what it calls “lexical laundering”: extremist language that escapes from fringe communities into mainstream discourse while retaining a second meaning understood by the people who originated it. One of its examples is “gorillion,” as in “six gorillion,” a far-right joke about the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Sometimes it mocks the number itself; sometimes it suggests that Jews exaggerated or fabricated the Holocaust. The deliberate absurdity provides plausible deniability. Someone called on it can always pretend it is merely an edgy internet joke.

What caught my attention was ISD's chart showing when the term took off on X. Usage had been comparatively low and stable, and then in October 2023 it suddenly exploded. 

That immediately reminded me of another word whose usage changed dramatically after October 7: genocide.

The analogy is not that “genocide” is itself an antisemitic word. “Gorillion” attacks the Holocaust from one direction by saying that Jews lied about, exaggerated or exploited their genocide. The accusation that Israel is committing genocide attacks Jewish Holocaust memory from the opposite direction by accepting the Holocaust and then turning its moral meaning against the Jews.

The Jews were victims of the Nazis. Now the Jews are the Nazis. The Palestinians become the Jews, Gaza becomes Auschwitz or the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Holocaust becomes less a crime committed against Jews than a lesson Jews supposedly failed to learn.

This rhetoric existed long before October 7. Holocaust inversion is hardly new, and anti-Israel protesters were comparing Israel to Nazi Germany decades ago. What changed after October 7 was its legitimacy and scale. The genocide accusation moved with extraordinary speed from activist circles into universities, NGOs, mainstream journalism, political speeches and international institutions. Within months, describing Israel as genocidal - recognized as obvious Holocaust inversion by most people before October 7 - had become ordinary language in environments where saying “the Jews are Nazis” would still sound grotesque.

That is where ISD's idea becomes useful. Lexical laundering allows an extremist meaning to travel inside language that sounds innocuous to outsiders, and the person who repeats the term later may have no idea where it came from or what its earlier users meant by it. Something similar can happen with a legitimate word. 

For decades, explicit antisemites have delighted in Holocaust inversion precisely because of its cruelty. Calling Israelis Nazis does more than accuse Israel of wrongdoing. It takes the central Jewish historical trauma and converts it into an accusation against Jews themselves. The power of “genocide” as political rhetoric is that the Nazi comparison no longer has to be spoken aloud. When protesters describe Gaza as a concentration camp, invoke Auschwitz, wear striped uniforms, draw swastikas inside Stars of David and call Israel genocidal, the cultural associations do the rest. The respectable speaker can use the same word without any of those images and insist that he is making a purely legal or humanitarian argument. Both meanings coexist.

That may be better described as semantic laundering than lexical laundering. Nobody invented the word “genocide” as an antisemitic code. A legitimate and morally powerful word acquired an additional ideological function, and its ordinary meaning provides cover for a much older message.

The symmetry with “gorillion” is striking. The far-right version says that the genocide of the Jews was a lie or exaggeration. The anti-Zionist inversion says that the genocide of the Jews was real, but its great lesson is that the Jews became the genocidaires. One denies Jewish victimhood; the other appropriates it. In both cases, the Holocaust stops being primarily something that happened to Jews and becomes a weapon against them.

Both forms became far more visible after October 7, when Jews had just experienced the largest mass murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. October 7 should have made the nature of antisemitism harder to deny. Instead, two different ideological ecosystems found ways to process the massacre while preserving their existing hostility toward Jews. On the far right, Holocaust mockery became more open. In anti-Zionist discourse, Holocaust inversion became respectable.

The vocabulary is different, but the maneuver is remarkably similar: the Holocaust is being weaponized against Jews, because they are Jews, by both Leftist and Rightist Jew-haters.

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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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08/20 Links Pt2: VDH: Hating Israel Fatigue; They Survived the Holocaust. 25 Years Later, They Were Burned to Death in Germany; 10 Quotes That Prove Palestinians Never Believed in Palestinians

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Hating Israel Fatigue

Three recent chapters in the long history of antisemitism remain inexplicable.

First, hatred of Jews and Israel peaked immediately after the greatest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—weeks before Israel entered Gaza, and only after Hamas refused to surrender the masterminds of the slaughter or the 251 hostages. The Jewish crime, apparently, was being so easily murdered by Hamas.

The clearest sign of that Pavlovian hatred was the jubilation on the far Left and among Islamists—and the strange new alliance these seemingly disparate groups were already forming—over the ease with which so many mostly unarmed Jewish civilians had been butchered and the prospect of even more killing to follow.

The ghoulish celebrants were not concerned about mass murder, torture, or mutilation of the women, children, and elderly. Instead, they grew ecstatic at the prospect of still more medievalism and blood to come.

Hamas, the darling of American campuses and Muslim communities, issued Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase books to the invaders with instructions for the rapist-killers on how to say in Hebrew, “Take off your pants,” “Take off your clothes,” “Raise your hands and spread your legs.”

Second, none of the Israel-haters ever offers any alternative course that the Israelis should have taken to retrieve the hostages and punish the murderers.

Much less do they imagine what other nations might have done—the United States, France, or the United Kingdom—had terrorists conducted such a mass slaughter at numbers proportional to their far larger populations.

I doubt any other nation would have petitioned the beloved International Criminal Court to bring the Hamas killers to justice.

Its chief prosecutor, the Israel-hating Karim Khan, refused even to examine Israeli evidence and instead rushed to condemn Prime Minister Netanyahu as an international war criminal.

Perhaps Khan’s hatred of Israel was aimed at hiding the fact that the now-fired Khan was being accused by his own legal team of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. Who will police the police? Will Mayor Mamdani arrest the ICC predator if he lands at JFK Airport in New York City?

Third, when 6,000 Hamas terrorists and Gazan “civilians” invaded Israel, it was during an agreed-on peace. Indeed, take away October 7, and Israel would never have entered Gaza; indeed, even after the slaughter that took place on that day, Israeli officers dreaded walking into such a subterranean ambush. And prior to the mass murder, it was Israel, not the Muslim nation and adjacent Arab neighbor Egypt, that had supplied almost all of Gaza’s water, electricity, fuels, and telecommunications.

For years Israel had invited 20,000 Gazans to work inside Israel at two to three times the wages available in Gaza. Gaza itself had been “ethnically cleansed” of all Jews in 2005 by the Israeli government under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was generally considered a “hawk.” Any valuable infrastructure they left behind was immediately looted and destroyed. After the departure of all the Jews from Gaza, the grifting Hamas government shook down roughly $20 billion of the more than $40 billion in international aid given to the Palestinians in general.

Had Hamas simply sought to create a multiparty democracy, held regular elections, created a bill of rights, and adopted a Western economy, it would have garnered hundreds of billions of dollars more in foreign investment. And its privileged seaside location could have made it the next tourist hub like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Oman.

Instead, the nihilist Hamas preferred to make Gaza an impoverished, violent, and pariah terrorist enclave, to rip off its own people, and to expose Gazan civilians to death on a regular basis to save its fighters’ skins and further its fanatical cause.

Hamas was never dedicated to bettering the daily lives of its own population, developing Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline or putting its enormous foreign aid to productive use. Instead, it had only a single homicidal agenda: to kill as many Jews as possible and to destroy the state of Israel.

Hating Israel while championing Hamas and its thousands of terrorist killers is a referendum not on Israel and its supporters, but a window into the mind of a sick, sick West—and an even sicker Middle East.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s history of the Middle East is a masterpiece

In the Middle East, history fuses with theology into “an unbreakable rampart of absolutist faith”, and, as Sebag Montefiore puts it, “it is hard to negotiate maps and timetables with people who await the Mahdi or Messiah”.

Sebag Montefiore stresses the strange bedfellows in the region: the Syrian civil war’s tangle of enemies, the Abraham Accords, and Israeli soldiers manning Iron Dome to defend the Emirates against Iranian missiles in 2026. On the other hand, the Middle East is the only region on Earth becoming ever less diverse – Christians down from 20 per cent of the population in 1900 to 4 per cent today, and in Iraq from 14 per cent to 0.4.

The nation-state, Sebag Montefiore asserts, is an imported European idea badly matched to a multi-sectarian patchwork; he notes the irony that Western media, law and academia still promote nationalism for the region having rejected it at home, and calls the pretence that some failed states function “international cosplay”.

But the idea that the region is uniquely ungovernably violent is “a historical illusion”. Its history is filled with dramatic reversals that mock every preconception: “Kingdoms, empires and cities, heroes, monsters and fools fight and reconcile, gamble and deal, rise and fall. The prizes are power, salvation and safety. Survival is everything; no one wins for long; the caravan moves on; the spark wheel spins and spins.”

The book proper begins with what Sebag Montefiore identifies as one of the two key pivots of the past (loosely defined) century – the story of how in 1902 25-year-old Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, sometimes referred to as Ibn Saud, restored his fallen family to power in Riyadh. Having taken power, “Abdulaziz moved into the palace of his grandfather – and the modern history of the Middle East began.”

Sebag Montefiore writes that “even Abdulaziz would have been amazed at the success of his dynasty and his realm. He would reign during the fall and rise and fall of empires – Ottoman, French, British – that dominated his region, and through two world wars, into the nuclear-powered years of US-Soviet rivalry, through holy wars, civil wars and the creation and disintegration of new states, secular and Islamist, royal and nationalist, Muslim and Jewish. And as late as 2025, a son of his would still be ruling the Kingdom in the age of the iPhone, drones and X, when a US president, Donald Trump, would fly into this same Riyadh, now a gleaming towered modern metropolis, and call Saudi Arabia ‘the centre of the world’.” As he then writes: “This book is the story of how that happened.”

It’s fitting that The Cauldron ends in 2026 with the death of Ayatollah Khamenei in an air strike, because the other pivot on which The Cauldron hangs is the 1979 Iranian revolution. Sebag Montefiore argues that this was a moment on the scale of 1789 and 1917. Khomeini was a “murderous modern revolutionary and political strategist of the rank of Lenin, Stalin or Mao”. Grasp that and the next 50 years fall into place.

The Cauldron would have been a valuable work had it stopped in 1979 – because there has long been a need for a readable, serious, ambitious history of the past century or so in the Middle East. By taking it to 2026, however – a bold step for a book whose entire point is that it is a work of history – Sebag Montefiore has written something far more important, both invaluable and necessary. Lies started to be spread about October 7, 2023 from October 8, and those lies have taken hold across the world. There are few other historians of Sebag Montefiore’s stature who could have challenged the lies and the myths simply by doing their job and writing calmly and – patently – objectively. It is to Sebag Montefiore’s huge credit that he has stepped up to do this, mainly by allowing the facts to speak for themselves – especially the words of the perpetrators. Hamas’ Ghazi Hamad promises “a second, a third, a fourth” October 7. Its second chairman Khaled Mashal shrugs: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany. In all wars there are civilian casualties. We are not responsible.” Sinwar, warned that 10,000 Gazans might die, retorts: “Let it be 20,000.”

But as Sebag Montefiore argues, Israel may be able to win on the battlefields but it has “totally lost” the narrative war. Hamas controlled the casualty figures, presenting every death as civilian and claiming there was no war with its fighters at all, only massacre.

The Cauldron’s conclusion is salutary and needs to be absorbed: add up every death in every Middle Eastern war from 1900 to today and the total roughly equals a single front of the First World War, or the Congo war of 1996 to 2003. It comes nowhere near the Second World War’s Asian theatre (20 million dead) or its Eastern Front (30 million). Eighty years of Arab-Israeli conflict, the Gaza war included, have killed around 150,000 people. The Partition of India killed a million in a few months. Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s killed 200,000, Iraq half a million, Syria 600,000, and Sudan, “in a tragic class of its own”, two million in its first civil wars, 300,000 in Darfur and more than 150,000 since 2023. The world’s fixation on the Jewish state’s wars is grotesquely out of proportion to their scale.

That notion is nothing new: but Sebag Montefiore’s magnificent work is not merely new. It is a masterpiece that demands to be read.

The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East 1900–2026, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Uri Kurlianchik: 10 Quotes That Prove Palestinians Never Believed in Palestinians

Until recently, if you called an Arab living in Palestine, “Palestinian,” he’d be confused or offended.

Palestine wasn’t even an administrative unit before the British mandate. “Palestinian” is what you called these pesky Jewish upstarts who had dreams of freedom of statehood on Arab land. The Arabs of Palestine had no more separate national identity than the people of East Texas.

Here are 10 historic quotes that prove it:

“We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.”

— First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations, Jerusalem, 1919
“Palestine is an Arab country and natural part of Syria.”
— Istiqlal Party manifesto, 1931

“There is no such country! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
— Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission, 1937

“Palestine is part of the Province of Syria… the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.”
— Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, 1947

“The union of Arab Palestine and Jordan had been brought about as a result of the will of the people.”
— American diplomat Stuart W. Rockwell, 1950

“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”
— Ahmad Shukeiri, first chairman of the PLO, to the Security Council, 1956

“Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation.”
— Zuheir Mohsen, PLO Executive Committee, 1977

“I don’t think there is such a thing as a “Palestinian nation”, I think it’s a colonial invention, when were there Palestinians? Where is it? I think there is an Arab nation.”
— Arab anti-Zionist activist and politician Azmi Bishra, 1995

"We don’t differentiate between Palestinian, Egyptian and Arab blood.”
— Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, 2010

“Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are a part of you.”
— Hamas Minister of the Interior and National Security, Fathi Hammad, 2012

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08/20 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Wise up, America!; United Nations is no longer fit for purpose, says top UN official; How Central Asia Thinks about Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Wise up, America!

Once again, American officials have failed to grasp that Islamist terrorists will lie shamelessly and sign ceasefires just to break them.

Instead of understanding that no deal would be worth the paper it was written on, Kushner was sent to Cairo to grovel to a bunch of psychopathic mass murderers. He thus legitimized these enemies of civilization, humiliating America and signaling to Hamas that they have Washington precisely where they want it.

The impasse arose because Hamas is refusing to honor the agreement signed by Israel last October in which the terrorist group would disarm before Israel started to withdraw from Gaza.

But the Board of Peace itself had moved the goalposts over this sequencing when Nickolay Mladenov, a senior board official, said Israeli withdrawal “must move in lockstep” with Palestinian disarmament (from which the board later retreated under Israeli protest).

Its own Gaza Roadmap, published at the start of this month, would not lead to disarmament and the end of Hamas rule. On the contrary, according to an analysis published by MEMRI, it would enable Hamas to retain military capabilities, ensuring that its political infrastructure would survive.

Worse still, by stating that its aim is a credible pathway towards Palestinian self-determination and statehood, the Roadmap cements the appalling message that the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 created a political opening for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Not surprisingly, Hamas sees this as a great achievement, reinforcing its belief that the slaughter of Oct. 7 was a huge step towards the destruction of Israel.

Such duplicity by the Board of Peace is hardly surprising. Since its members include those foes of civilization Qatar and Turkey, alongside two-faced false friends such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it should more properly be known as the Board of Appeasement.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have sent the White House a list of violations by Hamas. They say the terror group continues to retain and smuggle weapons; rebuild its military infrastructure, recruitment and training; continue with armed activity and intelligence gathering; and prepare and use explosive devices against Israeli troops. This report documented 14 Hamas violations within a single 24-hour period—the overwhelming majority of which were classified as developing threats to Israeli forces.

Not only is the Board of Peace preventing Israel from destroying Hamas and thus ensuring that it can never again pose an Oct. 7-style threat to the Jewish state. It is also negating the crucial task of setting back the Islamist threat to the West.

Although Hamas has been sponsored by Iran, it’s the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Total defeat of Hamas in Gaza would be a shattering blow to the Brotherhood and its activities throughout the world.

The Brotherhood is the link between Turkey, Syria, Qatar and Hamas. Qatar has been bankrolling American institutions and individuals to insulate it against recognition of its anti-West agenda. Turkey has its thumb on the immigration spigot into Europe, which has already destabilized it and threatens even more social and cultural mayhem.

And the Brotherhood, whose strategy for conquering America through mass immigration and democratic entryism was revealed at the Holy Land terror-financing trial in 2007-08, is enmeshed in an extensive network of mosques and Islamic charities and other institutions throughout America, Britain and Europe.

The war in the Middle East is not distinct from the war of conquest against the West, which is one unified project involving Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. The United States is currently fighting the former without grasping what it’s up against, and not fighting the latter at all.

America needs to wise up, urgently.

Palestinian Rejectionism Is the Harder Problem

We have been told that poverty and humiliation provide fertile ground for extremism, that if we improve Palestinian living standards, violence will diminish.

Give people jobs, better infrastructure, greater freedom of movement and a stake in economic prosperity, and they will have more to lose from conflict.

But this does not explain a conflict in which rejection of Israel has repeatedly survived periods of diplomatic opportunity, economic assistance and improved living conditions.

For more than a century, Palestinian and Arab leaders have rejected a succession of proposals that envisaged some form of territorial partition or coexistence between Jewish and Arab states.

The agreements of the 1990s created the Palestinian Authority, transferred significant governing responsibilities to Palestinians, and generated new possibilities for economic cooperation.

Yet the decade also witnessed a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks, culminating in the Second Intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were killed.

The uprising demonstrated that greater Palestinian autonomy and economic cooperation were not sufficient to prevent a return to mass violence.

A movement like Hamas that is motivated in part by the belief that Israel itself is illegitimate will not necessarily abandon violence simply because its supporters become more prosperous.

A durable peace requires more than the absence of poverty. It requires political acceptance of the other side's legitimacy.

Where children are taught that national liberation requires the elimination of the other side, economic development alone is unlikely to resolve the underlying dispute.

That is why the debate over Palestinian living standards can become a distraction when presented as the central explanation for the conflict.

If poverty were the decisive cause of Palestinian violence, decades of aid, economic initiatives, employment inside Israel, and diplomatic engagement should have produced a consistent decline in hostility. They have not.

How Central Asia Thinks about Israel

Central Asia is dominated by Muslim-majority, largely Turkic countries. The region has taken a pragmatic approach toward Israel even after hostilities began in Gaza.

Israel's best friend in Central Asia is Kazakhstan, which joined the Abraham Accords in November 2025. Along with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan supplies a significant portion of Israel's oil imports.

Even with an Islamic majority, the country has historically been tolerant of Jews. Many Jewish refugees fleeing Europe found safe harbor in Kazakhstan, where a sizeable number of German, Polish, and Hungarian Jewish populations temporarily resettled.

Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan all have diplomatic ties with Israel, but the relationships aren't meaningful. More than Kazakhstan, these countries are majority-Turkic states whose relations with Turkey are lucrative and growing.

Tajikistan has the weakest Israel connections due to the country's close cultural proximity to Iran. The Tajik population speaks a Persian dialect.

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Israel-hating academics can't even interpret their own studies accurately

A new paper in Critical Education claims that college students who know more about Israel and Palestinians become more supportive of Palestinians and less supportive of Israel. The title states the claim directly: “Empowered Resistance Explains the Relationship Between Historical Knowledge and Support for Palestine Among College Students.”

Here's the abstract:

College students’ calls and demonstrations for Palestine Liberation in universities across the United States have increased exponentially after October 7, 2023. However, little is known about the dynamic relationship between historical knowledge and support for Palestine. We use critical consciousness theory to frame our study and hypothesize that students’ knowledge of the history of occupied Palestine will predict college students’ support for Palestine Liberation. In addition, this relationship between historical knowledge and support will be explained by college students’ experiences of empowered resistance against oppression. Mediation analyses suggest that college students’ (N = 250; Mage = 20.45, SD = 4.07) historical knowledge about the occupation and colonization of Palestine increased their empowerment and resistance, which increased their support for Palestine Liberation. We conclude with recommendations to support college students during times of crisis, fostering their education of Palestine, supporting other oppressed peoples, and resisting oppressive and racist systems.

Their actual study is almost laughably flawed.

First, the students surveyed didn't represent a cross-section of students across the nation. They chose 250 students from a single university, almost certainly University of Nevada Las Vegas, and 65% of the respondents are minorities - 36% Latino, 23% Asian. To generalize from this group to all college students, as they do in the abstract, is pretty strange.

Much worse is how they measured  the students' historical knowledge of the conflict: they asked them, “How knowledgeable are you about the historical context of the Israel-Palestine conflict?”

Students rated themselves from 1, “Not knowledgeable at all,” to 5, “Extremely knowledgeable.”

So they base the study on what the students believe, not what they actually know. In fact, there have been other studies that show that pro-Palestinian activists are ignorant of the basics: only 25% of the Berkeley students who said they "care deeply" about the conflict could locate where the Palestinian territories on the map. Less than half of the students who said they supported "from the river to the sea" could name which river and which sea. 

A survey of Canadians showed that 50% felt they were well informed on the topic. Yet consistently far less than 50% could answer basic questions accurately.

To ask students how much they know about the region as proof  of their knowledge is, to put it simply, stupid.

The correlation that the researchers found was very weak, r=.18. The average respondent rated his knowledge at only 2.54 out of 5, yet the sample already averaged 62.3 out of 100 in support for Palestine and only 26.3 for Israel.

We do not know how support broke down across the five knowledge categories because the authors do not publish those results. The least knowledgeable students could themselves have been strongly pro-Palestinian, with the most confident students only somewhat more so. Roughly 96.6% of the differences in Palestine support were associated with something other than this self-assessed knowledge score that the authors present as the key finding.

Finally, correlation does not imply causation. Students who self reported as pro-Palestinian could simply be more likely to also report themselves as more knowledgeable, even if the entirely of their knowledge was from watching anti-Israel TikTok videos.

Then, after the authors present their curated description of the raw data (the entire survey results are not published), they change the goalposts on what they pretend to conclude, changing self-reported "historical context of the Israel-Palestine conflict" in the Methodology section to "knowledge about the socio-political history of the ongoing colonization and genocide of Palestine and Palestinians" in their Results section. 

A Zionist student who knows the history extremely well and rejects the authors’ description of Israel as colonial and genocidal could answer, accurately, that his knowledge was a 5.  The researchers would then count that answer as a high score for knowledge of colonization and genocide.

How could Critical Education publish such obvious garbage? 

The context helps. This was the second of two issues devoted to “Palestinian Liberation in Education: Solidarities and Activism for a Free Palestine.” Perhaps the stronger correlation is between a journal’s anti-Israel position and its willingness to mistake self-confidence for knowledge, correlation for causation, and the researchers’ political assumptions for something their data actually measures.

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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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08/19 Links Pt2: The Plague of ‘and Genocide Studies’; Democrats Take Aim at the Civil Rights Act; Thomas Friedman is wrong again, this time about AIPAC

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Plague of ‘and Genocide Studies’

Segal and his supporters appear to be arguing that it’s a violation of academic freedom for Segal’s superiors to delete something Segal wrote for the website. I don’t know whether Segal is right about that, but I do know that his written words ought to be an embarrassment to the university that hired him.

First of all, when Segal says “according to official figures,” he means Hamas. But also, he goes further than Hamas is actually willing to go in its own statistical presentations. The important point is that what Segal writes isn’t true, and isn’t even arguably true.

To defend himself, Segal “points to a vote by the International Association of Genocide Scholars last year in which the group declared that ‘Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide’ detailed in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

But that organization was revealed to be a joke, and its “voters” included a large number of internet trolls who realized you could just pay for “membership” and pretend to be a genocide scholar in good standing.

That is, Segal points to a known scam to claim that scholars agree with him.

But the wider point is the counterproductivity of the industry of “Holocaust and genocide scholars.” The Holocaust was a unique event, and it should be studied as such. Universities don’t enhance anybody’s education by diluting the Holocaust. And Jewish organizations should stop universalizing the Holocaust by adding “and genocide” to their own institutions and programs. In fact, where possible they should remove those terms.

The purpose of Holocaust education is education. The purpose of the work being done by Raz Segal, Briahna Joy Gray and the Democratic Socialists of America is the opposite of education. Let’s help society stop confusing the two.

Seth Mandel: Democrats Take Aim at the Civil Rights Act

Like clockwork, Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the baton handed to him by Van Erem and promised retribution for Trump officials. He called the anti-Semitism investigations a “frame-up operation” and threatened to push changes to the Civil Rights Act itself.

Raskin’s promised lawfare against federal employees involved in strengthening the enforcement of civil-rights law is no doubt the goal of complaints like those voiced by Van Erem. Raskin, further, is the perfect receptacle for these complaints. His Jewishness provides cover for Democrats who are, as Raskin presumably is, intent on dismantling federal protections for Jews and insulating the Democratic Party from accountability for its exploding anti-Semitism.

Raskin is also a co-sponsor of legislation that would enforce a partial arms embargo against Israel. He has fought anti-Semitism-related legislation and has been critical of Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre since the beginning of the Hamas-instigated war.

Raskin also demanded testimony from Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, alleging that it was a “a distinct possibility” that Dhillon “deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities, their faculties, and their administrators for political purposes while defrauding the American people and the courts.”

If the Democrats, as expected, win control of the House in the midterms, they are vowing to use this power to make government officials pay, and pay dearly, for daring to investigate universities’ discrimination against Jewish students. In the past, this would have struck most observers as a bizarre choice of priorities. In 2026, it’s what the public has come to expect from Raskin and company.

Thomas Friedman is wrong again, this time about AIPAC

For as long as I have been writing about the Middle East, Thomas L. Friedman has been one of my favorite foils.

I don’t mean that personally. Friedman is an accomplished journalist, a gifted writer and the possessor of perhaps the most influential foreign-policy column in America. The problem is that when it comes to Israel and the Middle East, he has been spectacularly, repeatedly and confidently wrong.

More remarkably, being wrong never seems to alter the prescription.

Now he has turned his attention once again to AIPAC.

Writing in The New York Times about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Friedman advised him that he can remain true to his pro-Palestinian views, appeal to Jewish voters and still “stick it to AIPAC.”

That phrase deserves more attention than Friedman probably intended.

AIPAC is fair game for criticism. So is every political organization in America. Its spending can be questioned. Its endorsements can be questioned. Its political strategy can be questioned.

But “stick it to AIPAC” is not a policy argument. It reflects an increasingly fashionable idea that there is something distasteful, or even illegitimate, about Americans organizing politically in support of Israel.

Friedman should know better. And this is not his first trip down this road.

In 2011, Friedman notoriously wrote that the standing ovations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received in Congress had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Two years later, he suggested that lawmakers would do what the Israel lobby wanted because they needed Jewish votes and campaign contributions.

The implication is difficult to miss.

When environmental organizations spend millions trying to influence elections, that is democracy. When organized labor does it, that is democracy. When gun-control or gun-rights organizations do it, that is democracy. When Arab-American and Muslim-American organizations lobby Congress on Middle East policy, that is democracy.

But when Americans who support Israel organize, contribute money, lobby Congress and vote according to their beliefs, Friedman repeatedly treats their influence as something requiring special suspicion.

Why?

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08/19 Links Pt1: The ghouls feeding on Hind Rajab’s death; Elliott Abrams: Kushner Legitimizes Hamas; To Palestinians and their supporters: How’s the resistance going?

From Ian:

To Palestinians and their supporters: How’s the resistance going?

This is not a hostile or inconsiderate question. It is perhaps the most important question anyone who actually cares about Palestinians could ask. The resistance strategy—violent, stubborn and uncompromising—has been one of history’s most expensive strategic failures. Yet it continues, sustained in part by a global industry whose financial survival depends on it never ending.

Since 1993, more than $50 billion in international aid has flowed to the Palestinian cause. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has received billions since it was founded in 1949, with the United States alone providing more than $7.3 billion from 1950 to 2016. Private charities devoted to Palestinian relief collectively raise hundreds of millions more annually. There are now thousands of careers, institutions and funding streams whose existence depends on the Palestinian crisis remaining unresolved.

When a problem becomes an industry, the incentive is not to solve it but to sustain it. Who loses their funding when Palestinian refugees are finally settled and integrated? What happens to UNRWA if there are no longer any refugees?

Do the people who most loudly claim to speak for Palestinians actually serve Palestinian interests or do they serve their own? The people most loudly advocating for the Palestinians are frequently the ones with the most to lose from a peaceful, prosperous Palestinian society that no longer requires their services.

What would it look like for Palestinians to succeed? Not in the sense of defeating Israel, but in the sense of their people living well?

Hong Kong, Taiwan and Estonia, among other countries surrounded by hostile neighbors, built prosperity not through military resistance but through trade, rule of law, open markets and human capital development.

What if Palestinian leadership had, at any point, decided that the primary measure of their success is the economic well-being, education and individual freedom of their people? What if, instead of funneling resources into armed factions and international lobbying campaigns, they had built transparent institutions, embraced civil liberties, cultivated a tech sector and made the present Palestinian enclaves a destination for investment? In other words, what if they actually built a vibrant country?

At least one person is trying this by creating a technology hub in Judea and Samaria. Rawabi, the planned Palestinian city developed by entrepreneur Bashar al-Masri, is a tentative proof of concept. It has faced enormous obstacles, many of them political. But it is at least an attempt at a different strategy, and it points toward a different kind of future.

The definition of strategic failure is not losing a single battle. It is pursuing the same approach, decade after decade, and watching it produce more destruction, more poverty, more displacement and more death than the alternatives you refused to consider. One definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time.

The most radical thing that Palestinian leadership could do right now is not to launch another resistance campaign or fire rockets at Israel. It would be to announce, credibly, that henceforth it will measure success by the flourishing of its people; by school-enrollment rates; per capita income; startup formation; and the quality of hospitals, courts and roads.

The strategy of perpetual resistance has produced perpetual suffering. What if Palestinian leaders choose prosperity instead? That would indeed be revolutionary.

Andrew Fox: The ghouls feeding on Hind Rajab’s death

The IDF has opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of Hind Rajab and eight others. That is the entire development. No verdict is implied. The announcement identifies no suspect, nor does it specify an offence. Online carrion crows have turned Hind’s death into clickbait by stripping the news of its qualifications and selling an investigation as a verdict.

The IDF examination states that troops fired at the approaching family car on 29 January 2024. Five passengers were killed; Hind and her cousin Layan survived the encounter. Hours later, a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance, whose movement had been coordinated, went to recover them. The announcement describes the alleged shelling of that ambulance and records that the girls and two paramedics were later found dead. It does not establish what happened during the intervening hours.

Mark Zlochin’s close reading exposes the misrepresentation. The formal finding concerns the initial fire at the car. The later events remain reports and allegations. His earlier analysis raised unresolved questions about the route and timeline and tested whether the telephone material and available lines of sight supported more than one source of fire. Those questions do not resolve the deaths, and today’s announcement provides no new evidence of criminal guilt.

There is one awkward point for Israel’s defenders. The IDF’s first account said no troops were in the area. Its subsequent examination now acknowledges that troops fired at the car. That correction cannot be wished away, and anyone who repeated the first version should amend their view. The acknowledgement revises the official account of the initial encounter. Hind and Layan, it now says, survived the initial fire, while the ambulance strike and their later deaths remain under investigation. Criminal responsibility remains unresolved.

The carrion feeders have ignored that distinction. They demanded an investigation. The moment one was announced, they called it an admission. Their trick relies on readers confusing suspicion with conviction. They use a dead child for emotional force and borrow legal vocabulary to manufacture authority. Nobody has been charged. No court has tested individual liability in the Hind case or in the separate Tel al-Sultan referral. There is no legal conclusion in either case. For these people, the case is not about truth or justice for Hind Rajab: it is about validating their preconceptions about Israel no matter what.

The IDF’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism compiles operational material for the Military Advocate General. Reasonable suspicion triggers a military police investigation; prosecutors then assess whether the evidence offers a reasonable prospect of conviction. A referral records suspicion but supplies no answer. The suspected offence may involve negligence in following procedure. The announcement does not say.

I have always maintained that where credible evidence supports a war crime charge, it should be prosecuted. That remains my position. The World Central Kitchen case illustrates the distinction. Australia’s review by Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin found that the strike was not knowingly or deliberately directed against the charity. It recorded mistaken identification and failures to follow procedures. Binskin made no criminal finding. A catastrophic outcome can warrant criminal scrutiny without establishing deliberate murder.

Aviva Klompas: Iran was a regional threat. War with the US changed that

For years, Tehran’s influence rested on a network that gave it strategic depth. Hamas threatened Israel from Gaza. Hezbollah amassed an arsenal on Israel’s northern border, while serving as Iran’s most powerful regional proxy.

Syria provided the logistical bridge connecting Tehran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. Iraqi militias extended Iranian influence westward while pressuring American forces. The Houthis gave Tehran a foothold on one of the world’s most important maritime choke points.

That network allowed Iran to keep its adversaries under pressure while minimizing risks to itself. Today, much of that architecture has been degraded.

Hamas remains in control of parts of Gaza, but much of its senior leadership has been killed, large portions of its military infrastructure have been destroyed, and its ability to rearm and reorganize has been sharply constrained by Israel’s operational presence in significant areas of the Gaza Strip.

Hezbollah remains dangerous, yet it is no longer the force it was before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. The group has also lost much of its senior leadership, including longtime Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, along with key commanders, weapons stockpile and infrastructure.

Hezbollah now faces growing pressure inside Lebanon from a population exhausted by economic collapse and increasingly unwilling to see the country’s future subordinated to Iran’s regional ambitions. The group still possesses formidable capabilities, but it is increasingly focused on preserving what remains rather than expanding its influence.

Syria may represent the most consequential loss. For decades, the Assad regime served as Iran’s indispensable ally and the critical land bridge connecting Tehran to Hezbollah. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government and the emergence of a new political order have severely disrupted those supply lines and deprived Iran of one of the central pillars of its regional strategy.

In Iraq, Iranian-backed groups continue to wield considerable influence, but they operate in an environment that is increasingly complicated by Iraqi nationalism, domestic political pressures, and growing demands that armed groups answer to the Iraqi state rather than to Tehran.

Only the Houthis retain something approaching their previous freedom of action, continuing to threaten commercial shipping and disrupt maritime trade. Yet even there, Iran’s success reveals its limitations. The Houthis can create instability, but they cannot create regional order.

Iran is being forced to play defense
The result is that Iran increasingly finds itself doing something it spent decades trying to avoid: relying on its own territory and its own capabilities to sustain confrontation.

An equally important shift is taking place elsewhere in the region.

For years, many Arab governments concluded that accommodation was the safest response to Iranian aggression. After months of unrelenting attacks on their territory, that assumption is changing.

Bahrain and Kuwait have launched strikes inside Iran, Saudi forces have joined attacks on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates has reportedly provided intelligence and air cover. Persian Gulf states are also deepening cooperation on missile defense, intelligence sharing and maritime security.

In attacking its neighbors, Iran has pushed its adversaries closer together and closer to the United States.

Iran remains powerful, but less so than before
None of this means Iran is on the verge of collapse. Its missile program remains formidable. Its nuclear ambitions are a source of legitimate concern. Tehran retains the ability to disrupt global commerce, and it has repeatedly demonstrated that even a weakened network can impose real costs on other nations.

But there is an important distinction between the ability to disrupt and the ability to shape the regional order. For decades, Iran played offense. Today, it finds itself increasingly on defense.

That could prove to be the most consequential outcome of this war. Not the destruction of the axis of resistance, but the gradual unraveling of the network through which Iran projected power across the Middle East.

The ring of fire has not disappeared, but it has become a ring of embers.

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A first response to "The Muslim Question"

I debunk conspiracy theories for a living, more or less, so when I published "The Muslim Question" and promised a response, I was concerned that it leaned much of its argument on a documented "100-year plan" for the Muslim Brotherhood to conquer North America. This sounded too conspiratorial for my taste. So I did what I always do - try to debunk it.

The claim comes from a November 2025 ISGAP report, and from ISGAP's director, Dr. Charles Asher Small, who told reporters "we are now fifty years into the Brotherhood's 100-year plan to entrench themselves into key institutions in the United States and other Western societies." Every subsequent citation of the 100-year plan — the Fox News piece, the syndicated wire copy, the essay that started this — traces back to that single quote. ISGAP's own report cites two documents as its evidence: a 1982 internal Brotherhood strategy paper known as "The Project," seized by Swiss authorities from a Muslim Brotherhood financier in 2001, and a 1991 memo by a Brotherhood official named Mohamed Akram, seized by the FBI in 2004 and entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial. I read both documents. Neither one discusses a "100-year plan." ISGAP's own report concedes this, saying the document "timelines and step-by-step approach clearly expect" long-term transformation.

But the contents of the files are just as concerning as any conspiracy theory would be.

Both texts are real, in the ordinary evidentiary sense: seized from people with documented Brotherhood ties, authenticated in a federal courtroom in the Akram memo's case, and never disowned as forgeries by anyone in a position to know. The Project lays out twelve "points of departure" for a worldwide Islamic strategy — build institutions, avoid needless confrontation, cooperate tactically with movements you don't actually agree with, keep the long-term goal of "the establishment of the global Islamic State wherever it is" in view at every stage. The Akram memo applies that logic to North America specifically, calling the mission "settlement" — making Islam "a part of the homeland it lives in" rather than a foreign transplant — and naming twenty-nine organizations, several of them still major institutions in American Muslim life, as the "seeds" of that project.

I cannot know if these plans were accepted by the Brotherhood as a whole or were just memos written by individuals in the organization. But from what I can tell, they are completely consistent with the Brotherhood ideology and larger strategy since it was founded nearly a century ago. 

Worse, they seem consistent with the things that have happened since they were written. 

From the eleventh point of The Project:

To adopt the Palestinian cause as part of a worldwide Islamic plan, with the policy plan and by means of jihad, since it acts as the keystone of the renaissance of the Arab world today.

a-Elements:

...To prepare the community of believers for jihad for the liberation of Palestine.

To create a modest nucleus of jihad in Palestine, and to nourish it in order to maintain the flame that will light the road toward the liberation of Palestine, and in order that the Palestinian cause will endure until the moment of liberation.

...

c-Suggested Missions:

To conduct studies on the Jews, enemies of Muslims, and on the oppression inflicted by these enemies on our brothers in occupied Palestine, in addition to preaching and publications.

To fight against the sentiment of capitulation among the Ummah, to refuse defeatist solutions, and to show that conciliation with the Jews will undermine our Movement and its history.

To conduct comparative studies on the Crusades and Israel, and [the victory that will be that of Islam].

To create jihadi cells in Palestine, and support them in order that they cover all of occupied Palestine.

To create a link between the moujahadin in Palestine and those throughout the Islamic world.

To nourish a sentiment of rancor with respect to the Jews and refuse all coexistence.

Yes, antisemitism is part of the strategy and there is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.  Which is what we are seeing today, 44 years later.

The other document, on North American strategy, is chilling both in its scope and in the scale of implementation since it was written in 1991:

4- Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America: 

The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal. 

5- Understanding that we cannot perform the settlement mission by ourselves or away from people: 

A mission as significant and as huge as the settlement mission needs magnificent and exhausting efforts. With their capabilities, human, financial and scientific resources, the Ikhwan will not be able to carry out this mission alone or away from people and he who believes that is wrong, and God knows best. As for the role of the Ikhwan, it is the initiative, pioneering, leadership, raising the banner and pushing people in that direction. They are then to work to employ, direct and unify Muslims' efforts and powers for this process. In order to do that, we must possess a mastery of the art of "coalitions", the art of "absorption" and the principles of "cooperation". 

Now, let's look at the so-called "Red-Green Alliance" between socialists and Islamists. It isn't an alliance. Watching the last decade of campus and municipal politics, it is a one-directional trade. The socialist side has moved: absorbing "decolonization" framing, treating anti-Zionism as settled progressive doctrine, going quiet on gender and sexuality commitments that would otherwise put it at odds with religiously conservative coalition partners. I can't point to the reverse — an Islamist-aligned organization publicly revising its own positions on gender, sexuality, or religious authority to accommodate its socialist allies. The accommodation runs one way, and "useful idiot," a phrase coined for exactly this kind of one-sided coalition, has acquired an uncomfortable second meaning: the people who used to deploy it as an insult may now be describing themselves without knowing it.

Again, I have no solid proof that the Muslim Brotherhood is employing this precise strategy in the US today. But since 2000, we have seen 9/11, wars against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and yet Islamist thinking is more embedded in the US than ever before. Muslim candidates are cool while Jewish candidates are suspect of "Zionism." New York was the site of the deadliest jihadist attack in American history. Twenty-four years later, New York magazine's cover story is 'Habibi City' — not because violence won, but because the Akram memo's other kind of jihad, the 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' of settlement and institution-building, did.  Muslims are running and winning elections as socialists, a worldview the Islamists certainly do not believe in, but one that shares their goal of "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within." This doesn't happen by itself; whether this is the actual plan or a general strategy, it is visible to anyone willing to see. 

When you have a well defined revolutionary ideology, you don't need a conspiracy to carry it out. You just need enough people willing to do whatever it takes to implement it. While these documents seem largely consistent with what we have been seeing, there may be other memos superseding them , or there may be none. We do not need a central organization to tell Linda Sarsour to promote Muslim political power while pretending it is consistent with socialist principles as her "MPower Change" organization claims.

"The Muslim Question" essay is terrifically important. But equally important is the presentation. If there is any overreach, anything that can be disproven, if the language is perceived as discriminatory, then the project fails. I've only just begun to deeply analyze it, but we have already established that the danger is real and Islamist organizing is the best explanation for much of what we see nowadays, It is critical that the project does not claim anything beyond what can convince a skeptical person. 

There are plenty of real concerns. Anyone who cares about the future of America, and of Jews in America, needs to take the contents of these memos seriously because those plans are being implemented, explicitly or implicitly.

 

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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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