09/28 Links Pt1: Holocaust inversion is obscene; Eleven Ways NAZA Misleads Viewers; US Identifies Three More UNRWA ‘Teachers’ Who Participated in Oct 7 Terror Spree

From Ian:

David Harris: Holocaust inversion is obscene

In the decades after the Holocaust, outright denial remained largely beyond respectable Western discourse. Its proponents faced public condemnation and, in countries such as France, legal consequences. But distortion took other forms: trivialisation, rationalisation, mockery, and supposedly historical explanations that excused or diminished the crime.

At Babyn Yar itself, Soviet authorities hid the victims’ Jewish identity. The monument erected there did not identify Jews as the targets of the September 1941 massacre, but spoke generically of the “victims of fascism”. The Kremlin denied Jews recognition of their tragedy. The struggle over memory was already under way. Although Soviet forces had liberated Auschwitz, Moscow was part of the emerging problem. Anti-Semitism as a political tool trumped historical truth.

Still, living witnesses were able to confront falsehood with personal testimony. Survivors, rescuers, and liberators could describe what they had endured or seen. The overwhelming documentary record reinforced their accounts. Alas, time has steadily deprived us of those voices. The evidence remains, but fewer people can stand before an audience and say: I was there.

That growing distance creates opportunities for those determined to deny the factual foundations of the Holocaust. And directing old – and new – anti-Semitic tropes against Israel offers another route: the hatred can be presented as political argument, even when its substance remains all too familiar.

To those who invoke their Jewish identity to lend credibility to anti-Semitic arguments, whether in London, Ottawa, or Washington, take note. Jewish ancestry does not make an antisemitic argument less anti-Semitic.

The danger extends beyond forgetting what happened. It includes the deliberate distortion of that history through the ghoulish phenomenon of Holocaust inversion: casting the one Jewish-majority state as a modern-day Nazi Germany, the embodiment of the evil that nearly destroyed the Jewish people.

The truth be damned. Never mind that Israel is a liberal democracy fighting for its survival against jihadist forces openly committed to its destruction. In a post-truth world, history can be hijacked, turned on its head, and repackaged beyond recognition. Consider Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, whose doctoral thesis in Moscow advanced Holocaust denial and distortion.

In 2022, in Berlin no less, Abbas accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Amazing! Fifty Holocausts, yet he continues to travel around the world while he lives comfortably in Ramallah, his sons prosper in business, and, miracle of miracles, the Palestinian population has grown substantially over the very decades in which these supposed fifty Holocausts occurred.

The obscenity of such Nazi imagery, circulated increasingly today by reckless politicians and unaccountable influencers, should be self-evident. It appropriates the systematic extermination of six million Jews, nearly two-thirds of European Jewry, to portray Israel as the successor to Nazi Germany. Such rhetoric turns the memory of murdered Jewish people into a weapon against the country, portraying it as having no moral legitimacy, no right to exist.

If words are to have any meaning and if history is to be a guide, then Holocaust inversion must be called out for what it is – premeditated dishonesty in the service of anti-Semitism.

The 33,771 Jewish people killed at Babyn Yar, and the millions of their murdered brethren, are not here to defend the truth of their lives and deaths. That responsibility falls to us.

Daniel Rubenstein: When Talking About Gaza, Start With This One Fact

“What do I say when…?”

This is the most common question that I get as a prominent advocate for Israel.

“What do I say when someone accuses Israel of genocide?”

“What do I say when someone accuses Israel of being an apartheid state?”

“What do I say when Israel is accused of colonialism?”

When people ask me these kinds of questions, what I really hear them saying is:

How do I play defense?

How do I remain in the frame that my opponents have set?

How do I use the vocabulary that my opponents want me to use?

This is a strategy for losers.

Sure, it’s important to understand the g-word, the a-word, and the c-word on an academic level so that you are able to have productive conversations with people who approach you in good faith. But I am not going to allow people who operate in bad faith to decide the terms of the debate.

I refuse to play defense.

If I’m on television and I’m asked a hostile question about the war in Gaza, I will reframe the debate by starting my answer with the following sentence: Hamas is the government of Gaza. Once this is established, I can begin to paint an accurate picture of the situation.

Most people don’t know, or they deny, or they like to avoid saying that Hamas is the government of Gaza (after three years of war!) and has been the government of Gaza since 2007. Israeli officials often respond to accusations about Israeli tactics in Gaza by saying something like “Hamas is responsible” – which of course is the conclusion that we’d like people to reach, but it’s an opinion, not a fact. If more people understood that Hamas was the government of Gaza on October 7, 2023, then there would be a greater understanding about who was responsible for what followed – and why Gaza looks as it does.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas had been the government of Gaza for 16 years. What does it mean that Hamas was the government of Gaza? Hamas controlled Gaza’s border crossings. Hamas determined who could enter Gaza and who could leave Gaza – whether through the Egyptian border at Rafah or through the Israeli crossings at Kerem Shalom and Erez. Hamas collected taxes. If goods entered Gaza, which they did – hundreds of trucks per day – Hamas got a cut. Hamas taxed fuel, electricity, and building supplies. Hamas taxed goods that Hamas smuggled into Gaza via its vast network of tunnels. Businesses in Gaza could operate only with Hamas’s permission and protection. Hamas controlled Gaza’s television networks, radio stations, and newspapers. Hamas controlled the mosques. Hamas appointed the imams. Hamas approved the sermons.

The Hamas government of Gaza controlled the education system in Gaza. Hamas managed its own network of schools and determined the curriculum that would be taught in those schools. At United Nations schools in Gaza, Hamas made sure that its own members (or friends and family members) were principals and teachers.

The Hamas government of Gaza ran a network of hospitals and appointed the directors of the hospitals. There is a children’s hospital in Gaza City named Al-Rantisi Hospital. It is named after Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a Palestinian pediatrician and a co-founder of Hamas. v The Hamas government of Gaza ran summer camps where children engaged in social activities alongside military-style training and indoctrination.

The Hamas government of Gaza had a police force that violently cracked down on dissent.

EXCLUSIVE: US Identifies and Blacklists Three More UNRWA ‘Teachers’ Who Participated in Oct 7 Terror Spree, Kidnapped and Held Israeli Hostages

The State Department formally added three more United Nations Relief and Works Agency school teachers to a first-of-its-kind blacklist after an ongoing U.S. investigation concluded that the teachers participated in Hamas's Oct. 7 terror spree and held Israelis captive, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal. It's the latest embarrassment for the United Nations, which has delegated most of its Gaza relief work to UNRWA even though the agency is fully infiltrated by Hamas.

The Trump administration's September 24 order bars the three UNRWA staffers from working on all U.S. taxpayer-funded aid projects for the next decade, blocking them from circulating into other U.N. humanitarian groups.

The three UNRWA teachers—revealed as Rami Mohammad Sabbah, Mamdouh Husain Al Qaq, and Yusuf Zedan El Hawajri—doubled as Hamas footsoldiers who entered Israel on Oct. 7 to kill and capture Israeli citizens, according to a nonpublic investigative summary prepared by the United States Agency for International Development's independent inspector general and obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.

The State Department has now added a total of four UNRWA staffers to a still-growing federal blacklist that will prevent them from joining any U.N. agencies involved in the Gaza reconstruction project. The USAID inspector general's office, a law enforcement entity separate from the largely defunct USAID, has referred more than 100 current and former UNRWA staffers for similar action, and U.S. officials familiar with the matter told the Free Beacon that further additions to the blacklist are likely forthcoming.

While UNRWA has fired a total of 70 Gaza-based employees, largely in response to the USAID inspector general's probe, its administrative action does not prevent them from moving to other U.N.-backed humanitarian groups that are working on American aid projects in Gaza. The State Department's blacklist—built as a result of the USAID inspector general's landmark findings—ensures that Hamas-linked UNRWA staff will not be eligible to work inside Gaza, benefit from American funding, and infiltrate the massive reconstruction project the United States is now standing up.

"The USAID inspector general's continued investigation, finding definitive links between UNRWA and Hamas, has opened the eyes of the international community as to why Secretary of State [Marco] Rubio deemed UNRWA a 'subsidiary of Hamas,'" a senior U.S. official briefed on the ongoing investigation told the Free Beacon. "This was quite evident last week at the U.N. General Assembly. The winds are finally shifting."

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Let's Talk About Privilege (Substack reprint)

This was originally posted on July 14 on my Substack as an article for paid subscribers only.

Julian Casablancas, the frontman of The Strokes, told a large YouTube audience recently that American Zionists “get the benefits of white privileged people, but talk like they are black people during slavery.” He then went to the Oxford Union and “clarified” that he only meant that Jews who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state “If the only thing you can bring yourself to say is ‘Netanyahu is the problem’ or, ‘Well, I believe Israel has the right to exist,’ you “are perhaps accidentally signaling to some that you…are supporting Jewish supremacy and white supremacy.”

Again, his audience is Oxford students. His father was the founder of Elite Model Management and his mother a former Miss Denmark; he was educated at the Lycée Français de New York and then at Institut Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school known as “the school of kings,” before finishing at one of the most expensive private schools in Manhattan. And he looks at Jews who support Jewish self determination, who support a nation that was literally built from nothing, as Jewish supremacists with the ultimate privilege.

Let’s talk about privilege.

The problem isn’t that Casablancas has it. Nobody chooses the family or the school they’re born into, and there’s no sin in inheriting advantage. The complaint is what he did with the word once he had it: he took a term that used to imply responsibility and used it as a slur against people with less power than he does.

Privilege is morally neutral. So is strength, so is intelligence, so is a beautiful voice — the raw material a person is handed carries no moral weight on its own. How you use these advantages - and everyone has some advantages - is what is important. A strong man who protects the weak and a strong man who bullies them have identical strength; only the use separates them, and only the use is anyone’s business to judge. The same holds for privilege, which is why the word used to travel with an obligation attached — noblesse oblige, to whom much is given much is expected, the boy who inherits the family firm and is expected to run it honestly. Privilege named a debt.

Warren Buffett still uses the word the old way. He calls it “the ovarian lottery”: born male, white and American in 1930, to parents who talked about interesting things at dinner and could afford to send him to decent schools, wired by pure genetic accident with a mind that happens to be extraordinarily good at valuing businesses in a market economy that rewards exactly that skill. None of it, he’s been clear for decades, had anything to do with merit. “I was born at the right time and place,” he told his biographer. He pledged to give away more than ninety-nine percent of his fortune, on the theory that winning the lottery obligates you to the people who didn’t. Casablancas took the word that makes a man like Buffett give away tens of billions of dollars and repurposed it as ammunition against people he’s never met.

Notice, too, what Casablancas had to do to make the accusation work: he never evaluated an individual Zionist’s conduct. He evaluated a category, and assigned the whole category his own family’s privilege. A Jew who fled persecution with nothing, whose family was murdered, who was expelled from the Arab country his family lived in for centuries, whose life has been building rather than inheriting, gets stamped with the privilege of “Zionists” as a class. That is the same move — judging a person by the group rather than by what he actually did — that identity politics is guilty of. This is no coincidence.

Everyone with privilege has a choice about what to do with it: use it as a weapon against other people who may or may not have as much of it, or show appreciation for having been given it at all. Casablancas chose the weapon. Buffett chose the gratitude, and then he chose to act on it. They each had the choice and we can determine what kind of man each is by what they did with their privilege.

Politicians have mostly chosen privilege as a weapon too, which is stranger, since nearly all of them are beneficiaries of exactly the advantages they campaign against. Imagine one who told the truth instead: “I am extraordinarily grateful for what my life gave me, and I want to use it to help others. That’s why I’m here. I want to raise everyone up, not knock anyone down.” Almost none of them say this. Instead they climb onto the anti-privilege bandwagon and rewrite their biographies as a struggle comparable to growing up in extreme poverty, because admitting to advantage now reads as disqualifying rather than as an obligation to be honored. Nearly none of them has the life story they’re selling their audience, and that gap is what leaves them open to the charge of hypocrisy — Graham Platner positioning himself as a blue-collar oysterman while his father quietly paid for his house, his mother was his only paying customer, and his boyhood included a prep school that cost more than most Mainers make in a year.

Privilege comes with two obligations, not one. Using the position to help others is the first. Showing gratitude for having the position at all is the second, and it’s the one politicians skip, because gratitude doesn’t poll as well as grievance. That is the whole difference between the false morality that treats privilege as an insult and the real morality that treats it as a debt. Wouldn’t you rather vote for the one who’s honest about what he was given than the one who divides the world into haves and have-nots and then lies about which side he’s on?

None of this requires wealth to get right, which is what makes Casablancas’s failure so complete. A kid raised by a single mother in a walk-up apartment still had a mother who loved him, and a kid who watched a friend end up in prison, or in the ground, learned something from watching, whether or not he had a word for it. Gratitude is available at every income level, because the test was never how much a person inherited. The test is whether he noticed, and what he did with it.

Sir Moses Montefiore had privilege. Baron Edmond James de Rothschild had privilege. They used it to help support Jews fleeing persecution and giving them the means to create industries and live with dignity in the land of their forefathers. That is a hell of a lot better use of privilege than spouting antisemitic tropes to the Oxford Union.

What Casablancas does with his privilege is to stoke hate and call it insight. He is entitled to the school of kings. He is not entitled to lecture Oxford about the imagined privilege of a people who have spent the last century rebuilding from ash, in a language of moral responsibility he has never once applied to himself.

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09/27 Links: IDF kills terrorist filmed abducting Noa Argamani; Israel marks two years since Nasrallah eliminated; UK police arrest several men in explosives probe near US-used RAF base

From Ian:

Deborah Lipstadt: Jews targeted by antisemitism need more than statements of sympathy from politicians

Unlike so many people who, though deeply disturbed by this development, feel helpless to make their voices heard, I have had and continue to have that opportunity. Long before, during my time in office as the United States’ Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and since then, I have had numerous opportunities to sit with leading government officials worldwide to discuss responding to this scourge.

After impressing upon them the gravity of this situation, I have warned them not to think of this as solely an attack on Jews, Jewish institutions, and those associated with them. Antisemitism poses a multi-tiered that encompasses more than just Jews. In fact, they and the societies they lead are in the crosshairs. Those engaged in these attacks – rightists, leftists, and Islamist jihadists – are also aiming at democracy, rule of law, and international security and stability.

Some of the haters are home-grown and some are foreign. Some are ideological Jew-haters, e.g. Iran, Muslim Brotherhood, and Russia. They want to harm – including lethally – Jews, because they despise them.

But some are utilitarian antisemites, e.g., China, and Russia. (Yes, Russia falls into the ideological and the utilitarian category.) The utilitarians use antisemitism as a means of fostering rifts in society, creating dissension, and destabilizing the social compact.

The plethora of incidents of Jew-hatred rolls off the tongues of those who follow these developments, like some sort of incantation: Washington D.C.’s Capitol Jewish Museum (2 dead), Boulder, Colorado (1 dead), Golders Green (2 stabbed, 1 beaten badly), Manchester (2 dead), Ontario (2 seriously wounded), Pittsburgh (11 dead), San Diego (1 dead), and the list goes on.

But this is not what has left me sick and tired. I knew that this was the case when I entered this field of study and when I accepted the Presidential appointment as an Ambassador with the portfolio of addressing this hatred.

No, what has left me sick and tired are the pious sympathies and sincere regrets issued by government leaders, Prime Ministers (UK, Canada), Mayors (London, Manchester, New York), University presidents (worldwide) and so many others. Their aides must have a file on their computers which they can expeditiously open when something happens. Maybe it’s entitled: “Reactions to Attacks on Jews.” They just need cut and paste from previous declarations. Last year, in the wake of the Golders Green stabbing, this newspaper put those platitudes on its front page. I was exhausted just reading them. [“Our thoughts and prayers are with you”; “An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us”; “We stand with you.” And the one that I find most infuriating: “This hate has no place in our society.” Has no place? It’s already here… and it’s thriving.]

Do I think leaders should condemn these acts? Of course. They must speak out unequivocally and expeditiously and with no contextual hesitations. But those condemnations must be accompanied by action, including difficult actions, ones that might have political costs. Political leaders must be willing to name the source of these attacks, call them out specifically, and demand that the communities and political enclaves spit out the hate mongers who have taken refuge in their midst.

Leaders must do this even at the risk of losing votes. They must also recognise, as those in the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, among other places, have failed to do, that when their most energetic foreign policy actions are aimed at Israel, when they reward Hamas even when it has made no moves towards peace, the attackers are invigorated. Despite being warned, as Foreign Secretary Miliband was by Chief Rabbi Mirvis and other Jewish leaders, that this singling out of Israel motivates attackers to harass, attack, and murder Jews worldwide, they ignore the warnings.

Why, my interlocutors ask me, is this happening now? In part because the haters know that there rarely are consequences for attacking Jews. So please spare me your pious sympathies, sincere regrets, and worn-out protestations. I am not just sick and tired of them, I consider them – and you – to be hypocritical and self-serving.

I – together with so many others – have had enough.

Argentina shows that fighting antisemitism requires more than condemnation

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Latin American office has spent years working with institutions throughout the region to promote understanding of contemporary antisemitism and provide training on how to identify it. Since the IHRA definition was adopted in Argentina, it has been applied in dozens of cases. The López proceedings demonstrated what those efforts can mean in practice.

One of us, Ariel Gelblung, testified twice as an expert witness, first during the preliminary investigation and later before the Judicial Impeachment Court. His testimony addressed the meaning and implications of López’s statements, the antisemitic tropes they invoked, and the international standards used to identify hate speech and discrimination.

The result matters beyond one judge and beyond Argentina. Judges occupy a distinctive position in democratic societies. Citizens who enter a courtroom must be able to trust that their religion, ethnicity or identity will not determine how they are treated by the person sitting on the bench. When a judge publicly traffics in prejudices about a group of people, that trust is fundamentally compromised.

The lesson from Argentina is not that every hateful statement should be prohibited by law. Different democracies draw different legal boundaries around speech, and freedom of expression remains an essential democratic principle. But freedom of expression does not mean freedom from professional or institutional accountability, particularly for public officials entrusted with extraordinary authority over the rights and lives of others.

That distinction is especially important today. Democratic societies frequently respond to outbreaks of antisemitism, racism and other forms of hatred with statements of concern. Those statements have value, but they cannot substitute for infrastructure. Fighting discrimination requires clear standards, education, training and institutions willing to enforce the principles they have adopted.

Simon Wiesenthal understood that confronting hatred cannot be limited to documenting the past. The lessons of history matter most when they equip societies to recognize warning signs in the present and act before prejudice becomes normalized in their institutions. Argentina’s experience shows that democratic institutions are not powerless in the face of antisemitism.

Removing one judge will not defeat antisemitism. But this case demonstrates something increasingly important at a time when hatred can spread quickly and become dangerously normalized: Democratic institutions can draw a line. And when they do, it matters.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Tells the UN: Palestinian Reforms Are Complete. The Evidence Says Otherwise

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas presented an extraordinarily positive picture of the reforms he claims his government has carried out. According to Abbas, the Palestinian Authority has fulfilled the commitments it made to the international community.

Last year alone, the United States determined that these payments ["Pay-for-Slay" rewards to the families of terrorists and "martyrs"] had amounted to $156 million — including to 5,000 families in Lebanon — much of which enabled, fungibly, from the European Union.

The US State Department, however, had reached a very different conclusion from that of Abbas. In a September 16, 2026 statement, the State Department said that the Palestinian Authority was "continuing to pay stipends to terrorists and to glorify acts of terrorism and terrorists in public pronouncements and school textbooks." The Palestinian Authority, the State Department added, had once again failed to live up to its commitments to the United States, including its commitment concerning terrorism and reform.

Last April, the State Department had already been even more explicit in a report to Congress. The report noted that despite changing the mechanism and ostensibly replacing the old system of paying prisoners with welfare system supposedly based on needs, "the Palestinian Authority continues to provide a system of compensation in support of terrorism through new mechanisms and under a different name." The report concluded that changing the mechanism did not amount to ending the payments.

In November of 2025, the European Union Commission also acknowledged its assessment that payments and benefits to terrorists and their families were continuing.

If accountability and rule of law have been strengthened to the degree Abbas claims, why are Palestinian human-rights organizations still documenting such cases?

The contradiction becomes even more disturbing when it comes to education.

Abbas told the UN that the Palestinian Authority has continued reforming its education system in accordance with international standards and in cooperation with UNESCO.

The findings of IMPACT-se's comprehensive review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority curriculum tell a very different story. The organization examined 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides and found that the curriculum remained..."substantively unchanged from prior editions and documented recurring patterns across subjects: promotion of jihad and martyrdom, glorification of terrorism, incitement of antisemitism, rejection of peacemaking and the two-state solution, and erasure of Israel from maps."

IMPACT-se also found textbooks and teacher guides that continue to present armed struggle and violent figures in a positive light.

If the international community is serious about bringing democracy and accountability to the Palestinians, it should demand verifiable reforms rather than accept declarations of success.

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

From Ian:

What Frederick Forsyth grasped about antisemitism and Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Campaign to Islamize Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

It was a j’accuse directed at the world.

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

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

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

We will prevail because we have no choice.

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

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

It was his j’accuse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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European sukkah design in the 18th century is really fascinating

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

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

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

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

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

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

As reported in the Derby Mercury on October 15th:

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

Have a wonderful and safe Sukkot!

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

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Why ‘Fauda’ has shocked the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Does Ireland Hate Israel So Much?

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

How the UN Forges Anti-Israel Bias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Way past time for a cartoon post

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s about us.

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

I’m Jewish, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are still a Jew.

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

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

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

How Propaganda Uses Emotion to Teach You What Not to See

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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