Thursday, June 11, 2026

It Isn't True Until Hamas Admits It: The UN's Standard of Evidence for Hospitals in Gaza

Throughout the Gaza war, UN officials treated Israeli charges that Hamas operates in hospitals as accusations to be rebuffed rather than investigated. In December 2023, the WHO representative for the Palestinian territories, Richard Peeperkorn, told reporters that "we on our missions have not seen anything of this on the ground" and that WHO was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used." When Israel's ambassador told the WHO executive board in January 2024 that the IDF had found evidence of Hamas military use in every hospital it searched, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus dismissed the charges as "false claims" that "can endanger our staff," while UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths, as Israeli forces entered Al-Shifa, posted that "hospitals are not battlegrounds" — a rebuke with only one intended address.

The UN was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used" only by ignoring its own files. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on the 2008–2009 Gaza War — the Goldstone Report — found that Hamas targeted Fatah affiliates and supporters, using hospitals as sites for questioning, executions and body dumps. The UN commission of inquiry into the 2014 war found that Hamas forces tortured victims in Al-Shifa Hospital. The question of how Gaza's hospitals were being used had been asserted, twice, by the UN's own investigators — and every UN official who professed skepticism during the war had those findings available the entire time.

Western doctors who traveled to Gaza became the war's most quoted witnesses, and they held the line as well. Asked directly on PBS NewsHour in January 2024 whether she saw any evidence of militant activity in or around the hospitals, the International Rescue Committee's Dr. Seema Jilani answered: "I did not see any evidence to suggest that. And the IRC would never work in a hospital that would be used for those purposes." When 60 Minutes asked Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, an American physician who had just left the Nasser Medical Complex, whether she saw Hamas hiding or operating in the hospitals, she replied: "I can really just talk about what I know. And what I know is that the health care catastrophe in these hospitals, that's what I saw." The formulation deserves admiration for its craftsmanship — an answer engineered to sound like a denial while asserting nothing that could later be falsified.

Israel, meanwhile, kept producing evidence. It published video of weapons caches recovered inside Al-Shifa, and at Nasser its forces reported coming under rocket fire from the hospital premises and detaining hundreds of operatives, some dressed as medical staff, including participants in the October 7 massacre. Released hostages testified to being held captive inside Nasser, where troops also found mortars, grenades and Israeli vehicles stolen on October 7. Declassified American intelligence independently assessed that Hamas and Islamic Jihad used Al-Shifa to command forces and hold hostages. The media response to this accumulating record was a Washington Post investigation concluding that the evidence was insufficient, alongside a genre of coverage that treated each Israeli disclosure as the latest unverified claim in an information war.

Israel's position was considered, by the UN, media and NGOs, to be presumed falsehood. Hamas denials, despite Hamas's documented history of using hospitals, were considered by the same sources to be presumed truth.

What would it take for the UN to admit that Hamas used hospitals in this war? The evidentiary bar is very, very high - Hamas has to publicly admit it. Mountains of evidence are worthless next to a single Hamas denial. I'm not exaggerating - this is the consistent pattern throughout the war in the media and NGOs.

However, Hamas has more recently been publishing videos of them enthusiastically torturing and executing suspected "collaborators," as a warning to others. Which means the UN can no longer deny what everyone knew and no one was willing to admit.

The result is the newest report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (A/HRC/62/22) — the same standing commission that last year accused Israel of genocide. On September 21, 2025, it finds, militants from the Qassam Brigades and Hamas's Rad'a Force publicly executed three men "in front of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City," blindfolded and bound, while a masked gunman announced to the crowd that "the death penalty has been decided against these traitors," after which the victims were "knocked to the ground and shot multiple times in the head and upper body" (para. 50). At Nasser Hospital, the Commission documents Hamas's plainclothes Sahm Unit conducting torture on the hospital grounds throughout 2024 and 2025: a man "tied up in a stress position (shabeh) and being forced to confess to illegally selling tobacco and severely beaten on his wrists, chest and arms with a metal pipe, while he screamed in pain" (para. 55); another pinned to the ground on the premises "while one militant repeatedly smashed a large cement brick on his legs and another hit his ankle with a metal pipe, likely fracturing it, amid his screams" (para. 56); a bound man kneecapped with three rifle shots "in an open area in front of the Nasser Medical Complex, in front of a crowd including at least three children" (para. 57). A witness described Hamas members beating victims inside the hospital and shooting a man in the cafeteria tent, an incident that "escalated into an attack by the victim's family on the emergency department, which was met by Hamas counterfire from inside the hospital"; on seven or eight occasions the witness "heard screams coming from the building" before masked Sahm-linked men exited it (para. 58). Hamas channels, the Commission adds, "instructed medical practitioners to withhold medical care from the victims" (para. 39).

The witnesses most celebrated by Western media were present for much of this. Doctors rotated through Nasser continuously, and MSF operated there continuously until suspending non-essential work on January 20, 2026 — yet the first public statement from an international medical organization about armed men in the hospital came on February 14, 2026, after the ceasefire, when MSF acknowledged that "its staff had observed armed and masked men in parts of the hospital complex, incidents of intimidations, arbitrary patient arrests and suspected movement of weapons within the hospital" (para. 59). Men were tortured in front of crowds on the hospital grounds, and the international medical presence found its voice only when the testimony could no longer complicate the wartime narrative.

Having been forced into these findings by Hamas's own publicity, the UN did everything possible to minimize them.

The Commission placed its Hamas findings second in the report, after twenty-seven paragraphs on settler violence in the West Bank — though by the report's own figures, settlers allegedly killed 26 Palestinians over three years while Hamas-affiliated forces killed at least 108 in eighteen months. The Hamas section opens by reasserting the Commission's genocide finding against Israel and explaining that "lawlessness, killings, looting, theft and social chaos were the direct results of that vacuum and Israeli attacks" (para. 46), and the Commission's chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, completed the framing in the official press release: "Hamas-affiliated forces have exploited the vacuum created by relentless Israeli attacks and widespread destruction of Gaza... While their origins and motivations differ, both operate within environments engineered by Israel." His own report refutes him a few paragraphs in, recording that "summary and extrajudicial executions and torture were also carried out by Hamas when there was no active Israeli military operation or attack, including in 2015, 2016 and 2017" (para. 44). Hamas tortured people in Al-Shifa in 2014 and executed collaborators in peacetime, and the UN's explanation for its conduct in 2025 is an environment "engineered by Israel."

One passage shows exactly how desperately the UN wants to exonerate Hamas even in the face of so much evidence. Having concluded "on reasonable grounds that the Sahm Unit of Hamas has interrogated and mistreated Palestinian civilians in the Nasser Medical Complex," the Commission immediately adds: "It notes, however, that such conduct does not amount to 'acts harmful to the enemy', namely Israel. Therefore, the hospital would not have lost its protection under international humanitarian law and would not constitute a legitimate target for attacks" (para. 61) — a point it considered important enough to repeat in its legal conclusions (para. 87).

In other words, the UN is saying that even though Hamas admits to using the hospitals, there is no evidence that Hamas used them to attack Israel — the very thing Israel spent two years documenting. Therefore, Israel still had no reason to shoot back. Hamas hadn't released any videos of their fighters shooting with patriotic music, so it cannot possibly have happened, and the Jews are lying, as usual.

It is true that the evidence the UN uncovered doesn't mean Israel had the right to attack. But that is because the UN only uncovered the evidence Hamas handed them on its social media channels. Anything beyond that cannot be proven, and on the contrary, if Israel provided the video evidence, that is itself probably evidence that Israel fakes videos.

Whether Nasser was a legitimate Israeli target sits outside the Commission's mandate, and nobody asked the Commission to decide it. The Commission volunteered the ruling anyway, categorically, on a record that excludes the rocket fire from the premises, the weapons caches, the hostages and the October 7 operatives in scrubs — every piece of evidence that actually bears on the question. A verdict was rendered after excluding the entire case file, on a charge nobody brought in this proceeding, because the one implication the Commission needed to foreclose was the one that might vindicate two years of Israeli warnings.

A UN commission has now confirmed that Hamas used Gaza's two most famous hospitals for torture, executions and armed combat across eighteen years, and the confirmation arrived only because Hamas filmed it. It sandwiched these findings between complaints about settlers, wrapped in a causal theory the report's own text disproves, and accompanied by an unsolicited ruling that Israel still had no right to act on any of it. The officials who spent the war assuring the world there was nothing to see have issued no corrections, and on the UN's demonstrated standard of evidence, none should be expected until Hamas publicly brags about its war crimes.

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)

06/10 Links Pt2: Why is Zack Polanski championing a convicted terrorist?; Trump welcomes freed Hamas hostage Rom Braslavski to WH; Gwyneth Paltrow receives online hate for Israel commercial

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Why is Zack Polanski championing a convicted terrorist?

Defiant to the last, Barghouti twisted the emotional knife by informing the court that he stood for peace and liberty and describing himself as a freedom fighter. The judge sternly pointed out: ‘A soldier does not kill civilians with bombs and kill children.’

To compare the Palestinian killer to Nelson Mandela, in other words, is a grave disservice to the South African leader. Nevertheless, Barghouti is undoubtedly an interesting character. He was never a raving jihadi like the late Yahya Sinwar or Mohammed Deif of Hamas. He is a nationalist rather than an Islamist. He began his political life in the 1990s as a relatively pragmatic Palestinian leader who supported peace in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank.

However, that had changed by the time of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, when 140 suicide bombs killed more than 1,000 Israelis – some of them schoolchildren on buses. Barghouti was often spotted on street corners in Ramallah during disturbances, issuing orders by phone, earning him the nickname ‘Little Napoleon’. Then came the evidence connecting him to murders.

Barghouti knows how to play a Western audience. Even in 2002, while directing savagery against innocent civilians, he struck a relatively moderate tone in English. In a column for the Washington Post, he wrote: ‘while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbour, I reserve the right to protect myself… and to fight for my freedom.’

What to make of all this? Here’s my take. Like other performative Palestinian firebrands, Barghouti knows that doe-eyed Western activists and journalists want to believe that he is a saint. So deep-rooted is hatred of Israel that liberals will lap up the most blatant lies and false comparisons, just to confect a Palestinian hero where they are otherwise lacking. Barghouti knows this; I know this; chances are, reader, that you know this. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the gullible left. Which brings us back to Zack Polanski.

Look, I get it. It must be frustrating to support a cause that has nothing to show for itself in terms of democracy, human rights, respect for women and minorities, the protection of homosexuals and the rejection of terror. To take as your tribune a people who spit upon all your values is a tricky position to maintain. But don’t expect the rest of us to join you in your circle jerk. Wishful thinking, in other words, does not a freedom-fighter make.

Harry LaForme: I stood on my ancestral land and said what Carney would not

On June 6, I stood before Toronto’s Jewish community on the treaty lands of my ancestors. Days earlier, Prime Minister Mark Carney had stood at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple and acknowledged a painful truth: Canada is failing its Jewish citizens. He recognized that antisemitism has reached levels unseen in generations. He acknowledged that Jewish Canadians are disproportionately targeted by hate. He acknowledged the fear felt by families whose schools, synagogues, businesses and communities have become targets. He named the statistics. He named the suffering. But he did not name the ideology driving it.

So, I will. I stand before you on the land of my ancestors to say what the prime minister should have said: “Anti-Zionism is a libel-driven hate movement that incites violence and the targeting, exclusion, and marginalization of Jews in the diaspora and has as its ultimate goal wiping Israel off the face of Mother Earth and the death of all beings within it.”

There. That is what should have been said, and now it has.

For Indigenous peoples, this moment feels painfully familiar. We know what happens when governments speak of reconciliation while avoiding uncomfortable truths. We know what happens when institutions choose carefully crafted language instead of moral courage.

Canada’s Jewish community does not need another expression of concern. It needs honesty. And honesty begins by confronting the lie at the centre of this moment: the claim that Israel is a colonial project and Zionism is a movement of oppression.

As an Anishinaabe man, a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and someone who spent almost 25 years as a judge interpreting the laws of this country, let me be clear — Canada is a colonial country. Israel is not.

Indigenous peoples know colonialism because we lived it. Colonialism means language suppression. It means forced religious conversion. It means population displacement, foreign governance, economic exploitation, imposed legal hierarchies and cultural erasure. Canada’s Indigenous peoples experienced these things. The Jewish people experienced these things. They do not describe Israel.

For thousands of years, Jewish identity has been tied to the land of Israel through language, culture, law, religion, traditions and collective memory. The Jewish connection to Jerusalem did not begin in 1948. It survived despite conquest, exile, persecution and genocide.

Why pro-Israel educators should teach the Nakba

In the charged classrooms where young Zionists form their understanding of Israel, one question now demands courage: Should we teach the Nakba?

The answer is yes. Not because the Palestinian narrative is true, but precisely because it is not. When we confront the events of 1948 with honesty, acknowledging real pain while refusing to distort the moral record, we strengthen the next generation rather than shield it.

The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the displacement of roughly 700,000 Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence. Anti-Israel voices present this as the inevitable result of Zionist aggression: a premeditated ethnic cleansing that stains Israel’s birth. That version is false. The truth is more complex, more human, and far more defensible.

In 1947, the Jewish leadership accepted the UN Partition Plan, despite its painful compromises. Arab leaders rejected it outright and launched a war of annihilation. If there had been no war, there would have been no displacement.

Once the fighting began, Arabs fled for three primary reasons. The majority left out of fear, as battle lines shifted; many departed on the explicit advice or orders of local Arab leaders, who cleared villages so their armies could operate freely; and in a smaller number of cases, Israeli forces expelled populations from strategic areas during active combat.

These were wartime decisions, not a systematic policy of expulsion. Historians who have examined the records closely, including Benny Morris in his early work, confirm that the overwhelming majority of departures occurred before major Israeli offensives, and often preceded them.

06/10 Links Pt1: Israel reclaims its right to self-defense; Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Democrats are Islamists now’; Fetterman: Outlook for Jews in Democratic Party is ‘bleak’;

From Ian:

Israel reclaims its right to self-defense

Despite what was widely perceived as Trump’s opposition to escalation, Netanyahu ordered Israeli fighter jets to strike targets inside Iran, including missile launchers and petrochemical facilities.

This is where the deeper challenge begins.

Trump has made clear that he wants negotiations with Iran to continue. His message to both sides has essentially been: enough. One side attacked, the other responded; now stop.

Iran agreed—but with a condition that effectively leaves Lebanon hostage to Tehran’s interests.

Israel, Iran declared, must refrain from attacking Hezbollah—conveniently referred to by Tehran as “Lebanon”—or else “far heavier measures than those already undertaken” would follow. In other words, the war would continue.

That is hardly an outcome Trump welcomes.

Yet almost immediately after the Iranian statement was issued, Hezbollah—which had remained conspicuously quiet for some 30 hours during Iran’s operation and rarely acts without guidance from Tehran—resumed firing at Kiryat Shmona, Metula and other northern communities.

Northern Israel was once again under terrorist attack.

Israel, therefore, appears to face a dilemma while Washington watches closely.

But is it really a dilemma?

The relationship between Jerusalem and Washington is too close, too strategic and too deeply integrated for either side to imagine that Hezbollah’s aggression should go unanswered. U.S. Central Command and the various coordination mechanisms linking the two countries operate continuously. There have been no reports of serious disputes or breakdowns in communication.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee strongly condemned Iran’s attacks. Likewise, Israeli officials explaining the operation against Iran emphasized both Israel’s commitment to its alliance with the United States and its determination to retain the freedom to punish those who attack it.

Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Yechiel Leiter, underscored both the necessity of Israel’s actions and Jerusalem’s commitment to maintaining close coordination with Washington. Explaining the operation against Iran, Leiter emphasized that Israel’s objective was not escalation for its own sake, but the defense of its citizens against an existential threat.

His message reflected Israel’s determination to preserve its strategic partnership with the United States while retaining the freedom—and the obligation—to strike those who attack it.

With precision and determination, Israel’s course appears to be the only realistic one in the dangerous region it inhabits.

There is little chance that Netanyahu will allow Iran to posture through Hezbollah’s Lebanese front while Israel absorbs the consequences.

This is the Middle East.

It is also logical that Israel’s decisive response has once again given the Gulf states and the broader Sunni Arab world a reason to revisit the prospect of a useful anti-Iranian alignment—one that could reshape the region.

That is an outcome Trump may well find attractive.

Michael Oren: Israel has no choice but to risk open conflict with Trump

In May 2021, on the eighth day of “Operation Guardian of the Walls” against Hamas, I received a phone call from a senior adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, who asked me to convey an urgent message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel must end the operation tonight, or risk losing American support.” Netanyahu was furious. He wanted to keep fighting for at least three more days. But he immediately complied. The operation ended that evening.

The only difference between U.S. President Donald Trump and previous presidents is his tendency to treat us publicly as vassals who must obey his every order. This is humiliating and demoralizing for Israel and, unfortunately, it strengthens our enemies. But that raises the question: Must Israel obey the White House’s demands under all circumstances and at any price?

Historically, the answer has been “no.” U.S. presidents not only ordered Israel to stop fighting; they also opposed its decision to go to war in the first place. That was the case in every war from the establishment of the state until “Operation Rising Lion” last year. Yet Israel’s leaders, despite the risk of a rift with Washington, determined that our basic security was at stake and decided to act.

Ironically, every time Israel defied the White House and went to war—in 1948, for example, in 1967 and in the 1981 strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor—we earned America’s respect. Every time we surrendered to pressure and showed restraint—in 1973 and in the 1991 Gulf War—we earned America’s contempt.

This record is especially relevant today, when Hezbollah will undoubtedly violate any ceasefire and continue attacking us. Israel needs to defend and save the north, but in doing so, it risks not only war with Iran but also an open confrontation with President Trump. As in the past, Israel will have no choice but to act.

With its eyes wide open to the potential cost, Israel must show that it is neither a U.S. vassal nor its 51st state, but a sovereign country with an unshakable duty to defend its territory and its citizens. In the end, if history is our guide, Trump will respect us for it.

Who Is To Blame for Israel’s Sagging US Poll Numbers? Not Netanyahu or the Gaza War.

The investigative reporting geniuses who were so keen to see the hand of Russia, Russia, Russia in Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory seem remarkably incurious about the roles Turkey, Qatar, Iran, China, and the Palestine Liberation Organization have played in shaping U.S. domestic opinion, notwithstanding a 2024 press release from President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, that "Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza."

In other words, Netanyahu and the Gaza war aren’t the only variables. America is also a variable. The information environment is a variable. The Iran war is another variable. It is not over yet. If it concludes with a joyously free Iran allied with Israel and America and pumping plentiful and cheap oil and gas that gets paid for in U.S. dollars, Israel’s poll numbers—and Trump’s—will climb. A White House signing ceremony for Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Iran and Lebanon joining the Abraham Accords would also help Israel’s popularity—and Trump’s. That won’t happen so long as a hostile Iranian regime armed with missiles, drones, and proxies and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz remains in power in Tehran.

The Gallup data are misleading because they omit respondents who say their sympathies are with both Israel and the Palestinians, with neither, or who have no opinion. Gallup itself concedes that the 5-percentage-point difference by which American sympathies are with the Palestinians over Israel in the latest poll "is not statistically significant." As recently as September 2025, Pew found Americans viewed the Israeli government more favorably than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, and also viewed the Israeli people slightly more favorably than the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel on and off since 1996. The decline in Americans’ sympathy for Israel predated the Gaza war, as evidenced by a former editor of the The New Republic, Peter Beinart, publicly abandoning Zionism in July of 2020, by the Harvard Crimson in 2022 editorially endorsing a boycott of Israel (while Naftali Bennett was prime minister in a coalition government that included Arab parties and Mansour Abbas as a minister), by the Harvard student organizations that came out with their letter on October 7, 2023, stating, "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence" and "the apartheid regime is the only one to blame."

My own bet is that the U.S. will eventually get back on track—Trump’s election has already set some of this in motion, including some changes to immigration policy and the forced sale of TikTok, if not yet a thorough cleanup of the feeds emanating from there or other platforms. The eventual end of the wars and of the pandemic will make it easier for young Americans to go to Israel and to see the reality of the situation for themselves. If the travelers so choose, they can fly there via the United Arab Emirates, which sees Israel as a promising partner. The hunger for meaning, purpose, and community may fuel a return to Christianity and Judaism, to churches and synagogues. Eventually people will figure out that the real dictators aren’t Trump and Netanyahu but Erdogan, Xi, and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar. Netanyahu will eventually die or retire or lose an election, and his successors will demonstrate the reality that Netanyahu wasn’t to blame for all the world’s Israel-hate. Until then, treat monocausal explanations—whether they come from former ABC anchor Moran or from the Brookings Institution's Bill Galston—with extreme skepticism.

Why won't the "pro-Palestinian" crowd be protesting the Lebanese Festival?

This weekend a church in New Jersey will celebrate its 40th annual Lebanese festival, where they will celebrate Lebanese culture. The fair will include "traditional Lebanese foods such as falafel, shawarma (gyro), hummus, spinach pies, tabouhli, stuffed grape leaves and pastries."

Now, every time there is a Jewish or Israeli centered event, it requires lots of extra security, and protesters are pretty much guaranteed to be there to try to ruin the experience. The ostensible reason? Because the protesters are "pro-Palestinian."

But no one will protest this festival.

Palestinians are discriminated against, by law, in Lebanon. They cannot build or expand their houses, they are not allowed to live outside the overcrowded camps, they are restricted from many jobs and higher education, and of course they can never become citizens even if they want to and even after five generations of living there.

Anti-Palestinian bigotry is rife in Lebanon, as the Lebanese still resent the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s that the Palestinians were a major part of. Comment sections of Lebanese newspapers show lots of hate for Palestinians.

Palestinians protest when Israelis and Jews serve falafel, hummus and shawarma, claiming that they are guilty of cultural appropriation of Palestinian foods. But those same foods will be served here, and no one bats an eye.

By every reasonable metric, Palestinians are treated worse in Lebanon than under Israeli rule. Any one of them would prefer to live under "oppressive Israeli occupation" than as "guests" under a supposedly benevolent Lebanese government.

So why aren't there any protests? Why are Lebanese families not nervous to go out in public for fear of harassment or terrorist attacks against them in New Jersey? Why is there no organization, no campus encampments, and virtually no op-eds about Palestinian human rights in Lebanon they way there is such obsessive hate towards anything Israeli? What is the secret difference between how "pro-Palestinian" activists view Lebanon and how they view Israel?

Do you really have to ask?

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)

On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a long meditation on how to protect the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Its central conviction is that human beings possess a dignity that does not depend on what they can do, a worth that holds whether a person is brilliant or impaired, productive or helpless, and that this dignity is precisely what the new technologies threaten to erode. The document warns against a culture that measures people by output and against the transhumanist dream of editing humanity into something it considers an upgrade. Against all of it the Pope sets a single insistence, that being human is itself the ground of a worth no machine can claim and no circumstance can revoke.

Peter Singer disagreed. Singer is the Princeton philosopher who, more than any living thinker, made the modern case for utilitarian bioethics, the view that the right act is the one that produces the most good measured across everyone affected, and that questions of life and death should be settled by that calculation rather than by tradition or sentiment. He is best known for Animal Liberation, the book that launched the modern animal rights movement by arguing that the capacity to suffer, and nothing else, determines whether a creature's interests count. Applied to the encyclical, his position is exactly what you would expect. Human dignity, in his view, is a piece of unearned favoritism. What matters is not whether a being belongs to our species but whether it has the mental capacities, above all the capacity to suffer and to want, that give a life its value. Being human, for Singer, is morally irrelevant.

The premise leads somewhere terrible. Singer defines a "person" as a being that is self-aware, that understands itself as existing through time, that holds preferences about its own future. An infant has none of these. Neither does an anencephalic baby, born without the brain structures that thought requires, nor a patient in a deep and irreversible coma. From this Singer draws the conclusion his critics quote with disbelief, that the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee, and that the painless killing of a severely disabled infant can be morally permissible. When Princeton appointed him in 1999, activists for the disabled protested that very view.

Most people who locate moral worth in mental capacity quietly stop applying the rule the moment it threatens a human being they love. They invoke intelligence to elevate humans over animals, then fall silent when reminded that a grown dog out-reasons a newborn. Singer took the capacity criterion that the Western tradition had always applied with a thumb on the scale and he applied it honestly in every direction, letting the clever animal in and letting the incapable human fall out. His monstrous conclusion is not the product of bad logic. It is the product of good logic resting on a false foundation, which is the more dangerous thing, because a philosophy is never redeemed by its internal consistency. When flawless reasoning arrives at the disposability of the most defenseless human beings, the consistency stops being a defense and becomes the diagnosis.

The criterion Singer trusts in determining the value of a being has a history, and the history is a record of one question receiving a series of failing answers. The question is old and constant: "What makes human beings different from the animals?" For most of the Western tradition the answer was reason. Aristotle's human was the rational animal, and the rational soul was the thing the beasts lacked, which conveniently set humanity on one side of the line and everything else on the other.

The word "consciousness" entered the argument as a newer and more sophisticated answer to that same old question. It did not exist as a term of art until the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth coined it in 1678, translating a Greek word of Plotinus, and he coined it expressly to attack the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, treating consciousness as something immaterial that mere matter could not produce. John Locke then built it into the foundation of the self, defining personal identity as a thread of continuous self-awareness, the mind's presence to itself across time. The very word was machined out of conscientia, the Latin root of "conscience," a term about moral standing and the soul's knowledge of right, and it carried that moral freight into its new life. Consciousness was not a neutral discovery about minds that later got drafted into moral service. It was forged, by men defending the immaterial soul against materialism, as a fresh way to mark the human as a being apart.

The new answer failed the same way the old one had, because the boundary kept moving every time someone made a new discovery about animals. Tool use was ours until the crows used tools. Language was ours until the apes began to sign. Self-recognition in a mirror was ours until elephants and magpies passed the test. Each retreat carried the boundary to a new faculty, and each new faculty failed in turn, which is the signature of a definition tracking a conclusion fixed in advance rather than a fact discovered in the world.

The deepest break came in 1789, in a single footnote in Jeremy Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham asked what could possibly trace the insuperable line between the beings that count and the beings that do not, considered reason and speech as candidates, and threw both out saying that the question is not whether they can reason, nor whether they can talk, but whether they can suffer. He justified the switch with the very counterexample that breaks the old criterion at the human margin, observing that a full-grown horse or dog is more rational and more conversable than a human infant of a day or a week or a month old. The rationality standard was abandoned because it failed to protect the newborn, and the capacity to suffer was installed in its place.

Bentham meant this generously. He set his argument beside the abolitionist cause, holding that the number of a creature's legs or the texture of its skin are as poor a reason to abandon a sensitive being to a tormentor as the color of a man's skin had been, and he looked forward to the day humanity would extend its protection over everything that breathes. The switch from reason to suffering widened the circle, and for animals it genuinely did. What Bentham never pressed was the edge hidden inside his own move, because a criterion that admits beings according to a capacity must, if it is honest, expel the beings who lack that capacity. Bentham flinched from that edge, which is why his marginal case is always the infant who will grow into reason, drawn with sympathy. Singer does not flinch. He inherited Bentham's criterion and ran it in the direction Bentham declined to look, and the contracting edge did its work on the newborn, the disabled infant, the comatose patient. The same blade that widened the mantle to cover the animal cut the most vulnerable humans out from under it.

Stand back from the whole receding history and it confesses something its participants never admitted. The concept of consciousness, in its long career as the mark of the morally significant, was built to answer the question of what makes human beings different. It kept failing at that job, so it kept being redefined, until it arrived at a form that can no longer be checked at all. Philosopher David Chalmers named the "hard problem of consciousness," the observation that subjective experience, the inner feel of pain or the redness of red, cannot be derived from any description of the brain's machinery, however complete. The inner fact is real and it is sealed off from outside verification. An ethics that grounds moral standing in that inner fact has therefore built its foundation on the one thing no observer can ever confirm. Singer's confident rankings of who suffers and how much are confident readings of behavior standing in for an interior he cannot reach and cannot possibly know. This is the same proxy game every earlier fence-builder played, now speaking the vocabulary of cognitive science.

The error was never which faculty to choose. The error was treating the faculty as the answer when it was only ever a guess at the answer. Consciousness was the wrong reply to the right question, and because the reply was wrong, a brilliant mind could fixate on the consciousness and lose the humanity entirely. Singer is the result of that mistake.

We need to reframe the question that started this whole thing: what makes a human unique, different from animals and from AI?

Mental capacity is not the answer. The anencephalic baby is undoubtedly human. Yet she will never think, never suffer in a way she can register, and never form a preference about her own future. By every capacity test ever devised she fails, and the Pope is still right that she carries inherent dignity, because her worth was never housed in a faculty.

But the Pope didn't define what makes a human unique, either.

A human being is a member of a a covenantal community, a web of relationships and obligations. The anencephalic baby still is part of that web even if she can only take and not give. Moreover, a human being has a single finite life that cannot be copied, backed up, restored, or replaced, which is what makes it always more valuable than an AI or a robot.

When an ant dies mid-task another ant fills the gap and the colony never notices. When an artificial intelligence is deleted it can be restored from a saved copy, identical, with nothing lost that a backup cannot return. A human being has no backup, and the relationships she anchors collapse into absence when she is gone, with no replacement able to reconstitute them. Worth lives there, in the non-fungible place inside a relational structure, and not in the thinking or the feeling that the structure happens to support in those of us equipped for it.

A dog may be beloved, and part of a web of relationships, but as a species it cannot be considered part of a covenant. That doesn't mean that a dog is not respected and that its life is not meaningful, but it is never as valuable to humans as other humans are. There is no obligation for a dog to save another dog's life, even though it might do so. Even service dogs may be trained to act that way but it is not an obligation. But there is such an obligation for humans.

The worst humans get trials precisely because they are part of the covenant. An animal that kills a human is put down without that presumption.

Singer might object that the distinction is arbitrary. But noticing that people aren't dogs or chimpanzees is not arbitrary. Our obligations are first to family, then community, country, and mankind, and only then to pets. Singer rejects that, but this is how people naturally act. Obligations come from relationships, and relationships cannot be waved away. A father who chooses to save the lives of others and let his children die is not acting as a father and is not fulfilling his obligations. Singer flattens all relationships to a single value, and the end result is horrific. Trivializing all relationships — marriage, motherhood, comrade in arms — is not serious ethics.

The reframing also dissolves the puzzle Singer leans on. We can never confirm that another's pain matches our own, and we never needed to. The human brain is built for language, empathy, and social coordination because reading other minds well enough to act decently toward them is how social creatures build something against the universe's general slide into disorder. The model in my head of your suffering does not have to be metaphysically exact. It has to be close enough to let me respond, cooperate, and refrain from harming you, and close enough is the whole specification. This is engineering, where a tolerance that works is the goal, against physics, where the exact value is the goal. Ethics has always run on the engineering tolerance. Singer mistook it for a physics problem and built a moral order on a quantity no instrument can measure.

Consistency is a virtue, and Singer has it in abundance. But it is one virtue among many, and not even among the most important ones. It ranks far below the protection of human dignity, which his consistency dismantles. A single axiom applied with doctrinal rigor and held immune to the counterexamples that ought to falsify it is not the profile of a science but the profile of a faith, and the faith Singer keeps does not describe how the world works or how human beings actually reason about the people in front of them. He can sketch a future in which persons are interchangeable and the incapable are surplus, but it is not a world anyone wants to wake into, least of all the vulnerable people whose lives his thought experiments quietly spend. The stated aim of his tradition is to enlarge human happiness, and the destination he reaches is a permission to kill the helpless. To call that ethics mocks the word. It is a thought experiment that escaped the seminar room and went looking for real people to endanger, and the right response is to send it back and ask the question again, correctly this time.

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)

06/09 Links Pt2: Graham Platner Makes History As First Vanity Oysterman With Nazi Tattoo To Win US Senate Nomination; Rep. Ritchie Torres’ opponent duped by ‘Rabbi Linda of Gaza’

From Ian:

UN Watch: Legal Analysis of the Pillay Commission’s June 2026 Report to the Human Rights Council

The Human Rights Council’s Pillay Commission on Israel, now headed by Srinivasan Muralidhar of India, just released a new report focusing on violations by “non-State actors,” specifically “settlers” and “Palestinian armed groups” in the West Bank and Gaza. Despite the Commission’s formal reconstitution following the resignation of Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti—with Sidoti subsequently re-appointed and Florence Mumba joining the panel—its reporting continues to reflect a persistent bias against Israel.

In an apparent effort to project even-handedness, the report addresses violations by both Israeli and Palestinian non-State actors. Yet the distribution of attention tells a different story. More than half of the report focuses on Israeli violations against Palestinians, while only approximately 9% addresses Palestinian attacks against Israelis. Another 34% examines Hamas abuses against Palestinians in Gaza. Even in those latter sections, however, the Commission repeatedly contextualizes or shifts blame to Israel, attributing lawlessness, repression, and social collapse primarily to Israeli actions rather than Hamas governance, effectively minimizing Hamas’s responsibility for its own crimes. The report also applies markedly different accountability standards to Israel and Palestinian actors.

At the heart of the report is a false moral equivalence between Israeli civilians residing in the West Bank and jihadi terrorist organizations. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 482,000 Israelis currently live in communities in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), home to areas of profound Jewish historical and religious significance, including the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, and Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. While the overwhelming majority are peaceful civilians, a small minority of Jewish extremists—estimated by Israeli defense officials at roughly 300 individuals, many of whom are not residents of the area—have repeatedly engaged in violence against Palestinians, including property damage, assaults, and, in some cases, killings.

The issue of extremist Israeli violence is real and should be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Israeli authorities themselves have acknowledged this as a serious problem and have taken actions to curb the phenomenon, ranging from issuing restraining orders to arrest and prosecution, as detailed in Section 3 below. Condemnation of such violence has come from the highest levels of government. As recently as May 21, 2024, Israeli President Isaac Herzog lambasted acts of violence by Jewish extremists, saying that they “defile and violate every basic moral, legal, and Jewish norm.” He noted that “There are elements on the fringes of our society that have normalized violence, and, sadly, some go even further — celebrating it and taking pride in it.”

However, the existence of a small number of violent Jewish extremists does not warrant the collective stigmatization of hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians. Using the term “settler violence” to characterize all Israeli residents of the West Bank through the actions of a small extremist minority is misleading and irresponsible and risks stigmatizing innocent civilians due to their status as “settlers.” The report then draws a false moral equivalence by placing them in the same analytical category as designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—groups openly committed to Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews. By the same logic, one could describe Hamas terrorism as “Gazan violence.” Such terminology would be widely rejected because it conflates the actions of violent actors with those of the broader population.

The report’s treatment of Israeli victims illustrates the consequences of this framing. In paragraph 68, the Commission notes that of 42 Israelis killed in terrorist attacks in the West Bank between 2023 and 2025, 36 were “settlers.” By contrast, when discussing Palestinian fatalities, the report does not distinguish between uninvolved civilians, members of armed groups, or Palestinians killed while carrying out terrorist attacks. Instead, it categorizes Palestinian victims only by sex and age. The Commission’s deliberate emphasis on the “settler” status of Israeli victims—while withholding comparable contextual information regarding Palestinian fatalities—creates the unmistakable impression that attacks against these Israelis are somehow more understandable or less morally troubling.

Seth Mandel: What the ‘Israel Day’ Parades Are Ultimately About

The anti-Semitic protesters at Toronto’s Walk with Israel, on the heels of the controversy around who did and didn’t attend the Israel Day parade in New York (Mayor Mamdani boycotted it, some hardline Israeli rightists joined), has reignited the debate over the existence of such events as the primary “Jewish” parade in the West.

Why, some wonder, does the big show of pride in Jewish life and culture have to be a specifically “Israel” event? Why don’t we instead have a Jewish parade?

The always-thoughtful Phoebe Maltz Bovy, the author and opinion editor at the Canadian Jewish News, gives a few of the answers. She points out, correctly, that those seeking the change aren’t interested in inclusivity but exclusivity. That is, they want to exclude all traces of Israel or they will not participate (and might protest the event itself). Bovy: “Anyone who was going to be mad at a gathering of Jews whose purpose was anything other than renouncing Israel is going to have that same sentiment.”

Bovy is entirely correct. And there are other reasons. For example, it is entirely rational for Jews to more readily celebrate the place they built than the places from which they were un-personed and expelled with the shirts on their backs.

But I want to mention one reason that usually goes unspoken and happens to be hugely important: A celebration of the Jewish state is a celebration of Jewish peoplehood.

There’s a reason “Am Yisrael chai” was a rallying cry for Jewish communities in peril well before 1948. The Jews are a people. As scholars like to point out, the Jews have survived for so long that their model of nationhood and religion feels like an anachronism to the modern world.

If you are Jewish, you are part of the Jewish nation. That can get confusing for people in the post-1948 world in which there is a Jewish nation-state. But in the century before that year, debates among major Zionist and non-Zionist thinkers took for granted that the Jews were a nation deserving of some measure of autonomy no matter where they were in the world. Jews were a “national minority” in the Russian Empire much as Ukrainians were, for example. Such particularism was not Moscow’s idea, it was a rebellion against the imperial regime.

No Place but Everywhere By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. I hate the “has no place” nonsense because it’s at once a lie, an irrelevancy, and a dodge. The lie is self-evident. While the speech police were busy monitoring the micro-aggressions of pronoun use, Jew-hatred established a very comfortable home here. It blares from megaphones, it’s advertised on banners and t-shirts, and it manifests in more and more violent attacks.

The line is irrelevant because hatred, or any emotion, isn’t the problem. Hatred is endemic to the species. As Solzhenitsyn said, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” I don’t care if people hate me. I’m not even sure I care that much if they hate me for being a Jew. In any event, they’re certainly allowed to. But I do care what they do about it. Which means the problem right now is the political organization of anti-Semitism and the actions of anti-Semites that infringe on the rights of Jews. These include the right to not be assaulted.

And the line is a dodge because even someone like Zohran Mamdani, who’s working to give anti-Semitism permanent New York City residency, can be congratulated for declaring that anti-Semitism has no home here and then go back to the business of Jew-baiting. With very few exceptions, America’s most prominent anti-Semites, on the left and right, are always at the ready to publicly denounce hatred in general and even anti-Semitism.

When I see or hear “Hatred has no place in ___,” I take it as a slap in the face, a blatant dismissal of Jewish experience. It is itself a kind of assault—on truth and accountability. Here’s what I’d like to hear an elected official say instead: Since October 7, Jew-hatred has been provided unprecedented political and academic camouflage in this country. It’s been downplayed and excused and allowed to occupy a place of dangerous prominence in the public square. Yes, sadly, hatred has been given a place here. This has inevitably led to unprecedented levels of violence against Jewish Americans. We must not ignore it or deny it. We must, instead, deprive anti-Semites of their recently furnished safe havens and push them back to the outermost edges of civic life.

The anti-Semites would just hate it.

06/09 Links Pt1: US strikes Iran after Trump vows retaliation for downing of US helicopter; Bombing Iran is the perfect way to celebrate Pride; NJ man charged with planning ISIS attack on synagogue

From Ian:

Ben-Dror Yemini: In a War Against Ideology, Calculations of Military Balance Become Less Relevant

Israel faces a special kind of enemy - an ideology built on destruction and victimhood. When Hizbullah fired its first rockets in the current round on March 2, against the will of most Lebanese, it knew that whatever damage it caused Israel, the damage to Lebanon itself would be 100 times greater. Because of Hizbullah, most villages in southern Lebanon are destroyed and close to a million people have been displaced.

Iran and Hizbullah are one entity with one ideology. In a war against an ideology, calculations about the balance of power become less relevant. Iran's ideology of destruction extends as far as its reach allows. With the power it still has left, Tehran is managing to damage the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Despite the ceasefire, last week it seriously damaged Kuwait's airport and a nuclear power plant in the UAE.

Iran feels it is on top. Public pressure is lining up in full force alongside Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran. Had World War II been fought the way wars against jihad, Iran and terrorism are fought today, the Allies would have been accused of war crimes and the Nazis would be ruling the world.

Iran and its proxies must be defeated. Israel's war is just. But it is a difficult war. It is not over. Not even close. More is coming. But giving up is not an option. This is a Sisyphean war. Hizbullah can and must be isolated through a diplomatic chokehold, together with Lebanon's leadership and the Lebanese people, who are ready for a peace agreement.

Dennis Ross: The War in Iran May Yet Lead, in Time, to Genuine Change

In the short term, Iran has proven surprisingly deft at using its leverage. But over the long haul, the internal incoherence and deep-rooted failures of the Islamic Republic may yet lead to historic changes for the better in Tehran.

Iran has two powerful levers it did not think to apply before this conflict: disrupting transit through the Strait of Hormuz and attacking its Gulf Arab neighbors' oil facilities. But Iran has also suffered profound losses to its military capabilities and defense industrial base, not to mention to an economy that is near collapse. Much will depend on how much of an economic lifeline Trump provides to Iran. A smart deal would limit sanctions relief as much as possible. Relief would only buy the regime time.

The regime's endemic corruption and massive mismanagement will be compounded by its new leadership's attempts to rebuild its military and defense industrial base. That will require huge resources, which won't be reconcilable with the needs of the civilian economy, the current crisis of mass unemployment, and the regime's chronic inability to deliver water, electricity, and a currency that has any value.

Israel Seeks a Decisive Resolution but Iran Still Remains a Threat

Although Iran has been significantly weakened, it still retains substantial levers of power. Jerusalem Center analysts assess that, despite the recent escalation, the current situation does not necessarily signal the start of a large-scale war.

Dr. Jacques Neriah believes both sides are engaged in a relatively limited round of fighting. He cautions that Iran continues to operate, the Houthis have resumed attacks on Israel, and Hizbullah retains significant military capabilities.

Ella Rosenberg notes that while Iran's overall economy has suffered greatly, the Revolutionary Guards have not only preserved their power but, in some areas, even strengthened it. They continue to benefit from diverse revenue streams, including oil sales, financial networks, and illicit activities.

Yoni Ben Menachem said that the prolonged absence of the Houthis from the fighting was due to an Iranian decision to preserve them for the right moment. The Houthis can disrupt the critical shipping route through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at any time.

Oded Ailam sees the current moment as a rare opportunity to weaken Hizbullah's grip on Lebanon and empower local actors seeking to reduce Tehran's influence.

Sam Harris asked a question. Peter Beinart spent 3,000 words to avoid answering it.

Recently, Sam Harris wrote an essay, "Why I won't Debate Critics of Israel," which has been widely cited and quoted. It boils down to one question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? If Hamas had that power, it would carry out a genuine genocide, a project it has announced repeatedly and acted on when it could. If Israel had it, the war would already be over. Harris said the histories are irreconcilable and that no amount of relitigating 1948 will change what the two populations want and are willing to die for today, so the only honest test is the one applied to the present.

Peter Beinart's reply runs almost three thousand words and never answers the main question. That omission is the whole story.

Beinart is a careful writer who knows exactly what Harris asked, and he declines to engage it because the answer cuts against him: Palestinians want the Jewish state destroyed, full stop. This applies to Muslims and Christians, religious and secular. Every poll shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly support specific terror attacks against Jews. Beinart cannot answer Harris' question because he knows Harris is right.

Instead, Beinart reopens every historical and legal sub-debate Harris specifically set aside, then frames Harris's refusal to be dragged backward as intellectual cowardice. Harris declined to argue the past because the present is dispositive. Beinart spends three thousand words proving him right by refusing to discuss the present at all.

Harris points at a question reality can answer and lets the answer stand. Beinart does what he has always done, the skill I have documented at length: he sets the frame so the other side's facts cannot be admitted, smuggling the accusation in as a shared premise rather than stating it as a claim the reader might examine. Beinart is very good at this sleight of hand. Here is what is behind the curtain in this case.

Harris called Israel a free society, and Beinart answers by describing a Palestinian living under military administration in the West Bank — no vote, military courts, permits to travel, Military Order 101 restricting political assembly. The claim was about Israel, the society that runs competitive elections, seats Arabs in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, and lets a free press savage the prime minister daily. Beinart pretends to rebut it by describing the governance of a territory whose final status Oslo left to negotiation where Arafat chose an intifada instead of a state. Moreover, most Palestinians live under PA laws, not Israeli laws, and that is an unfree society - and would remain so under any Palestinian state. Hell, Gaza was practically independent, living completely under Palestinian/Hamas rule, imports through Israel were at an all time high, and that didn't stop October 7. The collapsing of "a Palestinian in Area A or Gaza lives in Israel" is the same move he has run for years, the one that treats a population with its own flag, courts, passports, and UN membership as residents of a state denying them the vote; by that logic Canadians live in the United States because the US dominates Canada economically, and the US isn't a free society because Puerto Ricans cannot vote for President. The subject changed between the claim and the rebuttal, and Beinart is counting on you not to notice.

Beinart offers George Habash, the Greek Orthodox choirboy who founded the PFLP, as proof that Palestinian nationalism cannot be reduced to jihadism, alongside Said, Ashrawi, and Bishara. Harris named the entire Middle East and a specific roster of Islamist groups as the fundamental regional problem, so Christian Palestinians never touched his thesis. But even if we accept Beinart's argument, Habash pioneered international airplane hijacking and ran a Marxist-Leninist program for the elimination of Jewish sovereignty by force. A secular Marxist and an Islamist arriving at the identical destination is not evidence that the nationalism is moderate; it is evidence that the eliminationist aim is the constant and the theology is interchangeable costume. Beinart reached for a counterexample and produced Harris's deeper point — the rejection of Jewish political existence predates Hamas, predates 1948, and survives every change of ideological dress.

Beinart says the Palestinian Authority laid down its arms for twenty years, coordinated security with the IDF, got nothing, and watched Fayyad resign in defeat. Harris's hypothetical asked for two things: laying down arms and abandoning the culture that valorizes killing Jews. The Palestinian Authority did the first and rewarded the second the entire time, paying graduated salaries to imprisoned and deceased terrorists and naming schools and squares after them across the very years Beinart is citing as proof of renunciation. You cannot offer Fayyad as evidence that nonviolence failed while the institution he served was cutting checks to murderers by the severity of the murder. Moreover, Fatah, the party that runs the PA and is headed by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, built into its platform during those very years that terrorism is legitimate and legal, just not tactically wise at this moment in time. Beinart's own framing finishes the demolition: he notes that Hamas "gains recognition and is strengthened" as Fayyad's moderation looks like failure, which concedes that the population rewarded the violent faction — the exact thing Harris's question was designed to surface.

Harris charged that Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels and excluded its own civilians from them. Beinart answers that insurgents everywhere fight from within populations, that the Viet Cong dug tunnels too, and that the Kirya sits in downtown Tel Aviv. The Viet Cong tunnels sheltered fighters and villagers alike, which is the opposite of the accusation; the charge was not "Hamas fights in a city" but "Hamas kept its people above ground as cover." Locating a headquarters in a city and forbidding civilians to flee a combat zone are different acts, and the entire moral and legal weight of "human shield" rides on the difference. Beinart elides presence into shielding and moves on before you can object.

There are a number of other specific points where Beinart uses the same rhetorical devices - false framing, changing the subject, trying to change the playing field because he knows he cannot beat Harris' arguments. The pattern repeats: Harris makes a claim about the present, and Beinart answers a different claim about the past, the law, or some other country, performing the substitution at the seam and calling the result humility. The giveaway is not any single error. It is that the question Harris actually posed sits untouched on the page for three thousand words, because the man replying knows what reality would say if he let it answer.

Beinart closes by inviting Harris into a respectful public conversation, the implication being that confidence this firm must be fear of being tested. Harris already named the test. Beinart spent his entire reply avoiding it. This shows that Beinart is the one who is afraid of conversation, not Harris. And it proves Harris' point: debating Beinart is a waste of time because he will keep on reframing the past and assume the audience misses his slippery methods instead of discussing the present reality.

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)

The Israeli government issued a report detailing how the UN systematically accepted Hamas statistics without skepticism, laundered them through its own agencies until they became the "source" instead of Hamas, and on the rare occasions it corrected itself did so by quietly redrawing a dashboard where no one would notice. The report is careful, heavily sourced, and damning to the UN -= how it accepted casualty figures, completely made-up statistics on houses damaged, relied on poor estimation methodologies, ignored Hamas crimes that are under its remit, and more.

Everyone should read the report. Unfortunately, it doesn't go nearly far enough.

There are other false UN statistics that the Israeli report leaves out, and there are several categories of deception that aren't even mentioned.

Here are some that I had documented duringthe war:

The UN laundered libels, not only statistics. In January 2024 a video circulated on Palestinian Telegram claiming the Israeli air force was dropping explosives disguised as canned food to lure starving Gazans to their deaths. France24's verification desk debunked it within days: the objects in the footage were mine-clearing fuses, too small for anyone to mistake for food and harmless on their own. The claim had the shape of every blood libel before it — the Jew poisoning the food of the helpless — and like most of them it died once someone looked. It came back in May on UN letterhead, when OCHA's Flash Update #160 reported that Hamas's Government Media Office had announced a fourteen-year-old boy lost limbs opening a booby-trapped can, and that "many people" had been hurt the same way. Even though Franc24 had debunked it months before, the UN simply said "booby traps are not a threat UN specialized agencies have documented in Gaza" — not a denial but just something to keep the rumor alive.

The laundering was sometimes circular, manufacturing corroboration from a single source. OCHA reported at one point that 9,000 women had been killed in Gaza and attributed the figure to UN Women; UN Women, traced back, had taken the same figure from OCHA. The number originated with a terrorist group, passed once between two UN agencies, and emerged wearing the appearance of two independent institutional confirmations. The laundering was a straight line from Hamas to OCHA to the world. The closed loop is more dangerous than the line, because it fabricates exactly the thing a careful reader looks for — a second source — out of nothing but a single Hamas press release bounced between two letterheads.

Made-up numbers were stacked to mint new ones. Save the Children announced in June 2024 that 21,000 children were "missing" in Gaza, a figure the UN's ReliefWeb carried. The 21,000 was two invented numbers added together: roughly 17,000 children UNICEF had earlier "estimated" to be unaccompanied or separated — a figure UNICEF itself conceded was guesswork, since "it is nearly impossible to gather and verify information" — plus about 4,000 "likely" buried under rubble, a number that traced to Hamas's civil defense and rested on the assumption that 40 percent of the fictional missing were children. Two estimates, each admitted to be unverifiable at the source, combined into a third statistic that carried the false authority of arithmetic. Garbage in, garbage out, dressed as a sum.

Some Hamas claims the UN declined to parrot - but only when they were too crazy to be believed —which tells us it was reading critically the whole time. The same Gaza Civil Defense that supplies the UN its rubble counts, and the same Health Ministry director-general whose fatality figures OCHA prints without a caveat, told an Al Jazeera investigation in February 2026 that Israeli weapons had "evaporated" 2,842 Palestinians, vaporizing them so completely that nothing remained but blood spray and scalp fragments. Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal described the method — count the people known to be in a house, subtract the bodies recovered, book the difference as evaporated — and Health Ministry chief Munir al-Bursh supplied the physics, explaining that bodies are eighty percent water and boil away. The munitions named are conventional bombs, vaporizing a human body would demand sustained energy no battlefield weapon delivers to a single point, and Al Jazeera's own account concedes there was blood on the walls. The claim is physically impossible, not merely exaggerated.

Gaza's Government Media Office made a comparable claim in December 2023, announcing that bodies Israel returned had been "mutilated" and their organs "stolen," a charge the Washington Post printed under the formula "the claims could not be independently verified." That one is medically impossible: hearts and kidneys cannot be harvested from a corpse for transplant, and tissue recovery requires a donor evaluation within twenty-four hours of death. The UN didn't report either, even though they came from the same sources the UN trusted enough to publish in other contexts.

Corrections, when theycame, meant deletion rather than acknowledgment. Hamas claimed for months that roughly 10,000 people were missing under the rubble. I watched the number get invented: it sat at exactly 7,000 in every report from December 2023 through late April 2024, then jumped 3,000 overnight with no major strike to account for it, and froze again at 10,000. OCHA transcribed each figure as it came. When the October ceasefire removed every impediment to recovering bodies, the recovered count collapsed — two bodies found on one Tuesday in February 2025 — and the claim that 9,500 more lay waiting became impossible to maintain. OCHA's response was to drop the figure from its February 11 infographic without a word.

The same had happened a year earlier with the "70 percent of the dead are women and children" claim, which OCHA carried faithfully and then quietly removed once it became indefensible. A figure that rises in the record and then vanishes from it leaves no correction behind, only a gap — and a gap misinforms anyone who saw the figure and never saw it go.

Manufacturing a claim costs Hamas minutes; disproving one costs Israel days, because a responsible refutation means tracing which unit handled the bodies, when they were recovered, how they were stored, and what the forensic record shows — an internal investigation mounted to answer an accusation invented in an afternoon. This is an asymmetric contest, and the side that fabricates holds the advantage as long as it knows the claims will be repeated before they are checked. An institution that wants to keep citing Gaza's Health Ministry and Civil Defense as authoritative has every incentive to skip the claims that would force the expensive reckoning, because each fabrication it prints is one it might later have to defend. Filtering for plausibility protects the usability of the source; it is the behavior of a source-handler, not a neutral chronicler.

Everything above was checkable in real time, by anyone, for free. COGAT published a public dashboard counting every truck that entered Gaza; OCHA published its own snapshots, with the Hamas attributions sitting in plain sight in the footnotes; Identifying these failures required a search engine and an afternoon, not a war-zone bureau or a forensic team. The reporters who relayed "aid has fallen by two-thirds" and "10,000 missing under the rubble" had access to precisely the same documents I did, and the overwhelming majority never opened them. That is the charitable charge — incuriosity — and it is the least of the three.

The second charge is worse, because the skepticism the press withheld from Hamas was lavished on Israel. UN and Hamas figures were quoted as unimpeachable while COGAT's comprehensive aid data and official Israeli statements were ignored, hedged, or treated as inherently suspect — an inversion of the sources' actual records. COGAT's truck counts were the most complete figures available and went uncontradicted by events. A press applying symmetric scrutiny would have leaned on the source with the better record. It did the opposite, consistently, which is the difference between laziness and bias: laziness is even-handed, and this was not.

The third charge against the media is the one the press is showing right now. They have ignored Israel's report on UN deceptions and data laundering. Israel's report has been public for weeks, and the outlets that built their war coverage on the figures it dismantles have almost uniformly ignored it. The reason is not hard to reconstruct. Thirty months of reporting cannot be repaired by a single correction; a publication that took the report seriously would have to revisit hundreds of stories, not append one note. Faced with a reckoning that large, the rational institutional move is to bury the document that demands it. The non-coverage is not an oversight. It is the same calculation the UN made at the dashboard, scaled up to an entire press corps.

The UN's humanitarian record has a delete key and no corrections column. Figures enter, accumulate citations, harden into "UN data," and the only edit the system ever performs is the silent kind that erases the trail rather than flagging the error. This is what a write-only archive looks like: it grows in one direction, it never amends, and when a number becomes untenable it does not get retracted, it gets disappeared. The debunked 471 dead from Al Ahli Hospital statistics still sits in the WHO database today under "confirmed"; the 10,000 under the rubble simply stopped appearing one Tuesday in February 2025.

A newspaper is supposed to be the opposite kind of institution. It has a masthead, a readership, a competitor across town, and a corrections column — the machinery of an organization that can be told it was wrong and has to answer. That machinery is precisely what has gone unused. The press that carried the laundered figures owns the correcting organ the UN was never built with, and is declining to operate it, for the same reason the UN reached for the delete key: the error is too large to admit, so it is quietly made to vanish instead. The scandal the report documents is that the UN cannot correct itself. The scandal it cannot see is that the institutions designed to catch the UN have decided not to.

(h/t Irene)

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)