04/23 Links Pt2: Why Doesn't Everyone Love the Jews?; If the fire-bombed synagogues had been mosques, the Government would respond very differently

From Ian:

Stephen Daisley: Why Doesn't Everyone Love the Jews?

As the tide of antisemitism rises once more, a familiar question is posed: why do they hate the Jews? The answers are the same as before: ethnic and religious prejudice, political fanaticism, the conspiratorial mindset, each feeding and being fed by jealousy, ignorance and resentment.

Antisemitism is not a philosophy arrived at by reason. In fact, it's a volcanic madness that is always there, waiting to erupt at the first rumblings of societal instability, economic precarity, or spiritual disorder. There might be more to gain from flipping the question on its head: why doesn't everyone love the Jews?

It's a thought that has occurred to this gentile more than once because, truth be told, Jews are kind of awesome. The original scribes and scholars of the Bible, defiers of pharaohs, and humblers of empires. Source of modern law and ethics; composers of some of civilization's finest music, art and literature; bearers of an ancient covenant across two millennia of exile. Survivors of extermination; revivers of a nation and a language; and innovators in agriculture, medicine and technology. All this, plus Gal Gadot.

There is surely sufficient truth to foster a culture of philosemitism, by which I mean a respect and admiration for Jewish civilization and its fruits; for institutions, practices and teachings whose benefits stretch far beyond Jews and Jewish communities.

In practical terms, philosemitism means countering the ignorance of others, counseling your children in respect for Jewish people and revulsion for those who despise them, refusing to remain silent when Jews are targeted for harm or hatred.

Former Chief Rabbi of Britain Jonathan Sacks said: "The way a culture treats its Jews is the best indicator of its humanity or lack of it." That culture must move beyond thinking of Jews as a minority to be accommodated and understand them as rightful co-authors of the culture.

Moral Collapse Goes Mainstream By Abe Greenwald

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The liberal establishment has decided it can’t get enough of Hamas enthusiast and 9/11 fan, Hasan Piker. Democratic midterm candidates campaign with him by their side, and the New York Times seems determined to give him a daily platform. Yesterday, for example, on the Times’ homepage you could find a podcast featuring Piker in conversation with the writers Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino. The nominal topic was what Spiegelman dubbed “microlooting”—stealing items from corporate-owned stores as an act of political resistance. But the discussion quickly turned into a celebration of crime and terrorism committed in the name of justice.

Piker noted that he’s “pro-piracy all the way” and said “we gotta get back to cool crimes” such as “bank robbery, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Tolentino believes that when it comes to “stealing with a purpose,” “we love that in America.” She also thinks that blowing up pipelines should be legal and private schools should be outlawed.

It's three cheers for piracy, robbery, and terrorism on the homepage of the New York Times! The podcast seems to have shocked many people. They can’t understand how we’ve gotten here.

I can. It’s precisely the kind of thing I would expect to see from a culture that’s turned against its Jews. Piker, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a bunch of woke-right podcasters, has been celebrated by the liberals for his brazen anti-Semitic incitement in the years since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. That’s what made him, and so many others, a beloved star of the left and, eventually, the liberal establishment.

When a culture decides to protect and even reward people for promoting anti-Jewish terrorism—you know, intifada—that culture breaks the civic bonds that hold society together. If you think you can get away with encouraging Jew-hatred while preserving taboos and proscriptions on other destructive impulses, you’re in for a wild ride.

In permitting and elevating anti-Semitism, leftists and liberals have not only sanctioned violent bigotry, which is ruinous enough. They’ve unleashed a tsunami of evil. Because anti-Semitism is fundamentally a form of scapegoating, they’ve sanctioned the idea that victims are responsible for the transgressions committed against them. This legitimizes all manner of thuggery.

Pondering what makes Greta Thunberg and her ilk tick?

Why is the left so bitterly opposed to Israel? There are plenty of reasons why this should not be the case.

Yes, many Jews may look “white” to most people (of course, a great many do not). But most Israelis come from North Africa and other countries in the Mideast—Morocco, Yemen, Iraq. Of course, insofar as the right-wing fever swamp fringes are concerned, they are not even counted as belonging in the white category; “they will not replace us” is their motto. So, they are in effect non-white, and for all intents and purposes should be beloved of the left.

It cannot be denied that, considering this perspective, the underdog deserves special appreciation.

Well, Israel has a population of nearly 10 million people and is surrounded by 23 Arab countries hosting roughly 1 billion people. The governments of all of them—at least until the 2020 Abraham Accords—hated Zionism and Zionists with a purple passion. This country occupies far less than 1% of the entire land mass of the Middle East; yet, as some of its regional neighbors purport, it should be kicked out. Or rather, eliminated.

It is the “Little Satan,” according to Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other terror groups that target civilians. And it works with its ally, the “Big Satan,” aka the United States.

They point their fingers at the joint war against Iran as an example. Yes, the same Iran that happens to be launching missiles right now at fellow Arab states. Where is all the protesting against that?

And still, the left sees Israelis as colonizers. (That’s very bad, in case you haven’t been paying attention.) And so it goes, they deserve to be targeted by terror regimes and related outfits. (Aren’t they bad?)

The Jews have been in the Holy Land for some 3,500 years. The Arabs only arrived a few scant centuries ago. The Al-Aqsa mosque lies above the Jewish Second Temple, which is perched on top of the Jewish First Temple. So the natives, beloved of the left, are the Jews; the interlopers are the Arabs.

It could have gone the other way, but it didn’t. The order is the order. History is history.

But maybe not according to Greta Thunberg.

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04/23 Links Pt1: The dawn of a new world order; Introduction to Gazology; No, the Iron Dome Doesn’t Make Israel More Aggressive; Why Trump’s Iran Deal Is Not Like Obama’s Iran Deal

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The dawn of a new world order

Most people in America are against the war with Iran, as they are in Britain, too.

Very few, however, actually understand why this war is as necessary as it is unavoidably complex.

Few seem aware that Iran has been actively at war against America for the past 47 years. Few seem to grasp that Iran’s fanatical Islamic regime has killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, perpetrated numerous attacks on U.S. bases, committed countless terrorist atrocities and taken Americans hostage.

Few grasp that U.S. and Israeli intelligence had discovered that Iran was poised to create both a nuclear bomb and a missile arsenal so enormous and so buried underground that no one would ever be able to tackle the mortal threat posed by the regime.

Instead, the American and British public have been fed a remorseless mainstream media narrative framed entirely by obsessive hatred of U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This presents the war as a reckless choice into which Trump was bounced by Netanyahu, that it was always going to be a disaster, and that it’s already been lost.

Israel, however, which is desperate for the Iranian regime to be prevented from ever harming it again, fears that Washington is once again leaving it hanging out to dry. The Israeli public thinks that Trump’s ceasefire—and then its extension—shows that he hasn’t got the commitment to see this thing through. They fear that he seeks to make a deal he can call victory, but that will leave the Tehran regime in a position where it can rearm and come back even more deadly than before.

Others, though, think that Trump is displaying strategic brilliance. They point out that he’s flipped the script over the Strait of Hormuz by turning Iran’s supposed chokepoint for the world into a deadly weapon against the regime itself.

America’s blockade of the Strait is causing Tehran to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a day in vital revenue, while the buildup of oil will potentially cripple the oil wells themselves and put them out of further use.

The fact is that this war is neither won nor lost. Both sides say they have the upper hand. Everything depends on Trump. His repeated outbursts on Truth Social, which often seem to contradict each other, are giving many people severe emotional whiplash.

No one knows how this is going to end. But it’s very alarming that opposition to the war in America is feeding into a growing general public animus against Israel.

Matti Friedman: Introduction to Gazology

The origins of this essay lie in a recent visit to the Middle East shelf in a Washington, D.C., bookstore during a visit from my home in the actual Middle East. I was on a short break from the story I’ve been living and covering in Israel for three decades, and from the tragedies that have become routine for Israelis and for our neighbors since the war that began on October 7, 2023.

As a longtime denizen of bookstores in Western countries, I knew that almost any shop would carry a few titles about the evils of Zionism and Israel, a venerable genre on the Marxist left. But this time I saw a change: The Gaza war had inspired a proliferation of these titles so intense that they now filled much of a shelf. I noticed the same phenomenon in other bookstores in other cities, where there were suddenly more “Gaza” and “Palestine” books, it seemed, than books about the rest of the entire Arab world combined. Humanity now inhabited a new age, according to one title, The World After Gaza. According to another, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. There was Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, and Palestine and Feminist Liberation, and many more examples in the same vein, with more soon to be published. A new literary genre had been born.

The Gaza war has been fought a two-hour drive from my Jerusalem home by people I know, and has claimed the lives of several of them. For me, reading the back covers of these books left the impression of a genre related to the actual territory of Gaza as the Dune novels are related to the actual NASA space program. At the same time, it wasn’t fringe work. Among the practitioners were authors who have recently won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and additional accolades.

After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals.

It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.

Peter Beinart’s ‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza’ wins PEN America award

Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart has won the 2026 PEN America Literary Award for nonfiction for his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

Beinart, who has long been an outspoken critic of Israel, is the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents magazine and a professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. His book offers a harsh critique of the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel and response to the war in Gaza.

“This book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering,” Beinart wrote in a Substack post announcing the book’s release in September 2024. “It’s about how we came to value a state, Israel, above the lives of all the people who live under its control. And it’s about why I believe that Palestinian liberation means Jewish liberation as well.”

In a statement, the judges of the PEN America award said the book “offers a model for writing a new story when inherited narratives no longer hold.”

The award offered the latest evidence of a shift for PEN America when it comes to Israel, which has polarized the literary and cultural world in recent years.

Founded in 1922, PEN America is a writers’ and free-expression advocacy group that defends the rights of authors and opposes censorship. The group has long opposed cultural boycotts of Israel, including in a December 2023 letter calling on art institutions “not to police speech nor deprive audiences of artists’ work,” earning it increasing ire from progressives.

The group’s CEO left amid tensions in 2024, and last year it published a report accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza.

Seth Mandel: No, the Iron Dome Doesn’t Make Israel More Aggressive

The debate over the Iron Dome is a near-perfect encapsulation of the weakness of the Israel discourse in America. Opponents of the purely defensive program try to work their way back from their partisan conclusion to a coherent rationalization for it. They then demand we dignify their ignorant declarations with a response.

Here’s the latest version of this routine. Democrats looking for an excuse to vote against Iron Dome have reverse engineered the following talking point: Iron Dome, they say, isn’t actually defensive, because the fact that it protects Israelis from rockets makes Israel more likely to attack its enemies.

This seems to be the reasoning that a fair number of Democrats have settled on. As Semafor’s Dave Weigel noted, this argument allows them to claim to support only “purely defensive” weapons while still voting against Iron Dome.

Anyone who has participated in the social media discourse on Iron Dome has had this theory tossed at them. Usually it’s “Nathan Thrall says so!” Thrall’s argument is as follows: “Iron Dome facilitates greater Israeli offensive measures, because it lowers the perceived cost to Israel of escalating or extending or initiating attacks.”

Now, making this particular argument requires one to be unfamiliar with basic political-military decisions—why an army would procure certain weapons systems instead of others, what its broader strategic and tactical aims are, its perceived threats, etc. A fair amount of this is usually in public documents.

But in the case of the Iron Dome the debate is even more frustrating because we don’t need to theorize. We already have the answer. The data tell us what common sense would suggest: Iron Dome makes Israel less likely to escalate military conflicts because it can absorb a significant level of rocket attacks from Gaza with minimal casualties.

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One Pushy Schnorrer Too Many: Homeowner Installs Trap Door On Porch (PreOccupied Territory

 Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

Jerusalem, April 23 - A local family has taken drastic measures to preserve its peace and quiet, neighbors reported today, amid a stream of unsolicited dinnertime and bedtime visits from people going door-to-door to collect for charitable causes: if the visitor fails to take the hint and leave after receiving no answer, or shows up a second time despite a previous rebuff, the head of the family enters a code into the security system that opens a panel beneath the solicitor's feet and sends him into a dungeon.

The neighbors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the innovation as a last resort after years of polite hints falling on deaf ears. Sources close to the family say the final straw came when a collector for an indigent pair of would-be newlyweds refused to accept "no" for an answer, launching into an extended monologue about starving Torah scholars and orphaned children while the homeowner's dinner grew cold on the table.

A relative noted the family had long been identified as a "prime target" on informal networks shared among door-to-door solicitors. "They swap addresses like baseball cards," explained one cousin who asked not to be named. "Once word gets around that someone actually opens the door and listens for more than thirty seconds, you're marked. The good targets get visits from everyone — from the widows-and-orphans people to the ones collecting for 'emergency' medical equipment in places you've never heard of, to the support-this-promising-young-scholar-who-chooses-not-to-work."

Some in the community expressed concern over the new security feature, warning that it could set a dangerous precedent. "This kind of escalation hurts everyone," said a veteran schnorrer who claimed decades of experience. "We're just trying to engage people's empathy and generosity. A simple 'maybe next time' would suffice. Instead, now we have to worry about falling into dungeons? Where's the tzedakah in that?"

"Hmm," he wondered. "We can probably leverage this to collect for pidyon sh'vuyim," the redemption of captives.

The homeowner remains unapologetic. "They come during bedtime stories, during conference calls, during the one hour a week we actually sit down as a family," he told reporters. "They've got clipboards, sob stories, books they want to 'sell' and that disappointed look when you hesitate — like you're personally responsible for the downfall of Jewish education or whatever cause they're pushing that week. And thanks to their little address-sharing WhatsApp groups or whatever they use, once you're on the list, it's relentless."

Local police have so far declined to intervene, noting that no complaints have been filed by the affected solicitors, nor any Missing Persons reports issued. "Technically it's his property," said one officer with a shrug. "And honestly, after hearing some of these stories, we're not rushing to investigate."

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The Jewish Witness - Part 3 of Reclaiming the Covenant

Here is an excerpt of Part 3 of my upcoming book, Reclaiming the Covenant.

Paid subscribers to my Substack can read each entire chapter s they get published, twice a week. If you pay EoZ monthly by any other means and want access, let me know. 

The Jewish Witness

Part 3 of my series on America at 250, Reclaiming the Covenant

Every argument has a tell.

In Jewish legal tradition, machloket l’shem shamayim — argument for the sake of heaven — describes a dispute conducted in genuine pursuit of truth, where the other side is still recognized as a legitimate participant in a shared enterprise. Its polar opposite is sinat chinam: baseless hatred, the condition in which the opponent is no longer someone you are arguing with but someone whose presence is itself the offense. The Talmud distinguishes these not by the content of the disagreement but by what each side does with the other’s existence. Hillel and Shammai disagreed about nearly everything for decades; their schools preserved each other’s opinions and their children intermarried. That is machloket l’shem shamayim. The factionalism that the rabbis blamed for the Second Temple’s destruction — groups so consumed by contempt for each other that the legal architecture for covenantal repair became unusable — is sinat chinam. The disagreement in both cases was real. What differed was whether the parties retained enough basic regard for each other to remain in the same covenant.

A covenantal society needs a way to know which condition it is in, because the two look similar from the inside — passionate disagreement always feels righteous to those conducting it — and the consequences of misreading them are severe. Part 2 established that the covenant’s renewal mechanism requires, as its operating condition, the willingness to grant your opponent the benefit of the doubt. But how do you know when that condition is being met and when it has already failed? How do you detect sinat chinam before it has progressed far enough to make the repair mechanism unavailable?

There is a diagnostic. It is not a survey or a political index. It is a pattern so consistent across three thousand years of history that it functions less like a coincidence and more like a structural law: the societies that are losing the basic regard between their members — that are converting policy disagreement into existential enmity, that are beginning to treat some of their members as outside the covenant’s protection — often show the same symptom first. They turn on their Jews.

The Jews are almost always the first target because they are the perennial test case for the covenant’s membership principle — a group identifiable as separate, whose full membership was most recently contested, most explicitly established by legal or founding act, and therefore most available to be re-contested when the covenant’s universalism begins to erode. A society willing to strip one group of its inherent dignity has already decided that dignity is conditional — available to be stripped from any group once the right justification is constructed. The Jews come first not because the hatred is primarily about Jews but because the logic that makes them first makes everyone else potentially next. Watching what a society does with its Jews tells you whether the argument inside it is machloket l’shem shamayim — legitimate disagreement within a shared covenant — or something that has tipped into sinat chinam, the contempt that makes covenantal repair impossible.

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Consider the sequence. Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed — the beginning of a golden age that turned out to be followed by centuries of relative decline as the intellectual and commercial energy that Spanish Jews had contributed was permanently exported to the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and eventually America. The Weimar Republic’s Jews were among the most assimilated, educated, and patriotic citizens in Europe — their persecution was the clearest possible signal that something had gone catastrophically wrong in Germany’s civic architecture long before the world understood what that something was. The Soviet Union’s antisemitism tracked its internal decay with uncomfortable precision. Poland’s postwar antisemitic episodes — most notoriously the Kielce pogrom of 1946, when Poles murdered Jewish Holocaust survivors who had returned home — revealed a civic sickness that would take decades to begin healing.

The inverse is equally striking. The Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century offered Jews something genuinely unusual for its era: stable residence, property rights, relative freedom of worship, and meaningful participation in commercial life. The correlation with Dutch commercial and intellectual dynamism is not coincidental. Britain’s nineteenth century trajectory moved further along the same arc: the gradual extension of actual civic membership to Jews — Parliament in 1858, Oxford and Cambridge following — tracked the development of the most robust parliamentary democracy of the era. The closer a society moved toward Washington’s formulation, the more it flourished. The societies that went all the way — that built inherent membership into their founding architecture rather than extending it as a concession — produced something different in kind, not merely in degree.

The mechanism is structural. Once a society decides that dignity is conditional — that membership can be revoked, that the dignity floor is negotiable for one group — the question becomes only which group is next and what justification will be constructed for their exclusion. The attack on Jewish dignity is always, simultaneously, an attack on the covenant architecture that protects everyone’s dignity. The diagnostic works because what it detects is not specifically anti-Jewish sentiment but the deeper condition: the conversion of machloket l’shem shamayim into sinat chinam, the moment when a member of the covenant stops being someone you argue with in good faith and becomes someone whose existence is the problem.

Jews are, in this sense, canaries in the coal mine. Our historical position has given us a sensitivity to specific kinds of danger that people who have never occupied that position are slower to develop. We notice the early signals. We recognize the patterns before they become undeniable. We have seen where certain kinds of rhetoric lead, where certain kinds of institutional erosion lead, where certain kinds of redefinition of membership lead — because we have been the people those processes were turned against, repeatedly, across civilizations that each believed they were different from the ones that had come before.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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A group of Jews pray in in a public place in Morocco. Antisemites freak out.

Lakome (Morocco) reports:

The local front for supporting Palestine and opposing normalization in Marrakesh announced that it will organize a protest today, Wednesday, at 7 pm near the Bab Doukkala wall, to denounce what it described as “provocative and normalization practices,” and in defense of the Palestinian cause.

This protest comes after the widespread circulation of photos and videos documenting dozens of people in Jewish religious attire (whose nationalities are unknown) performing rituals near the Bab Doukkala wall in the old city of Marrakech, in a scene mimicking prayer in front of the “Western Wall” (Wailing Wall) in occupied Jerusalem.

...This has renewed accusations of opening the door to “forms of Zionist infiltration” under the guise of religious tourism.

The head of the Moroccan Jewish community, Jacky Kadoch, explained that they were tourists and they realized they needed to pray in an appropriate time. It was an ad-hoc minyan of which one can see happening every day in sports stadiums, airports and trade shows. The Jews realized that they could not reach a synagogue in time. 

To their credit, most Moroccan media are supportive of the Jews' rights to pray in public. One pointed out the hypocrisy of Muslims being allowed to worship in public but Jews being treated suspiciously:

Throughout the world, Muslims perform their prayers in public spaces. We see them in the streets, airports, universities, parks, and squares. We see them individually and in groups. And sometimes in the heart of major European cities, and in New York and Washington. When this happens, many consider the scene normal, or at least understandable within its religious and human context.

Indeed, many voices rightfully defend the right of Muslims to practice their rituals wherever they are found, as long as this is done in respect of the law and public order.

So what changes when those performing the prayer this time are Moroccan Jews? Has the public space changed? Or the meaning of prayer? Have the rules of freedom changed? Or is the real problem for some that the person standing to pray is not a Muslim?

If the standard is respect for public order, then it should apply to everyone. And if the standard is refusing to pray in open spaces, then it should also apply to everyone. But for the same act to be considered normal for one group and provocative for another is not a defense of principle. It is blatant selectivity.

This double standard doesn't merely reveal a passing tension; it exposes a deeper flaw in the understanding of religious freedom itself. The right to worship does not lose its legitimacy with a change of religion. Those who defend the right of Muslims to pray wherever they are, yet reverse the same principle when it comes to Jews, are not defending freedom. They are defending an exclusive privilege they seek to monopolize for a single identity.

Freedom is not a selective right. It cannot be used when it serves our identity and then rejected when others benefit from it. Those who do so are not protecting the public sphere; they are merely reshaping it to fit their own biases.

Another blamed the criticism on Algerian media always trying to make Morocco look bad.

No other Arab country is as openly supportive of Jews in their media as Morocco is. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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04/22 Links Pt2: Asking the wrong questions about antisemitism; The ‘anti-extremism’ movement has always been a con; SPLC indicted for ‘manufacturing’ extremism

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Asking the wrong questions about antisemitism

Dahl was also living proof that once you remove the thin veneer of justifiable concern about any misdeed that Israelis are supposed to have committed, the gap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is revealed to be a distinction without a difference. And that is why so much of the commentary about this play and antisemitism in general is still asking the wrong questions about the subject.

Some 78 years after the birth of the modern-day State of Israel, we should no longer be trying to draw distinctions that will allow Israel-bashers to avoid being tagged as what they really are: antisemites. Instead, we should be noticing the painfully obvious similarities that unite all anti-Zionists, whether they are as uncivil as Dahl or not.

Those who cheer for or rationalize attacks and violence, including the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust that took place on Oct. 7, as well as deny Israelis the right to defend themselves against those who pledge its repeat, are on the same level as Dahl.

Are students or college professors who chant for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) or terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”) really idealists who should be accorded the respect that sophisticated theater-goers are forced to retrospectively deny to a nasty old man who thinks the Jews deserved the Holocaust?

Is the contemporary journalist or politician who traffics in blood libels about Israelis committing a mythical “genocide” someone to agree to disagree with? Is that akin to how we are expected to react to an open neo-Nazi who does so in a less dignified manner?

The real lesson to be drawn from “Giant” isn’t the answer to the age-old debate about what to think about good art created by bad people. Nor is it a guide about how to behave when a favorite childhood author turns out to be a rotten bigot.

It is this: Those who embrace the cause of Israel’s destruction and the genocide of half of the world’s Jewish population that goes with that belief don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to evaluating their character. Some may act in a less repugnant manner than Dahl and pretend to oppose antisemitism even as they support it, as is the case with the mayor of New York. Others are less civil or arguably even crazier, as might be said of some anti-Israel podcasters. But they are all part of the same evil cause. And they all deserve the same opprobrium a decent society should accord to antisemites like Roald Dahl.

Brendan O'Neill: The ‘anti-extremism’ movement has always been a con

The SPLC denies the charges. It says it will ‘not be intimidated’ by the Trump administration. It’s worth noting that there’s little love lost between Trumpists and the SPLC. The centre started life as a civil-rights law practice in 1971 before morphing into a huge outfit that keeps tabs on extremism across America. Some on the right accuse it of targeting not only genuine loons but also normal groups, like Turning Point USA. It is ‘liberal’ intolerance made flesh, they say, with its tendency to treat everyone to the right of David French as an Adolf-in-waiting. It’s a ‘partisan smear machine’, says FBI director Kash Patel.

Hopefully the truth will out as the fraud case progresses. But I’m interested in what this simmering scandal tells us about bourgeois activism right now. The possibility that the SPLC is Jussie Smollett on steroids requires analysis. He’s the actor who falsely claimed to have been roughed up by a pair of racists yelling ‘This is MAGA country!’. Is the SPLC the institutional version of such vain self-delusion, blowing up the threat of extremism in order to fatten both its bank balance and its sense of virtue?

If it’s true the SPLC ‘funded extremism’, that would only be a monetary expression of what has for a long time been its core mission – namely, threat inflation. For years now, the centre has promiscuously expanded the definition of extremism, lumping in normies with Nazis. It maintains a ‘hate map’, showing all the nutters in America, which apparently includes not only Sieg Heiling ‘Aryan’ freaks but also Christians who aren’t fond of gay marriage.

Just four months before Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September last year, the SPLC branded him and Turning Point USA as ‘hard-right’ promoters of ‘hate’. It has also designated the Alliance Defending Freedom a ‘hate group’. Anyone who has ever met those Christian folk will know how ludicrous this is. Even Moms for Liberty, which doesn’t want schoolkids to be taught ‘critical race theory’ or that there are 72 genders, has found itself on the SPLC’s map of hate. If it’s extremist to oppose telling seven-year-olds that people with dicks are women and people with white skin are privileged, I guess I’m an extremist.

The aim of such extremism-mongering is transparent. It’s about criminalising moral opinions that the credentialled classes find offensive. And it’s about keeping groups like the SPLC flushed with cash and busy with cases. It’s a job-creation scheme for the do-gooding classes. If the SPLC ‘funnelled millions’ into extremist groups, that would perversely be in keeping with its demented mission to keep the ‘hate’ bandwagon rolling.

Groups like the SPLC don’t only inflate the far-right threat. They also deflect from one of the true extremist scourges of our time – Islamism. The SPLC has long had a blind spot on Islamist extremism. Worse, it has branded those who oppose Islamism as ‘extremists’. A few years ago it drew up a ‘Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists’, which included the mighty Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This is a black immigrant woman who has stirringly made the case for liberal values against the despotism and misogyny of Islamism, and who has been threatened with death for doing so. Yet in the Kafkaesque hellscape that passes for ‘activism’, it is she who is a ‘propagandist’ whose ‘damaging misinformation’ is a menace to public life. This is moral inversion at its most despicable.

We have the same problem in the UK: ‘anti-extremists’ who are wilfully blind to Islamist extremism. On Saturday, as yet another Jew-hater was prepping a petrol bomb to hurl at a London synagogue, the Guardian published a long-read on the ‘return of fascism’ illustrated with white working-class men waving England flags. Islamists are firebombing synagogues. They killed Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur. They’ve massacred children at a pop concert. They’re on our streets calling for more violence against the Jewish State. And yet ‘the virtuous’ myopically fret over the white far right. From the Guardian to the SPLC, the preening activist classes inflate fantasy threats and downplay real ones, to ensure that nothing as pesky as the truth will meddle with their narcissistic crusading. Now that’s dangerous.

Europe's Jew-Hate with a Vengeance

[M]any in the West who sympathize with Islamic terrorists were, within hours, trying to justify Hamas's atrocities by blaming Israel. The allegations against Israel were that it was denying supposed rights of an invented Palestinian people that "does not exist," as admitted by senior PLO official Zoheir Mohsen in 1977 in the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw. They nevertheless repeat spurious claims to the Jews' ancestral land, on which Jews have lived continuously for nearly 4,000 years, explicitly named "Judea," and to the failure by Israel to implement what -- according to the Palestinians themselves -- would be a "two-state solution" dedicated to taking whatever land they can get and using it as a base from which to conquer the rest.

There is invariably a grim consequence to constant vilification of minorities; the current slandering of Jews is no exception.

Israel may stand pretty much alone against the haters of this world. Depending on the political climate at the time, it can be expected that international leaders will remain absent, even silent, for the most part when Israel's enemies once again attack it – as they surely will. As historic events reveal, Israel and Jewry at large cannot fully rely for protection on the West.

"Many things will be forgiven," observed Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973. "but one thing will not—weakness. The moment we are marked as weak—it is over."

Lawmakers from 15 Latin American nations unite to combat antisemitism

The First Congress of Latin American Legislators Against Antisemitism was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, last week, to develop a coordinated strategy to combat rising Jew-hatred across the continent.

The three-day forum culminated in a joint declaration formulated by the 35 participants from 15 countries, the association that organized the event, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, said in a statement on Sunday.

The declaration included a call to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, show “solidarity with the State of Israel and firmly back its right to self-defense against the Iranian regime and its regional proxies,” demand “that Iran be held accountable for its global terrorist activities, both past and present, including in Latin America, reject “all attempts to isolate and boycott the State of Israel,” and the “bolstering of bilateral ties between Latin American countries and Israel in every relevant realm,” the statement read.

“From parliaments, and in coordination with the executive branches, we seek to build common public policies to confront this scourge [of antisemitism] with a regional and coordinated vision,” said Uruguayan Rep. Conrado Rodríguez, president of the regional legislators coalition.

Shay Salamon, the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s executive director of Latin American Affairs, described the gathering as a turning point in regional efforts.

“The Congress marks a decisive step toward the consolidation of a firm and coordinated regional commitment. The active participation of legislators from Latin America demonstrates that there is a real willingness to confront antisemitism by strengthening legal frameworks, promoting education and defending the democratic values that sustain our societies,” Salamon said.

In addition to policy discussions, participants took part in Uruguay’s national Yom Hashoah ceremony, commemorating the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

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04/22 Links Pt1: The Birth of a Great American Ally; Britain’s Jews are quietly preparing to leave the country; A warning from Britain’s Iranian diaspora

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Birth of a Great American Ally

In March, the New York Times reported that “U.S. and Israeli military officials are talking as often as 4,000 to 5,000 times a day, divvying up targets across Iran.” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine spoke of his regular contact with his Israeli counterpart, and one source told the Times that the majority of military briefings were being held in English, not Hebrew, because of how closely the forces were cooperating.

But being a good junior partner isn’t just about the fighting. Israel has also been willing to stop at a moment’s notice when President Trump wants to switch gears to the diplomatic track. Last week, this meant agreeing to a cease-fire in Lebanon that Israeli voters didn’t like and that became a cudgel used by the political opposition against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, Israel complied. It was reminiscent of the point during last year’s U.S.-Israel joint bombing missions when Trump decided enough had been accomplished and ordered Israeli jets to turn around and go back home mid-flight.

European allies claim they agree with the necessity of stopping Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and diminishing the Islamic Republic’s ability to bomb European bases and territory, but when Trump asked them to put their money where their mouths were, they balked. When the Iranians threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping, the Europeans got together and came up with a plan—to be carried out only once the war was over and such a plan was no longer needed.

The structure of U.S. “aid” to Israel also follows this pattern, because it requires Israel to purchase from American manufacturers. Thus U.S. companies get a boost, the manufacturing base has steady income and occasional growth spurts, and the U.S. still gets all the intel once those weapons are battle tested—and without having to deploy the systems themselves or send U.S. troops into harm’s way to carry out real-world trials.

The aid is becoming a political football, and opposition to it has been made a progressive litmus test, so the aid structure will almost certainly be reworked. Doing so will harm American workers and the domestic economy far more than it would punish Israel.

Trump is loving the returns America gets by putting the alliance to fuller use. The Israelis, Trump said, “have proven to be a GREAT Ally of the United States of America. They are Courageous, Bold, Loyal, and Smart, and, unlike others that have shown their true colors in a moment of conflict and stress, Israel fights hard and knows how to WIN!”

That statement began with the words “whether people like Israel or not.” Because the truth is that Israel is a superb ally, and reality is impervious to partisan narratives that suggest otherwise.

IDF chief: Years of war have reshaped Israel’s security

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said “prolonged years of fighting have reshaped Israel’s security and fortified our existence,” speaking at the President’s Outstanding Soldiers Ceremony for Israel’s 78th Independence Day.

The ceremony at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, recorded earlier this week and broadcast on Wednesday, honored 120 outstanding soldiers and officers from across the IDF.

President Isaac Herzog presented certificates and pins to the honorees, recognizing excellence, dedication, professionalism and responsibility.

The event was attended by Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz, senior military leadership and the families of the recipients.

This marked the third consecutive year the ceremony has taken place during ongoing fighting, with all of the honorees having served in operational roles during the war.

Of the 120 recipients, 69 are men and 51 are women, including 18 officers. Sixty-seven serve in combat roles, two in combat support positions and 51 in rear-echelon roles.

The Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers awarded academic scholarships to the honorees, including financial grants and iPads to assist with studies following their discharge.

Aviva Klompas: The unseen victories of the Iran war

NATO allies have often been described, sometimes fairly, as hesitant and divided.

In contrast, Israel has demonstrated its exceptional ability to meaningfully contribute to shared strategic objectives.

Israeli intelligence penetrated deeply into Iranian systems. Its pilots carried out complex, high-risk missions. Its forces even assisted in recovering a downed American airman.

This is not the profile of a dependent ally; it is the profile of a partner that expands American capacity.

That distinction is not lost on Washington. Nor is it lost on the Middle East.

Iran’s actions during the war have had an unintended effect: pushing its neighbors closer to the United States and Israel. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and others, cautious about actions that could upend regional stability, quietly signaled support for continued pressure on Tehran.

They have allowed American and Israeli aircraft to traverse their airspace. They have encouraged a more sustained campaign.

This is a significant shift.

For decades, Iran has sought to position itself as a regional power capable of intimidating its neighbors and reshaping the balance of power. Instead, its aggression has accelerated the very alignment it sought to prevent.

Another audience is watching closely: the Iranian people.

The regime has long projected strength, both internally and externally, but this war has exposed its vulnerabilities. Strikes deep within Iran, disruptions to critical infrastructure and visible failures in defense have undermined the image of control.

In some cases, the regime has resorted to extraordinary measures, such as urging citizens to form human chains around key facilities. It is a striking image: a government relying on its own people not out of loyalty but out of necessity.

That too is a shift.

None of this suggests that Iran is no longer a threat. It has demonstrated its ability to disrupt global commerce, particularly through mines and drones in the Strait of Hormuz.

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Something’s Gotta Go—But Maybe Not This (Judean Rose)

It’s an odd feeling to sit down and write a column about stepping back from writing this column.
Judean Rose has been part of my week for more than a decade. In some ways, writing this column has felt like a marriage: for better or worse, in sickness and in health, in war and more war. I’m not someone who walks away from commitments lightly. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. Even in weeks when alerts and sirens are going off, I write this column. Week in, week out.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s a commitment I’ve undertaken with joy. I love being part of the blogosphere.

It’s exciting to say what I think and have people read it—and respond. Especially when I’ve worked my kishkes off on a piece I’m not even sure is coherent.

Only the next day, with a bit of distance, do I read it again. Then I can step back and see it more clearly—sometimes wondering if I could have chosen a better word here or there, and sometimes surprised that it reads so well.

Because the day before, I’m often agonizing over every word: can I say this? Can I really say this?

I love when people come up to me at the supermarket or the doctor’s office to tell me a column resonated with them. Fan mail is nice, too—it keeps me writing and saying what I think.

But perhaps the best moment is when I’m introduced to someone for the first time, and I can see them trying to place my name. Then it clicks—and I’m suddenly getting more enthusiasm than I probably deserve.

(Not quite the Beatles—but I’ll take it.)

I’ve tried to make a difference. In some ways I’ve been disappointed. I wasn’t always able to persuade people, even when I knew I was right. I’m not all-powerful, but I tried. I kept writing, even when it broke my heart.

I wrote about the origins of antisemitism—how to spell it, and why that matters. I interviewed some famous people, and some ordinary Israelis who are anything but ordinary, living here despite the difficulties.

Perhaps, like me, they pinch themselves every morning as they discover the miracle anew:
“I am really here. I live here, in Israel, in the Holy Land!”

There was the ongoing heartache of October 7. I had to write about it—to bear witness—but doing so brought enormous pain. As a writer, my imagination works overtime. I imagine scenes no one should have to imagine at all. It still hurts.

The pain of October 7, I believe, brought on my cardiac arrest. I shared that experience with my readers. But even there, Judean Rose brought me comfort and happiness. Two faithful overseas readers arranged to have get-well flowers and a gift delivered to me. I can’t begin to describe how that touched my heart—and went a long way toward healing it.

Still, age is taking a toll. I get tired. I move slower. It’s a struggle to keep up with things that have been part of my life for what feels like eons. I find myself cutting back whenever I think, “Something’s gotta go.”

But I haven’t been able to give up this precious column—the readers who mean so much to me, and the honor of being a regular voice in this space. I have so much gratitude for all of it, and to Elder of Ziyon for giving me a home here.

Elder of Ziyon has a large following on X, which is one of the reasons I asked for the column. But he’s also a wonderful person who always defends me from haters and never censors me, something that has not always been the case in my writing career. I’ve felt very good about posting here, because EOZ is so respected, yet somehow remains humble and kind.

I can’t say I’m quitting for good. That would hurt too much. So rather than call it quits, I’m going to step back a bit. Maybe one less commitment is what I need, but giving up this column isn’t the right one to give up. Who knows?

I certainly won’t. Until I take a breather and see how it feels. Thank you to all my faithful readers who stick by me, even when they don’t agree with me. I see and appreciate you! You can’t possibly know how much.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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