Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 05, 2025

What right do you have, Lindsey Graham? (Judean Rose)

PM Netanyahu with US Senator Lindsey Graham© GPO/Haim Zach

Senator Lindsey Graham is considered to be one of the most pro-Israel members of Congress. It’s difficult to imagine why. In speaking to the Jerusalem Post at the recent Republican Jewish Coalition summit, Graham trotted out the old two-state solution from its well-earned grave, dusted it off, and insisted that without it, Israel has no sustainable future.

"Being pro-Israel means telling hard truths," said Graham. "The only path that keeps Israel Jewish and democratic is a two-state framework, when the conditions are real. That is the reality friends should say out loud."

Does Graham have a God complex? Because God Himself does not seem to have endorsed this plan. God granted that land to the Jews, not to anyone to else, and most especially not to the bestial neighbors.

Therefore, Senator, speaking between friends, I have questions:

What right do you have, Lindsey Graham?

What right do you have to carve up our land and give it away to our enemies—speaking of it so matter-of-factly, as if it were a foregone conclusion, telling us that the only way to get peace is to give away our ancestral lands to the baby-killers who burned, beheaded, and raped our people?

Of what faith are you that you would take the Holy Land away from us? That you would separate the Jews from Judea?"

But apparently, the good senator doesn’t think of himself in this way, as a thief. He has ideas! "Hamas must be gone as a governing and fighting force,” said Graham. “Then you put Gaza in the hands of Arabs who do not want to kill all the Jews—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others. They reconstruct Gaza. They change the school system so it does not glorify killing Jews. You devolve authority based on performance. If they cannot meet the metrics, they do not get the power. Meanwhile, Israel gets new security boundaries and the right to act."

How lucky is Graham to have insider information. He knows which Arabs wish to kill all the Jews and which do not. He also believes that world opinion trumps Israel’s, even when it renders Jews unsafe.
“If you want to marginalize the Jewish state, go down that road,” says Graham. “It will do more damage to Israel’s future than any bomb Iran could ever build. You would lose support here in America, and you would isolate Israel from the world.”

Lindsey Graham is smart. He knows that there are a whole lot of Muslims. For some reason he thinks that means Israel has to let them move in. “There are a billion Muslims. If you imagine a new Middle East with no Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, you are living in a dream world,” says Graham.

In playing the numbers game, Graham somehow misses the fact that there are 22 Muslim Arab states in the region. He wants the Jews to also give them eastern Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. But do they have to live in these places? Is there no arable land left in any of those 22 Arab states where Israel’s nasty neighbors might reasonably reside alongside other Muslims who speak their language and share their culture?

Senator Lindsey Graham professes to be a Baptist and a born-again Christian. How then does he simply ignore the fact that God gave Israel to the Jews? Graham postures as Israel's ally, yet wishes us to accept terrorists as our eternal neighbors and relinquish our ancestral lands to them.

Is this your idea of turning the other cheek, Lindsey Graham?

If so, fine—turn yours if you must, but please, spare the Jews. That doctrine is part of your faith, not ours.

Our Talmud says something else altogether: "If someone is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first."

For us, self-defense is not optional—it's a sacred imperative.

Coming next week, IY"H: JD Vance on the sovereignty bill.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Fac Ut Fiat: A secular update to Pascal's Wager

(Note: As I am writing my philosophy book, this short chapter ended up on the cutting room floor. So I’m publishing it here.)

Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes’ formula stood for centuries as philosophy’s bedrock, the one truth doubt couldn’t shake. Even if an evil demon deceives you about everything else, the act of thinking proves something exists to be deceived.

Then the simulation hypothesis arrived. We could all be characters in a giant computer simulation and we wouldn’t know it. Our instinct that we are even thinking is no longer solid. We might be an unimportant subroutine.

This is where most people either spiral into nihilism or retreat into unprovable faith. If we can’t know base reality, then either nothing matters or we must believe in something bigger than us without evidence. Life itself is otherwise meaningless.

But there’s a third option.

We don’t need faith for life to have meaning. We can create meaning.

We can act morally. We can improve the lives of others. We can help the helpless.

We create meaning by walking values when forces clash. Every time we choose to align with values over instinct and reflex, we are creating a more moral world. We are authoring significance that wouldn’t exist without our conscious intervention.

Meaning isn’t something you discover or prove. It’s something you create through moral action with other people.

Create meaning and you change from an isolated observer into an active creator of our world.

Descartes could not go past a world where only he exists and he cannot know anything else. But we are not passive observers of life. We are not chained in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows. We have agency to act, to create.

This inverts Descartes from cogito ergo sum to fac ut fiat. Do, and through the doing, it becomes.

When we perform actions, it doesn’t only change our world - it changes us. If we choose to tell the truth, then we are more likely to tell the truth in the future. When we go against our nature to help someone, it is easier to make that same choice the next time. Even if we are in a simulation, we are not non-playing characters - we are more like self-learning AIs that behave in a probabilistic way. And we can change our own selves.

Choosing values to override instincts is what separates us from other creations. That override, that moment when you choose value even though it costs you, is what makes you more than mere code. Not because you’re free from deterministic forces, but because you can override those forces when they misalign with values. The capacity for acting morally creates meaning. And the meaning you create through consistent choosing of values in your relationships, the trust you build through truth-telling, the dignity you honor through respect for others, are all experientially undeniable regardless of substrate.

Pascal’s Wager, Rewired

Pascal’s Wager argued that belief in God is the rational choice even without proof. The upside of belief if God exists is huge, the downside is small. And if God doesn’t exist, belief doesn’t hurt you. So choose to believe.

We are updating that wager for anyone who ever doubted whether anything matters, no God required.

You might not be able to prove base reality. But you have a choice: nihilism or a life with meaning?

There is no need for faith in this derech wager. You are choosing to make the life you are in, simulated or not, meaningful. The upside is huge. You are helping to create a better world, real or not.

There is no downside.

The feeling of making a difference is real. The shared joy of being in a relationship based on respect is real. It is something that didn’t exist before you made your decision to act morally. This is true even in a simulation.

The wager isn’t hypothetical. You’re already in it. Every day you’re choosing whether to choose values or let reflex win. The question isn’t “should I start?” It’s “given that I’m already creating or destroying meaning with every choice, will I optimize for meaning?”

If you act as if nothing matters, you are right. If you act as if only you matter, you are right. If you act as if everyone matters, you are right again. That’s how you create your world.

Fac ut fiat. Do so it becomes.

Do, and through the doing, meaning becomes real.

Be the creator of your world.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

For most of modern history, Jews could find shelter in at least one ideological home. When the Right turned against them, the liberal Left offered refuge. When the Left radicalized, conservatives defended Israel as a moral cause. Even amid hostility, there was usually a countercurrent of empathy somewhere—a political camp that saw antisemitism as civilizational decay.

That equilibrium has broken.

Antisemitism now thrives simultaneously on the Left, the Right, and, most disturbingly, in the exhausted center. It no longer needs ideology; it functions as a universal solvent, binding otherwise incompatible movements and manipulating moderates through fear and shame. Each faction rationalizes its version differently, yet all converge on the same outcome: Jews are once again isolated, and defending them has become a thankless act across the political spectrum.

The modern Left built its moral identity on solidarity with the oppressed. But in a political culture obsessed with oppressor–oppressed binaries, complexity is betrayal. Israel’s success as a democratic, self-defending Jewish state violates the purity test.

For the activist Left, the answer is to recast Jews as oppressors. For the moderate Left, the temptation is to avoid conflict in the name of unity. “Yes, globalizing the Intifada sounds extreme,” they say, “but they come from righteous anger.” Confronting antisemitism would fracture the coalition, so it is rationalized away.

This dynamic gives the extremists power far beyond their numbers. They set the moral tone; the moderates absorb it. In the name of keeping the Big Tent intact, progressives surrender control of the conversation to their most radical members. The antisemites set the agenda for the entire movement. And every time they do, the boundaries shift further leftward.

Opposing antisemitism becomes a mark of disloyalty—a signal that one is “not truly progressive.” The result is ideological capture: a movement once grounded in empathy now treats Jewish self-defense as heresy.

On the populist or nationalist far-Right, antisemitism satisfies a different need. Conspiracy offers coherence amid cultural upheaval. Jews become symbols of global manipulation, moral decay, or elite cosmopolitanism—everything that threatens the imagined purity of the nation.

Here too, the extremists drive the conversation. Their numbers are small, but their passion—and their willingness to police purity—give them disproportionate influence. Many moderate conservatives, fearful of dividing their base, learn the same survival instinct as the Left: don’t challenge your own radicals. We saw this only this week with the Heritage Foundation defending platforming neo-Nazi antisemites with the excuse that the Left is a worse enemy.

Thus antisemitism becomes not just tolerated, but useful. It serves as an identity signal: who is “with us” and who is “with them.” To denounce it is to side with the media, academia, or “global elites”—all enemies in the populist imagination.

Like their counterparts on the Left, the moderate Right has been captured by the logic of fear. They justify silence as pragmatism, but every silence moves the Overton window closer to the abyss.

What we haven't been discussing is the Center.

If the Left moralizes antisemitism and the Right mythologizes it, the center normalizes it through paralysis. Centrist antisemitism isn’t driven by hate, but by terror of being seen as partisan.

In a polarized world, defending Jews has been redefined as taking sides. Condemn Leftist antisemitism and you’re branded a right-wing Zionist. Condemn far-Right antisemitism and you’re demonized as an enemy power-hungry globalist.

Both poles exploit this dynamic deliberately. Antisemitism becomes a bipartisan trap—a loyalty test that drags the center toward silence. Each side accuses defenders of Jews of being agents of the other. And so the most ethical act—standing up for truth and decency—becomes politically suicidal in each camp.

But it is worse than that. Otherwise principled centrists are exhausted by the battles that they want to fight. The battle against antisemitism is not considered as important as the others, and they don't want to waste political capital on it. And, latent antisemitism prompts them to think that the Jews are powerful and can defend themselves - they don't need the Centrists to defend them, better to use limited outrage at things that they think are truly outrageous.

The result is a moral vacuum filled by noise. The extremists dominate the conversation, moderates retreat, and the algorithms reward the screamers. It isn’t a steady process - it is logarithmic. Each cycle of cowardice makes the next outburst of hatred louder and more normalized.

Across the spectrum, antisemitism now functions as a moral tollbooth: you can oppose it only by paying a reputational price. To speak out is to invite accusations of betrayal—from your allies, not your enemies.

This inversion is new. In earlier eras, antisemitism discredited the extremist; today, it defending Jews discredits the moderate. The reward structure has reversed: the less you say, the safer you are.

That is why the worst may not be behind us but ahead. As extremists continue to set the agenda, polarization deepens, institutions bend to intimidation, and moral fatigue becomes apathy. The slope steepens with every news cycle.

We are no longer watching a slow march of antisemitism. We are living through its acceleration phase. The catastrophe is much closer than we realize.

Antisemitism was once the measure of a society’s sanity. Now it is the glue of its madness, and in fact has become a political force on its own that transcends the slogans and pseudo-principles that each side spouts. It is a useful tool not only against Jews but a weapon against anyone who opposes antisemitism.

The Left wields it to prove anti-imperialist authenticity. The Right brandishes it to prove nationalist loyalty. The Center treats it as something to be strategically ignored, not a danger to be confronted.

The Jews, as ever, are the first to feel the tremors—but not the last to be buried by the coming earthquake.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Yes, I think she's antisemitic

Last year the BBC invited popular Egyptian commentator Hind al-Dawi on their Arabic channel, even though she had a history of antisemitic statements. She denied any antisemitsm.

Here is what she said this week on Cairo Talk:

Media personality Hind Al-Dawi stated that Zionist thought and Christian Zionism form a central axis in the orientations of a large number of American politicians who believe that Israel is a gift from God to the peoples of America and the West, and that supporting it is a religious duty that achieves God's satisfaction. She explained that this thought has been prevalent in the United States since the first to fourth European migrations, where the migrants adopted a new Protestant doctrine that views God's promise to Abraham in the Torah regarding the land of Canaan.

She added, during an episode of the program "Cairo Talk," broadcast on the "Cairo and People" satellite channel, that the Torah texts did not explicitly mention the Jews but spoke of Abraham's descendants, meaning that the Holy Land belongs to all his offspring, including the Arabs and the original Children of Israel. She pointed out that the texts on which this thought is based were written after the return from the Babylonian exile and are not original, confirming that the real problem began with the establishment of Israel in 1947, when many Westerners considered their support for it a form of religious worship.

She's obsessed with Israel and Jews. Last week she said:

Hind Al-Dawi added, during the presentation of the “Cairo Talk” program, broadcast on the “Cairo and People” channel, that Israel has no history, geography, or antiquities to claim that it is collecting money to preserve what it calls “Israeli antiquities” in the Palestinian territories, stressing that reality proves that not a single stone or coin has been found in the Palestinian territories to confirm the existence of an ancient Israeli kingdom, adding: “Israel, despite its claim of existence for more than two thousand years, has not been able to obtain any archaeological evidence to prove its right to this land.”

She's apparently quite popular - probably for her bizarre antisemitism.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/04 Links Pt2: The horseshoe politics of America is coming for the Jews; Melanie Phillips: New York's fateful choice; BBC’s bias ‘pushed Hamas lies around the world’

From Ian:

The "Jews" Are a Proxy for a Bigger Political Fight over the American Future

Since Oct. 7, 2023, American Jews have found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of the political left and the political right, between progressive internationalists and extreme isolationists.

On the left, antisemitism takes the form of anti-Zionism. Universities that style themselves champions of diversity now host chants for Israel's eradication. Encampments celebrating Hamas set the moral tone. When mobs target Jewish students, administrators avert their eyes and invoke "free speech." Yet the same administrators spring into action when non-Jewish groups suffer even a "microaggression."

On the right, Tucker Carlson has updated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the 21st century. He elevated the podcaster Darryl Cooper to "the best and most honest popular historian in the U.S." Cooper trivializes the Holocaust as a bureaucratic mishap and depicts Winston Churchill as the agent of rich Jews. World War II becomes the first in a series of misguided American interventions abroad - engineered, ultimately, by Jews.

Israel has always carried a special symbolic weight in America. From the beginning, Americans cast their self-understanding in Israel's image. The Puritans saw themselves as Israelites crossing the Red Sea. When Americans talk about Israel, they are often talking about themselves. Evangelicals still see in Israel a covenantal twin.

Progressives give more attention to Israel than to any other foreign nation, casting Israelis as "white colonizers" and Palestinians as "oppressed people." Yet Israel is not a "white" society. Its Jewish population includes, among others, Yemenite and Ethiopian communities - unmistakably people of color. Their very presence highlights the absurdity of the racial binary on which the progressive coalition depends.

Israel is the archetypal nation-state: God, people, land. Covenant and borders. Israel's miraculous rebirth, and its power and flourishing - despite the destruction of European Jewry, and its multiple wars for survival - stir American nationalism. The very existence of the Jewish state and the excitement it provokes in America shatters the dream of a post-national, multicultural world run by a global managerial elite.

Carlson and progressives are firing at the same target: the bond between America and Israel. To sever it is to rewrite the American story. Arguments about Israel are, at bottom, arguments about America. To be for or against Israel is to choose among competing visions of the American future. When Trump embraces Netanyahu while waving off Carlson, he is not just setting Middle East policy - he is declaring who America is.

Melanie Phillips: New York's fateful choice

I left New York last night as the city braced itself for a fateful decision. Today it votes for a new mayor, and the front runner is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani is an individual who believes Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state and who doesn’t see anything wrong with chanting to “globalise the intifada”.

He has claimed that the Israelis are behind acts of violence committed by the New York Police Department — a riff on the ancient antisemitic trope that the Jews are responsible for problems that have nothing to do with them.

His pledge to shut down the NYPD’s strategic response group, which broke up the violent anti-Israel protests at Columbia university, suggests that he won’t protect New York’s Jews against the tsunami of antisemitism to which they are being subjected.

Less than three weeks after the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023, he was rabble-rousing on New York streets inciting the mob against Israel’s “genocide”.

Stephen Daisley: The horseshoe politics of America is coming for the Jews

Alighting on the Jews as the cause of the world’s iniquities is nothing new, but it is significant that both American leftists and rightists draw on antisemitic and anti-Zionist frames for their scorched-earth approach to contemporary politics. Rejecting the gradual reform of liberalism or conservatism, the progressives and the nationalists are as one in their conviction that the reigning order must be toppled. The systemic flaws or injustices that led them to this conclusion no longer matter as much as the zealous pursuit of political destruction.

This year-zero temperament is bound to put its ideologues, whether leftist or reactionary, on a collision course with Jews. Jewish observance and Jewish culture are bound up with ideas of creation and repair, and in the Torah as in Jewish history, destruction is almost always a source of great sadness and loss.

The Tanakh is a story of building, of establishing a people, forging kingdoms, erecting a temple, and instituting laws and customs. The defeat of the kingdoms and destruction of the temple are not cause for abandoning the commandments but the consequence of not hewing to them.

Burning everything to the ground is a punishment, not a plan of action. Destruction is reserved to God, which is why the Aleinu prays for the Lord to obliterate idols and remove false Gods, while it reserves to mankind the duty of tikkun olam — perfecting the world. But the prayer doesn’t stop there. It adds ‘be-malchut Shaddai’, rendering the full phrase as ‘perfecting the world under the sovereignty [or kingdom] of the Almighty’.

That’s the rub. Jewish text and tradition teach an obligation to repair this earthly realm so that it conforms to the designs of the Almighty, not the passing preferences of man. Obligation is exactly what the revolutionaries of left and right are furiously trying to shake off. Obligation constrains and they want to be free to remake the world in their own image and according to their ideological impulses.

There is an angry messianism spreading across American politics, and perhaps our own soon, too. On left and right, among those of all faiths and the fiercely faithless, a zeal to cleanse, purge, smash and bring down — to destroy to save — is taking hold. The world is too defiled to be conserved or reformed. The only salvation lies in smouldering ruins. The tables of the temple must be overturned, and many a self-appointed saviour is only too keen to volunteer.

For those who yearn to destroy, the people of the book and of the laws are a constant reminder of men’s obligations to creation and its perfection. However strong the will to power, there are limits temporal and divine. Those who demolish in spite will be left with only spite for building blocks.

Seth Mandel: Why the Two Parties Have Diverged on Fighting Anti-Semitism

The reason this reaction is important is because the fight against anti-Semitism is a long one. (It’s not called “the world’s oldest hatred” for nothing.) The Labour Party learned the hard way that it could rid itself of Jeremy Corbyn but that would not cure its Corbynism—and it now has no serious internal mechanism to do so.

The Democrats risk falling into a similar trap. The RJC is part of the Republican Party’s immune system. But the Democratic Party was for so long able to take Jewish support for granted that its own partisan Jewish infrastructure atrophied. It had completely let down its guard. Republicans, meanwhile, are benefiting from the fact that they had to build something—arguably beginning in the 1980s—that would be a specifically Jewish part of the party’s organizational world and could withstand resistance from existing groups. Once it had a foothold, it would have the energy of a start-up not a legacy institution.

Start-ups, of course, have their own weaknesses. But at the moment, that start-up energy enables the wider conservative world to multitask. And it’s why those who claim that fighting anti-Semitism is a “distraction” are, for the moment, losing that argument.

11/04 Links Pt1: Israel identifies remains of Israeli-American Itay Chen; The Strategic Fruits of Israel's Military Victory; How the ICJ works as Hamas’s partner in crime

From Ian:

The Strategic Fruits of Israel's Military Victory

The fact that for the first time the Arab Middle East and Turkey have come together to force Israel's enemy to lay down its arms is a sign of a major sea change. It may not be a sign that everyone loves Israel, but it is a sign of respect that Israel has earned through its two-year war with Hamas. Rather than turning the Jewish state into a global pariah, the war has reaffirmed its international standing. Israel had finished its greatest comeback from pain, adversity, and existential danger since the Yom Kippur War.

Israel not only recovered its strength and spirit, but brought the war directly to its enemies with a finality that had been lacking in previous conflicts. In less than two years, Israel managed to break the backs of both Hamas and Hizbullah, and quieted the West Bank. It broke the grip these terrorist regimes had held over both Lebanon and Syria, ending the encirclement by hostile neighbors Israel had faced since 1948. Most importantly, Israel shattered the power of the terrorist groups' main supporter, Iran.

Once again, Israel proved that the IDF is a fighting force without equal. The men and women of the IDF displayed unquestionable skill and professionalism in battle, as well as humanity in dealing with a fanatical enemy. All this, while defying the overwhelming weight of contrary world opinion, even from the U.S. and the Biden administration. The story of how Israel transformed the Middle East after Oct. 7 also contains a valuable lesson for the rest of the West, on how to confront its critics and enemies.

There Will Be No Phase B of Ceasefire Plan in Gaza

The fighting in Gaza has subsided, but the war has not ended. The implementation of Phase B of the ceasefire agreement depends on three miracles: the disarmament of Hamas, the establishment of a non-Hamas Palestinian government to administer Gaza, and the deployment of an international force to maintain order.

But who exactly is supposed to disarm Hamas? The Lebanese precedent teaches us that contrary to the hopes and illusions underpinning the ceasefire agreement signed in Nov. 2024, Hizbullah has shown no willingness to even consider disarmament. Lebanon's government and army are neither willing nor able to compel it to do so. In Gaza, Hamas has declared that it will not disarm. After all, Hamas did not fight for two years only to simply surrender and vanish.

It is now evident that Phase B of the agreement will not materialize, that Hamas will refuse to disarm, and that no international force will enter Gaza to confront it.

The Fall of Hamas in Gaza Begins

On Sep. 15, 2025, ordinary Gazans refused to obey Hamas. Instead, they listened to the IDF's evacuation instructions. Around 800,000 residents of northern Gaza gathered their belongings and walked south as instructed. Hamas tried to stop them with threats and violence, but failed.

Since that day, Hamas has ceased to function as a unified military or governing force. What remains is a collection of scattered, semi-independent cells clinging to the remnants of a once-organized army. The IDF has systematically eliminated most of Hamas's senior and mid-level commanders, leaving the group without strategic leadership or coordination. The mass public executions of alleged collaborators in October 2025 was a show of desperation disguised as strength.

As Hamas's power structure erodes, a political shift is emerging. Ten major clans across Gaza are cautiously but increasingly challenging Hamas's authority. None of these clans possess the military strength to overthrow Hamas on their own. Yet their existence as armed, organized communities with their own interests and leadership represents a serious crack in the system of fear and blind obedience that Hamas built over the years.

The ceasefire violations are isolated acts by local commanders trying to prove that they still have power and relevance. There is no longer a unified military council or strategic command. What remains is inertia, a chaotic pattern of violence driven by habit rather than strategy.

Hamas is at its weakest point since its creation. Its leadership has been eliminated or forced into hiding. Its military power is exhausted, its finances depleted, and its civilian support fading fast. Now is the time to dismantle what remains of its terror network, to remove Turkey and Qatar from the equation, and to secure American backing to prevent Hamas from ever rebuilding. Waiting for the usual cycle of diplomatic negotiations would mean wasting this opportunity and returning to a state of perpetual threat.

Taking Hostages Turned Out to Be Hamas's Undoing

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. The terrorists apparently believed that the taking of hostages and accompanying psychological warfare would force Israel to capitulate, leaving Hamas victorious. Yet the hostage-taking transformed the moral landscape in ways Hamas failed to anticipate.

While hostages remained in Gaza, it was no longer reasonable for international leaders to demand that Israel stop military operations. How could the world ask a nation to abandon its citizens to captivity while letting Hamas hostage-takers and torturers continue to hold them?

True, a politicized battery of UN organizations engineered a massive disinformation campaign, demonizing Israel as it waged a just war by just means. And weak leaders in the UK, France, Australia and Canada succumbed to local and international propaganda, demanding that Israel stop defending itself and rewarding Palestinian terrorism by recognizing a Palestinian state. That appeasement prevented an earlier hostage release deal and prolonged the war.

The hostage-taking prevented the conflict from dissolving into the traditional false narratives about "occupation," "resistance" and "apartheid." Many saw the truth - innocent people being held hostage by a genocidal terrorist organization committed to murdering Jews. The hostage-taking provided a broadly recognized imperative that eventually overcame the propaganda.

The hostage-taking ironically gave Israel the time and space it needed to degrade the terrorist organization drastically. The job isn't finished, but Israel stands stronger than ever.

From The Free Press:

We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics—racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy.

Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.

....Staunchly anti-Zionist texts—those that question the moral legitimacy of the Israeli state—are commonly assigned. Rashid Khalidi, the just-retired Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is the most popular author on this topic in the database. A Palestinian American and adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization delegation in the 1990s, Khalidi places the blame on Israel for failing to resolve the conflict and sees the country’s existence as a consequence of settler-colonialism.

The problem is not the teaching of Khalidi itself, as some on the American right might insist. To the contrary, it is important for students to encounter voices like Khalidi’s. The problem is who he is usually taught with. Generally, Khalidi is taught with other critics of Israel, such as Charles D. Smith, Ilan Pappé, and James Gelvin.

Not only is Khalidi’s work rarely assigned alongside prominent critics, those critics seem to hardly get taught at all. They include Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis, a professor at Shalem College in Israel. Despite winning the National Jewish Book Award, Gordis’s book appears only 22 times in the syllabus database. Another example is the work of Efraim Karsh, a prominent historian. His widely cited classic, Fabricating Israeli History, appears just 24 times.

For most students, though, any exposure to the conflict begins and ends with Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978. Said is the intellectual godfather of so many of today’s scholars of the Middle East, thanks in no small part to this classic book. In Orientalism, Said claimed to be the first scholar to “culturally and politically” identify “wholeheartedly with the Arabs,” and he faulted the West for not recognizing the “Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine.”

Orientalism is among the most popular books assigned in the United States, showing up in nearly 4,000 courses in the syllabus database. But although it was a major source of controversy, both then and now, it is rarely assigned with any of the critics Said sparred with, like Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, or Samuel Huntington. Instead, it’s most often taught with books by fellow luminaries of the postmodern left, such as Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Foucault.

That isn't education. That is indoctrination.

The entire study is here. It finds that when pro-Israel texts are assigned, they are assigned along with many more books critical of Israel; but when texts like Rashid Khalidi's polemics are assigned, it is together with other anti-Israel texts. The truth is the exact opposite of Edward Said's contention that all universities were teaching nothing but anti-Arab texts - and Said is still the king of Middle Eastern studies, with his Orientalism book assigned more than any other.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Hezbollah still manages to get digital payments through sham "charities"

L'Orient Today describes an FT investigation showing how Hezbollah gets around international sanctions to get money - by tying their sham "charities" to non-sanctioned individuals:

Charities linked to Hezbollah, which have been sanctioned by the United States, have regularly directed donors to send funds via Lebanese digital payments providers that have partnerships with U.S. payment card companies, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Sunday.

Several charities in the group’s network of social programs have asked donors to send money to digital wallets held by private individuals through financial company Whish Money, or to donate through its competitor OMT, the British newspaper added.

The FT’s findings highlight how Hezbollah "appears to be exploiting weaknesses in the fight against terrorism financing and money laundering to raise funds", despite coming under intense global pressure since it suffered significant losses during last year's war with Israel.

It is a game of whack-a-mole. Even if sympathetic individuals are reluctant to help Hezbollah (or Hamas or any other terror group) by using their own phone numbers or digital wallets, these are terror groups - they can threaten ordinary people under their control to do the same thing. Which means there are unlimited ways for them to accept money.

I thought the more effective way would be to go after the charities themselves, to deplatform them. But the US OFAC already does that too. They cannot get foreign-hosted sites to be taken down but they can go after their social media. For example, the Shaheed.com.lb Lebanese Hezbollah site is still up, but every single social media link on that page doesn't work - they were all taken down.

So the US and to some extent European anti-terror agencies have made it more difficult for individuals to donate to terror groups. FT apparently didn't find the wallets or phone numbers online; they simply called the "charities" and asked how to donate. The terror fronts provided them with the donation numbers of private individuals.

What about the phone numbers themselves? Can spy agencies watch who is calling them?

Apparently, metadata showing that non-US residents are calling the numbers of the charities can also trigger watching those people for terror ties. For US residents, it is more difficult - a warrant would be needed because of privacy concerns. And there is a loophole - if a foreign person uses a US-based phone number, with VOIP or a burner phone, they would be assumed to be a US resident and it would be more difficult for US agencies to track them legally.

So it isn't that the US isn't trying to shut down these terror financing methods. It is that technology is always a little but ahead of what they can legally do.

---

One amusing thing I found while researching: a Lebanese Hezbollah front charity called the Wounded Foundation is still on Facebook for some reason. It put a notice up warning its donors that scammers are asking for money pretending to be the Wounded Foundation and not using the money for good jihadist purposes of helping Hezbollah members wounded by Israel.

Speaking of, one of the Hezbollah members blinded by the pager attack was blown up by an Israeli missile yesterday as he was being driven. Those are the sort of people supported by the "Wounded Foundation."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Moral Politician: A Jewish Ethical Reflection on Power, Integrity, and Public Trust

For Election Day, I asked my AskHillel ethical chatbot how an moral politician should act - balancing his or her legitimate competing interests with consistency and morality.

11/03 Links Pt2: Ben Shapiro: Tucker Carlson Sabotages America; The Right’s Immune System Has Kicked In; Yad Vashem has compiled 5 million names of Jews murdered in Holocaust

From Ian:

The Right’s Immune System Has Kicked In by Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. The backlash was fast and furious. Roberts’s initial statement, in which he labeled Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition” that is “sowing division,” dropped on Thursday afternoon. By Friday, he was out with a mealymouthed cleanup clip in which he denounced Fuentes. On the same day, he was interviewed by Dana Loesch, whose straightforward questions about right and wrong had him all but malfunctioning in response. On Friday evening, Roberts announced that his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, would be moving to another position. Today, news broke that Neuhaus is gone from Heritage altogether. Not bad for a few days’ work. Let’s see where this goes next.

It goes without saying that Jewish Zionists will do all they can to excise the rot of Jew-hatred from the right. But it’s the majority of the non-Jewish right that has me so uncharacteristically hopeful about that effort. Carlson told Fuentes that Christian Zionists suffer from a “brain virus” and that he dislikes them “more than anybody.” Well, this country’s Christian Zionists weren’t about to take that slander of their faith lying down. And they’re fighting back with the most glorious array of weapons: their shining decency, their overpowering goodwill toward the Jews, and their love for both Israel and the United States.

This weekend, I’ve pored over dozens of social media posts, articles, and speeches from non-Jewish supporters of Israel. In opposing the right’s institutional acceptance of Jew-hatred, they unfailingly articulate the multiple threats posed by Kevin Roberts’s misguided stratagem. They know that right-wing anti-Semitism is a threat not only to the Jewish people and Israel, but to Christians of faith, to a political right worth saving, and to the future of this country. And without a United States guided by its Founding principle of liberty for all, the world would return to a moral dark age.

And in this moment, in an uncertain political climate, their defense of the good is not without risk. Unlike liberals, who’ve spent years ceding ground to their own Jew-hating mob, pro-Israel conservatives are not only full of goodness but courage, as well.

COMMENTARY receives more “thank you” emails from Christian readers and podcast listeners than you’d ever imagine. Too much for us to respond to adequately. And this won’t be quite adequate either, but there is no better time for me to express my thanks to them. So, to the virtual armies out there who take up the cause of the Jews, Israel, and the United States, thank you! It means the world. It literally means the world.

Seth Mandel: Let’s Put This ‘Legitimate Criticism of Israel’ Claim Under Scrutiny

All right. So we have part of our desire for specifics accommodated here. We do not hear who, specifically, accused Roberts and Heritage of anti-Semitism for asking Israel to “please get to the bottom of” what happened when a shell hit a church in Gaza. Roberts says he asked the question publicly and privately, so we don’t know exactly how he phrased it each time. It’s possible he said “Can we please get to the bottom of this?”

It’s doubtful such phrasing invited much of a backlash, obviously. But even if we suspend disbelief and give him the full benefit of the doubt, the reaction he claims he received from an unnamed “handful of people in Washington, DC” was surely disproportionate to his response, which was to call them a “venomous coalition” comprising “the globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington.”

How do I know this? Because when the church in Gaza was struck, President Trump also registered his disapproval—and he did so in more pointed terms than “can we please get to the bottom of this?”

On July 17, a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt what Trump’s reaction was. She responded: “It was not a positive reaction. He called Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning to address the strikes on that church in Gaza, and I understand the prime minister agreed to put out a statement. It was a mistake by the Israelis to hit that Catholic Church. That’s what the prime minister relayed to the president — and you should look at the prime minister’s statement that will be coming out.”

Indeed, Netanyahu expressed regret for the mistake publicly and even in a phone call to the pope.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce was asked about it the same day at the department’s press briefing. Bruce said that “President Trump also spoke to the prime minister, and I think it’s an understatement to say that he was not happy.” Bruce said the administration has “asked that Israel investigate the strike.” She added: “Obviously, everyone is appalled.”

Earlier in July, false accusations flew that Israelis had set fire to an ancient church not far from Jerusalem. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it “an act of sacrilege” and “an act of terror” for which Israel must ensure there are “harsh consequences.”

Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t remember Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Mike Huckabee getting “canceled” by mysterious pro-Israel forces in Washington. All three men are regarded by the Jewish community here and in Israel as monumental friends of the Jewish nation.

One more point to make. I reject the idea that being falsely accused of something should make that person choose to become what they’ve been falsely accused of. I fully understand that tempers flare in the heat of the moment, but that is different from embracing ideas one recoiled from the day before. Put simply, I don’t believe someone turns into Pat Buchanan overnight.

If you think Tucker Carlson is being criticized for embracing a guy who praises Hitler because there’s a foreign-aligned cabal of manipulative Jews in Washington, you have stumbled upon the problem—and it isn’t other people.