From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
One eye and four blindfolds
So why has Albanese suddenly decided to act against the Islamic regime? The reason is almost certainly that he has begun to feel some heat over his government’s appalling behavior.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed diplomatic niceties to one side by chewing him out in public over the Rothman ban, while Israel has stripped some Australian diplomats of their visas. This may have concentrated Albanese’s mind on the fact that intelligence-sharing with Israel remains crucial to Australia’s national security.
In 2017, Israel alerted ASIO that there was a plot to blow up an Etihad Airways flight leaving Sydney. And this week, Sky News revealed that a tip-off from Israeli intelligence had assisted ASIO during its investigation, which unraveled the Iran connection to the terror attacks.
More significant still, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be taking a very dim view indeed of Australia’s anti-Israel antics. He has yet to meet Albanese.
And Australia’s defense minister, Richard Marles, was humiliated this week by American defense officials’ ambiguity over whether exchanges with his U.S. counterpart, Pete Hegseth, in Washington, D.C., were an actual “meeting” or a “happenstance encounter.”
Any idea that Albanese has now seen the light over Israel is vanishingly unlikely.
On Sky News Australia, Sharri Markson revealed that in 1998, a “starry-eyed” Albanese met Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, which had sponsored and funded his trip to Ramallah.
Two years later, she said, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinian Arabs were blowing Israelis to bits on buses and in pizza parlors, Albanese joined protests against Israel, during which American and Israeli flags were burnt.
In a speech to the Australian parliament while Israel was struggling to stop the slaughter of more than 1,300 of its citizens, Albanese condemned Israeli roadblocks and other restrictions on Palestinians as abuses of their civil rights.
Albanese has now admitted that he has been an advocate for the Palestinian cause his whole life and says he is angry at the anti-Israel protesters—only because their extremism is undermining that cause. In other words, in the great battle now underway between civilization and barbarism, Albanese has put Australia on the wrong side.
This matters not just to Israel but to the West. Australia is a member of the Five Eyes security alliance. The other four members are the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and New Zealand.
In its hostility to Israel—the West’s indispensable front line of defense in the Middle East—Australia has been puncturing that alliance, a breach that its belated burst of realism over Iran cannot repair.
Unfortunately, though, it’s not alone in this. The United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have also turned into foes of the Jewish state, demonizing it with lies aimed at its delegitimization and preparing to recognize the illusory “state of Palestine” which is being willed into existence purely as a means to Israel’s destruction.
Only America is holding fast to Israel’s security and defense. So the Five Eyes alliance has now turned into One Eye and Four Blindfolds.
Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand can no longer be trusted with the defense of the West. It’s now America and Israel fighting for a free world that no longer understands what that means.
Iran’s evil does not stop at its borders
These revelations should hardly have shocked Albanese. After all, Iran has long exported its brand of violent Islamism well beyond its borders. This has ramped up especially since 7 October 2023 and the start of the Gaza war.
In May, seven Iranian nationals were arrested across the UK, accused of plotting two separate terror attacks. A July report from the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee described Iran as a ‘wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable’ threat. Iranian-backed attacks have also been carried out in Spain, France and Argentina. Even 7 October itself had Iran’s fingerprints all over it. The Hamas militants who murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel were flush with Iranian cash and weapons.
It is, of course, hardly positive news that a foreign country is sponsoring anti-Semitic attacks in your own country. Yet you can’t help but think the career politician in Albanese must have breathed a sigh of relief. Flanked by Australia’s top spy Mike Burgess and foreign minister Penny Wong, Albanese was suddenly able to pose as a protector of Australian Jews. Even though he has been anything but in the recent past.
Indeed, Albanese cannot fully wash his hands of the crisis of anti-Semitism in Australia. Ever since 7 October, he has depicted Israel as essentially the sole perpetrator of every misfortune in Gaza. His Labor government has repeatedly demanded ceasefires which would have offered strategic advantages to Hamas. It even condemned Israel for its counter-attacks against Hezbollah – Iran’s most lethal and well-armed proxy. Albanese’s one-sided, unwavering criticism of Israel has cultivated a national hostility to the Jewish State. It is not hard to see how this has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish.
Anthony Albanese is right to stand up to the Iranian terror threat. But Australia’s Jewish community will expect far more from the prime minister before trust is restored. The arson attacks may have been ordered from abroad, but the broader climate of Jew hatred is largely homegrown.
The UN’s Blue Flag, Hamas’s Black Hand: A Case Study in Complicity
The UN’s Three-Part Mantra of Excuses
1 Humanitarian Necessity – UNRWA claims it is the “only game in town.” But humanitarian aid isn’t just bread and water, it has included cement, wiring, and infrastructure that repeatedly ends up in Hamas’s tunnels. The UN knows it, yet refuses to answer the obvious: where did all that concrete go? There is even little to no oversight or accounting regarding the projects all the cement, wires and infrastructure was slated for from the beginning. How many schools or health facilities were never developed because the supplies were designated to construct Hamas's underground world?
2 Institutional Separation – UNRWA insists its staff are “civilians.” Yet OIOS admits some were terrorists, and polls show the majority of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria support Hamas. The idea that UNRWA employees are immune from these sympathies is absurd. Teaching jihad in classrooms, wiring electricity from UNRWA buildings to Hamas tunnels, turning blind eyes to tunnel entrances hidden inside compounds, this is complicity, not neutrality.
3 Process Over Outcomes – When scandals erupt, the UN launches reviews, frameworks, reforms. Endless paper. But the system never changes, because the bureaucracy exists to protect itself, not reform itself. Reviews become fig leaves for corruption.
Donors: Suspend, Resume, Repeat
When Israel exposed the October 7 connection, donors briefly froze funding. Then, predictably, they resumed. The EU returned to business as usual. Only the U.S. codified its funding halt into law until at least March 2026. Donor governments know UNRWA is compromised, yet they cling to it out of habit and fear of logistical headaches.
What Honest Neutrality Would Look Like
True neutrality would demand:
- Full Transparency – Line-by-line staff records, affiliations, and vetting against terror lists, continuously audited.
- Independent Verification – If a statistic comes from Hamas ministries, it should be labeled “unverified,” not “UN-confirmed.”
- Operational Redesign – Break UNRWA’s monopoly. Fund private or independent alternatives like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (@GHFUpdates), which has proven aid can reach civilians without Hamas skimming off the top.
The Moral Bottom Line
Neutrality does not mean parroting terrorists. It does not mean rockets in schools, tunnels under headquarters, or staff participating in massacres. It does not mean reviewing the problem to death while feeding the same beast year after year.
Until the UN stops outsourcing truth to Hamas ministries and proves it can police its own payroll, Western governments must stop pretending this setup produces neutral information. It doesn’t.
It produces propaganda wrapped in a blue flag.
The only immediate solution, one that will save billions in taxpayer funds, is simple: Defund the United Nations!
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Israel Shows Some Diplomatic Spine
Israel is responding aggressively and appropriately to two recent public relations challenges, suggesting Jerusalem understands the gravity of its situation as well as the fact that it is in the right on both.
The first is the “famine” libel. Israel is asking the IPC, the multinational monitor, to retract its debunked report on Gaza City. According to Reuters, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is warning that “if a new report were not presented within two weeks, Israel would continue to challenge the assessment and would ask the IPC’s donors to halt their financial support.”
Good. Israel can no longer afford to simply be correct on the merits. If corrupt global agencies are going to insert themselves as partisans into this war then they’ll learn to take a (metaphorical) punch.
As a reminder, Israel first meticulously proved the report false based on the IPC’s own data, which suggests the agency is not merely incompetent but corrupt and compromised.
Indeed, it’s clear the report was released as a preemptive attack on Israel’s new operation in Gaza City. The IPC simply declared famine in the one place in Gaza that the IDF was looking to enter, which was also the one place in Gaza relatively untouched by the war. Still, it’s important to have the numbers on your side, and Israel did (all emphasis in the original):
“The report relied on only half of the data actually collected in July — five sub-samples covering 7,519 children, described on pages 49–50 of the FRC report, with a combined average of roughly 16% — just above the threshold.
“By contrast, a Nutrition Cluster presentation released on August 8 — a week before the August 15 cut-off date — reported the full July sample of 15,749 children. Those results showed unweighted and weighted GAM rates of 13.5% and 12.2%, respectively — both well below the famine threshold.”
So the data were clear: no famine. That the IPC chose to manipulate the data for political purposes suggests the agency has forfeited its legitimacy.
Andrew Fox:
How a Humanitarian Crisis Became a Fight for Influence
Our central finding was stark: Israel was effectively absent as a source in the media field covering Gaza, while Hamas became the default provider of information. I recently came across a study by the NCRI, a research center based at Rutgers University that examines disinformation, extremism, and media manipulation. Its report on famine coverage has now confirmed the same patterns.
Four things stand out.
First, Hamas-linked sources are treated as if they were neutral. Reports routinely cite the Gaza Health Ministry without noting that it is run by Hamas. Both our own research and NCRI’s analysis found the same result: in roughly 75–80% of coverage, the Hamas affiliation was left out.
Second, Hamas figures are often repeated without any attribution at all. Almost one in five reports simply quoted the numbers as if they were common knowledge. The Guardian was the worst offender, doing this in 43% of its coverage effectively treating Hamas propaganda as fact.
Third, the headlines tell their own story. NCRI found that they blamed Israel or the GHF for famine, but never once Hamas. That matters, because most readers don’t get beyond the headline. About 75% share stories without opening them. In NCRI’s experiment, such headlines cut attribution of violence to Hamas by 70%.
Finally, damaging rumours about GHF have been amplified far beyond Gaza. One striking case was the claim that its flour contained narcotics. The story was traced back to Hamas’s Gaza Media Office, but by then it had already been echoed in NGO briefings and sympathetic coverage abroad. A rumor repeated became the story.
Tom Fletcher from the UN also became a source of disinformation with a reach of millions. Several months ago, his post on X went viral, falsely claiming that 14,000 children would die in Gaza within two days. The claim was later retracted, but not before more than 2.5 million people had seen it. Coming from a senior UN official, it carried extra weight, making the damage impossible to undo. Later corrections were too little, too late to counter the impact of the original message.
What is happening in Gaza is more than a military conflict. It increasingly looks like a struggle for institutional survival: the UN seeking to retain control of aid flows, Hamas working to delegitimize alternatives, and GHF challenging a decades-old monopoly.
WSJ:
Israel: "We Need to Survive First. After that Comes Popularity"
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar interviewed by Elliot Kaufman
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar marvels at how governments in the UK, France, Canada and Australia "came to the conclusion they need to recognize a Palestinian state now. In the beginning, it was supposed to be under certain conditions" - if the Palestinians would make peace. Instead, they made war, and "all conditions were forgotten." The states plan to make their recognition official in September.
Many Europeans "cannot understand that the Palestinians - all the factions - their ideology is to eliminate the Jewish state. It's a nice term, 'two-state solution.' First of all, you have a solution. But when you ask, 'Do you want a terror state?'" it becomes a different conversation.
In Gaza, "the real aid situation has improved dramatically. The prices of basic products that had been very expensive fell during the past weeks. And this is because the quantities that enter Gaza, mainly by trucks, and also by airdrops, are huge." Israel has had to facilitate the increase, knowing it is "sustaining Hamas's war machine."
"Of course we are in a very tough diplomatic battle. We are a small nation. We are standing against huge propaganda." But "take into consideration that the current reality comes after a consistent two years of war. I want to hope it won't last with the same temperature on calmer days. We will finish this war."
"We will not risk real interests for a temporary period of quiet and better PR. I still recall how Israel had great PR after the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005." It didn't last. Hamas took over and Israel is still paying the price, in diplomacy and in lives.
"We need to survive first. After that, there comes popularity and how much we are able to convince others around the world."
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
‘Gaza’ As An Ideology
Forget being on the other side from this crew, politically. What is the effect on aspiring Democratic activists? If you are told to ban the Star of David from the Dyke March, you are made to understand that you will not be considered an ally of LGBT unless you first shed any sign of Jewishness.
If your climate-change priestess wears a keffiyeh and demands you menace a Jewish performer, then that’s what you’ll do. If your public-gardening co-op requires a pledge of anti-Zionism before you can water the flowers, well, can’t let the flowers die.
These are actual real-life cases, and as far as the Gaza ideologists are concerned, the sillier the better. The reason your astronomy TA at Columbia instructs you to think of Gaza when you gaze at the night stars is because you’re being trained to think of Gaza before you think.
So is everyone in the Democratic Party orbit really obsessed with Gaza? No. Whether that’s the good news or the bad news depends on the party’s commitment to asserting its own authority and keeping its own gates. If the progressive activist wing of the party succeeds in making “Gaza” a blood oath to get in the door, then it doesn’t matter if the individual members are passionate about it. They might be passionate about climate change or paid family leave, but if they can’t join those clubs without professing loyalty to Gaza, then Gaza becomes the most important issue by default.
This is also the reason behind one of the pro-Israel world’s great frustrations. Every few years, Hamas starts a new war. And each time, there is a whole new cast of useful idiots in the West that appear to have been born yesterday. Somehow, both traditional media and social media are filled with Hamas windup toys. I don’t mean the bots—I mean the people who might as well be bots. The talking points are the same; the mindless receptacles are different.
Where is this lemming farm? How is it that the enemies of the West always appear to be buying in bulk?
The answer has something to do with the DNC’s gatekeeping problem. Those who feel strongly about Gaza don’t want everyone else to care about Gaza nearly as much. They just want everyone to be required to say they care. They want pliancy, not passion. That’s how their numbers balloon. And it’s up to people like Ken Martin to stop the anti-Zionist inflation over which he is currently presiding.
The DNC Passed a Resolution Calling for ‘Unrestricted’ Aid to Gaza and a Two-State Solution. The Party’s Chairman Pulled It After Anti-Israel Dems Complained That It Didn’t Go Far Enough.
A Democratic National Committee meeting on Tuesday devolved into an anti-Israel slugfest, leading its chairman, Ken Martin, to pull a resolution many party members believed was not harsh enough on the Jewish state. Instead, Martin invited the anti-Israel members to join a committee to reevaluate the party’s position on Israel.
The Martin-backed resolution, which the DNC initially approved, called for "unrestricted" aid to Gaza and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, language that moderate Democrats have long used. An alternate resolution championed by the party’s anti-Israel wing went significantly further, calling for a full-scale arms embargo on Israel, the suspension of American military aid, and recognition of "Palestine as a country."
DNC members initially adopted the more moderate version in an uncounted voice vote, but Martin ultimately pulled both from consideration after the party’s anti-Israel members revolted. Semafor reporter Dave Weigel captured Martin during a private discussion "with the alternative Gaza resolution sponsors" before he canceled the vote.
"There’s a divide in our party on this issue," Politico quoted Martin as having said. "This is a moment that calls for shared dialogue, calls for shared advocacy."
After abandoning his own moderate proposal, Martin pledged to assemble a DNC committee "comprised of stakeholders on all sides of this" that will "continue to have the conversation, to work through this, and bring solutions back to our party."
The tumult during the meeting reflects the Democratic Party’s growing divide on Israel in the nearly two years since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against the Jewish state. The terrorist organization's massacres ignited a flurry of violent protests, primarily involving the party’s progressive base. Anti-Israel Democrats formed an "uncommitted" delegation during the 2024 election, protesting the party’s convention over its failure to grant a speaking slot to a Georgia state representative with a history of pro-Hamas rhetoric.
Allison Minnerly, the 26-year-old DNC member who spearheaded the arms embargo resolution, told the Nation in an interview published Tuesday that her efforts represent the will of the Democratic Party.
From Ian:
Clifford D. May:
The U.N.’s long war against Israel
Given this history, I thought the U.N.’s demonization of Israel had gone as far as it could go.
I was wrong.
Last week, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) released a “report” declaring “with reasonable evidence” that famine now exists in parts of Gaza. It goes without saying – actually it’s being incessantly repeated – that Israelis are to blame.
To make these claims, the IPC manipulated its methodology, adjusted its criteria, and reinterpreted the legal definition of genocide utilizing dubious data from the Gaza Health Ministry – i.e., Hamas – and discarding data provided by Israel.
What’s more, one of the authors of the report, Andrew Seal, had already begun accusing Israel of genocide on the second day of the October 2023 counterattacks against Hamas.
No one denies that, amid a war that has dragged on for almost two years, Gazans are suffering terrible hardships, including food insecurity and, in some cases, malnutrition.
But the incontrovertible facts are these: Hamas started this war and refuses to end it; Hamas takes no responsibility for the people it has ruled and is determined to continue to rule; Hamas refuses to release hostages abducted from Israel and whom it is torturing – even though doing so would almost certainly lead to a ceasefire.
One more fact: Since May, more than 10,000 aid trucks have entered Gaza, with eight out of ten bringing food. This has resulted in wider availability of essential foods at reduced prices in Gaza markets.
The U.N. is making distribution of this aid more difficult by demanding that UNRWA be in charge despite UNRWA letting Hamas take a cut both to feed its leaders in the tunnels and resell for cash to pay its troops on the streets above.
The UN adamantly refuses to work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American/Israeli project delivering free food directly to Gazans with Hamas excluded.
Much of the media have been helping weaponize public opinion against Israel. Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova revealed in The Free Press this month that even before the IPC designation, at least a dozen “viral images of starvation” published by The New York Times, NPR, CNN, and other major news outlets were in fact photos of children with “significant health problems” such as cerebral palsy – not famine victims.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee observed on X: “Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas. Meanwhile UN food sits rotting in sun. The UN should declare itself corrupt & incompetent.”
Which raises a question: Why are American taxpayers still spending roughly $13 billion a year on the most globalist of institutions which for half a century has been waging a disinformation war – including bogus charges of racism, apartheid, genocide, and intentional starvation – against the only democracy in the Middle East which also is America’s most reliable ally in the world?
Memo to President Trump: Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Author of UN-Backed Gaza Famine Report Peddled Anti-Semitic Tropes, Conspiracy Theories, and Terrorist Apologia
An author of a U.N.-backed report that accused Israel of creating "famine" in Gaza is a longtime anti-Israel radical who has defended Hamas, claimed Jewish politicians have a "conflict of interest" on Middle Eastern issues, and supported boycotts targeting the Jewish state.
Andrew Seal, who serves on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) famine review committee and helped write the IPC’s highly publicized report published earlier this month, has a history of incendiary rhetoric that includes comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and accusing the Jewish state of having killed its own people on Oct. 7, 2023.
The report, which declared the situation in Gaza a "famine" and called for an immediate Israeli "ceasefire," said the "time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading."
Numerous mainstream media outlets picked up the IPC’s claims without disclosing Seal’s history of attacking Israel and defending Hamas terrorists or noting the possibility that his beliefs could have influenced the IPC report. Newspapers and networks like the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and ABC News relied on the IPC report to claim Israeli policies have led to mass starvation, with the Times stating that "months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel on the territory" have caused a famine "across most of Gaza."
Just one month after the Oct. 7 massacres, Seal defended a statement from Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad in which the terrorist promised to repeat the attacks "again and again." Seal said he believed Hamad’s comments were reasonable because Israel was "currently committing genocide."
"You can’t ignore the fact that one side is currently committing genocide and the other isn’t," Seal wrote. "And, do you realistically expect a political leader of occupied & oppressed people to say they will stop fighting in absence of an alternative? Let’s be real."
In another post on X, Seal claimed there was "no evidence" Hamas committed sexual violence against Israeli women, describing footage of the Oct. 7 attacks as "propaganda."
Andrew Fox:
When hospitals become battlefields
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior IDF commanders have already suggested that something went wrong. The IDF has promised to ‘examine several gaps’ in the strike, including who authorised it. Netanyahu was far more emphatic. He said Israel ‘deeply regrets the tragic mishap’ that led to the strike, and promised a ‘thorough investigation’. The IDF owes Israelis, Palestinians and the international community a clear and transparent explanation.
What happened at the Nasser Hospital encapsulates the tragic reality of the Gaza war. It also highlights the sadistic logic used by Hamas to protract the war at all costs. It has embedded fighters, weapons and command centres in hospitals, schools and mosques. In doing so, it gains a cruel advantage: if Israel refrains from striking, Hamas benefits militarily. But if Israel does strike, Hamas benefits politically, as images of civilian casualties dominate headlines worldwide. Israel, meanwhile, is forced to make decisions in an environment where the normal distinctions between civilian and military sites can be impossible to discern. In such circumstances, mistakes are inevitable. Yet each one becomes a source of global outrage, with Israel pinned as the callous perpetrator of an alleged war crime, long before the facts are established.
The Nasser Hospital strike is, in many ways, a distillation of the insoluble moral and strategic problems of the war in Gaza. It shows how boundaries between civilian and combatant are deliberately erased, how international law is abused for the benefit of terrorists, and how Israel is condemned for fighting an enemy that hides behind the sick and wounded.
The world should demand answers about Monday’s strike – but it should also demand accountability from those who have deliberately turned hospitals into battlefields. Of course, that would mean admitting that this war is far more complex than the standard narrative allows.
When hospitals become battlefields: The strain on Israeli soldiers
International law does not demand perfect outcomes in war. It demands distinction, proportionality and feasible precautions. The Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (Art. 57) states that attackers must take “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian harm—but feasible means “that which is practicable or practically possible, taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time.” Scholars like Yoram Dinstein emphasize that commanders are not required to sacrifice their soldiers’ lives for marginal reductions in collateral damage.
Comparable practices exist elsewhere: “U.S. Joint Publication 3-60” on targeting notes that collateral damage estimation must always be balanced against “force protection and mission accomplishment.” NATO’s doctrine on urban operations similarly acknowledges that standoff firepower may be necessary in asymmetric conflicts where insurgents exploit civilian structures.
Here, the target was a legitimate military objective; at least seven of the dead were confirmed combatants, including participants in Oct. 7; and feasible alternatives that posed less risk to civilians would have required unacceptable risks to IDF soldiers.
No ethical system requires troops to walk into the jaws of a tunnel war to shave down collateral damage that the enemy itself engineered. When Hamas embeds cameras, launchers and fighters in and around medical centers, it is Hamas that erases the line between combatant and civilian.
The tragedy at Nasser Hospital was not born of reckless IDF firepower but of Hamas’s calculated tactic of using civilian cover to wage war. The IDF is left balancing the impossible: protect its soldiers, fulfill its ethical code and fight an enemy that thrives on turning hospitals and homes into battlefields.
Seven of the dead were not innocents. They were armed actors in a brutal conflict, some with blood from Oct. 7 already on their hands. That does not erase the grief of the other lives lost, though it does shift the moral calculus.
The hard truth of Khan Yunis is this: There is no surgical way to fight an enemy that tunnels beneath your feet and hides behind patients’ walls. The burden on IDF soldiers is immense, and the responsibility for civilian casualties rests first and foremost with those who made hospitals into fortresses.
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin:
Yes, the whole world is wrong about Israel
We’ve been here before, observing other examples of when journalistic groupthink in the mainstream media creates false narratives.
In September 2000, at the start of the Second Intifada—the Palestinian Arab terrorist war of attrition that answered Israeli and American offers of statehood—another atrocity story became emblematic of how false reporting can influence world opinion. The television channel France 2 broadcast edited footage claiming to show that a 12-year-old boy, Mohammed al-Durrah, was shot dead by Israeli forces while clinging to his father. The claim set off a global tsunami of anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations, as well as providing an alleged justification for more acts of murderous Palestinian terrorism.
Yet, as subsequent investigations showed and documented in Richard Landes’ 2022 book, Can The Whole World Be Wrong?, the incident was staged by the Palestinians in a classic “Pallywood” information operation that made it clear the allegation was a hoax. Nevertheless, the mainstream media acted as stenographers for Israel’s foes in much the same way they now do for Hamas’s claims about civilian casualty statistics, starvation and other supposed Israeli misconduct.
Nor is this mentality limited to anti-Israel media bias. Journalistic groupthink, motivated by partisanship or ideology, can have the same impact on other issues.
It happened when some of these same outlets that now defame Israel about Gaza were insisting in 2017 and 2018 that there was credible evidence that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, though the American public now knows that the charge was a lie debunked by the FBI even before the smear was made public. No one at the Times or The Washington Post has subsequently given back the Pulitzer Prizes they got for those misleading, if not downright erroneous, stories. But in the first years of Trump’s first term, even those who were inclined to support him figured there had to be some truth to the claims if so many journalists all agreed they were true.
The current campaign of disinformation is just as dishonest. But when you consider that its impact is to empower antisemites on both the left and the far right, and to create an atmosphere in which Jews are increasingly at risk, the consequences are not merely an unfairly hobbled administration but a wave of violent Jew-hatred.
Battling untruths is difficult for those who are engaged in the business of public discourse and journalism. How much more challenging is it for ordinary people and college students to stand up against the tide of invective and to defend the justice of a war to eradicate the terrorists for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians?
It may take more courage than many individuals possess to correctly identify the corporate media’s conventional wisdom about Israel as blood libels that have led to the mainstreaming of antisemitism. Nevertheless, we must remind ourselves and others that just because what seems like the whole world is ready to buy into a lie, that doesn’t make falsehoods true. And just because questioning conventional wisdom that emanates from Hamas propaganda is being labeled as no different from “Holocaust denial” by journalists who pose as truth-tellers, that shouldn’t deter us from pointing out that their narratives are at odds with facts about the war in Gaza.
Though you wouldn’t know it if all you read is the Times and similar outlets, the world is lying about Israel—and those who defend it are not.
Seth Mandel:
Iranian Terror in Australia Clarifies the Stakes
Late last night (in DC time, anyway), Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called a rather remarkable press conference. Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, had been digging into a spate of anti-Semitic attacks since Oct. 7, 2023. Albanese announced that the agency “has gathered enough credible intelligence to reach a deeply disturbing conclusion—that the Iranian Government directed at least two of these attacks,” including one on a synagogue in Melbourne.
Albanese continued:
“ASIO assesses it is likely Iran directed further attacks as well. These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil. … A short time ago we informed the Iranian Ambassador to Australia that he would be expelled. We have suspended operations at our embassy in Tehran, and all our diplomats are now safe in a third country. I can also announce the Government will legislate to list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, as a terrorist organization.”
It is no secret that Albanese has received much deserved scorn lately for his handling of Australia’s relations with Israel and its role in the current conflict. The premier at first signaled that he would proceed with caution on the matter of whether to recognize a Palestinian state. But he threw that caution to the wind once all his friends started joining that particular club.
The pleas of Australia’s Jews fell on deaf ears. Albanese seemed suddenly unconcerned with anti-Semitism and the government’s responsibility to confront it. Upon Israel’s objections to this indifference, Albanese’s government got prickly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced Albanese as weak-willed, and Albanese’s home affairs minister shot back that Israel measures strength “by how many people you can blow up.”
The row left Australia’s Jewish community even more on-edge. Yet it clearly left the government looking for a way to prove itself tougher in the face of terror and foreign manipulation. The discovery of Iran’s directing attacks on the Australian homeland was just such a chance. And Albanese didn’t fumble it.
Indeed, moving to outlaw the IRGC is a substantial-enough response. One can argue that it should have already been done, but here we are. As for the diplomatic penalties levied on the Islamic Republic, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who joined Albanese at the presser, explained that this was “the first time in the post-war period that Australia has expelled an ambassador.”
Might, dare one hope, this stiffened Australian spine influence other Western leaders the way those leaders’ weakness influenced Australia? At the risk of courting disappointment, it’s worth considering what France in particular can learn from this series of events.
Iran is waging a war on the West - Australian antisemitism is the latest front
On July 31, the US, UK, Albania, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden issued a joint statement condemning growing attempts by Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass journalists, dissidents, Jewish citizens, and current and former officials.
The US Justice Department alleged in November that IRGC asset Farhad Shakeri had used the criminal associations he developed in prison to plan the murder of US President Donald Trump and Iranian-American human rights activist Masih Alinejad.
Shakeri was also tasked by the IRGC with the surveillance and murder of two Jewish businesspeople and was asked to plan a mass shooting attack on Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka.
Brooklyn resident Carlisle Rivera and Staten Island resident Jonathon Loadholt were contracted by Shakeri to stalk and murder Alinejad.
Iran has repeatedly targeted Alinejad, including an alleged 2022 attempt in which an Eastern European crime syndicate was contracted to murder her.
The US Justice Department said in March that Georgian citizen Polad Omarov and Iranian citizen Rafat Amirov were paid $500,000 for the assassination and that they subcontracted fellow criminal organization member Khalid Mehdiyev to commit the deed. Mehdiyev was arrested before the attack due to a traffic violation.
Last May, the Swedish Security Service alleged that the Islamic Republic had been using criminal networks in the country to target its enemies. This included dissidents from the Iranian diaspora, Israelis, and Jews.
“Iran has earlier carried out acts of violence in other European countries to silence criticism and what it regards as threats to its regime,” it said in a statement.
“In order to carry out these security-threatening activities, the Iranian regime has sometimes made use of criminal networks,” it added.
One such incident in Europe may have been the attempted assassination of Spanish Vox party founder Alejo Vidal-Quadras Roca in November 2023, Reuters reported.
Eight people were charged in July for trying to kill Vidal-Quadras. Unknown individuals committed the assault on behalf of a criminal organization seeking revenge for the politician’s support of Iranian opposition groups.
Further, the UK Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament warned in July that Iran had made 15 attempts to kill or abduct Jewish citizens and residents in the country since 2022.
In a threat assessment given by the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London in October 2024, MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum said that the Islamic Republic was making extensive use of criminals, “from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks,” to target British citizens and residents. McCallum said security forces had foiled 20 Iranian-backed plots.
Case in point, in May, five men were arrested by London’s Metropolitan Police on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. Four of them were Iranian nationals. Three more Iranian citizens were arrested in a counterterrorism operation the day after. The Telegraph reported that a plot had been set against the Israeli embassy in the UK.
Iran has been using criminal elements as proxies and directing attacks in other countries for years, with Australia becoming only the latest example of this.
ASIO said that it was likely that other attacks were conducted at Iran’s behest, hinting that it remains to be seen how many of the country’s antisemitic attacks were at the Islamic Regime’s orders.
The rise in antisemitic incidents across the world raises the question of how many other countries may have been victims of Iranian-backed plots.
Whether the West wishes to recognize this or not, Iran is already at war with it, using its criminal proxies to strike within sovereign borders and then cover itself in thinly veiled deniability.
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
We are not being told the truth about Gaza
The truth – as we have come to expect on everything Israel-related – is far more complicated. What the IDF database actually says is that 8,900 – around one in six – of the dead in Gaza are ‘named fighters’ from ‘Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’. There will be many other dead, it says, who are either fighters who could not be identified or fighters from other Islamist groups. Indeed, the purple-prose ‘exposé’ of the IDF’s supposed genocidal ruthlessness undercut its own claims by acknowledging that the number of fighters killed is ‘likely higher’ than 8,900 since the IDF’s database ‘does not include… operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name [or] Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ’.
Right. So it’s not true that only one in six of the dead are militants. That was a reckless and sinister misrepresentation of the facts. It’s even feasible that the number of fighters who could not be identified is higher than the number who could be: war, after all, is a messy business where establishing facts is hard. And yet the post-truth insistence that 83 per cent of the dead are civilians spread like a fire in influencer circles. ‘Barbarians’, they cried. ‘Demons’, even. The small print, the truth, was incinerated in the rush to damn Israel as genocidal.
It seems the butchery of truth is a small price to pay for that most jealously coveted goal of the West’s cultural establishment: to find Israel guilty of genocide. It’s not only numbers they’ll twist – it’s language, too. Recall when the Irish government said the International Court of Justice should broaden its definition of genocide in order that Israel might be put in the dock for its ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza. Can’t find Israel guilty of genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide. Classic Orwellianism. One human-rights expert reminds us dimwits that genocide is ‘a crime that can be committed without a single person dying’. So whether Israel had killed 60,000 people or none, it could still be deemed a genocidal state. This is a species of madness.
Also last week, the IPC – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification group linked to the UN – ruled there is famine in Gaza. No one doubts there’s huge suffering in Gaza, including deathly hunger. And yet some scepticism is warranted here, too. Israel says the IPC applied a lower ‘famine threshold’ to Gaza than it does for other countries. The IPC report also seems highly politicised: one of its contributors is an expert on international nutrition who has a track record of stinging commentary on Israel, including describing its founding in 1948 as being built on ‘the destruction of the state of Palestine by Jewish insurgents’. Could we not have some neutral analysis for once, please?
The screws are truly being turned on Israel. A sick union of anti-Semitic militants and fashionably Israelophobic Westerners has devoted itself to damning the Jewish nation as the wickedest nation. Nothing better captures the crisis of civilisation than this sinister pincer movement, this double siege of Israel by the neo-fascists on its borders and their gurning useful idiots in the cultural citadels of the West. Israel should win in Gaza City. But that other flank, the one overrun by Westerners so suspicious of our civilisation that they find greater common cause with its enemies – that will be a harder fight. And not just for Israel – for all of us.
The numbers just don’t support the UN-backed Gaza famine report
However, using an unjustifiably low threshold was only part of the problem. The much bigger issue was that the IPC discarded half of the available data and misrepresented what the remainder actually showed. The key claim for declaring famine was that child malnutrition had surged from around 10 per cent in early July to 16 per cent later in the month, supposedly crossing the famine line. But this “trend” can’t be backed up by the data.
In reality, the IPC based its conclusion on only half of the July sample, covering about 7,500 children, which gave an average of roughly 16 per cent. The full dataset of more than 15,000 children showed rates closer to 12 per cent – well below the famine threshold. Even within the partial sample, the claim of a dramatic upward trend did not hold: the numbers remained flat across the month with no increase at all. By failing to use the complete data, the IPC created the illusion of both a breach and a surge that never occurred.
The same pattern played out with mortality, the second key pillar of a famine declaration. The IPC analysis quietly admitted that reported deaths were below the famine threshold, but then suggested that many deaths might not have been counted. What they did not spell out is just how enormous the gap really was.
For Gaza City, the famine line would have meant close to 200 deaths every single day from hunger or related disease. The actual reported figure was about six deaths per day across the entire Strip – nowhere near the threshold. Even if every one of those deaths had been in Gaza City and directly caused by malnutrition, the rate would still have been more than 30 times lower than the famine threshold.
Of course, in any war zone some deaths may go unreported. But to claim that actual mortality was 30 times higher than the numbers on record is an extraordinary leap. And as the late Carl Sagan famously said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The IPC did not provide such evidence. Instead, it relied on speculation and on a few highly controversial studies that were far from sufficient to support claims of hundreds of unreported starvation-related deaths per day. Yet it was precisely this assumption that underpinned the famine declaration.
In addition, the report downplayed or ignored positive signs of recovery, such as increased aid deliveries, falling food prices, and expanded humanitarian access. Observers have also noted that at least one of its authors has a record of anti‑Israel bias.
Taken together, these issues raise serious questions not only about the technical rigour of the analysis, but also about its objectivity and neutrality. In short, the evidence presented by the IPC did not even come close to justifying the use of a famine designation. By lowering the bar and relying on speculation, the report turned a situation of undeniable hardship into a claim of catastrophic collapse that the data simply did not support.
Front-Page NY Times Falsehood Charges “Most” Food Blocked from Gaza
According to the first sentence on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times, Israel “has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip” during the war with Hamas.
The damning charge is repeated in a second Times story, published around the same time, which tells readers that “Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the enclave since the war began nearly two years ago,” on Oct. 7.
The statements, a clear message to readers that Israel has allowed only a trickle of food into Gaza, are categorical, sweeping, and definitive.
They are also false.
On average, thousands of tons of food aid per day have entered the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack. Even with the temporary blockage of most aid between March and May 2025, which contributed to concerning food insecurity (and a spate of dishonest reporting), the rate of food aid into Gaza since Oct 7 massacre has exceeded the pre-war rate.
OCHA’s dashboard shows an average of 2,285 trucks of food per day entered the Gaza Strip in 2023 before the war.
A data portal by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documents the entry of goods both before and after the start of the war. From January through September 2023, an average of 2,285 truckloads of food per month entered the Strip, according OCHA. With an estimate of about 15 tons of food per truck, that amounts to 1,142 tons per day of food entering Gaza prior to the war.
OCHA’s dashboard shows 17,665 truckloads of food between Oct. 23, 2023 and May 7, 2024.
The same portal describes 17,665 truckloads of food aid entering between Oct. 21, 2023 and May 7, 2024, the last date for which OCHA has complete data. That comes to about 1,332 tons per day.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Looting Jewish History
Every story about Israeli archaeology buries the lede, if you’ll excuse the pun.
The latest is an ongoing debate over how to protect ancient historical artifacts from Palestinian marauders in Judea and Samaria. One proposal would grant the Israel Antiquities Authority, a civil administration agency, oversight with regard to archaeological digs beyond the “green line,” the temporary 1949 armistice line treated as a de facto border. At present, the IAA only has authority over sites inside Israel proper, and the military oversees the rest.
A Times of Israel story about it, after going through the requisite motions of he-said-she-said finger-pointing, extracts from this contested earth the following:
“A separate survey by a group of Palestinian archaeologists in 2024 found evidence of looting at 309 of 440 West Bank sites, according to Salah Al-Houdalieh, an archaeology professor at al-Quds University.”
That’s the most important fact to know about the controversy: The Palestinians admit that Palestinians are regularly looting and destroying artifacts at most of the archaeological sites in the West Bank.
What’s the explanation for the ISIS-like obsession with destroying evidence of history? Well, the real reason is because the modern Arab-Palestinian fable of Jewish colonialism doesn’t withstand the inspection of a single grain of sand. But the Palestinians have their own ready explanation for why they are destroying the historical record of the ancient Jewish land on which they live. Here is the aforementioned Palestinian archaeologist al-Houdalieh, writing in January:
“Looting has always been an issue, but the recent escalation of hostilities by Israel against Palestinians has led to an increase in antiquities looting, as tens of thousands of unemployed people struggle to meet their most basic needs.”
The Palestinians, the academic claims, have been forced to become tomb raiders because the areas under Palestinian governance have no jobs.
This deflection is risible, but we should instead focus on the fact that there is no disagreement on whether Arab Palestinians are actively destroying the history of the world. They do not deny it.
Largest dam in ancient Israel uncovered in the City of David
A monumental dam excavated in the Siloam Pool in the City of David National Park has now been dated in a joint study by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Weizmann Institute of Science to the reign of the kings of Judah, Joash or Amaziah. Its construction may have been a creative solution to the climate crisis, about 2,800 years ago, according to the researchers. The research, published Monday in the prestigious scientific journal PNAS, will be presented at the upcoming “City of David Studies” conference in early September.
The massive wall uncovered in excavations of the Siloam Pool in the City of David National Park was built around 805-795 BCE, during the reigns of Kings Joash or Amaziah of Judah. The discovery of the dam was made by the excavation directors Dr. Nahshon Szanton, Itamar Berko, and Dr. Filip Vukosavović on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
“This is the largest dam ever discovered in Israel and the earliest one ever found in Jerusalem. Its dimensions are remarkable: about 12 meters high, over 8 meters wide, and the uncovered length reaches 21 meters - continuing beyond the limits of the current excavation," the directors stated. "The dam was designed to collect waters from the Gihon Spring as well as floodwaters flowing down the main valley of ancient Jerusalem (the historical Tyropoeon Valley) to the Kidron Stream, providing a dual solution for both water shortages and flash floods.”
“Thanks to highly precise scientific dating, this is the first time it is possible to point with certainty to a structure that formed the basis for the construction of the Siloam Pool, which until now we knew only from the Bible and historical sources,” adds Itamar Berko.
Dr. Johanna Regev and Prof. Elisabetta Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute of Science, who employed advanced micro-archaeological methods and extremely high-precision radiocarbon dating, explained: “Short-lived twigs and branches embedded in the dam’s construction mortar provided a clear date at the end of the 9th century BCE, with extraordinary resolution of only about 10 years - a rare achievement when dating ancient finds. To complete the climatic reconstruction, we integrated this dating with existing climate data from Dead Sea cores, from Soreq Cave, and from solar activity records influencing the formation of certain chemical elements. All the data pointed to a period of low rainfall in the Land of Israel, interspersed with short and intense storms that could cause flooding. It follows that the establishment of such large-scale water systems was a direct response to climate change and arid conditions that included flash floods.”
The newly uncovered structure joins two other water systems from the same period discovered in the City of David: an imposing tower that dammed the Gihon Spring, and a water system that gathered water from the Gihon, directed through a channel into the Siloam Pool, where it was joined by floodwaters blocked by the dam.
Seth Mandel:
The Dancing Hamasniks
In a case like Nativ’s, there isn’t much room for interpretation. The university policy prohibits discrimination on the basis of, for example, “national origin.” This is why the rampant anti-Zionism across academia is such a legal problem: The claim that someone can be “anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic” becomes irrelevant. Anti-Israel discrimination is national origin discrimination. The rest is noise.
But the Nativ case also shows why the distinction between anti-Israel prejudice and anti-Semitism is so hard to make. Ask yourself the following question: If Yael Nativ had been an Arab Israeli—which the university and activist worlds increasingly and imprecisely call Palestinian—would she have received the same note? To ask the question is to answer it.
So the problem, very clearly, is not that Nativ is from Israel. It’s that she’s a Jew from Israel.
Interestingly, in her original Haaretz op-ed Nativ made the following observation about her students:
“The diligent students read, listened attentively and did everything they were asked to do, except for one thing — speaking and engaging in classroom discussions. They were silent. A lot. Even when I explicitly asked them to speak or asked a specific question, they reacted with great discomfort.”
So Nativ asked a colleague what the Berkeley students were so afraid of. The colleague responded: “That they won’t say the right thing, that they won’t give the exact answer. That they’ll offend you or somebody in the class, that they’ll be subjected to online shaming or will be canceled on social media. They prefer to stay silent and get through the lesson that way.”
I’m skeptical that’s the full explanation. In case after case, students have been unafraid to insult the Israelis in their midst so long as their professor shared their prejudices. (In plenty of cases it was a professor who initiated an anti-Israel pile-on during class.) The students in Nativ’s class weren’t afraid to offend a Jew or an Israeli; they were fearful of speaking their mind because—at least in some cases, we can presume—all they had to say consisted of ad hominem accusations and personal insults.
The truth is, they had nothing worth saying, so they (somewhat miraculously) managed to say nothing. That may have seemed troubling to a visiting professor but unfortunately, in academia, it’s fast becoming the best-case scenario.
From Ian:
In Gaza, they film; in Sudan, they die: The politics of humanitarianism
The UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has published a report claiming “mass famine” in Gaza. The announcement made instant headlines worldwide. But behind the drama was a quiet, extraordinary shift in methodology. Instead of the accepted global standards for measuring malnutrition, the IPC downgraded its criteria, relying on mid-arm circumference instead of weight-to-height and lowering the threshold for acute malnutrition from 30% to just 15%.
These drastic changes appeared only in a footnote. However, the global media treat them as hard facts, blasting headlines that Israel is responsible for “starving Gaza.” Amnesty International has gone even further, accusing Israel of running a “deliberate starvation project.”
The real question is not about the numbers themselves but about perspective. Why does Gaza dominate the global stage while large-scale famines – such as the one unfolding right now in Sudan – barely register? The answer: political humanitarianism.
According to that very same IPC report, nearly 24 million Sudanese face food insecurity. Over eight million are in emergency conditions, and tens of thousands are already in famine. Unlike the disputed Gaza numbers, these are facts that no one contests. Yet, Sudan earns almost no front-page coverage, no mass demonstrations in Western capitals, and no urgent debates in the UN.
Why? Because Hamas has perfected the art of weaponizing human suffering. It blocks aid, manipulates data, and circulates shocking images, all to increase international pressure on Israel. Western media, predisposed to highlight Israel’s faults, plays along.
Sudan’s generals, by contrast, are not running a global PR campaign. There are no glossy NGO videos, no Hollywood stars hugging starving children, no UN resolutions on endless repeat. Most of all, there is no link to Israel or the Jews. The result: Mass death in Sudan remains invisible.
Sanders’s criticism of Israel helps its enemies
Every poll in the United States and Europe reflects a steep rise in antisemitism, nationally and globally. Antisemitism—the oldest hatred—has been around for millennia. It is currently being fueled by the rise of Western progressivism, Arab petrol-dollars and an anti-white ideology that lumps Jews as white oppressors of Palestinians.
The distorted treatment of Israel on the world stage can be exemplified by a recent TV interview between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and CNN news anchor Dana Bash. Sanders, echoing Hamas propaganda, blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not the terrorists for the situation in the Gaza Strip. Of course, Sanders showed no empathy for the remaining Israeli hostages being starved in Hamas’s tunnels. Nor did he show much compassion for Israel, which experienced the trauma of Oct. 7 and the Hamas-led massacre that included decapitating babies, raping and murdering women, and killing children in front of their parents; crimes against Jews that haven’t been seen since the Holocaust.
Sanders accused Netanyahu and Israel of “going to war against the entire Palestinian people” and being responsible for “some 60,000 who are dead, most of whom are women and children and the elderly.”
The senator has accepted the unsubstantiated figures that Hamas has provided, even though Hamas’s casualty figures do not differentiate between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters, the civilians they use as human shields, and Gazans executed for opposing Hamas or stealing food.
Asked if Hamas has any culpability, the Jewish senator’s response was no. Instead, he told Bash that “on top of all that human destruction … what Netanyahu does is impose a blockade preventing food to come in, and people are starving to death.”
Sanders’s assertion that Netanyahu is starving Palestinians in Gaza is a despicable lie. Hundreds of trucks filled with humanitarian aid at the Kerem Shalom border crossing have been turned over for distribution to the Gazans. Yet the United Nations, which is doing Hamas’s bidding, has done nothing but condemn Israel. Moreover, Israel has allowed food packages to be air-dropped into Gaza in coordination with the United States. Sanders should know all of this, but it appears he has chosen to ignore it for political reasons.
Bassam Tawil:
Qatar's Muslim Scholars: Nothing More Important Than Killing Israelis
As far as Qatar's Muslim scholars are concerned... the war in the Gaza Strip did not start on the day Hamas launched its invasion of Israel. Rather, the war began the moment Israel fired back, and the only victims are the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, not those who were murdered, raped, beheaded and burned alive on October 7.
Several Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain have added Qatar's IUMS to their terrorism blacklists, saying it used "Islamic rhetoric as a cover to facilitate terrorist activities."
Needless to say, the scholars have not called on Hamas to release the Israeli hostages and accept a ceasefire that would end the war and the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Instead, the conference has unleashed scathing criticism of Israel for daring to defend itself against Hamas's terrorism.
For the Muslim scholars, boycotting and isolating Israel is more important than halting the death and destruction in the Gaza Strip. Their interpretation of Sharia laws and international humanitarian principles suggests that it is fine to sacrifice as many Palestinians as necessary for the sake of murdering Jews and destroying Israel.
The IUMS's position does not come as a surprise. Instead of urging Muslims to denounce terrorism and renounce violence, the organization, earlier this year, issued a fatwa (Islamic ruling) in which it called on all Muslims to wage Jihad (holy war) against Israel. The scholars want to see Muslims commit more massacres against Jews.
Once again, Qatar and Turkey have proven that their top priority is to promote the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates as part of the Islamists' Jihad to destroy Israel.... It is time for the Trump administration to call out Qatar and Turkey for their ongoing support for Hamas. It is also time for the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Once again, Qatar and Turkey have proven that their top priority is to promote the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates as part of the Islamists' Jihad to destroy Israel.... It is time for the Trump administration to call out Qatar and Turkey for their ongoing support for Hamas. It is also time for the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
From Ian:
Arnold Roth:
Trump must demand Jordan surrender the celeb jihadist who murdered my American child
A thunderous explosion stunned Israel’s capital Aug. 9, 2001, destroying a crowded Sbarro pizzeria.
Seven of the 16 murdered in the Jerusalem blast were children. One was my daughter Malki, 15, killed as she waited in line to order lunch.
The United States has failed for more than a decade to enforce the extradition of the bragging jihadist who faces trial in Washington for what she calls “my operation.”
Ahlam Tamimi, a native Jordanian, walked free from an Israeli prison as part of a 2011 deal the Jewish state was extorted to do with Hamas. She has since lived a life of celebrity in Jordan.
But President Trump can bring justice to a murdered American.
Consider whom Jordan harbors.
Tamimi, then a journalism student, part-time TV newsreader and at 21 the first woman ever admitted to Hamas’ terrorist ranks, carefully selected the fast-food outlet.
She boasted in a viral interview she targeted the pizzeria because of the crowds of Jewish children inside and the proximity of a Jewish religious school.
Tamimi’s Hamas handlers furnished her with a human bomb — a young, radicalized Islamist lugging a guitar case packed with explosives and flesh-ripping nails.
She brought him to the entrance of the crowded Sbarro, then fled to safety as he detonated, ending his own life and many others.
Confessing to all charges in an Israeli court, she was convicted and sentenced to 16 life terms with a judicial recommendation that she never be released in any future deal.
The judges were ignored. Israel freed 1,027 convicted terrorists including Tamimi in 2011 to get the release of Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, held hostage by Hamas for five years.
Tamimi’s arrival at Amman’s airport was a riotous celebration.
Settling back in Jordan, Tamimi’s celebrity soared along with her influence.
She hosted a weekly made-in-Jordan talk show on Al-Quds TV for five years, promoting terrorism. Her standing as an advocate for ideological murder earned her wide support across the Arab world.
Few Americans knew since mainstream US news channels didn’t report it.
Jake Wallis Simons:
It’s time for the whole truth on the UN’s declaration of famine in Gaza
As I write, Israeli troops are mobilising to conquer Gaza City. In response, the United Nations has declared that the Strip has succumbed to famine, a claim that has been denied by Israel but amplified unquestioningly by the media. There you have it: attack and counterattack.
Such is the asymmetry of this war. When it comes to military might, the IDF is unstoppable. As Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out on a podcast this week, Hamas would have been defeated without a single Israeli casualty if Jerusalem hadn’t striven to limit civilian deaths.
The jihadis have lost hundreds of their tunnels and tens of thousands of men, including several generations of leadership. But this is not the war they are fighting.
No, Hamas is fighting for your sympathy. Embracing death and misery, both real and exaggerated, for the sake of propaganda, they keep the hostages for bait and use gullible ideologues in NGOs and the media to conjure international pressure on the enemy. Sooner or later, Israel will buckle. All they have to do is hold out.
Both sides are on the ropes. While Hamas is a shadow of the light infantry corps it resembled in 2023, Israel is enduring the worst crisis of legitimacy in its history, with country after country lining up to recognise a Palestinian state. Hamas openly applauds Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and the rest. They push on regardless.
Weakened by trauma, grief, political infighting, fatigue, anti-Semitism and international demonisation, the unity and resilience of Israel’s population has ebbed. The campaign to take Gaza City is a last-ditch attempt to force Hamas to release the hostages and end this appalling war.
Enter the UN. For all its veneer of authority, this is not an assembly of democracies. Rather, most members are autocracies or corrupt regimes seeking legitimacy by equivalence with free countries. Many derive individual benefit from vilifying the Jewish state.
Daniel Greenfield:
The Gaza Famine Claim Was Timed for Gaza City Op
The false claim that Gaza is in a state of famine was only made possible by a UN linked group redefining the definition of famine. (If you’re confused why this is a big deal since famine claims have been made about Gaza for over a year, it’s because that was media hype and false claims from international groups but without any formal famine finding.)
The more significant point is that the famine claim was timed for a key event, in this case an Israeli operation in Gaza City, just like previous false famine claims were timed for particular events.
For example, the recent ‘sick kid’ photos that were falsely used to claim children were dying of malnutrition were timed for a key point in the negotiations with Hamas.
When you go back, time after time that there’s a major famine PR push, it coincides with some actual event happening in the war.
Are those coincidences? Not at all. It’s the event that generates the famine claim. Propaganda is a weapon of war. The false claims of famine have been far more effective weapons than any Hamas attack post Oct 7.
From Ian:
NYPost Editorial:
Hamas must return the hostages now or face death in Gaza City
Friday’s “famine in Gaza” announcement by a UN-backed agency is simply the latest effort to preserve Hamas’ rule over the territory on supposedly humanitarian grounds as Israel reluctantly begins to go after the terror group’s major enclaves in Gaza City.
Note how the “experts” of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification outfit claim to have sufficient ground-level access to ordinary Gazans to determine, for example, that 30% of children are severely malnourished — by measuring the upper-arm widths of a statistically significant random sample of the kids! — even though somehow no one is able to produce photographic examples of Gazan starvation that stands up to elementary fact-checking.
Not to mention all the double-talk about Israel refusing to allow international aid to enter the war zone, when in fact it’s only insisting that supplies go in with armed guards to prevent immediate seizure by the terrorists.
More deception: “News” that Hamas is willing to return the remaining hostages in a ceasefire agreement.
Yes, if Hamas is willing to turn over the living hostages now, some deal may be possible.
Short of that, it has nothing real to offer, and Israel should proceed with taking Gaza City and wiping the terror group from the earth.
Time and again, Hamas has taunted Israel by offering the release of its captives, but inevitably on unacceptable terms, namely that Israel agree to leave it in power in Gaza, with security guarantees and UN backing.
No country in the world but Israel would be expected to allow a death cult dressed up as a normal state to operate on its border: The Oct. 7, 2023, attacks should have ended forever the fantasy that the Jewish state can coexist with Hamas.
All the Western leaders sanctimoniously vowing to recognize a Palestinian state forget that a ceasefire was in place on Oct. 6; Hamas broke it by murdering 1,200 innocents and kidnapping hundreds.
Gantz calls on Netanyahu, Lapid, Liberman to form temp. gov't to return all of the hostages
Blue and White Party head Benny Gantz called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, opposition leader Yair Lapid, and Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman to form a temporary “government of redemption for the hostages” for a period of six months, during a press conference on Saturday.
Gantz said that the temporary government should focus on two primary goals: securing the release of hostages held by Hamas and passing the controversial haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft law.
The party leader also said that elections should be scheduled following the completion of these objectives.
“The government’s term will begin with a hostage deal that brings everyone home,” said Gantz. “Within weeks, we will formulate an Israeli service outline that recruits our ultra-Orthodox brothers and eases the burden on those already serving.
“Finally, we will announce an agreed-upon election date in the spring of 2026 and pass a law to dissolve the Knesset accordingly,” he said. “That is what is right for Israel.”
Gantz addressed anticipated criticism of the move and dismissed claims that his initiative was politically motivated. He underscored that the proposal was solely for the purpose of rescuing the hostages and not to “save” Netanyahu’s government.
“I know, soon the poison factories will get to work. They will say I want to save Netanyahu. That is not true: I want to save the hostages,” he said.
“Some will say I am doing this because of the polls. I will remind them that I joined governments twice: once with 33 mandates and the second time when my party was leading in the polls.”
The scent of opportunity
Over the years, I must have read tens of thousands of pages devoted to the topic of antisemitism, and I’ve yet to find a better explanation for its persistence across the centuries than this one: “Everything seems impossible or terribly difficult without the providential appearance of antisemitism. It enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified. If one were not an antisemite through patriotism, one would become one through a simple sense of opportunity.”
The author of those words was himself an antisemite—Charles Maurras, a 19th- and early 20th-century French Catholic monarchist. Maurras founded the Action Française movement and became one of the more visible tormentors of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of espionage in 1894, following a trial driven by the burning antisemitism inside the courtroom and on the streets outside.
Maurras’s legacy is deeply relevant to the character of antisemitism today. For one thing, we live in an age that distrusts complexity and nuance, reaching for utopian solutions because “compromise” is a dirty word. The profound shift from traditional media to an endless stream of personality-driven, no-holds-barred posts, videos and talk shows has rewarded the loudly ignorant.
As is always the case in the early stages of a cultural transformation, the participants revel in their ability to finally say what was previously unsayable. When it comes to Jews, nothing escapes their vengeful scrutiny—not Israel’s right to exist, not the Holocaust, not the emotional and political support for Israel among Jewish communities outside the Jewish state.
Then there is Maurras’s well-observed and cynical point about opportunity. The gallery of fools and morons we have to contend with—among them political commentator Candace Owens, for Fox News cable-TV host Tucker Carlson, English broadcaster Piers Morgan and their ludicrous guests—aren’t so dumb as to have not sniffed out an opportunity here. The receptiveness to antisemitism that remains stubbornly embedded within non-Jewish societies has been skillfully exploited by this crowd for commercial gain and brand exposure, now reaching the point where we need to stop seeing them as critics to respond to and start seeing them as enemies to defeat.
Most importantly of all, Maurras functions as a precursor to the antisemitism we are confronting today. It doesn’t really matter that none of these people will have heard of him. Even if they don’t realize it, they have picked up on the trend he pioneered.
While Maurras was a supporter of the collaborationist Vichy regime who was imprisoned in France after World War II, his antisemitism was not the Nazi kind, obsessed with pseudoscientific “racial” categories. Rather, Maurras was a political antisemite. For him, post-revolutionary France had abandoned the noble moorings of French governance in favor of an alien republic serving Protestants, Freemasons and, above all, Jews. An early advocate of the “dual-loyalty” conspiracy theory, Maurras regarded French and Jewish interests as diametrically opposed, making the Jew the natural enemy of France.
This trope, which flies in the face of the empirical evidence of Jewish soldiers, Jewish diplomats and Jewish politicians loyally serving the countries of which they are citizens, has been eagerly grasped by parts of today’s American right, as well as most of the left. Which brings me, unfortunately, to the subject of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
From Ian:
Gadi Taub:
The Left’s October 7 Revisionism
October 7 presented the Israeli left with a daunting challenge: how to prevent the Hamas massacre from sounding the death knell of its most cherished dream, the so-called two-state solution. Having witnessed the vast majority of the Palestinian public cheer Hamas’ savagery, the last thing Israelis wanted to hear was plans for future partition of their land, never mind a peace agreement. Faced with this popular rejection of its central platform, the left first had to focus on preventing the right from consolidating its growing majority, to avert total collapse.
But how could the left leverage an event that showed its side was wrong in its fundamental assumptions about Israel’s neighbors against the right, whose position was vindicated? The answer is simple: Lay Oct. 7 at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s feet.
And so, the left launched a campaign to blame the man who had presciently warned that Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 would give rise to a terrorist “Hamas state.” Netanyahu’s accurate understanding of Israel’s neighbors didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Oct. 7 happened on his watch.
The campaign required a new narrative that tailored the historical record to suit the left’s political objective. A recent example of this revisionism is an 11,000-word New York Times Magazine piece by Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer, titled “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” The piece presents itself as a work of investigative journalism, with new revelations and intimate details “reported here for the first time,” along with scores of interviews and documented sources.
The piece puts forward a neat storyline that echoes the Israeli left’s articles of faith: Netanyahu could have ended the war with a hostage deal in April 2024. However, he keeps prolonging the war to satisfy the radical, irrational hawkish wing of this coalition, all to stay in power. The real reason Netanyahu is desperate to remain in office, the piece argues, is so that he can appoint a new attorney general and thereby quash his prosecution on corruption charges.
Only, there isn’t a single true link in this imaginary chain of political logic. Netanyahu never wanted to end the war with a hostage deal. While the prime minister has pursued a deal for the release of the hostages, the caveat was his absolute refusal to end the war short of achieving all of Israel’s declared goals: the dismantling of Hamas as a military and governing force, the return of all hostages, both the dead and the living, and the assurance that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel’s security. Meanwhile, Hamas never agreed to anything other than a complete Israeli surrender with the full withdrawal of the IDF from every last inch of Gaza, along with funds to reconstruct the strip under its rule, and internationally binding guarantees for the survival of its regime—conditions the overwhelming majority of Israelis would never agree to.
The truth is, nothing would serve Netanyahu politically better than ending the war, so long as it ends in victory. The longer the war drags on without victory, the more support he bleeds, especially among his base. In other words, both The New York Times Magazine’s depiction of Israel’s interests and its assumptions about Netanyahu’s political calculations are wrong.
The same goes for the assertions about Netanyahu’s coalition partners, which the piece gets backwards. The so-called radical wing of the coalition has been pressing for a swift end to the war through a decisive victory. The criticism it has leveled at Netanyahu has been over his prolonging the war with endless negotiations over yet another temporary deal that prioritizes the hostages over Israel’s victory. Had Netanyahu moved to satisfy his coalition partners, we would now be in the final leg of this war, single-mindedly focused on crushing whatever remains of Hamas. Of course, Israel did not take this course of action during the period described in the magazine’s alternative history.
The imaginary account of The New York Times entirely distorts how Netanyahu has had to struggle to make sure Israel doesn’t end the war prematurely, before achieving its objectives. From the moment it began, Netanyahu came under overwhelming pressure to shut down Israel’s military campaign. He faced the combined, and often coordinated, efforts of the Iran-appeasing Biden administration, Israel’s peacenik opposition, a leftist media obsessed with overthrowing him over any other consideration, the weaponization of criminal law designed to impair his ability to govern, and a reluctant IDF brass that preferred a compromise deal over the reoccupation of Gaza.
Douglas Murray:
The oppression of Sally Rooney
In the Guardian and elsewhere she has expounded her low-resolution understanding of a foreign conflict into which she seeks to throw herself gleefully. Recently the group Palestine Action was proscribed by the British government as a terrorist group. Rooney was one of the ‘celebrities’ who chose to lobby against this decision. She said: ‘Palestine Action is not an armed group. It has never been responsible for any fatalities and does not pose any risk to public safety.’ Which isn’t quite true. The group has claimed responsibility for hundreds of incidents across the UK, many of which have turned violent. Last summer, Palestine Action activists broke into the Bristol HQ of defence technology firm Elbit Systems. Two police officers were struck with a sledgehammer and an employee suffered head injuries. One of the officers was taken to hospital, while his colleagues seized sledgehammers, axes and other weapons.
In June, Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged aircraft. Estimates of the cost of the damage run from £7 million to more than £30 million. One of those allegedly involved, Muhammad Umer Khalid, 22, faces charges relating to criminal damage and the compromising of this country’s security. One of the group’s heads faces prosecution over a speech he made on 8 October 2023, in which he said that the massacre of Jews in Israel (named by Hamas ‘the Al-Aqsa flood’), which was then still going on, should be emulated everywhere. Or as he put it: ‘When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood, we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.’
Still, Rooney claims that a ban on Palestine Action constitutes an ‘alarming curtailment of free speech’. The other day in the Irish Times, Rooney made herself the martyr in all this, writing ominously: ‘My books, at least for now, are still published in Britain and are widely available in bookshops and even supermarkets.’ In a similarly self-important vein, she declared that she intended to go on supporting Palestine Action in any way she could, including by donating royalties from her books and TV adaptations.
Although she seems to hear the jackboots of the Stasi British police at her door, Rooney is of course Irish, and appears to live in Ireland. And so wittingly or otherwise she joins a long list of Irish public figures willing to throw themselves into the middle of a row – any row – so long as it allows them the warm, fuzzy feeling of continuing to be part of the most oppressed people ever.
The Betrayal of Journalism in Gaza
Anas Al-Sharif, whose death last week triggered the current wave of international opprobrium, was such an individual. While both CNN and the BBC have confirmed that he previously served as a Hamas propaganda operative, he went on to join Al Jazeera, becoming a recognizable face to millions in the Arab world as he broadcast from Gaza throughout the current war.
In October 2024, the IDF released a ream of personnel files, salary records, and other documents captured in Gaza proving that six Al Jazeera employees were active Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror operatives. Al-Sharif was identified as the commander of a Hamas rocket launching squad and a member of the group’s Nukhba Force — the elite unit that spearheaded the October 7 attack — and was shown to be on Hamas’s payroll. Al Jazeera angrily rejected the charges, claiming that they were being used as a pretext to target its journalists, and continued employing Al-Sharif and the others.
After Al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed in an Israeli airstrike, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg declared the killings to have been unlawful. “International law is very clear on this point that the only individuals who are legitimate targets during a war are active combatants,” she told the BBC. “Having worked as a media advisor for Hamas, or indeed for Hamas currently, does not make you an active combatant,” she added. Her comments were later echoed by Foreign Press Association President Ian Williams, who told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga that he “[doesn’t] care if Al-Sharif was in Hamas or not,” saying that “Hamas is a political organization” and “we don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats or, in Britain, Labour Party.”
But that comparison is plainly ridiculous and it is simply untrue that only “active combatants” can be targeted in wartime. Under international humanitarian law, an individual who performs a continuous combat function (CCF) is viewed as having lost his or her civilian status and is indeed considered a legitimate military target. In point of fact, that standard has been applied in numerous conflicts — from the Kosovo War to the Iraq War to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine — to justify the targeting of propaganda officials and functionaries whose activities contributed directly to war efforts. Even a “media advisor” for Hamas — or a propaganda operative for one of its media outlets, like the individuals discussed above — could indeed be targeted if he or she had a CCF, meaning he or she was fully integrated into the terrorist group and was continuously engaged in hostilities.
Yet according to the evidence produced by Israel, Al-Sharif was no mere “media advisor” — he was an actual combatant on behalf of a recognized terrorist group, having commanded a rocket squad and served as a member of Hamas’s commando force. There is no question, then, that he was a legitimate military target.
Which begs the question: Why are media organizations and journalists’ associations defending terrorists?
While it is only natural for there to be a certain circling of wagons at wartime, and while we would expect these groups to stand up for the rights of actual journalists facing various threats in the line of duty, that cannot explain why, time after time, both media outlets and journalists’ groups have turned a blind eye to the gross misdeeds of the individuals they have chosen to protect.
Journalists certainly deserve protection and Israel’s approach to the international media throughout this war — including its ill-considered and continuously detrimental decision not to permit foreign journalists to enter Gaza freely — has been imperfect at best. But by accepting the outlandish notion that terrorists who exploit journalistic cover to engage in hostilities deserve the same protections as actual journalists, these groups betray both their profession and the very individuals they are meant to represent, endangering them and making a mockery of their work. Rather than dismissing or ridiculing honest critiques by media watchdogs, these groups would do well to take evidence of wrongdoing seriously and consider whether the individuals in question are indeed deserving of protection — or of the title “journalist” at all.
Not every journalist can be expected to uphold the ethical standard set by Marie Colvin and others, who sacrificed their lives to protect their subjects, but surely those who go to the other extreme — who exploit their self-identification as journalists to cause, rather than prevent, harm — are worthy of our condemnation and our scorn, not our defense.
Dem senators, Sanders say Israel hasn’t proven Anas al-Sharif of ‘Al Jazeera’ was part of Hamas
A group of 16 Democratic senators, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who votes with the Democrats, wrote to Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, questioning Israel’s claim that Anas al-Sharif was a Hamas member posing as a journalist.
“The recent targeted Israeli strike on a group of journalists and media workers, which killed six journalists, including well-known Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, is just one example of attacks on reporters in Gaza and part of a pattern of violence that has silenced the voices of far too many Gazan journalists,” wrote the senators, led by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who is Jewish.
“Israel has not provided convincing evidence for its claim that al-Sharif was a Hamas militant,” the senators wrote. “Absent a compelling explanation of the military objective for this attack, it appears Israel is publicly admitting to targeting and killing journalists who have shown the world the scale of suffering in Gaza, which would be a violation of international law.”
Israeli officials have publicized records suggesting that al-Sharif led a Hamas cell and was part of a Hamas phone directory. The Jewish state has also published photos of al-Sharif with senior Hamas members, including Yahya Sinwar, who led the terror group until he was killed in October.
Israel said it has more information about al-Sharif that is classified, and that several other journalists who were killed with him were also terrorists.
The BBC reported that al-Sharif worked with Hamas’s media unit prior to the war.
“What steps has the State Department taken to ensure that the Israel Defense Forces, a major recipient of U.S. security assistance, reforms its rules of engagement to mitigate harm to journalists?” the senators wrote.
In addition to Schatz and Sanders, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) signed the letter.
Thursday, August 28, 2025
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