From Ian:
At the site of a Nazi massacre, the Jews are forgotten
Former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s speech at Sant’Anna di Stazzema shows how the Palestinian cause is becoming a political and moral rallying point for parts of the European left.
Conte is an especially interesting case in the antisemitic tsunami now engulfing much of the world. The former prime minister and current leader of the left-wing populist Five Star Movement is a key ally of Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein and a potential candidate to lead Italy again. Italian media are already portraying his political moves with an eye toward a future contest for leadership of the left-wing coalition.
Increasingly, Conte appears to be using the Palestinian cause as a moral glue for the electorate he hopes to assemble, much as New York politician Zohran Mamdani has done in the United States.
That is what made his appearance this week at Sant’Anna di Stazzema so significant.
Sant’Anna is not simply another Italian village with a tragic wartime history. It is one of the most powerful symbols of Nazi-Fascist barbarism in Italy.
On Aug. 12, 1944, soldiers of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division “Reichsführer-SS,” aided by Italian Fascist collaborators, descended on the Tuscan village and surrounding hamlets and massacred hundreds of civilians. The official commemoration on Wednesday marked the 82nd anniversary of the slaughter, in which 560 people were killed, including more than 100 children.
Women, old people and children were slaughtered. The youngest victim, Anna Pardini, was just 20 days old. What was ostensibly an operation against partisans became a bloodbath of defenseless civilians.
Italian writer Adriano Sofri has compared the massacre to Srebrenica. The comparison is understandable.
But there is another massacre, far closer to us in time, that should have been impossible to ignore at Sant’Anna: Oct. 7, 2023.
On that day, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and carried out a mass slaughter of Jews in kibbutzim, towns and at a music festival, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.
Why should Oct. 7 have been remembered at Sant’Anna?
Because the defining ideological crime of Nazism was the persecution and extermination of the Jewish people. The SS did not merely terrorize Europe. It was a central instrument in the machinery that murdered 6 million Jews.
On Oct. 7, an ancient ideological hatred appeared once again in its most bloodthirsty form: the mass murder of innocent Jews, accompanied by an explicit determination to destroy their state.
Yet Conte, who delivered the official commemorative address at Sant’Anna on Wednesday, did not make that connection.
David Collier:
The Clueless Hate Preachers in Liverpool
Foreigners, and Israel in the Strait of Hormuz
And incredibly, it got even worse.
My attention turned to the people living there. I was told Israelis are just “foreigners” who arrived, sent by imperial powers that wanted influence in the region.
There is something particularly absurd about this inversion of history. The modern Middle East was shaped by successive imperial conquests. Arab-Muslim armies conquered the region in the seventh century. The Ottoman Empire that ruled it for centuries was itself an Islamic empire. British rule followed as part of the largest empire the world has ever seen.
Yet somehow, when a tiny and historically persecuted minority rebuilt its national home in its ancestral homeland, that became the great act of imperialism.
Turning the Jewish story of return and national liberation into a twisted narrative of foreign global power requires both an extraordinary rewriting of history and the recycling of some very old antisemitic tropes.
I pressed the issue.
“It is nothing to do with religion,” she said.
By this point I was toying with her. Islamic identity, supremacy and religious rhetoric have run through major strands of the Palestinian national movement from its earliest decades and remain central to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad today. She is certainly not alone in mistakenly reducing the entire conflict to an argument over land, but she was proving more clueless than most.
I pushed back lightly on the subject of a Jewish homeland.
And then came the killer blow.
As she reaffirmed that this was all about Western power rather than religion, she explained to me why Israel had been created where it was.
Israel, she told me, was built in the Strait of Hormuz because the West wanted control of it.
I had to check that I had heard her properly.
So I questioned it.
She doubled down.
This woman really believed that Israel was in the Strait of Hormuz:
At this point it became clear that she was mixing up the various fragments of TikTok geopolitics that had apparently built her education, so I played along for a while, asking her to explain more about Israel’s geopolitical position in the Strait of Hormuz.
Eventually she gave up.
Instead, she began pushing me towards the literature on the table.
That, she assured me, “would help answer my questions.”
Justifying October 7
I was presented with the latest copy of the Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! newspaper. Pointing to the headline, she began telling me about how the activist Sarah Cotte had been arrested simply for saying that “Palestinians had rights.”
These were just more lies. Cotte has been charged with terrorism offences over alleged support for Hamas. The “unconditional” solidarity was expressed at a public rally in London on October 9, just two days after the October 7 atrocities.
I wanted to push this further. She did not budge. According to her, simply supporting Palestine could “put you in jail”.
All that was left for me to do was ask about October 7.
“They have a right to resist,” she responded.
She then spent the next few minutes conflating Gaza with both real and imagined events in Judea and Samaria, droning on about occupation and the daily killing of children, all supposedly leaving these poor Gazans with no alternative.
“What option do they have?” she asked.
The reality crossed my mind. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, dismantling every settlement and dragging its own civilians out, Palestinians were presented with an opportunity to begin building towards statehood. Gazans had lots of options. Instead of peace and investment in the future, Hamas and other armed groups spent the following years building tunnels, accumulating rockets and preparing for war.
October 7 was not the only option at all. It was the one Hamas chose.
And then the absurdity of the conversation struck me.
Just two minutes earlier she had tried to convince me that simply supporting Palestinians was an arrestable crime. Yet here she was, standing perfectly freely in the middle of a major Liverpool shopping district, offering her own thinly veiled justification for the terrorist atrocities of October 7.
It was time to leave.
The problem here is a simple one. A false narrative is being spread openly on our streets – one that generates hatred, radicalises weak-minded and vulnerable people, and ultimately places British Jews at risk. And those spreading these lies have not even taken the time to learn the basics about the subject they speak about with such certainty.
They stand on British streets campaigning for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state while repeating a historical narrative they have never seriously examined. When confronted with the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, even that can be absorbed into the same ideological framework: they had no choice; they had a right to resist.
These are not harmless mistakes about distant history. This is political extremism being sold to passing members of the British public.
When will we stop pretending that someone standing on our streets spreading hatred, historical falsehoods and justifications for terrorist violence is merely an “activist”?
Why not call it what it is – hate preaching?
For 2028’s Jewish hopefuls, Israel is the test that decides who’s the ‘right’ kind of Jew
A quarter century ago, when the late Sen. Joe Lieberman was tapped by Al Gore, the Democratic nominee for president, to be his running mate on the 2000 ticket, the question around many a Shabbat table was, “Is he too Jewish to be in the White House?”
There’s a different question being asked, largely in Democratic circles, of today’s Jewish presidential candidates: “Is he the ‘right’ kind of Jewish candidate to be president?” — a question that is almost entirely centered around a candidate’s position on Israel and how openly he identifies with his religious faith.
A long list of Jewish candidates are considering a presidential campaign or are being touted as credible contenders, ranging from moderates like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to progressives like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and those who straddle the ideological divide, like Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA).
In both 2026 and 2028, the debate over Israel is on the ballot: Congressional primaries are pitting pro-Israel candidates against those who don’t acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a
Jewish state, and already a clear divide is emerging in the prospective 2028 presidential field over the issues of the U.S.-Israel relationship and dealing with rising antisemitism.
Even in races where Israel policy is not front-and-center, invoking AIPAC has become something of a catch-all slur for progressives attacking the role of outside money in Democratic primaries. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 hopeful, proudly proclaimed in February that he’d never taken AIPAC money — which of course he hasn’t, given that AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC historically focus on federal, not state, races.
Since soft-launching his presidential campaign last month (in Tel Aviv, no less), former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made the Jewish state — and its relationship with the U.S. — one of his top issues in speeches and interviews. Even when his views are well within the mainstream, his signaling that he’s talking tough against Israel is a sign he recognizes his long-standing pro-Israel record is a vulnerability in a Democratic presidential primary.
From Ian:
Andrew Fox:
Shame on the "genocide scholars"
None of these academics sits on the ICJ, although it must be noted that some of their fellow Israel-haters do. Their public biographies reveal no qualification to adjudicate international criminal law or the law of armed conflict, no understanding of targeting, and no expertise in Hamas and its tactics. They may, of course, offer historical parallels or sociological theories within the very narrow bounds of their expertise. However, they have instead issued verdicts, wrapped those verdicts in academic prestige and watched journalists cite the prestige as proof. Shaw’s latest book is called The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges after Gaza. The accusation produces headlines and speaking invitations. It also sells books. The blood libel has acquired peer review and a publicity department.
That description is earned. The modern version of the mediaeval libel says that the Jewish state deliberately kills Palestinians as a people, with dead children serving as its most potent imagery. Once repeated as settled fact by decorated academics, the charge escapes Gaza and attaches itself to Jews everywhere. The consequences have names. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum. The accused gunman allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza”. Weeks earlier, an attacker shouting “Free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at a Jewish hostage walk in Boulder. Karen Diamond died from her injuries. Bondi, Manchester, the list of Jews murdered over the Gaza blood libel goes on.
These academics did not commit those attacks. They have positioned themselves, however, as part of the international anti-Israel machine. Along with activists posing as journalists, maniacal Israel-haters posing as UN officials, and a whole industry of fellow travellers, they helped dignify the mythology in which Jews anywhere can be treated as accessories to an imaginary extermination campaign. Professors who lend their authority to that mythology cannot retreat into innocent scholarship when its slogans arrive outside Jewish museums with guns, or at Jewish gatherings with petrol bombs. Bartov, Mordechai, Shaw, Mehdi Hassan, Owen Jones, DropSite, Max Blumenthal, and all the rest: they all have blood on their hands as much as any of the IDF soldiers they accuse so viciously.
The evidential problem remains untouched. Under Croatia v Serbia, group destruction must be the only reasonable inference when intent is deduced from conduct. My earlier pieces have covered Gaza’s wartime births and Israel’s facilitation of mass polio vaccination, facts the genocide campaign simply wishes away. A brutal war against Hamas remains an obvious alternative explanation.
The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.
These academics have strayed wildly beyond their lanes and converted moral vanity into counterfeit legal authority. They profit in attention and publication from a blood libel whose human cost is paid by Jews they will never meet. Shame on them. They are shameless.
UN study debunks Gaza malnutrition claim, but Labour presses on
British Jews are scared; they’re right to be. Since October 7 they have seen murderous violence against their persons, vandalism against their synagogues, and arson against their property. Jewish-owned ambulances have been fire-bombed. Ambulances. It’s not enough that Jews be stabbed and bloodied and cowed into hiding their religious symbols; they must be deprived of the means to save themselves.
Most British Jews are Zionists, albeit the intensity of the attachment to Israel differs from person to person, as do the feelings stirred up. Some are happy warriors for Zionism; others are concerned by the impact of Jewish sovereignty on Jewish ethics; others still are the dissenting critics who imagine themselves to be the voice of Jewish conscience.
Zionism, like Judaism, encompasses the complexities of the Jewish experience: “Bless the sting and bless the honey/Bless the bitter and the sweet.”
Instead of acting to calm tensions, this government prefers to inflame them. If the political chatter is true, we can expect yet more inflaming in the coming months as Andy Burnham attempts to reset his party’s relationship with Muslim voters. Ministers will slug away at the Israel punching bag in the vain hope that it will sate the electors who have abandoned them.
New foreign secretary Ed Miliband used his “frank and constructive” first conversation with Israeli counterpart Gideon Sa’ar to lash out at Israel on settlements, Palestinian statehood, and, inevitably, the transfer of aid to Gaza. The anti-Israel lobby is itching to get its NGOs back into Gaza where they can return to business-as-usual, turning a blind eye to Hamas’s crimes, and denouncing Israel at every opportunity.
There is no silver lining in this for Jews. Labour increasingly sees British politics in terms of interest blocs, whether those interests be economic, political, or ethnic, and the harsh truth is that Jews are a much smaller bloc. It is worth noting, in passing, how insulting it is to treat all British Muslims as an unintegrated, ethno-religious bloc. Make no mistake, those Muslims exist, and in far greater numbers than we should be comfortable with, but plenty of British Muslims want to be addressed as the individuals they are.
Regardless, the voters who ditched Labour over Gaza are, by and large, not coming back. They want representatives who share and are willing to give voice to their extremist, antizionist prejudices. The 2024 election has shown them that Labour can be beaten in its heartlands by populist Muslim, Palestine-centric, sectarian campaigns.
While Labour MPs have grown accustomed to pandering to this electorate over the years, they could never go far enough. Now these voters don’t need Labour, and where they have the numbers they will put one of their own in Parliament.
Labour isn’t prepared to accept this yet, so expect the anti-Israel politicking to be stepped up again and again. Even though it won’t redraw the electoral map in Labour’s favour, it will contribute to the noxious fug of antisemitism that lingers in Britain’s major cities, university towns, and in progressive spaces like education, trade unionism, the public sector, and the arts.
It would be better all round if Labour just admitted what it was up to, that it doesn’t care whether the data it bases policy decisions on are reliable, that certain Muslim votes matter more than the Jewish community. Lessons should be learnt, but won’t, about the credence given to UN statistics on Israel. When you want to be misled enough, and to mislead others, you will believe anything.
Was Oct. 7 ‘inevitable’?
Asked what the DSA wants for Israelis and Palestinians, Romer described a “free Palestine” with a capital in Jerusalem, volunteering that this could safely be read as a one-state solution. She said nothing about what becomes of the roughly 10 million people currently living in Israel. Not a word. In this framework, the question does not arise.
Asked whether the DSA would have supported the terms discussed at Camp David in 2000, the closest the parties have ever come to a two-state agreement, she said it was a good question and that she would have to look at the specifics.
She didn’t know then and doesn’t now. She holds a maximalist position on the outcome and hasn’t read the history that produced it. That is not a policy. That is a slogan wearing a policy’s clothes.
The pattern held everywhere. She said the DSA believes in taxing the hell out of millionaires. Remnick asked what that means in practice. She had no answer, and when he observed that a co-chair might be expected to have one, she offered that it is a democracy and that we have to look at what we need to spend. On open borders, she described reforming the current system while rethinking it, building a new one and eventually “flipping a switch.”
And when the backlash came, Romer didn’t revisit any of it. She went on X the next day and called Remnick a “debate bro” trying to make her look and feel stupid.
He asked her questions. That was his job. The questions were never the problem. It was the lack of answers.
Democrats should understand exactly what is at stake because life is not a podcast. DSA members have won congressional primaries in New York, Colorado and Michigan, unseating sitting House incumbents in the above first two states. By January, there will almost certainly be seven of them in Congress.
This is no longer a caucus writing manifestos in a rented room. It is an organization with a functioning electoral machine, a farm system and a demonstrated ability to end 30-year careers.
To be exact, because exactness is the point: Romer’s words are hers. Mamdani did not say them, and no one should pretend that he did.
But Romer is not a member having a bad afternoon. She is the co-chair—the person whose formal job is to articulate what the organization believes. When the person elected to speak for a movement calls Oct. 7 inevitable, cannot answer a question about Camp David or explain her own tax position, then that is a description of the movement’s intellectual center of gravity.
It’s not a gaffe. It is a readout.
So put one question to every candidate seeking your vote, your check or your endorsement. Not whether they criticize Israeli policy. Not whether they grieve Palestinian suffering (because decent people do).
Was Oct. 7 inevitable? Yes or no.
The ones who can answer in a single syllable belong in public life. The ones who need a paragraph have already told you what they think.
Nothing about this was inevitable. Not then. Not now.
Pay-for-slay: Could the Palestinian Authority be held legally liable for October 7?
Can the Palestinian Authority (PA) be held civilly responsible for the October 7 massacre even if the plaintiffs cannot produce records showing that it directly paid the Hamas terrorists who planned and carried it out?
That question sits at the center of litigation brought by more than 8,000 plaintiffs now moving through the Jerusalem District Court, where they are seeking to hold the PA responsible for deaths, injuries, and other harm caused by the massacre and the war that followed.
Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, a former director of the IDF Military Prosecution in the West Bank whose recent study examines the PA and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) prisoner-payment system and its possible connection to October 7, does not expect the litigation to uncover a neat paper trail linking individual Hamas leaders to PA payments.
“I don’t think we’re going to see individual links to the PA,” Hirsch told The Jerusalem Post in a Monday interview. “I think it’s going to be very, very difficult to find that type of evidence.”
That evidentiary gap is central to the cases. Hirsch argued that the question is broader than whether a particular October 7 terrorist received a particular payment. The question is whether the PA’s long-standing system of paying, supporting, and employing prisoners and released prisoners can itself provide a sufficient connection to people who later returned to terrorism.
“What will most likely happen is that most of the discussion will be about the prima facie [initial] responsibility of the PA, if that can even be shown,” Hirsch said. “It will very much depend on whether the judge accepts this argument that the PA is responsible because of the payment of the salaries.”
The court has not decided that question.
In a July 1 decision, Jerusalem District Court Judge Eran Shilo set a common procedure for the thousands of lawsuits, separating the shared question of the PA’s potential responsibility from the individual circumstances and damages claimed by each plaintiff. The plaintiffs’ law firms were initially ordered to submit short written arguments, while the PA is due to file a single response by October 18.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
Gaslighting on steroids
Since Zionism is framed as racist, destructive and positively demonic, all Jews are now held to be positively demonic. The result is Jews across Europe and elsewhere in the West being abused, insulted, screamed at, spat at, threatened with murder and physically attacked.
This gaslighting on steroids has produced an alarming response among some American Jews. Instead of fighting back, they are deliberately avoiding any reference to Zionism.
A poll taken last February by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only 37% of American Jews describe themselves as Zionists, even though 88% said Israel had the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. The study said respondents were either unclear about what Zionism was or else they thought it implied blanket support for Israeli government policies and actions with which they disagreed.
Some badly gaslighted American Jews are now even saying that the words “Zionism” and “Zionists” should no longer be used. The existence of Israel, they say, means these terms are outdated; and since they’re now associated with racism and killing, they should be junked.
This is a catastrophically wrong conclusion. Words matter. They shape the way people see the world. When the United Nations passed its infamous 1995 resolution declaring “Zionism is racism,” it lit the fires of Jew-hatred across the world. Language has been hijacked to turn words into weapons to destroy Israel and the Jews.
Zionism has been cast as an evil doctrine to detach Israel from Judaism. But the land of Israel is an essential part of Judaism. That’s why anti-Zionism is an existential attack on Judaism itself.
“Genocide” is another word that’s been hijacked as a weapon for Israel’s destruction. To deal with the patent absurdity of describing as a “genocide” Israel’s totally justified war of self-defense, in which it has gone to unprecedented lengths to avoid killing civilians as far as possible, Israel’s foes have changed the meaning of the word.
According to them, genocide now means merely killing any Palestinian Arabs, or—even more imbecilically—just destroying Gaza’s buildings.
Jews should absolutely not be aiding the intended dismemberment of Judaism by helping remove “Zionism” from the lexicon and from the world.
Jews should be asserting that the land of Israel is inseparable from Judaism, that the Palestinian Arabs are ethnic cleansers and that Zionism was the greatest anti-colonialist liberation movement of the 20th century.
The proper response to a malevolent narrative of lies is not to shuffle away for cover. It is to get up off your knees and fight back with pride.
James Murdoch Throws DEI Spin at Israel Controversy
Days after an eruption of condemnations over an issue of New York magazine that repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of genocide and that describes the Jewish state as "the land mass currently called Israel," the magazine’s leadership has finally offered up a wan response.
It’s not exactly an apology, and it’s not exactly "we stand by our story," either.
Instead, the statement from New York magazine's editorial leadership—no names, please—to the Washington Free Beacon dodges the journalistic accuracy and integrity issues involved, along with the antisemitism. Instead, it serves up a salad of lefty buzzwords.
"Our latest cover story is an exploration of a New York subculture that is making its presence felt, both culturally and politically, in new ways over the last few years. As with other communities forged by common experiences of conflict, there is an irreducible political dimension to any coverage of this subject," the statement says. "We have endeavored to capture the tensions and live debates that exist within these communities, including how they relate to Israel. We are aware of the wide range of responses to the piece, including critiques from some in the Jewish community. We take these comments seriously, and, as always, we welcome and acknowledge good faith discussion and criticism about our journalism."
The reference to the "cover story" and "the piece" obscures the fact that it was not just a single article that is fueling outrage, but two articles. One is by Zaina Arafat, an adjunct assistant professor at Barnard College and a featured faculty member at the unaccredited, for-profit "School" of the New York Times. A second article, focused on food, is by Madeline Leung Coleman, whose social media indicates support for the unlawful Gaza encampment at Columbia, which culminated in the storming and occupation of a campus building, and its demand for divestment from Israel. That article matter-of-factly accuses Israel of genocide.
James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems company took control of New York on July 8, and New York’s "Habibi City" cover is being interpreted as a signal of his plans for what the press release announcing the transaction described as "the beginning of a new chapter." Murdoch is not pushing back on that idea.
Vox, which was also part of the James Murdoch deal, on August 10 published an article calling for a U.S. embargo on arms to Israel. "The Democratic Party’s burgeoning support for restricting aid and arms transfers to Israel is well-founded," the article said. "Supplying Israel with money and weapons is contrary to both America’s moral obligations and security interests. It is wrong to subsidize or provision any foreign military’s assaults on human rights. And doing so undermines global respect for both the United States and the concept of international law." The article didn’t explain how it would be in the U.S. "moral" or "security" interest to allow its ally to be overrun by Islamist terrorists, rapists, and murderers, or to turn to alternative arms suppliers such as China or Russia instead of the U.S.
The New York magazine statement that it welcomes "good faith discussion and criticism" also is a not-so-subtle attempt to shift the question from the accuracy and integrity of the magazine’s journalism—which the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called "a blatant, disgusting double standard"—to the intentions of the magazine’s critics.
For the assignment to cover Middle Eastern food in New York City, James Murdoch hired a reporter, Coleman, who signed an October 26, 2023 "Statement of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" that claimed "Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people." The statement said, "We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation." Never mind the "good faith" of the critics, where is the good faith of an editor or an owner who makes such an assignment or publishes the false accusations of genocide it produces?
Simon & Schuster Doubles Down on Notorious Writer Who Calls Jews 'Ghouls,' Will Publish Her New Novel: Writer Taunts Angry 'Zionists' Who Oppose Her Deal
Simon & Schuster's partnership with a notorious antisemite who regularly calls Jews "roaches," "demons," and "ghouls" is deeper than previously reported.
Susan Abulhawa—who has projected the medieval bile for years on her X account—announced in a defiant video that the publishing giant would put out her new forthcoming novel. Simon & Schuster has already faced significant controversy and been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for its decision to reprint two of Abulhawa's past novels through its Atria imprint.
"The Zionists have missed or don't know, but Simon & Schuster will also be publishing my new novel," Abulhawa said.
"My upcoming novel, The Sun Still Kisses Me, is not yet listed, because its release isn't until next year, but I'll post more about it soon," the author promised.
In a brief video announcing the project, Abulhawa also took aim at Jewish writers and editors who have spoken out against the collaboration—including Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson and Commentary editor and Free Beacon contributor John Podhoretz—laying digitally altered video of them over foreboding music.
"Zionists are really mad," Abulhawa deadpanned.
Abulhawa promised in the video to donate all funds from the preorders of her books to the Palestinian Youth Movement. The movement "organizes events with the U.S. designated terrorist entity Samidoun" and, according to the Israeli government, has "close ties" with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, also a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, Sen. Tom Cotton's (R., Ark.) office reported.
Abulhawa's track record of attacking Jews ("Jews" specifically, not just "Zionists") stretches back years and is in plain sight.
"We live in the time of jewish supremacist demons," Abulhawa said in a September 2025 post on X, adding that Jews were a "cultureless, rootless human aberration."
That same month, she blasted another critic as a "lying Jewish supremacist cockroach" and attacked "dual loyalty zionists," citing former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis as an example.
From Ian:
Stephen Pollard:
Netanyahu Isn't Blocking Peace in Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli cabinet: "The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal [in Gaza] until Hamas is disarmed. And when I say the disarming of Hamas, it means heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry." He is far from alone in his response. For what should surely be obvious reasons, Israelis do not trust Hamas.
The idea that Israel should take the word of the organization behind the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust that it will now disarm should be self-evidently preposterous. There is no possibility in the real world of any deal progressing, let alone succeeding, which requires Israel to trust Hamas. Israeli opposition leaders Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman have said more or less exactly the same thing as Netanyahu. Netanyahu is not an outlier on this in Israel.
The merit of the proposed plan is precisely that it does not involve trust. It is based on verification - as outlined in an interview on Channel 12 in Israel with Nickolay Mladenov, the former UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process who now leads the Board of Peace. The proposal does not require Israel to withdraw a single troop from anywhere in Gaza until the first stage of weapons decommissioning has been verified by a U.S.-led body. If Hamas does not meet its obligation to disarm, Israel remains where it is now. Netanyahu said nothing which prevents the Board of Peace plan from being implemented.
Fact Checking NBC: Did Hamas Ever Say it Would Disarm
NBC’s coverage of negotiations over a plan to ultimately rid Hamas of its weapons continues to be problematic. In at least two instances now, the outlet has presented Hamas’ agreement on disarmament as an unqualified factual description of the group’s own stated position. This comes despite a CAMERA correction request.
The first example is from August 3, when Yuliya Talmazan and Yarden Segev’s piece, “Israel conveys concerns to the U.S. about Hamas disarmament deal.” They state that Hamas has “indicated that while it agreed to disarm, this was conditional on Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and complete cessation of ‘all forms of aggression.’”
Hamas itself disputes the characterization. The use of the word “indicated” grants Talmazan and Segev some leeway with the phrasing, but Hamas senior official and spokesman Ghazi Hamad told the Wall Street Journal on July 30 that the group “didn’t say disarmament, didn’t say handing over the weapons, and didn’t agree on any Israeli involvement.” Instead, Hamad clarifies that Hamas has agreed to “place its weapons in storage,” in control of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), Gaza’s proposed transitional, technocratic government. According to Neomi Neumann of The Washington Institute, “Israel insists on the physical removal” of weapons from Gaza’s territory, while Hamas will interpret the storage of weapons inside Gaza as meeting the deal’s requirements. The latest 15-point roadmap also does not define which weapons would be prohibited in the future Gaza managed by the NCAG.
The Journal report adds that Egyptian mediators did not “explicitly mention that Hamas agreed to disarm in an official statement, noting instead ‘their agreement to the road map’ and a future meeting in Cairo ‘to discuss implementation mechanisms and reaffirm the commitment of all parties to the terms of the agreement.’” Translated from bureaucratic speech, Hamas – infamously patient and determined to drag negotiations out – simply agreed to another lengthy process to continue talking about disarmament.
Coming four days later, Talmazan and Segev’s report should have mentioned these crucial details.
But NBC reporters erred in the same manner when covering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s August 9 statement that the Israel Defense Forces would not withdraw until Hamas was completely disarmed. It’s to be noted that the original 20-Point Plan calls for the IDF to withdraw from the Yellow Line only after Hamas has been disarmed, a fact reiterated on August 3 by the Board, of Peace.
In the article, “Israel rejects Trump’s 15-point plan for Gaza, Netanyahu says,” Mithil Aggarwal reported that “Hamas had last month said that it would disarm, but only after Israel withdraws completely and stops all hostilities. The group also said that laying down its heavy weapons would come later in the process, conditional on the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Even within the paragraph, there are major conditional qualifiers to Hamas’ purported statement. Once again, NBC confidently presents the word “disarm,” even after the terrorist organization’s own spokesperson disclosed that it was not currently an option.
Washington remains more optimistic. U.S. President Donald Trump stated on July 30 that negotiators had “reached a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza.”
NBC reported the news as if Hamas had published an official statement agreeing to the disarmament process, but without any official Hamas statement confirming that it had agreed to disarm.
Family of American Murdered in Jerusalem Sbarro Bombing Sues Female Hamas Mastermind 25 Years After Massacre
The family of a 15-year-old American girl who was killed in one of the most high-profile terrorist attacks in Israel's history is suing the Hamas operative who planned the operation in an American court for the first time, hoping to secure justice 25 years after the horrific bombing claimed their daughter's life, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Arnold and Frimet Roth, on behalf of their daughter Malki, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Ahlam Aref Ahmad al-Tamimi, the female terrorist who helped plan and execute the 2001 bombing on a Sbarro restaurant in downtown Jerusalem that killed 15 people and wounded approximately 122 more, including seven children. The attack, carried out during the Second Intifada, or uprising, against Israel, sent shockwaves through the country that reverberated internationally. Al-Tamimi was sentenced in 2003 to serve 16 life terms by Israel, but was ultimately released from prison in 2011 during a prisoner release deal that granted her citizenship in Jordan.
Since that time, al-Tamimi has "publicly described her role in the Sbarro attack," "celebrated its lethality," and "expressed no remorse" for the terror bombing, the lawsuit states. Al-Tamimi even became a revered media figure while in Jordan, "hosting a weekly television program on the Hamas-affiliated Al-Quds satellite channel" from 2012 to 2016. Al-Tamimi remains on the FBI's Most Wanted list, and there is an outstanding U.S. warrant for her arrest in Jordan, which will not extradite her to face federal criminal charges originally filed in 2013.
The Roth family’s civil case—filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia—offers a new pathway to hold al-Tamimi directly responsible for her crimes in an American court 25 years after their daughter was murdered. There is already legal precedent for holding foreign terrorists accountable in American civil courts, where they can be tried without the extradition necessary for a criminal trial.
"Jordan can block an extradition but it cannot block a judgment," said Mark Goldfeder, CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC), which is handling the case alongside the Schoen Law Firm. "For twenty-five years, Ahlam Tamimi has lived free in Jordan while the Roth family lived with an empty chair at their table. Congress opened the doors of American courts to American victims of terror, and after twenty-five years, the Roths are walking through them."
Al-Tamimi remains one of the most brazen faces of terrorism living free in Jordan, where she is protected from the FBI and other federal authorities seeking her extradition. The State Department has a $5 million bounty on al-Tamimi's head and, in 2017, the Department of Justice unsealed its criminal complaint and arrest warrant.
From Ian:
A Discussion of Rachmil Bryks, May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych
If there were justice in the literary world, this moment would be noticed by many: a new translation of Rachmil Bryks’ works had appeared. Instead of celebrating a major literary event, one confronts a question: “Who is Rachmil Bryks?”
Sadly, one has to educate an English-language readership. I hadn’t heard of him either. He was a famous Yiddish writer who wrote a great deal about the Holocaust in Poland. He grew up in Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland, among Hasidim, and moved to Łódż, where ultimately he survived the ghetto. In 1946, he went to Sweden and from there to the United States. He lived nearly two decades in New York City until his untimely death in 1978. His many books in Yiddish can be acquired free of charge (download) from the National Yiddish Book Center.
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Admittedly, there are many great writers of the Holocaust, so what makes Bryks a stand-out? For me, it is his range, he has pieces that pay compliments to Shalom Aleichem (“Those Who Didn’t Survive”), and other pieces that share traits from Ahron Appelfeld. However, many of his works, such as the Holocaust Triptych, resemble Tadeusz Borowski. In my opinion, Borowski was the finest of all. His enigmatic, condensed, and sparing style hinted at depths that readers were asked to imagine, to fill in the silence left by the author. Borowski told what he saw in flashes and narrow slices, but with great precision and intricate detail. But by leaving out his analysis, he forced the reader to sort out the horrors and draw his/her own conclusions. Thus readers became contributors to the text. It was an effective system.
Bryks is a bit like that. He is a writer, not a philosopher, theologian, moralist, or historian. His material is always local, visits to family, descriptions of relatives, neighbors, or strangers encountered in the here and now. The material in this book is all autobiographical, in the “Triptych” he describes his journeys during the first days of war, his arrest by the Nazis and experience in a work camp. Later he will describe his deportation to Auschwitz. Because this is real literary craft, it is useless to paraphrase. As Tolstoy said in answer to a question of what War and Peace was about, “To answer, I’d have to write the book again from beginning to end.”
To give a sense of his style, I quote from the third part, “From Agony to Life,” when he is in Auschwitz. The chapter is entitled, “The Wild Beast,” and in it Bryks describes a German overseer of the kitchen, Hermann, who takes a young boy, Pinek, to bed nightly and beats a different prisoner with a metal pipe daily. The anecdotal story reflects bare description without analysis.
9/11: The Lesson We Forgot
This is where the political horseshoe closes. On one side, a conspiratorial far right sees hidden Jewish power behind governments, wars and history. On another, a radical anti-Zionist left can arrive at strikingly similar conclusions through different language.
One calls it Jewish power, another calls it Zionism. One says Mossad knew about 9/11, another says the IDF committed 7 October.
The vocabulary changes, the conspiracy survives.
And now comes the warning, one we should all recognise. Consider the cultural distance travelled from “Never Forget” to Hasan Piker saying “America deserved 9/11”.
Increasingly, the question after an atrocity becomes not simply why someone committed it, but what the victim did to provoke it. Context becomes mitigation, explanation begins to resemble justification, and the ideological agency of the perpetrator disappears beneath an examination of the victim’s supposed culpability.
We saw it after 7 October, and this is one aspect of why Israel and the Jews matter to the 25th anniversary of September 11th.
Jews are sometimes described as the canary in the coal mine. What I mean by that is simple, historically, we have an uncomfortable habit of finding ourselves early in the queue.
Israel is not the only target of Islamist extremism and Jews are not its only victims. Al-Qaeda’s principal enemy was America, ISIS murdered Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and Jews, Islamist terrorists have struck London, Paris, Madrid, Manchester, Brussels, Mumbai, Bali and countless cities across the Muslim world.
The West keeps hearing “Israel” and assuming the argument ends at Israel, history suggests otherwise.
Israel is not the final destination, Jews are not the final target, Palestine is not necessarily the limit of the cause. 9/11 should have taught us that.
In a month’s time, the names will be read again, nearly 3,000 of them. I will think about sitting in my car in Sunderland, listening to those names and finally crying for something I had witnessed twelve months earlier but had somehow been unable to process.
For millions alive today, September 11th is history; for me, it never will be. I remember where I stood, I remember the confusion and the fear, I remember the towers coming down and the sensation that the world was changing around me before any of us understood what the new world would look like.
Perhaps that is why our collective amnesia troubles me so much. I was there the last time the West discovered, in the most horrific way imaginable, that an ideology incubated thousands of miles away did not intend to remain there. I watched the towers fall.
Twenty-five years later, we still remember the planes and the buildings, those who jumped and the firefighters who ran in, above all, we remember the names.
What we appear to have forgotten is the warning.
That is why I am writing this now, a month before September 11th. I don’t want to argue, I want to remember. The dead deserve that much. But remembrance without learning eventually becomes ritual.
“Never Forget” was supposed to be both a promise to those we lost and a warning to those who remained.
Twenty-five years later, we haven’t forgotten 9/11.
We have forgotten what “Never Forget” was supposed to mean.
Amb. George Deek:
The Christian Israel you are not being shown
If you genuinely want to know whether Christians are flourishing in a country, there are better measures than the behavior of its worst citizens.
Start with the most basic question:
Are Christians disappearing?
In Israel, they are not.
In 1950, Israel was home to roughly 34,000 Christians. Today there are about 184,000, and the community continues to grow.
Then look at what Christians actually do here.
Consider one image that tells you more about Christian integration than a hundred government brochures.
Justice Salim Joubran was an Arab Christian justice of Israel's Supreme Court. He sat on the panel that sent former Israeli president Moshe Katsav to prison. Think about that sentence. An Arab Christian judge helped send the Jewish president of the Jewish state to prison.
And nobody in Israel regarded his ethnicity or religion as an issue. He was a Supreme Court justice doing his job. That is the point.
Christians are physicians and hospital directors, academics and businesspeople, mayors, police officers, soldiers and diplomats.
I happen to be one of them.
The boy from the Christian Scouts in Jaffa eventually joined Israel's diplomatic service and became the first Christian appointed to represent Israel as an ambassador.
Today, I serve as Israel's special envoy to the Christian World, a position created specifically to deepen Israel's relationship with Christian communities around the world. Quite an elaborate way for a country supposedly hostile to Christianity to behave.
There are other inconvenient facts. In 2014, Israel formally recognized the Aramean nationality, giving members of ancient Aramaic and Syriac Christian traditions official recognition of an identity rooted in Christianity's earliest history.
Israel is also investing in Christianity's past and future here.
A few days ago, I visited the excavations at Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, where archaeologists identified what is likely to have been the hometown of the Apostles Peter and Andrew.
I watched Israeli and American archaeologists, Jews and Christians, literally digging the world of Jesus back out of the earth.
There is something wonderfully inconvenient about that image: The country supposedly erasing Christianity is uncovering the village of the Apostles.
And Israel is already preparing for 2030, when Christians will mark 2,000 years since the baptism of Jesus, an anniversary expected to bring enormous numbers of pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Basilica of the Annunciation
Something interesting is happening beyond Israel's borders as well. Recent polling in Lebanon found strong support among its Christian communities for peace with Israel: 77% among Maronites and 72% among Orthodox Christians.
Perhaps Middle Eastern Christians, after watching what has happened to ancient communities in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, are beginning to ask questions that old political slogans cannot answer.
Perhaps Jews and Christians in this region have more invested in one another's survival than generations of conflict allowed either side to admit.
From Ian:
Why isn’t Iran attacking Israel?
Iran’s last weapon
Iran has delivered a sweeping set of demands that the United States must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened to maritime traffic. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been fighting a war with the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, for 46 years.
Iran’s most powerful strategy has been to use proxies and drones. The proxies are on life support, but not their drones. They are able to keep the Gulf destabilized with these drones and also hit American bases, despite the fact that the US and Israel have neutralized more than 90% of those missiles.
Bombing bridges and power plants is not the answer. It will only hurt the Persian people who are crying out for freedom.
Why isn’t Iran attacking Israel?
To understand what is happening, one must ask a simple question: Why is Iran not attacking Israel?
The answer is that Israel fought one of the first true drone wars involving a great power. But what Israel did that was most effective was target Iranian leadership, such as Razi Mousavi, senior IRGC general and overseer of Syrian-Iran military coordination; Mohammad Reza Zahedi, IRGC Quds Force commander for Lebanon and Syria; Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader; Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij internal security forces; Alireza Tangsiri, commander of the IRGC Navy; and dozens, if not hundreds, of other Iranian leaders.
Iran is not attacking Israel because Israel targeted the top leadership of Iran, primarily through drone warfare. Cutting off the head of the snake is the key to keeping those snakes from procreating.
Trump has broken Iran’s war machine
What Donald Trump has achieved in the Iran war is astonishing, despite the liberal, godless media attacking him and claiming he has failed. Iran’s nuclear backbone has been broken, and its war machine is in shambles.
The next phase of the war does not have to be a major military operation. Quite the contrary, the US has the largest inventory of advanced drones in the world, but needs to manufacture 10 times that amount.
Iran’s only power left is its drones. They are trying to smuggle more of those fiber-optic drones to Hezbollah through Syria and Iraq and hit US bases in Iran, Kuwait, and Jordan.
Global campaign launched to counter claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza
More than 35 organizations from around the world have joined together in a campaign aiming to debunk “Hamas genocidal propaganda” about the Gaza war.
International Legal Forum CEO Michal Cotler-Wunsh says Hamas’s claim threatens foundational principles of law by hijacking the term genocide to spread what she calls “a modern blood libel,” accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Other organizations involved in the “Gaza GenoLIE” campaign include the American-based Anti-Defamation League, the International Legal Forum, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the World
Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.
“The term ‘genocide,’ along with other international legal terms, has been deliberately and systematically hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to ‘the Jew’ among nations,” Cotler-Wunsh said in a statement. “This well-orchestrated campaign to spread a modern blood libel accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ began before any Israeli response to Hamas’ genocidal war crimes and crimes against humanity of October 7.”
The GenoLIE website asserts that the genocide claims began on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians. The word genocide was already in wide use, even though Israel’s ground operation did not begin until Oct. 27.
Amnesty International, certain UN bodies and other international groups have found there is evidence Israel committed genocide during the Gaza War. But Israel insists such investigations are fatally biased, and that the nation has done all it can to limit civilian casualties in a war in which the enemy hides behind its civilian population.
Israel acknowledges more than 70,000 people have died in the war. Gaza’s population was about two million prior to the war.
The Gaza GenoLIE website says it is an educational initiative about the “generated and orchestrated genocide lie promoted by anti-Zionists and antisemitic networks in the U.S., Europe and around the world.”
Genocide was defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted after the Holocaust. Under Article II, genocide refers to certain acts, such as killing, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions of life, committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The GenoLIE campaign argues the most crucial element is the word “intent,” noting that the convention does not merely ask whether people died, or whether they died in large numbers, it asks whether the perpetrator acted with the specific purpose of destroying a protected group because of its membership in that group.
The groups argue that Israel waged war to dismantle Hamas and secure the release of the hostages, and the civilian death toll was a consequence of urban combat against an enemy that “purposely and cynically embed(ed) itself” among its own population.
Third Time Is the Charm? The Mecca Pact and the Sad History of Collective Defense
Seventy-five Years of Collective Defense Announcements
The clearest recent illustration of the gap between announcement and defense lies one country away from Riyadh. Turkey has maintained roughly 3,000 troops in Qatar under a defense partnership that deepened considerably after the 2017 Gulf blockade, a presence Ankara initially characterized as a real fighting force rather than a symbolic gesture. That presence was tested twice within a year, and twice it did nothing. When Iran struck the Al Udeid air base near Doha in June 2025, and again during the war in 2026, the Turkish presence neither deterred the attacks nor prompted a response. When Israel struck Hamas leadership in Doha in September 2025, the Turkish response was a condemnation at the United Nations and attendance at an emergency summit, not a military one.
What is missing from the Turkish presence in Qatar, and from every agreement examined here, is the conversion of solidarity into obligation: a common definition of the aggression that triggers the guarantee, forces assigned to it in advance, an integrated command, agreed rules of engagement, and a settled answer to who decides that the common war has begun. This is the difference between these pacts and the alliance they imitate. NATO functions not because its members pray next to one another but because a common threat and an American hegemon willing to underwrite the guarantee made it worth the surrender of sovereignty that integrated command requires. The Middle East’s treaties reproduce NATO’s language while omitting each of these foundations because their signatories face different adversaries, decline to place their forces under a partner’s command, and have no hegemon prepared to compel or reassure them. A mutual-defense clause is cheap to sign and dear to honor, and one cannot collect its benefits without bearing its costs. The Mecca pact reproduces this arrangement on a larger scale, and with fewer troops actually deployed.
The pattern predates the present crisis by three-quarters of a century. The Treaty of Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation of Arab states in 1950, signed a year after the defeat in Palestine, contained the same clause declaring aggression against one member to be aggression against all, and it established a Joint Defense Council that never functioned as a coordinating body, most conspicuously in the 1967 war, in which the Arab League as such did not intervene at all. The United Arab Command, promised at the first Arab summit in January 1964 and placed under an Egyptian commander, was the only tangible product of that promise. When Israel raided the Jordanian-held West Bank village of as-Samu in November 1966, the command did nothing: its Egyptian core was tied down in the war in Yemen, and the frontline states had refused to allow Egyptian troops onto their soil. There was only one instance in which such a mutual defense treaty was honored, and it led to a disaster when, in May 1967, King Hussein of Jordan placed his army under the Egyptian general Abdul Munim Riad in the days before the war. The sole consequence was that General Riad, acting on false reports of Egyptian victory relayed from Cairo, ordered the Jordanian front into an offensive that cost Jordan East Jerusalem and the West Bank within seventy-two hours. The pattern has persisted in the present decade. Egypt’s proposal for a unified Arab force at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2015, and its NATO-style proposal at Doha in September 2025, never came to fruition.
Collective defense agreements in the Middle East have repeatedly functioned as projects of regional order and leadership before they functioned as mechanisms of war. This is why their ceremonial character is substantive rather than incidental. Thus, they repeatedly flounder because collective defense is never merely collective defense. To determine the supreme commander is to determine hierarchy. To place forces permanently in another regional country is to create political leverage inside it. To decide which threat activates the common force is to decide whose definition of regional order prevails. To institutionalize an alliance is therefore to settle, or at least freeze, the struggle for primacy among states that have rarely accepted one another’s primacy.
NATO did not solve this problem through superior committee design. It solved it politically because there was never serious doubt that the United States sat at the apex of the alliance. Western Europeans could integrate because integration did not require Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and Belgium to settle among themselves which one would dominate the others; an overwhelmingly superior external power already occupied the commanding position, and a massive Soviet adversary supplied a threat sufficiently common to make American hierarchy tolerable.
Assessment
Moreover, the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is best understood as a message directed at Washington rather than a capability directed at Tehran. Since October 7, Saudi Arabia has worked steadily to advertise its strategic autonomy and its access to alternative partners, first through the bilateral pact with Pakistan, then through the quadrilateral that never materialized, and now through a trilateral agreement staged for maximum visibility. The aim of this sequence has been to raise the cost of American disengagement by demonstrating that the kingdom is prepared to seek elsewhere the guarantees it no longer trusts Washington to provide. The same message is being delivered on other fronts: when the Saudi commentator Ali Shihabi, a reliable barometer of official thinking, warned in the Washington Post that pressing Riyadh too hard on the terms of civil nuclear cooperation could push the Kingdom toward China instead, he was performing the same function as the pacts, reminding Washington that the Kingdom has options and intends to be seen holding them.
For American policymakers, the appropriate response is to read the pact as a piece of diplomatic theater designed to leverage security concessions from Washington. Riyadh’s search for alternatives arises partly from a shortage of defensive capacity and partly from uncertainty about the conditions under which American power will actually be used to defend the Kingdom. Additional air-defense assets can reduce the first problem; only a clearer and more credible understanding of consultation, resupply, and response to proxy attack can address the second. The agreement is, in the end, an argument about American reliability conducted in the language of alliance, and in this region that language has a long history of describing commitments that no one genuinely intends to keep.
From Ian:
On Democracies and Death Cults
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. A pathological hostility toward Israel has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and "armed resistance" can be romanticized or excused. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Douglas Murray's recent book, On Democracies and Death Cults, confronts precisely this mutation. He argues that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the West has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy and an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians.
His central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition - and that this is controversial - says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Hamas's objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel's destruction. Hamas's own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals - girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys' heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Shai Davidai:
It’s Time to Stop Playing Defense
Rebutting the “genocide” libel without explaining how Hamas operates from densely populated civilian areas and uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes leaves people without an alternative explanation for the horrifying death and destruction they see in Gaza. Rebutting the “apartheid” libel without explaining how suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks led Israel to construct a security barrier and establish military checkpoints leaves people without an explanation for why those measures exist. Rebutting the “settler colonialism” libel without explaining the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the land and the historical circumstances that produced the modern State of Israel leaves people without an explanation for why millions of Jews live there at all. Asking people to abandon an explanation without giving them another through which to make sense of the world risks creating a hole in their story without offering anything with which to fill it.
None of this means lies should be ignored. Some accusations cause immediate harm and must be answered quickly, clearly, and forcefully. Falsehoods can destroy reputations, influence institutions, inspire violence, and become accepted wisdom if no one challenges them. Defense matters. Yet the moment adherents of American Intellectual Antisemitism force us to debate whether their accusation is true, they have already secured an important victory: dictating what everyone else must discuss.
Playing offense means doing something fundamentally different. It means choosing your own questions rather than merely answering theirs. It means deciding which ideas deserve attention, which values should frame the conversation, and which facts people encounter before someone else tells them what those facts mean. It means telling people who the Jewish people are, why we remained connected to our homeland through two thousand years of dispersion, and what happened during centuries in which we lacked the power to protect ourselves. It means explaining why Jewish self-determination emerged, how Israel became the national expression of an ancient people, and why Jewish sovereignty matters in the first place. Instead of spending all our time explaining what Israel is not, we must tell people what it is. We must stop letting our opponents choose the story and start telling the story we actually want people to understand.
On October 7, 2023, Israel’s defensive systems did what they were meant to do: they detected incoming rockets, calculated their trajectories, and destroyed those threatening populated areas before they reached their targets. Over the months that followed, they intercepted thousands more attacks and saved countless lives. Yet no general would confuse successful missile defense with victory.
What is true about the physical war against Hamas is equally true of the ideological war against American Intellectual Antisemitism. If all you ever do is shoot down whatever your opponent fires at you, your opponent still chooses the targets, timing, and tempo of the war. Correct the lies that must be corrected. Defend the truth that must be defended. Shoot down the attacks that cannot be allowed to land. But never confuse successfully intercepting your opponent’s attacks with defeating the ideology launching them.
Defense can keep you alive. Only offense can change the battlefield.
It is time to stop playing defense.
Ruthie Blum:
What’s the right way to beat the left?
Combating radicalization, which has creeped into the zeitgeist despite efforts to keep it at bay, is not simply the demand of the day; it’s an existential imperative for liberal Western democracy and civilization. And though the tendency to sound the alarm on individuals running for office is completely understandable, it doesn’t always achieve the desired results. On the contrary.
Greenwald offered a useful reminder of why. “The 2016 presidential election left no doubt about the exact nature of Donald Trump’s flaming outlandishness, and he stunned the world by becoming the GOP nominee and then president,” he wrote. “Starting years before the 2024 election, Democrats made a full-time job of repeating that Trump was a threat to democracy, a sexual predator, a grifter and a convicted felon, and then he was elected president by a greater margin than in 2016.”
The lesson here isn’t that it’s useless to impugn an opponent. It’s that doing so excessively can backfire badly.
Indeed, the irrational, obsessive maligning of Netanyahu by Israeli leftists and their fellow “anybody but Bibi” travelers didn’t succeed at their mission. Instead, they were pummeled at the ballot box in November 2022, ushering in the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history.
The right should take this into account today. It would also do well to consider another problem that Greenwald elucidated: “When a candidate makes his opponent’s unfitness the central message of his campaign, he also makes the race all about his opponent.”
Exactly.
If the right spends the next two and a half months explaining why Eisenkot, Golan and Abbas are the bogeymen, it will be turning them into the protagonists of the election. You don’t have to be an expert in advertising to grasp that this is a way to build, rather than dilute, their brand.
Greenwald’s prescription is worth noting. “Perhaps the best way to go after a radical opponent,” he suggested, “is to get a jump on offering a compelling vision of your own that competes with the dark one he’s peddling.”
That should be the Israeli right’s strategy. Not letting the left off the hook, but preventing it from becoming the centerpiece—and from disguising itself as the center.
From Ian:
Want Peace with Israel? Lift the Siege
One accusation repeated again and again is that Israel is aggressive. But the opposite is true. Israel is denied a peace it has pursued since its establishment in 1948.
The truth is that Israel is surrounded by an explicit desire to erase it, and remaining constantly on guard is what it must do to survive.
On Friday, a defense pact was signed among Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, champions of Sunni Islam.
It may appear that they want to defend themselves against Shi'ite Iran, but no. Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Asif, said: "In the context of Israel, all Muslim countries must unite," describing Israel as "a threat to the entire Muslim world" and calling for a "united military front" against it.
Turkish President Erdogan has made hatred of Israel - and the ambition to take control of Jerusalem - a banner of his politics.
Benny Morris:
A Mid-War Assessment
The Islamist war on the Jewish state, which began with the Palestinian Hamas assault from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, is still with us, with no end in sight. That assault was followed the next day by rocketing by Lebanese Hizbullah, and the Yemeni Houthi rebels and assorted Islamist militias in Iraq joined in a few weeks later. On April 13-14, 2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran directly attacked Israel with ballistic missiles and suicide drones, initiating a frontal confrontation with the Jewish state.
Since then, bouts of intensive fighting have been interspersed with ceasefires, with the halts in warfare invariably imposed on Israel by U.S. President Trump and acceded to by the Islamist belligerents happy to enjoy breathers.
The present stalemate leaves Iran controlling passage through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's proxies - Hamas, Hizbullah, Iraqi militias and the Houthis - recovering and still in the fight. Iran's periodic rocketing and droning of America's regional Sunni allies - Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan - and U.S. military bases in these countries have severely undermined American power and prestige and have underwritten Iran's current hegemony in the Gulf. Trump is palpably reluctant to resume the war with Iran, and the Iranians are exploiting this weakness to the hilt.
As Israelis see it, the war is far from over, and most assume that the Islamists, once ready, will resume their war-making against the Jewish state and a very revenge-minded Iran will press ahead with its nuclear program. Iran's Islamist leaders have consistently declared that their goal is Israel's destruction.
Israeli observers expect Iran to move as quickly as possible to acquire nuclear weapons in the hope that these will shield it from future American and Israeli attack (and provide it with the means to flatten Israel). But while Iranian intentions are crystal clear, its capacity to rapidly progress toward nuclear weaponry is unknown after its major nuclear enrichment facilities were devastated in 2025-26.
Lebanon Lacks the Will and the Power to Confront Hizbullah
There is a contradiction at the heart of Western policy toward Lebanon. The forces in the country that are willing to negotiate with Israel don't have the power to influence those who are at war with it. The Iran-backed forces responsible for the violence openly reject the talks and make clear that they will not consider themselves obligated by any agreements reached. This contradiction shows no signs of being resolved any time soon.
There is little optimism on the Israeli side that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) performance this time will differ from past experience. Two UN Security Council resolutions, 1559 from 2004 and 1701, which ended the war of 2006, already called for the disarmament of all non-state military groups in Lebanon. Past Lebanese governments accepted these resolutions. Yet Iran's proxy Hizbullah continued to prosecute its long war against Israel from Lebanese soil, without suffering serious hindrance from the forces of the state.
The current government uses sharper tones in its criticisms of Hizbullah. But the Lebanese state lacks both the will and the capacity to force the non-state element to obey. Moreover, the LAF is believed to consist of 50% Shia among its rank and file and 30% in its officer corps.
So the U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon diplomatic process rests on a series of fictions. Israel is aware of these fictions and is not in a position to endlessly indulge this illusion, given its responsibility for the residents of Israel's border communities.
From Ian:
Bethany Mandel:
Foreign money is flooding US politics — but AIPAC’s is American
If Americans are actually concerned about foreign money influencing American politics and policy, there is plenty to investigate. And unlike AIPAC, much of it is actually foreign.
Americans for Public Trust has just launched a new database, FollowForeignMoney.org, attempting to track the enormous sums flowing from foreign sources into American nonprofit groups and advocacy organizations. At launch, APT says it has identified more than $5 billion in spending across more than 500 groups, documented in more than 12,000 records.
The scale is remarkable, but so is the loophole that makes much of it possible. Federal law prohibits foreign entities from contributing to candidates, political committees, and super PACs, or participating in a campaign’s decision-making process. But elections are hardly the only way to influence American politics, and there are far fewer restrictions on foreign money once it moves outside the narrow confines of electoral activity.
Foreign dollars can finance nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, voter registration, issue advertising, and various policy and lobbying efforts, all of which can help shape the political environment in which Americans eventually cast their ballots. As APT explains, the line between regulated electoral activity, where foreign money is prohibited, and unregulated issue activity, where it is typically permitted, is “nearly indistinguishable to the average American.”
For some perspective, AIPAC, which again is funded by American donors, spent $29 million in 2022, $46 million in 2024, and $67 million in 2026, much of it in Democratic primaries. Those are substantial sums, and Americans are perfectly entitled to debate whether they like AIPAC’s political priorities, its tactics, or the candidates it supports.
But there is something deeply unserious about treating money donated by Americans to an American organization advocating an issue they care about as a sinister form of foreign influence, while billions of dollars originating overseas can flow into American organizations seeking to shape our laws, institutions, and political culture with comparatively little scrutiny.
In a conversation with the Washington Examiner, Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, explained what her organization found when it began following the money.
“Foreign money is flowing through the nonprofit sector to implement an extremist climate agenda and bankroll radical left-wing causes and policies,” Sutherland said, including organizations supporting political causes such as radical ballot measures. “And it’s all propped up by foreign money.”
The database allows users to trace that money through the complicated network of foundations, nonprofit groups, and advocacy organizations through which it often travels. An organization spending millions of dollars trying to change public opinion, influence legislation, register voters, or pass a ballot measure is participating in American political life, whether its name ever appears on a candidate’s campaign-finance report.
Congress was beginning to take notice of the problem even before APT released its database. At a hearing this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) focused on how nonprofit organizations can exploit gaps in American law to bring foreign money into domestic political and policy fights.
Smith later put the problem plainly: “Tax-exempt status … exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest.”
There is a legitimate debate to be had about how far Congress should go in restricting foreign donations to American nonprofits, particularly because any new law would have to avoid inadvertently ensnaring legitimate charitable, educational, or religious organizations that receive support from abroad. But it is difficult to have that debate honestly when our political and media class applies the label “foreign influence” so selectively.
AIPAC’s donors are Americans exercising the same right every other American has to pool their money around an issue they consider important and support or oppose candidates accordingly. The fact that the issue is Israel does not transform those Americans into agents of Israel any more than Cuban Americans advocating policy toward Cuba or Ukrainian Americans lobbying for aid to Ukraine become agents of foreign governments.
That is what made Axelrod’s calculation so revealing. He was not simply complaining about the amount AIPAC spent, or making the familiar argument that there is too much money sloshing around American politics. He described an organization funded by Americans as “essentially an agent” of a foreign government because those Americans are politically engaged on behalf of the Jewish state.
My husband, Seth Mandel, identified the more disturbing implication in Commentary after watching the exchange. “Why would Axelrod, who has worked so hard to position himself as a moderate in temperament and a card-carrying member of the mainstream, go on CNN and slap American Jews across the face?” he asked.
“And that’s when I realized it. Axelrod is positioning himself in the party’s mainstream. Accusing AIPAC of being a foreign agent isn’t relegated to the fever swamps anymore. And Axelrod, a very smart observer of Democratic Party politics, saw El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens as confirmation that this is what the party is now. And that might be the most dispiriting part of it all.”
That observation makes the timing of APT’s database particularly useful because it offers a remarkably simple test of what this debate is actually about. If Axelrod and others are genuinely alarmed by foreign money influencing American politics, they have just been handed a database documenting more than $5 billion of it, spread across thousands of records and hundreds of organizations. There is enough there to keep journalists, lawmakers, and cable-news panels occupied for quite some time examining whether American law adequately protects our political system from money originating overseas.
Yet that wasn’t the money Axelrod was talking about on CNN. The $30 million that concerned him was raised and spent by Americans, and calling it foreign required treating the political interests of those Americans as somehow foreign themselves.
AIPAC’s supporters are not just Jews; they include evangelical Christians and millions of other Americans who believe, for religious, moral, or strategic reasons, that the United States should maintain a strong relationship with Israel. Americans organize politically around all sorts of foreign-policy questions, and we generally understand that doing so is an expression of their American political rights rather than evidence that they are acting on behalf of another government.
Something peculiar happens, however, when the country in question is Israel and a substantial number of the Americans doing the organizing are Jews.
Ireland’s fog of prejudice
It is striking that at a time when the Torah just commanded us to learn how to see, we are also confronted with examples of what happens when prejudice prevents people from seeing clearly.
Ireland has a long and painful history of living under British rule. The memory of oppression, struggle for national self-determination and resistance to a powerful empire is deeply embedded in the Irish consciousness.
Logically, that history should create a natural sympathy for the Jewish people and for Israel.
The Jewish people, too, have experienced centuries of foreign domination, persecution and exile. Israel has emerged from a history in which Jews were repeatedly denied security, sovereignty and the ability to determine their own destiny. Israel itself was also governed under the British Mandate before its independence in 1948.
One might therefore expect Ireland, of all countries, to understand the complexity of a people seeking security and self-determination after generations of suffering. Yet sometimes, history teaches the opposite lesson. People can remember their own oppression while becoming blind or indifferent to the experiences of others.
Last week exposed a particularly striking example in the debate over Israeli technology in Ireland.
Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense company, has developed a sophisticated aviation navigation technology that helps aircraft operate and land safely in difficult weather conditions, including conditions of poor visibility. This navigation system has become a near standard on military and state jets in countries across the world.
Ireland, a country famously familiar with fog, should be especially capable of appreciating the value of technology that helps pilots navigate safely when they cannot rely on their eyes alone.
And yet, headlines were made last week when it was reported that the Irish government refused to install this advanced landing system in official state aircraft—the Irish “Air Force One”—due to its Israeli origin. The twisted irony is so difficult to miss. A nation accustomed to physical fog is allowing the ideological fog that clouds its moral vision to imperil the safety of its leaders.
This is not just a hypothetical risk. In 2011, an airplane attempting to land in Cork, Ireland, crashed in dense fog after three failed attempts to land, killing a relative of the Irish president and five other people.
When a technology that can improve aviation is judged not according to what it does, but according to the nationality of the people who developed it, something has gone seriously wrong.
Made in India: Inside the India-Israel weapons alliance Amnesty wants dismantled
AMNESTY IS asking New Delhi to go considerably further than imposing additional checks on exports.
It called for an immediate halt to arms transfers to Israel and a comprehensive embargo covering weapons, components, technologies, technical assistance and training. It also recommended that Indian companies terminate business relationships, including joint research and development, with Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.
“Israeli systems currently form the technological backbone of India’s security architecture along its sensitive borders with China and Pakistan,” Birvadker told the Post, on what possible consequences implementation would have for India’s own military.
“Companies like Elbit, Rafael, and IAI are not standard import suppliers,” she said. “They are India’s premier partners in building a domestic defense industry.”
Birvadker went further, arguing that severing the relationship could set back India’s objective of technological self-reliance “by decades.”
“India would once again find itself dependent on other global powers, a resurgence of defense colonialism,” Bivadker stated. “Who benefits from such an outcome?”
The legal argument: The controversy lies in what is not publicly visible
Amnesty’s challenge is also directed at India’s export-control system itself.
India is not a party to the Arms Trade Treaty, although it is a party to the Geneva Conventions and Genocide Convention. Amnesty argues that those existing obligations are sufficient to require India to halt transfers where there is a clear risk that weapons could contribute to serious violations.
Indian arms exports are not unregulated. Military and dual-use goods are controlled through the SCOMET system and require authorization from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade. Applications are reviewed through an inter-ministerial process involving the foreign, defense, and home ministries, and official guidelines require consideration of the end user, declared end use, chain of transmission, and whether an export could conflict with Indian national security or foreign policy.
The controversy, according to Amnesty, lies in what is not publicly visible.
The inter-ministerial deliberations are confidential, leaving no public record showing whether international humanitarian law or India’s treaty obligations were specifically assessed when licenses for exports to Israel were approved.
Amnesty filed a Right to Information request seeking details of specific export licenses and any human rights assessments undertaken by the government, but said it had received no reply before publication.
Birvadker’s position is that New Delhi should resist external pressure rather than allow NGOs to determine its strategic relationships.
“New Delhi must categorically reject the pressure to suspend defense exports, fiercely guarding its principle of strategic autonomy and its sovereign right to conduct relations in alignment with its national interests,” she said.
“Yielding to Amnesty’s demands would severely undermine India’s credibility as a reliable defense partner on the global stage,” she told the Post.
India’s concept of strategic autonomy predates the Israel controversy. It was visible, for example, when New Delhi resisted Western pressure over Russian oil purchases following the invasion of Ukraine, prioritizing energy security and its freedom to maintain relationships across competing geopolitical blocs.
The relationship with Israel increasingly fits into that same model. India remains a major purchaser of Israeli technology while becoming a supplier in its own right. Israeli companies gain an enormous manufacturing base and access to Indian industry; India acquires technology, domestic production and exposure to global defense markets. The greater the integration, the harder it becomes to describe the partnership simply as one country selling weapons to another.
That is another revealing aspect of Amnesty’s report. Its authors see the hundreds of thousands of Indian-made components flowing to Israeli companies as evidence that the relationship should be curtailed. Birvadker cites the same supply chains as evidence that the relationship has become strategically indispensable.
The argument over Gaza will remain bitter and unresolved, particularly when the charge of genocide is treated as settled despite the substantial legal arguments against it. The industrial shift beneath that debate, however, is already taking shape.
India is no longer merely buying Israeli weapons. Increasingly, some of Israel’s weapons begin their journey in India.
Saturday, August 15, 2026
