09/25 Links Pt2: What Frederick Forsyth grasped about antisemitism and Israel; The insane case of the blacked-up Palestine activist; Ro Khanna calls on Israel to release Marwan Barghouti

From Ian:

What Frederick Forsyth grasped about antisemitism and Israel

At the beginning of the month I was invited to see the play Wiesenthal by Tom Dugan at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London – a stone’s throw, if that is an appropriate phrase, from Cable Street – but I found myself unable to go. But it set me off thinking about the first time I heard the name of the legendary Nazi-hunter: and that would have been in the pages of Frederick Forsyth’s second novel, The Odessa File, and I would have been about 12. (Everyone was reading it, and its predecessor, The Day of the Jackal.)

Because it was so very long ago when I was 12, I had forgotten all but the barest bones of the plot, which involves a secret group dedicated to getting ex-SS officers out of Germany, and a concentration camp commander known as “the butcher of Riga”. I thought I’d re-read it, just for the heck of it.

Revisiting the book for the first time in half a century gave me more of a jolt than I expected. It starts like this: a Hamburg journalist comes across the diary of a 56-year-old Jew, who looks 76, and has (and only as I type these words do I realise the savage irony) gassed himself in his flat on (coincidentally) the night of JF Kennedy’s assassination. The journalist finds his diary of his times in a concentration camp in Latvia, which also contains the reason for his suicide: he was a Kapo, and was forced by the Commandant to kill his wife. He can’t live with this any longer. He also feels he can’t go to Israel: he feels too morally stained. I remember being moved, almost as physically as you can be by a punch to the stomach, the closing words of the diary: “But if ever these lines should be read in the land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say khaddish for me?” Because I am not Jewish, I didn’t have the faintest idea what “khaddish” meant, but I got the gist, and somehow these words kind of rammed home the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. When I re-read those words I felt that punch to the stomach again.

Forsyth was more of a storyteller than a writer, but he put in as many factual elements as he could to make the story plausible. One such factual element was Wiesenthal, who appears as a character: for which, presumably, he had given permission. (The Riga camp commander, whose name I will not utter, was also a real person.) The striking thing about the novel, though, was that Forsyth, who in his later years portrayed himself as a growling mastiff of the establishment Right, was clearly motivated by a deep hatred of Nazism, and genuine anguish at what happened to the Jewish people as a result of it. There was a moral clarity to the book; and now I come to think of it, it’s partly because of this early exposure to the evil of the Holocaust that I write for this paper today.

Two other things struck me: Forsyth makes it very clear that opposition to the state of Israel was entirely motivated by hatred of Jews, and not a humanitarian desire to found a Palestinian state. In the book, there’s much about a plot based on historical events hatched by Egypt to get ex-Nazi rocket scientists to develop a proper guidance system for ballistic missiles, loaded with either strontium-90 or plague bacilli, to kill everyone in Israel. The establishment of a Palestinian state isn’t mentioned, because that wasn’t even a notion then.

David Collier: When the Facts Don’t Fit: BBC News Invents a Motive

The Pen Behind the Sword
The journalist Brandon Drenon is not new to me. I first wrote about his BBC reporting more than two years ago, raising concerns about the way he framed Israel-related stories. Since then, the media watchdog CAMERA has also challenged his reporting on several occasions. In April 2024, Drenon falsely told BBC readers that the International Court of Justice had found the accusation of genocide against Israel “plausible.” It had not. Following a complaint, the BBC amended the article.

But there is a broader pattern worth noting. Drenon has repeatedly produced sympathetic human-interest reporting centred on Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activism. Just a few examples:
October 2023: ’I wake up and check if my family in Gaza is still alive,’ says Palestinian American
November 2023: Palestinian-Americans struggling with “survivors’ guilt”
May 2024: US campus protests: ‘Student arrests will be my final college memory’
April 2025: Anxiety at US colleges as foreign students are detained and visas revoked
October 2025: US campus activists relieved – and anxious – after Gaza ceasefire deal

I looked for the other side. I could find no comparable standalone feature from him centred on Jewish or Israeli-American experiences of October 7, the hostage crisis or the subsequent surge in antisemitism.

Nothing.

Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. When I last reported on Drenon I noted he came from a social justice background, and had married a Syrian-Palestinian from a family of anti-Israel activists.

And now we have his coverage of the shooting in Vermont.

Once again, the problem is not simply what Drenon reports, but the story he invents beyond the facts. His article introduces the Gaza war, Islamophobia, Arabic and keffiyehs in quick succession – leading readers to assume a motive that the evidence never established.

We Should Not Have to Pay for This
The BBC’s motive seems considerably clearer than Jason Eaton’s. We know Eaton shot three young men on a dark street in a peaceful city. Nearly three years later, we still do not know why.

What we can see clearly is what the BBC has done with that uncertainty.

This was a local shooting in which nobody was killed. Would BBC News have reported the conviction of an American who shot and wounded three strangers in Vermont nearly three years earlier if the victims had not been Palestinian?

But having chosen to report it, the BBC then supplied the missing narrative itself: Gaza, Islamophobia, Arabic and keffiyehs – all pointing the reader towards an anti-Palestinian motive that was never established.

But the bottom line is this. I do not actually care if BBC News wants to employ activist journalists who produce one-sided, skewed and misleading coverage.

There are plenty of dreadful media outlets in the world. One more will make little difference.

But here is the crunch: if the BBC has abandoned impartial journalism for student-level activism, then there is no justification for forcing the British public to pay for it.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Campaign to Islamize Canada

At least three ideologically aligned organizations—CMPAC, CJPME, and GTP—registered as third parties with Elections Canada. In the Canadian context, “third parties” are entities other than political parties or candidates that engage in political advertising. Their registration enabled coordinated messaging campaigns centered on specific policy demands, including calls for a Gaza ceasefire, the institutionalization of anti-Islamophobia measures, and the repeal of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21. A pre-election survey conducted by CMPAC found that 75% of Canadian Muslim respondents identified Palestine as the most important issue influencing their vote. A post-election poll conducted by Mainstreet Research on behalf of TCMV identified Palestine as the dominant issue for respondents at 45%. These findings reflect the sustained salience of transnational politics on domestic electoral behavior within the Muslim community.

Though these groups claimed to be merely guiding and empowering the Muslim community to vote on values and principles rather than partisan lines, the explicit promotion of their preferred parties and candidates suggests they essentially canvassed Muslims to vote for those who would support their radical agenda. For example, while CMPAC endorsed 47 Liberal, New Democratic Party, and Green candidates via its MuslimsVote.ca platform, a joint endorsement statement issued by CMPAC in tandem with four other Muslim advocacy organizations—Arab-Canadian Vote, Canadian Muslim Healthcare Network, HIKMA, and the National Muslim Action Fund—unanimously backed 41 candidates.

The statement encouraged Muslims to not only exercise their franchise in favor of these candidates but also to support and volunteer with them. A “Joint Statement of Muslim Organizations on Federal Election 2025” was drafted and approved by a committee including CMPAC, TCMV, and the NCCM. Prominent Brotherhood-aligned groups such as the Islamic Circle of North America and the Islamic Society of North America were among its signatories.

Similarly, CJPME’s report card-styled Federal Election Guide 2025 gave the NDP and the Green Party the joint-highest grades for their strong support on issues concerning Palestine and Islamophobia, while the Conservative Party received a failing grade. A popular campaign called Vote Palestine—backed by CJPME, CMPAC, and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), an entity with ties to the U.S.-designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—secured the full endorsement of 344 candidates from four federal parties: the NDP, the Green Party, the Liberal Party, and the Bloc Québécois.

Based on this evidence, the 2025 federal election cycle reveals a broader transition from passive demographic influence to active, organized political intervention. Through a combination of third-party campaigning, coordinated voter mobilization, and targeted advocacy, Brotherhood-aligned networks and their allies demonstrated a capacity to influence electoral dynamics, particularly in tightly contested ridings, in ways that are likely to prove decisive in future elections.

Islamophobia featured among the stated priorities of the 2025 joint electoral statement issued by CMPAC, NCCM, the National Muslim Action Fund, The Canadian Muslim Vote, and over 100 signatory organizations, including the Muslim Association of Canada and 23 of its centers, ISNA Canada, and ICNA Canada. The statement urged voters to question candidates on Gaza, human rights, Islamophobia, and economic justice, and identified Quebec’s Bill 21 as evidence of rising Islamophobia.

The sustained advocacy of these entities has yielded tangible policy responses. In January 2023, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Elghawaby as Canada’s first special representative on combating Islamophobia, following relentless pressure from the NCCM. However, this initiative was soon deemed insufficient by the NCCM, which in the leadup to the 2025 federal election publicly pressed political parties to advance a comprehensive national strategy on Islamophobia as a prerequisite for securing support from Muslim voters.

Legal and quasi-legal constructs further shape the operational environment. Frameworks such as Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, in the specific institutional contexts examined, affect administrative behavior, influence the interpretation of conduct, and alter the terms on which scrutiny and accountability are applied. Their significance lies not in abstract definition but in their practical interaction with broader narrative and organizational dynamics. Taken together, these elements indicate a structural environment characterized by reinforcing domains rather than by a single causal factor. The cumulative effect is the normalization of specific narratives, practices, partnerships, and associations within institutional settings, alongside uneven scrutiny and variable response.

The implications are systemic. Effective responses require a framework capable of addressing the interdependence of narrative, institutional, financial, regulatory, and legal domains with consistency. Without that, individual interventions are unlikely to alter the underlying conditions identified across universities, civil society, and public life.

Read More

09/25 Links Pt1: Netanyahu’s UN speech: ‘J’accuse’ against the West; Sukkot and the United Nations: Two competing visions of Israel’s history; Ontario Gunman shouted ‘you’re going to die for the Jews’

From Ian:

Netanyahu’s UN speech: ‘J’accuse’ against the West

Netanyahu confronted the fundamental distortion of Israel’s long war of self-defense, a struggle that has continued for decades but has been recast as colonialism. An army that has saved Israel from annihilation is instead criminalized for doing so.

He laid out, in a matter of minutes, the pillars of the case Israel has struggled to make to the world: the manipulation of the media; the role of Qatar, Hamas’s closest patron, through Al Jazeera and its enormous financial influence in American and European institutions; Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields; and Israel’s efforts to warn civilians and move them out of danger.

He spoke of the food and vaccinations provided in Gaza—facts that contradict the accusation that Israel is committing genocide.

It was a j’accuse directed at the world.

But it was also a celebration of Jewish resilience: 3,000 years of attachment to the same land and the same faith, a civilization that gave the world monotheism and the sanctification of life.

Netanyahu spoke of the heroism of Israeli soldiers and their understanding of the magnitude of the task before them. He cited Neryiah Leiter, the son of Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter, and his words of complete dedication to serving his country.

They echoed the spirit of Netanyahu’s own brother, Yoni, who was killed leading the mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages at Entebbe in 1976.

We will prevail because we have no choice.

Netanyahu finally turned to Iran. He promised that the murderous regime that persecutes and kills its own people will ultimately disappear, even as the West has too often failed to raise its voice forcefully against it.

Netanyahu’s speech was not simply a defense of Israel. It was an indictment of a world that has turned reality upside down, treating those defending themselves as aggressors and too often excusing those who openly seek their destruction.

It was his j’accuse.

And his warning was directed far beyond Israel: The war Israel is fighting against terrorism, jihadism and totalitarianism will not end at Israel’s borders. A common thread unites all forms of totalitarianism.

Recognizing that threat should likewise unite the world’s democracies in defending freedom.

Jake Wallis Simons: The West joins the UN’s anti-Israel hate fest

There is something almost reassuring about the United Nations General Assembly. However much the world changes, however many wars rage and dictatorships rise and fall, you can be sure that sooner or later, everybody will start hating on Israel.

At this year’s gathering in New York, the hatred came sooner rather than later. What was different, however, was the identity of some of the people doing the hating. During the Cold War, the most lurid denunciations of the Jewish state came from Arab autocrats, Soviet satellites and assorted Third World dictatorships. Western democracies might have criticised Israeli governments – sometimes severely – but they generally retained some sense of proportion.

No longer. This week, the rhetoric of Israeli wickedness was found firmly in the Western mainstream. Take António Guterres. In his final address to the General Assembly as UN Secretary-General, he rightly described the Hamas atrocities of October 7 as “abhorrent”.

But then came the qualification. “What followed,” he said, “was an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.”

Really? As Jon Snow famously remarked in Game of Thrones: “What did father use to say? everything before the word ‘but’ is horse s**t”.

Let’s look at the facts. Guterres has occupied the post since January 2017. His tenure therefore encompasses the Tigray war in Ethiopia, one of the most appalling and under-reported catastrophes of our age, but one of which the UN should really be aware. Estimates of its death toll vary enormously, but as many as 600,000 people are thought to have died through violence, starvation and lack of medical care.

His tenure also encompasses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the UN has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths since February 2022 – while stressing that the true figure is considerably higher – alongside astronomical military casualties. And I don’t even need to mention Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar. These wars may not have commanded the headlines, but they should certainly have commanded the attention of the UN. Guess not.

Gaza is unquestionably a human catastrophe, entirely of Hamas’ making. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been reported killed since October 7, including a significant number of combatants. But the suggestion that nothing in the past decade compares with Gaza is simply malicious nonsense, designed – yet again – to demonise Israel.

Then there was Emmanuel Macron. The French president became so carried away while berating Israel that he found himself claiming that “Hamas has never operated in the West Bank.” I’m not joking; he actually said it. Incredible, no?

As any world leader – especially one who is so vocal about “Palestine” – should understand, Hamas has operated there for decades. Its cells have been repeatedly uncovered; the Palestinian Authority arrests Hamas members. Even Le Monde, hardly a mouthpiece for Benjamin Netanyahu, described Macron’s assertion as a “factual mistake” and said the position was “indefensible”.

Indeed, a French citizen, Netanel Shukrun, a father-of-six, was shot dead on the West Bank just two days before Macron’s speech, by a Hamas gunman.

There was something revealing about Macron’s error. Israel’s critics increasingly appear so certain of the moral architecture of this conflict – powerful Israel, powerless Palestinians, Israel guilty and the Palestinians victims – that facts simply dissolve.

Not so with Netanyahu. Like him or loathe him, and there are plenty of reasons for both, his address on Thursday contained a string of home truths that the diplomatic world needed to hear.

Sukkot and the United Nations: Two competing visions of Israel’s history

The general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations illustrates how the international system is no longer a mouthpiece for objective justice, but rather a stage on which the spirit of the age determines what will be considered “truth.”

Concepts such as “human rights” and “self-defense,” or those that have become sacred to the Jewish people such as the “Holocaust” and “concentration camps,” are emptied of their original meaning and moral weight and mobilized as political weapons, directed precisely against the people who set out to defend themselves against genocide and who rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, while authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations benefit from systematic disregard.

The phenomenon displayed at the UNGA represents the greatest danger facing modern society: a society that has lost the ability to distinguish between victim and aggressor is one that has lost its moral conscience, its values, and consequently its identity.

This is precisely the picture that emerges from an institution in which an automatic majority can legitimize falsehood and grant legitimacy to the attempt to erase the Jewish people’s right to live in their land as a sovereign and free people.

Sukkot: Memory as the foundation of national existence
Against the lies voiced from the UN podium stands the holiday of Sukkot, offering a far deeper conceptual alternative: historical memory as a condition for survival.

The Torah commands: “You shall dwell in booths for seven days ... so that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:42-43).

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain, wrote extensively about the uniqueness of Judaism as a civilization that placed memory, and not merely dry history, at the center of its national life.

Unlike great empires that were erased from the pages of time, the Jewish people survived for thousands of years precisely because of their ability to carry their story and their books with them, to know where they came from, and not to relinquish their identity even under conditions of exile and rupture.

Dwelling in a fragile and temporary sukkah is not merely an agricultural or seasonal ritual. It is a deliberate act of education in national memory.

It reminds us, year after year, that our security does not rest solely on concrete buildings, nor on the approval of international institutions that present themselves as the conscience of the world, but on deep roots and faith in the justice of our path.

Political fashions at the UN change from generation to generation, but the historical truth of the Jewish people in their land is as firm as a rock.

The national memory that we revive every Sukkot inoculates us against attempts to rewrite history, whether through denial of the Jewish connection to the land or through obscuring the circumstances of the war forced upon us by the murderers of October 7.

At the Israel Defense and Security Forum, we have placed at the heart of our mission the understanding that standing firm in the face of international pressure requires not only diplomatic and military tools, but first and foremost a strong cultural and spiritual foundation.

The holiday of Sukkot provides precisely this perspective: one that looks beyond the background noise of global diplomacy and recognizes that the Jewish people’s right to their land is rooted in the eternity of Israel, which does not lie or deceive.

Read More

European sukkah design in the 18th century is really fascinating

I found a 1724 copperplate of sukkot in Amsterdam  titled "Repas des Juifs pendant la fête des Tentes" (Jewish Meal During the Feast of the Tabernacles) by the French engraver Bernard Picart. Both the sukkah on the foreground and to the side are remarkable: the main one has a domed roof, and the one to the right has a conical roof, all seemingly kosher.

And here is a detail of Das Laubhütten Fest (The Feast of Tabernacles / Sukkot) from Johann Christian Georg Bodenschatz's treatise Kirchliche Verfassung der heutigen Juden, published in Erlangen. It shows a remarkably similar domed roof  sukkah in Germany, certainly redrawn based closely on the earlier Picart copperplate,  and next to it an attic sukkah built where the walls leaned in and formed the schach.

I know that German Jews often built sukkot on their attics and built retractable roofs (Klappdach) so they could be protected during storms, but this sukkah does not seem to show the actual house roof so it may have been built on a flat roof.

All three designs - domed, conical and leaning walls as the entire sukkah, plus the retractable roof sukkah, were probably done for practical reasons. The weather in Europe in autumn can be brutal, and all these designs are more resistant to being destroyed by high winds. 

This year, Jews in the northeastern United States are a bit nervous about the path of a nor'easter storm scheduled to hit during the Sukkot festival which starts tonight, endangering the booths we built.

But it is not likely to cause close to the damage of the Great Gale of October 7,  1756, which affected England and much of Europe. Hurricane-force winds battered the region.

As reported in the Derby Mercury on October 15th:

Luckily, the holiday had not started yet: Sukkot in 1756 began the night of October 8 so the local Jews had an opportunity to rebuild quickly to celebrate. 

Have a wonderful and safe Sukkot!

---

 

Read More

09/24 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Why ‘Fauda’ has shocked the West; Why Did It Take a Massacre of Jews to Lift the Lid on Anti-Jewish Hostility?; Why Does Ireland Hate Israel So Much?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Why ‘Fauda’ has shocked the West

Many things have contributed to the insanity of the West’s obsessional delegitimization of Israel that has turned it into a pariah in mainstream political and cultural circles. This can only be properly understood as part of a broader and deeper Western civilizational crisis.

However, one factor, in particular, has turned truth and lies inside out in the minds of many. For decades, there’s been a settled view among progressives that Israel is a rogue state that behaves illegally and cruelly.

That’s because the overwhelming majority of media coverage of the Jewish state has consisted of lies and distortions intended to delegitimize it as a prelude to its destruction.

In recent days, a curtain has been lifted on a corner of this madness. Motaz Azaiza is a Palestinian Arab photojournalist lionized by Western liberals for his production of images that have fueled hatred and incitement against Israel. Time magazine listed him among its top 100 most influential people of 2024.

But in a long interview in Arabic, whose translation is now all over social media, Azaiza revealed that every claim or image coming out of Gaza during the war had been crafted to fit the Hamas narrative. If Gazan journalists didn’t toe the line, they disappeared. Every journalist in Gaza belonged to a Hamas-run group.

Said Azaiza: “They take the details of a specific person, publish his phone number in the group and instruct online activists to attack him, curse him and make his life miserable.”

As a result, photographers like him lowered their cameras the moment anyone said something bad about Hamas.

Furthermore, Azaiza himself supported Hamas terrorism. He related how he’d filmed Gazans beating and abusing Israelis who were captured and dragged into the Strip on Oct. 7, but he didn’t publish those videos because he didn’t want Israel to identify the abusers and kill them.

Not a word of Azaiza’s revelations has appeared in Western media. Of course not. That would reveal that they’ve been doing Hamas’s dirty work for it. Every report from Gaza should have carried a health warning that it was produced under Hamas censorship. Instead, it was all presented as credible or true.

And this has been the case for decades. The Western public has no idea that what it takes to be the truth about Israeli behavior and Palestinian suffering—because it’s “seen it on TV”—is a giant and monstrous lie.

Shockingly, many Diaspora Jews are now claiming that Israel’s terrible image in the world is due to the toxic nature of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremists in his coalition government, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Such a ludicrous misrepresentation of the civilizational emergency that has engulfed the West can only be explained by the desperate need for such Diaspora Jews to deny the danger to themselves from their own society that has simply lost its collective mind.

“Fauda” is delivering to the West a truth that it doesn’t even realize it has so devastatingly denied.

Why Did It Take a Massacre of Jews to Lift the Lid on Anti-Jewish Hostility?

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a leading voice in the U.S. Reform community, is senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. Here are additional excerpts from his Yom Kippur sermon on Monday:
Anti-Jewish hostility is simply part and parcel of our three millennia existence. It is one reason why we are still so tiny - a mere 0.2% of the world's population. What we are seeing today is not new, even in America. Our grandparents and great grandparents lived through worse.

I concede that I, too, was shocked, and am still unsettled, by how quickly so many past allies turned against us. Not because they were sensitive to Palestinian pain - I am, too - but because they were so insensitive to Jewish pain.

Why was Oct. 7 morally complicated? Even if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause - if you are a Palestinian, yourself - why the moral stuttering? What would have been more natural, normal and humane than to express empathy for the loved ones, demand that the hostages be returned immediately, and to condemn the savagery? Then - talk all you want about so-called apartheid, occupation and resistance.

I know Hamas. It was not surprising that they murdered Israelis - although their barbaric brutality, proudly filmed by them in their GoPro cameras live and in living color, was still stunning to me. What was shocking to me was Oct. 8. Why did it take a massacre of Jews to lift the lid on all this bile? And don't tell me Israel's response - the poison was released before the sun set on Oct. 7, before Israel could even clear its towns, villages and kibbutzim of murderers.

Deep down, we also know that the return of legitimated, tolerated, excused, contextualized, intellectualized and often violent antisemitism is a flashing warning sign of the decay of something uniquely precious about America itself. Some of the best minds of a generation are inflamed by an aggressive form of cultural encephalitis, distorting reason and impairing moral judgment. If a politician or intellectual or journalist tells you that the Land of Israel has nothing to do with the People of Israel, the civilization of Israel, the religion of Israel, the God of Israel, or the State of Israel - why are you listening to them? They know nothing.

Why Does Ireland Hate Israel So Much?

Ireland and Israel will face off in a men's soccer match in Hungary on Sunday. The game was supposed to be played in Ireland, but such is the hostility there that it must take place at a neutral venue instead. A second match will take place in Serbia rather than Israel the following Sunday. The Football Association of Ireland doesn't want to play at all. It wants the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to boot Israel from the organization. Only Turkey and Norway share the Irish position.

In the days after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, no Israeli flags flew in solidarity outside public buildings anywhere in Ireland. Many politicians began displaying the Palestinian colors instead. The hostility of official Ireland stands out in Europe. Before Israel closed its embassy in Dublin last year, Israeli diplomats would quietly tell you that they regarded Ireland as the worst diplomatic posting in Europe. There are almost no politicians they can ever work with, and that was before the Gaza war. There are no friendly media.

Why is Ireland so anti-Israel? Irish history explains most of it. Ireland was occupied by Britain for centuries and most Irish people liken the Palestinians to themselves, and particularly to the Catholics of Northern Ireland. They liken Israel to Britain.

This startles a lot of Israelis. Surely if anyone was like the dispossessed Irish, it was the Jews. During the early days of the struggle for a Jewish state, leading figures such as future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir took heart from Ireland's successful fight for independence from Britain. Shamir's nom de guerre was "Michael," after Michael Collins, one of the leaders of the old Irish Republican Army.

Read More

09/24 Links Pt1: How the UN Forges Anti-Israel Bias; While the World Is on Fire, the Media Are Still Obsessed with Israel; Was there a famine in Gaza? The top expert answers; Paging Hezbollah - Trailer

From Ian:

How the UN Forges Anti-Israel Bias

Every annual UN Week comes with the certainty of abuse for Israel. The hatefest is already in full swing. Tuesday saw accusations of genocide, the lie du jour. Then, in criticizing Israel, France's Emmanuel Macron said, "Hamas was never forceful in the West Bank." On Sunday, a Hamas terrorist there murdered an Israeli father of six. Were Israel to exit the West Bank, Hamas would quickly take over.

Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 187 condemnatory resolutions against Israel, per UN Watch data, "more than twice the number adopted against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Qatar, Pakistan, Cuba, and Venezuela combined." The votes become building blocks of a permanent bureaucracy that supplies anti-Israel findings to be echoed by UN humanitarian and other agencies. The findings are then used by governments and courts to blacklist and sanction Israel.

Only Israel is subject by rule to a Human Rights Council agenda item at every regular session, plus an "open-ended Commission of Inquiry and a uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate." That's on top of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Division for Palestinian Rights, Information System on the Question of Palestine, and UNRWA, the forever refugee agency for Palestinians.

The question is why the U.S. and other democracies finance this discrimination, which undermines the ability of all to fight terrorism.

"The Cost of Not Doing Something about Iran Is Substantially Higher" than Doing Something

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday: "The southern lane of the [Hormuz] straits is open. Every day more and more barrels of oil are flowing through there. And they're open, thanks to the efforts of the United States military that's both defending shipping and has removed mines....I'm happy to see that the Saudis were able to restart the East-West pipeline again, which is critical for their economy and also critical for the global economy."

If the Iranians "continue to insist on the desire for a nuclear weapon, their support for proxies in the region - they're the world's leading sponsor of terrorism - then we're going to have big problems with them."

"I think the Iranians misread our system. I think the Iranians are under this illusion that Democrats are going to win in November, and the President will no longer be able to do things against them....The legislative branch is a very important branch of government. I served in it for 14 years, so I understand its powers, but also understand its limitations."

"When it comes to the national security of our country, when it comes to the imposition of both sanctions and the use of military force, the President has extraordinary powers. Every president does."

"The Iranian issue is not a political issue. It is the fact that for generations now - for almost 50 years - every American president...agrees that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. But ultimately, no one ever does anything about it...and he's doing something about it. And it comes at a price and at a cost...but the cost of not doing something about it is substantially higher, especially for future generations."

While the World Is on Fire, the Media Are Still Obsessed with Israel

Jeremy Musighi, an independent researcher, recently released a study analyzing 14.7 million news articles published across 65 languages over the last decade.

He found that, in 2024, news outlets published "more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined."

"On American cable news, Israel was the most-mentioned country - ahead of Iran, Russia, Ukraine, China. On the BBC's news channel, 1 in every 17 broadcast minutes mentioned Israel."

In 2019, long before the war in Gaza, "1 of every 112 news articles on Earth - from all the world's outlets minus Israel's - was primarily about Israel. 1.8 million international articles mentioned it."

Read More

Under 'Schizophrenia,' DSM-VI To Just Show Image Of Lebanon (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

ARLINGTON, September 24 — The American Psychiatric Association announced Thursday that the next edition of its clinical manual will no longer list symptoms under the mental disorder schizophrenia; instead, editors will print a photograph of the country that claims its seat of government as Beirut, but in fact has answered to Tehran and Damascus, and wherever the PLO is headquartered this decade since at least the 1970s.

APA officials described the change as a space-saving measure that also improved agreement among reviewers. In internal tests, staff who read the old criteria argued over semantics. Staff who were handed the picture did not. The image will appear only with the caption, "Lebanon."

The Association’s brief explanation, issued in the tone of a shipping update, noted that Lebanon has become the textbook case of a polity that cannot choose a self. It cannot decide whether it is an Iranian vassal or an independent Arab state. It cannot decide whether it wants a settlement with Israel and the ordinary prosperity that would follow, or whether it prefers to keep absorbing strikes and instability by hosting and encouraging irredentist Palestinian groups and claims. It cannot decide whether it still wants the old tourist-board title, the Paris of the Middle East, or whether that title is now to be treated as an anti-Muslim affront — this in a country whose constitution, still theoretically in force, sets aside the presidency, substantial parliamentary weight, and other offices for Christians and the Druze.

Lebanese officials do not appear among the manual’s consultants. A government that recently renewed confidence in itself while one bloc walked out of the chamber did not immediately comment. Neither did the "political party" that maintains a separate arsenal and a separate foreign policy and has, on paper, been told to disarm. Talks with Israel exist, do not exist on the announced day, and exist again as a framework. The government has agreed to a framework obligating it to disarm Hezbollah, which it has steadfastly upheld by refusing to disarm Hezbollah.

The Association said it considered adding a short paragraph about banks that froze deposits, a currency that functions as legal tender and also not, and a capital that is both open for dinner and one good afternoon from another evacuation. Editors cut the text, saying it repeated the picture.

A minority of reviewers wanted two photographs, one labeled “before the ceasefire” and one “after.” The request was denied on the ground that no one could agree which print was which.

---

 

Read More

Way past time for a cartoon post

---

 

Read More

09/23 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionist Jews will always ultimately fail the purity tests their allies set them; Martin Kramer: Ivory Towers on Sand at 25; Teacher in Philadelphia admits to fabricating Palestinian identity for years

From Ian:

Anti-Zionist Jews will always ultimately fail the purity tests their allies set them

Security based upon somebody else’s tolerance is not security.

For centuries Jews existed as minorities whose safety depended upon rulers, governments, neighbours and political movements continuing to tolerate them. Sometimes they did, until they inevitably didn’t.

England expelled its Jews, Spain expelled its Jews, across Europe Jews experienced pogroms, restrictions, dispossession and ultimately industrialised extermination. Across the Middle East and North Africa ancient Jewish communities dwindled dramatically in the decades around Israel’s creation amid persecution, violence, expulsions, state pressure, Zionist migration and war.

Jewish history contains an uncomfortable abundance of reminders of what happens when our safety depends entirely upon somebody else’s goodwill. That is a major, undeniable and historically essential reason Zionism exists.

Not because Jews believe ourselves superior to anybody else, but because after millennia of discovering how conditional somebody else’s protection could be, Jews concluded that our survival could not forever depend upon other people granting us permission to remain. And now that conclusion itself is being put on trial.

Ask yourself this crucial question. Why, among the world’s national movements, does Jewish national self-determination generate this particular obsession? Why is the answer to alleged crimes committed by Israel not merely to change its government, borders or policies but, uniquely, to question whether the country should continue to exist at all?

Britain committed atrocities during empire, nobody seriously proposes abolishing Britain. America was built through the dispossession of indigenous peoples and slavery, nobody demands the dissolution of the United States as the prerequisite for opposing racism. States throughout the world have disputed borders, bloody histories and governments that have committed terrible acts. Their citizens are not routinely required to renounce the existence of their countries before being permitted into polite society.

Yet somehow Jewish national self-determination is subjected to a different test.

Any political movement capable of imagining liberation and self-determination for peoples across the world but unable to imagine them for Jews should ask itself why the Jew is once again the exception.

That is why this isn’t really a story about Zack Polanski and it isn’t ultimately a story about the Green Party.

It’s about us.

For three years I have watched Jews desperately negotiate with people who despise Zionism, who are fueled by hate.

I’m Jewish, but…

Three words that have become almost a ritual incantation, three words that so many still think will guarantee them acceptance, save them from the mob. Three words that exemplify “suicidal naivety”.

Because there is always another purity test and eventually you run out of things to surrender. Except one, your Jewishness.

That is the lesson I want my children to understand. They do not need anybody’s permission to be Jewish. They do not need to apologise for Jewish history. They do not need to barter pieces of their identity for acceptance. They do not need to pass somebody else’s test of what constitutes an acceptable Jew and they should never imagine that making themselves smaller will make somebody else’s hatred disappear.

I cannot control the Britain in which my children will grow old, I cannot promise them that antisemitism will disappear, but I can teach them what generations before us learnt at an unbearable cost.

Never build your Jewish future around passing somebody else’s purity test.

The test will change, the line will move and eventually, whatever you say, whatever you condemn and however much of yourself you surrender, there will be one thing you can never wash off.

You are still a Jew.

So be one proudly, be strong, be unapologetic, be loud.

Do not whisper your Jewishness to make other people comfortable. Do not shrink it to fit inside somebody else’s politics. Do not bargain it away in return for an acceptance that history tells us was always conditional.

We are still here, after everything, we are still here and so we shall remain.

How Propaganda Uses Emotion to Teach You What Not to See

There is something profoundly revealing about the way the story of Jadallah Jihad Jadallah has been told.

A Palestinian boy from the al-Far’a refugee camp was shot by Israeli forces on November 16, 2025. Al-Far’a is in the northern West Bank, near Tubas. This was not a story from Gaza or Hamas. The details surrounding Jadallah’s death came instead from the West Bank, from his own community, and from Fatah, the movement led by Mahmoud Abbas.

The death itself is not disputed. He was shot, and forty-five minutes later, he died. What is revealing is everything that followed and has been left out. His case provides a clear example of how narrative framing is created and how effective emotional propaganda works.

Propaganda does not always require fabricating an event. Sometimes the more powerful technique is to take a real event, select the facts that support a particular emotional response, place those facts in a carefully constructed sequence and narrative, and leave other relevant facts out. The audience is then given a story that may contain real images, real people and real events, while being guided toward a particular conclusion that contradict the very evidence right in front of their eyes.

That distinction is particularly important when the subject is the death of a child. The image of a wounded fourteen-year-old boy can produce an immediate and powerful emotional response. Once that emotional frame has been established, everything else becomes irrelevant. Who he was, whether the circumstances surrounding his death are actually as reported, and how ordinary military protocol or acts of self-defense are being reframed as evidence of criminal conduct. Reality and critical thinking disappears when faced with an emotional narrative.

That is why the story of Jadallah deserves to be examined not only for what was reported, what was left out, but for how narrative framing and propaganda is constructed and works.

Across social-media posts surrounding his death, Jadallah was described in the language of martyrdom, heroism and fighting. Posts on associated with the al-Far’a camp also presented him as a “heroic martyr” from the beginning. Other material celebrated him as a child fighter.

Fatah-associated imagery was displayed prominently throughout the camp and surrounding community. There was also an official Fatah vigil following his death, held specifically for people to offer condolences to his family, by invitation only. These were not obscure details buried somewhere beyond the reach of a journalist or an “human rights organization.” They were part of the environment in which Jadallah’s death was being publicly commemorated locally in real time.

But his death wasn’t just glorified by Fatah, the party of Mahmoud Abbas. The public record also includes a TikTok post attributed to Jadallah from before his death that can reasonably be read as anticipating or embracing the possibility of death that day. That is a very important part of the story. Did Jadallah leave his house wanting to become a “martyr” and commit suicide?

But this is where narrative framing becomes visible. Haaretz published a lengthy account under the headline, “Watch: A 14-year-old bled to death for 45 minutes as Israeli soldiers stood nearby.” The BBC followed with, “Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian boy and stood around as he bled to death, video shows.” Both framed the story around soldiers allegedly failing to provide life-saving treatment.

Both publications also displayed an image of Jadallah that tells another part of the story: a Fatah martyr poster calling him a “Hero Martyr,” presenting a fourteen-year-old boy as a heroic fighter, publicly celebrated by his own father.

Yet the reader encounters the emotional frame first: a wounded child, “bled to death,” “shot,” and soldiers who “stood around.” The poster is visible, but its meaning is not explained. The audience is shown the evidence, but taught how to interpret it.

That is how propaganda can work without fabricating every fact. The information remains in plain sight, yet becomes psychologically irrelevant once the emotional conclusion has already been established.

The question, therefore, is not only what these reports showed their audiences. It is what they taught their audiences not to see.

But the framing does not end with the headline or the photograph. In fact, that is where the more consequential part begins.

First, the security-camera footage shows Jadallah throwing something toward an IDF soldier immediately before he is shot. That is not a minor detail. It provides a clear explanation for why the soldier fired. A rock is not necessarily harmless simply because it is a rock. Being struck by a thrown object can cause serious injury, and even death. The relevant question in a military engagement is not whether the object looks like a conventional weapon, but whether the soldier reasonably perceived an immediate threat.

Read More

09/23 Links Pt1: Son of Israel’s US envoy, a soldier, seriously hurt in car-ramming attack; Rebutting ‘NAZA,’ freed hostage says he knows what it’s like ‘to be collateral damage’; Hillel Neuer: "In the Middle East, the UN is completely irrelevant."

From Ian:

Ambassador Jeff Bartos: UN must abandon anti-American, anti-Western legacy of Durban Conference

Over the course of the past half-century, virulent anti-Western ideology has become a permanent feature of our international institutions. One of the key inflection points in this transformation took place at a United Nations conference 25 years ago: the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

The conference’s stated purpose was to confront alleged racism and bigotry. Today, the United Nations touts the Durban Declaration — the ideological framework adopted at the conference — as "the U.N.’s blueprint to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance globally." In reality, it represented the instantiation of a set of radical ideas about race, history and Western civilization as the formal dogmas of our most powerful global institutions.

Since then, the anniversary of the Durban Declaration has frequently served as an opportunity for radical bureaucrats to reaffirm and double down on their anti-Western hatred. Nearly every five years since the conference, including next week, the U.N. commemorates and revels in the falsehoods and civilizational self-hatred that the conference has propagated across the international system. The United States will not have any part in celebrating this poisonous legacy. In fact, we are urging countries to join us in rejecting this propaganda and taking a meaningful step forward in repairing the rot within the U.N.

The U.N.’s embrace of racial grievance, collective guilt, unapologetic antisemitism and fervent hostility toward our shared Western heritage is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life. It runs counter to American virtues established 250 years ago. Americans need no instruction from international bureaucracies on the principle that men are created equal. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders declared that our unalienable rights did not come from kings, emperors or any earthly government — least of all unelected globalist bureaucrats. They were inherent in man, endowed by God.

Because of the Durban conference, extremist ideologues who had long festered at the fringes of the international system were pulled under one tent, handed credentials and microphones and given the imprimatur of the United Nations.

The result was radically anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian, antisemitic and dedicated to the destruction of the very civilization that gave birth to the United Nations itself.

The Durban conference itself was a testament to the radicalism of this project. Attendees used the event as a platform to demand reparations from the United States and other Western nations for slavery and colonialism. These calls were backed by speakers such as Fidel Castro, the brutal communist dictator of Cuba, who used the conference’s stage to denounce the West for its crimes of "conquest and colonization, of slavery, of the ruthless exploitation and the extermination of hundreds of millions of people."

Read More

Australia student elections party is named "Globalise the Intifada"

From Honi Soit:

Activist group Solidarity is contesting the annual [Students’ Representative Council] elections under the ticket name ‘Globalise the Intifada’ and pushing for students to vote in a referendum to sever institutional ties between the university and Israel. 

Some election materials from the ticket, placed outside of designated areas, have also been removed by the University. 

A spokesperson for the University said: “Everyone should feel like they belong on our campuses and we take seriously the distress reported by members of our community. Lawful political expression is an important part of university life, but it must be balanced with our responsibility to protect the psychosocial and physical safety of our community.   

“We have taken immediate action in response to complaints about this SRC election ticket and materials and are removing relevant material displayed outside authorised areas; we’ve also asked the independent SRC Electoral Officer to explain how the ticket name was assessed and approved under the SRC’s constitutional and regulatory framework.”

‘Globalise the Intifada’ campaigner Vieve Carnsew, who is contesting the SRC presidency, said that the phrase is not illegal in NSW. 

“‘Globalise the Intifada’ is a call for action to free Palestine and end the violence and genocide of Israel’s occupation,” Vieve Carnsew said. 

Carnsew a (they/them) indigenous activist, never held a role in the SRC. But she wants to win because Palestine is the center of her universe, and it should be everyone else's major issue, too:

“Palestine is the biggest issue to focus on right now” because it impacts everyone, affecting freedom of speech and government budgeting, with military spending taking away funding from “things that are far more useful” such as the healthcare system and education. 

In an interview, Carnsew was asked what her top three policy commitments would be. She said "Yeah, so we don't have like policy commitments."

Anti-Israel activists are sort of like children on the spectrum who can only focus on one thing and get angry at anyone who wants to talk about anything else. 

The job pays AUS $42,000 a year as of 2021.

(h/t Jill)

---

 

Read More

09/22 Links Pt2: Argentina charges 7 Iranians, 1 Lebanese over 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing; Gal Gadot's $3m. Genesis Prize funds 24 Israeli mental health and trauma care NGOs

From Ian:

David Collier: The Church of England is a runaway train – and its driver is out of her depth

Within the space of a few days, two Church of England institutions were forced into humiliating retreats.

At Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury withdrew an award she had personally presented to Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, a leading Pakistani cleric who was honoured for “reconciliation and interfaith cooperation”.

Ashrafi was no genuine interfaith operator. He helps uphold Pakistan’s brutal blasphemy laws, has supported the persecution of Ahmadis, declared the October 7 massacre an act of religious pride, and in 2007 he honoured Osama bin Laden with the title Saifullah – “Sword of God.”

“Come to Light”
When Ashrafi’s record was exposed, Lambeth Palace claimed that his previous remarks had “come to light” and withdrew the award.

They would have been better off saying nothing.

The Lambeth Palace statement makes it sound as if the information about Ashrafi was hidden away in some intelligence file. The truth is that just a few minutes of searching was all that was needed to uncover Ashrafi’s extremism. Lambeth Palace simply never bothered to look before selecting him as a worthy recipient.

There was no explanation of the vetting failure and no apology to 9/11 survivors, persecuted Pakistani minority groups, or Jews appalled by Ashrafi’s rhetoric.

Nothing but an “oops.”

“Stitch their Names”
While this farce was unfolding at Lambeth Palace, another was occurring two hundred miles further north, where Leeds Minster was forced to close an exhibition that had portrayed numerous Hamas fighters as innocent victims of Israeli aggression. During the controversy, the Minster’s rector, Canon Paul Maybury, was asked about the murder of the Bibas children – two Israeli children taken captive and brutally murdered by Hamas. He replied that “the history is complex.” Asked what he thought of Hamas, he answered: “No comment.”

The names in the tapestry have simply been taken from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and the advert Leeds Minster published notably described those names as “Gaza’s martyrs.”

Institutional Decay
The Lambeth Palace Award and the Leeds Minster exhibition are not identical incidents but they expose the same signs of institutional decay. The Church is so eager to align itself with a particular message that symbolism replaces scrutiny, producing morally indefensible acts that are exposed when outsiders do the work the Church neglected to do itself.

Take the tapestry. The concept itself is not unique, but intentionally serious memorial projects invariably involve dedicated bodies researching and confirming the identities of those being commemorated. Stitch Their Names Together simply draws its names from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry without verification. The result is empty Palestinian advocacy that promotes the libel of genocide against Israel and helps to spread antisemitism. It should have been nowhere near the inside of Leeds Minster.

With the award it was the symbolism of interfaith, with Leeds Minster it was alignment with the anti-Israel bandwagon. Different causes, but the same failure. As Church of England vicar Rev Giles Fraser recently wrote, “the Church leadership has become ideologically captured by the progressive lanyard class.”

Which leaves the Church of England increasingly resembling a runaway train – while its driver, the Archbishop of Canterbury, looks totally out of her depth. From a Church that Protects to One that Threatens

I want to add a little personal context here. I never had a problem with Christian England. When I was just three years old, I went to a kindergarten inside a Methodist church, before attending a state school that held Christian prayer services. My Jewish identity was always accommodated and I never felt threatened by the Christian majority.

In fact, my family home sat directly opposite a large church, and during heavy storms we would talk about the protection it gave us: its lightning conductor helped keep our house safe. I still see that today as symbolic of the protection the Church provided as I grew up Jewish in Britain.

So there is no inbuilt hostility here. Quite the opposite. What has emerged over the years is a growing sense of betrayal at the direction parts of the Church of England have taken.

Anyone researching the resurgence of antisemitism in Britain will eventually encounter Anglican figures such as the now disgraced Reverend Stephen Sizer, along with a strand of supersessionist theology that continues to have influence in some Anglican circles. That part is relatively easy to identify.

But during the years I spent undercover inside the anti-Israel movement, I encountered something else. I found myself all too often sitting inside Anglican buildings listening to anti-Jewish hostility being spread within their walls. A two-day conference at Lichfield Cathedral provides just one example: an event where Jewish history was rewritten, frustrated Jewish audience members were silenced, and material from the Islamist group Friends of Al-Aqsa was freely distributed.

The symbolism is difficult to ignore. The church building that stood opposite my childhood home represented shelter. Decades later, I found myself sitting inside Anglican buildings listening to hostility towards Jews being given a platform.

Yet when Jewish concerns are raised today, too often the response seems to consist of little more than words and carefully staged gestures.

The New Archbishop Meets the PFLP Activists
Let me start with the current Archbishop’s performative gestures towards British Jewry. Just days before her recent pilgrimage to Israel, she paid a visit to the NOVA exhibition in London, a travelling memorial providing an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at the Nova Music Festival on October 7.

Yet the Archbishop was not one of the many Londoners with no access to the actual site of the atrocity. She was literally about to travel to Israel. If she wanted to make a meaningful gesture of solidarity, why not visit the real thing – the site where hundreds were murdered, just a couple of hours’ drive from Jerusalem?

She didn’t.

Instead, during her five-day pilgrimage, the Archbishop was presented with carefully selected Palestinian voices. Among them were two women I subsequently identified as having documented links to PFLP activism.

I covered the full story and the evidence in an investigation published at the time. There is no need to repeat it all here. The point is what it tells us about the Archbishop’s judgement, and the judgement of the team around her.

Within days of standing at a London memorial to the victims of October 7, she travelled to the region and gave a platform to activists associated with a terrorist organisation that participated in the October 7 attacks.

Once again, the scrutiny came afterwards – and from outside the Church.

Maureen Lipman: Read on for the best-laid plans of mice, men and Maureen

Many of you will have been aware that I am politically “hot” these days. Due to my writings in this very tome, my reflections in The Spectator and a rather charged interview on Sky TV, nominally about my play Allegra, but actually about their agenda. My belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state has thrust me, in my near dotage, into a sort of “Mo of Ark” situation.

I was due a break after my stint in Allegra, so, as a delayed honeymoon, David and I travelled first to Puglia for a friend’s wedding, to be followed by a week on a sailing boat to three Greek islands to meet with other chums. Afterwards, I had signed up to do a one-day play reading, called Right Before I Go; a moving compilation by Stan Zimmerman (of Roseanne and The Golden Girls fame), of letters written by actual suicides. It was to be followed by a discussion with the audience to raise awareness and funds for a charity. But… read on for the best-laid plans of mice, men and Maureen.

My phone bleated out the news that an actor has withdrawn from the reading on the grounds that he could not countenance my political views. His name was McCarthy and being me, I couldn’t resist wondering – in the Telegraph whether this might be the “New McCarthyism”. The phrase was taken up, although not credited, by none other than The Wall Street Journal, then the Times, and then, wonder of wonders, The Hollywood Reporter. Goodness, it was going viral – or at least, mildly infectious all through the holiday.

I offered to meet with Mr McCarthy and discuss our differences. Or, better still, celebrate our similarities. I mean he might have been marching behind me on the anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine demos or standing in front of me with a placard outside the Chinese Embassy protesting the treatment of the Uyghurs. I suggested hummus and mint tea in a restaurant of his choice and that he might rejoin the show as colleagues who agree to differ, but both support an anti-suicide charity.

McCarthy would not look at my olive branch let alone pick up my gauntlet.

He was interviewed in the Belfast Times and protested loudly that he never asked for me to leave the cast, he never bullied me, he just made his point. He omitted to add that his appearance at Soho would have been on a different night to mine.

The fascinating part of the actor’s moral incapacity to share a lectern with a British Jew was heightened by his being a member of the audience at the opening night of my play Allegra at Richmond. He is on camera at the vox pop, singing the show’s praises, and mine as he made his way to the after-show party. Apparently, he came to see the show again in London. Only my husband visited Allegra more than once and we share a bed.

I have never made it secret that I am a proud, outspoken Jew, but something must have radicalised the actor in the six weeks that followed the party, to the point of issuing a statement on social media. He didn’t have to withdraw quite so publicly. He could have quietly told the producer that he’d forgotten on that particular Wednesday, he’d promised to take an elderly aunt to have a boil lanced.

Two days later another actor chose to exit the reading for the same reason. Now I was slightly getting the wind up enough to toss around in my bed on the ferry to Corfu. My dreams were uniformly about being thrown off buses in Hull and everyone I’ve ever met crossing the street to avoid me.

Sayeeda Warsi is minimising the Islamist threat

Among the front-runners to be appointed the UK’s first ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ tsar is Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi. Earlier this month, we had a grim taste of what she might bring to the table in this position.

Warsi delivered the inaugural lecture at University College London for Equi titled ‘Patriotism: Pride not Prejudice’. Warsi’s carefully curated talk, as well as the nod to Jane Austen, was peppered with quotes from Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, along with paeans to cricket and village fetes. But these whimsical references concealed a darker message.

During the Q&A, I challenged Warsi on the framing of her lecture. We hear much from Labour and progressives about ‘Islamophobia’, but less about Islamic attitudes towards the West. What, I asked, about the profound hostility of the Deobandi and Salafi movements – which control the majority of British mosques – to the Enlightenment philosophy of personal autonomy, pluralism and universal human rights, including gender equality?

Her answer displayed a flippant disregard for the kind of threat Western nations face from Islam. In particular, the profound challenges that supremacist, exclusionary Islamic theology presents to public security, social cohesion and democracy in the UK. She said:

‘Does the Muslim community have nutcases? Absolutely. Does the Christian community have these nutcases? Absolutely. Does the Jewish community have these nutcases? Absolutely. And they’re always on display for all of us to see.’

This was a strange response. ‘Nutcases from the Muslim community’ – her phrase, not mine – have killed dozens and inflicted life-changing injuries on hundreds of Britons, including children, in the past several decades. They have stabbed two sitting MPs, one fatally. The vast majority of the suspects currently on MI5’s 43,000-person terror watchlist – as many as 39,000 – are jihadists. So why is Warsi telling me not to ‘waste my time’ interrogating the motives and goals of these ‘nutcases’?

I then asked her about support for Hamas among parts of the Muslim community and the willingness of many to deny the atrocities of 7 October. Yet rather than address these concerns, Warsi deflected and denied there was a problem. ‘I honestly don’t know who the six freaks are that you speak to that give you all this data’, she said. ‘But the people I speak with and I spend time with… hundreds and thousands of them, I have yet to meet somebody who’s told me Hamas is a great thing and I want to go out and, you know, kind of support them.’

Does Warsi really expect us to believe that only ‘six freaks’ support Hamas in the UK? It would be hard to explain, then, how a hardline Islamic platform like the UK-based 5Pillars boasts one million readers. Or the celebrations in cities across the UK after Hamas’s 7 October pogrom and the rampant anti-Semitism that accompanied them. In June 2025, 40 organisations – including students’ networks, religious groups and advocacy organisations – called for Hamas to be removed from the UK terror list.

Read More

09/22 Links Pt1: Israel's Enemies Misjudged the Resilience of Israeli Society; Police foil Manchester Yom Kippur terror plot; Gaza Health Ministry Chief’s Eldest Son Identified as Hamas Commander

From Ian:

Israel Derangement Syndrome

When the subject turns to the Jewish state, formerly robust minds are turning to mayonnaise. Frontal autolobotomies are eagerly being carried out on every campus. Israel Derangement Syndrome (IDS) is a drug that gets you high on self-righteousness while disabling your cognitive faculties.

In reviewing for Variety a movie called "NAZA," about the alleged depravities of the IDF, Jay Weissberg presented with an advanced case IDS, claiming: "The Israeli government has stocked its jails and morgues with Arab men in order to use them as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges."

Israel doesn't "stock its jails with Arab men" so it can "use them as bargaining chips." Israel is a liberal democracy with written law, due process, proper judicial procedure and carefully vetted judges - all the stuff that Hamas rather famously overlooks. Israel arrests terrorists and other criminals. If they're convicted, they go to prison. Israeli police don't cruise down the streets with tuna nets picking up random Arabs while exclaiming, "Caught another bargaining chip!"

Call Israel a genocidaire, and you're violating what John Erskine called "the moral obligation to be intelligent." Israel's prosecution of the war Hamas started has resulted in around 24,000 combatant deaths among 73,000 war dead in Gaza. That's a civilian-to-warrior kill ratio of about 2 to 1. Women and children are among the innocents killed due to Hamas policy.

No matter how many heart-rending pictures of war carnage appear, genocide means taking major steps toward wiping out a people. A 2 to 1 ratio ain't close to genocide. It isn't even genocide lite. It's tragic that Hamas operations guarantee the deaths of lots of civilians. But that's their way. They embed themselves among innocents, use hospitals as weapons depots, and skulk in a 400-mile network of tunnels. When you're pro-death, all of this comes naturally.

An entity that launches a war has no moral right to complain when it faces a justified counterattack. Japan's response to losing a war it started wasn't to beg for sympathy, but to drop its death cult, join the ranks of liberal democracies, and cease attacking its neighbors. Gaza could move on from Hamas and do the same.

Israel's Enemies Misjudged the Resilience of Israeli Society

The assumption that Israel would collapse under three years of missile attacks has proved mistaken, according to a recent position paper published by Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research, based in Haifa. It said Israel's Jewish public has demonstrated sustained resilience, broadly supports the continuation of military campaigns, and is willing to bear the human and economic costs because of a shared perception of an existential threat.

Similar observations have been made by Dr. Abdel Moneim Said, chairman of the advisory board of the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies, who highlighted conceptual failures that worked against Hamas leaders and Iran's "axis of resistance." The first was a misreading of the effect Israel's internal divisions would have on Israeli society. Instead, Israeli society came together and displayed a resilience that surprised decision-makers in Gaza and Tehran.

Israel's war is not yet over, but victory will be unmistakable if it produces a change in the enemy's consciousness: a recognition that Israel cannot be defeated by force and that attempting to do so is not worthwhile.

Iranian Children Recruited for "Self-Sacrifice" Campaign

Male children under the age of 15 will soon be recruited to join the Islamic Republic's Janfada (self-sacrifice) campaign, the Iranian Labor News Agency reported. Females would need to reach the age of 18.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit the recruitment of minors under the age of 15 by armed groups, while Iran has admitted recruiting children as young as 12.

Military training for the campaign is set to begin in Tehran this week.

They will be trained in "ensuring local security, general war preparations, observation, surveillance, and intelligence measures," as well as "guiding micro-aircraft (drones), which are used in military operations," and "the possibility of using shoulder-launched weapons."

The campaign's spokesperson, Sasan Zare, said it was centered on the cultural slogan, "We have one life, and we give it for Iran."

Read More