09/29 Links Pt2: How jihad learned to speak the West’s language; Mamdani announces campaign against antisemitism, doesn’t mention connection to anti-Zionism; Florida designates CAIR as domestic terror group

From Ian:

How jihad learned to speak the West’s language

In 1991, an internal memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, later entered as evidence in a US federal trial, described the movement’s work on the continent as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Not a bomb. Not a rifle. Jihad, waged from within, through the institutions of the very society it targets.

Almost nobody in the West has heard that sentence. What the West hears are other words: freedom, justice, liberation, resistance, human rights. Words it knows, loves, and has built its moral identity around. The question it rarely asks is who supplied those words, and to what end.

A mind does not check where a word came from. It checks whether the word fits.

Consider a young man marching on an American campus, or through London, Paris, or Berlin, calling for the liberation of Palestine. He does not believe that he is calling for jihad. He is thinking about oppression, colonialism, and his duty to stand with the weak. He is running his own value system.

Scrutiny is triggered by foreign content, not by familiar content. A phrase that matches what a person already believes is absorbed without inspection. The most efficient way to transmit foreign content is therefore to wrap it in the familiar.

No need to say jihad. Resistance will do. No need to speak of victory. Liberation will do. No need to explain the day after. Decolonization will do.

An effective slogan does not transmit a message. It produces commitment without requiring comprehension.

Ask him which river and which sea, and very often he cannot answer – not because he is concealing anything, but because he genuinely does not know. He fills the gap with the concepts he does believe in: freedom, equality, an end to oppression.

That moment exposes the mechanism. A man who chants a sentence whose content he does not truly understand has not adopted a position. He has acquired belonging. Once he fills it with his own meaning, the sentence becomes his, and he will defend it as though he had written it.

Anyone confronting him with facts is no longer arguing with whoever drafted the line. He is colliding with the values of the man shouting it.

Florida designates CAIR as domestic terror group

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and the Florida Cabinet voted to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and more than 90 other organizations as terror groups on Tuesday.

In a more-than-400-page agenda document for the vote, the state alleged that “there is substantial evidence that CAIR is engaging in terrorist activity” and accused the group of having connections to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holyland Foundation terrorism financing trial.

In the same vote, Florida applied foreign terrorist designations to groups already listed by the State Department as terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, the Houthis and the Continuity Irish Republican Army.

CAIR bills itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization” and notes on its website that it has never been charged with a crime.DeSantis signed an executive order in December designating CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization, which a federal judge blocked in March.

In July, DeSantis signed a bill granting him and the state Cabinet new powers to designate groups as terrorist organizations and recommended that CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and the other groups designated on Tuesday be the first to be so sanctioned.

The bill, which DeSantis has described as an “anti-Sharia law” measure, allows the state to legally dissolve groups designated as terrorists and creates criminal penalties for those that fail to do so. It also allows for the expulsion of any students in the Florida university system who promote the groups and bars the groups from certain other state funding, including contracts.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented CAIR in its lawsuit against DeSantis’s executive order, is also suing the state to stop the implementation of the terrorism designation law.

“Gov. DeSantis’s use of Florida’s dangerous new ‘terrorism’ designation regime against CAIR and its Florida chapter is baseless and unconstitutional,” Hina Shamsi, director of ACLU’s national security project, stated on Tuesday.

“There are simply no legitimate grounds to brand our clients with a reviled label, impose crippling criminal penalties and force them to shut their doors in Florida,” Shamsi said.

Why ‘Washington Post’ columnist Shadi Hamid excuses Hamas, demonizes Israel, Jews

When Gaza-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib penned a devastating op-ed in The New York Times on September 4 decrying Hamas’s destructive role in the Gaza Strip, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid was incensed (“For Gaza to Recover, Hamas Must Be Expelled”).

Hamid invented on X/Twitter that “pro-Israel hardliners” support Alkhatib because he “justifies the killing of Palestinians as unfortunate fact or a necessary evil.” Hamid’s assault against Alkhatib is a gross distortion of Alkhatib’s vision for a bright future for the people of Gaza.

“A Palestinian miracle on the Mediterranean is within reach if Gaza rejects Islamism, Jihadism, Hamas, and stale nationalist notions, all of which have left it devastated,” Alkhatib wrote, laying out the path forward for the fruitful development of the coastal territory.

But a thriving future in which the Gaza residents can pursue peaceful lives free from the ruinous rule of Hamas is apparently not Hamid’s shared vision. Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre, Hamid’s columns and social media posts have rationalized Hamas, demonized Israel, and marginalized Jews politically.

On October 31, 2023, Hamid published a column in The Washington Post explaining that Hamas isn’t evil. The essay – written three weeks after Hamas launched a cross-border raid and murdered 1,200 people and abducted 250 others – exonerated murder, abduction, and rape carried out in the name of Palestinian “resistance.”

Noting that Palestinians had become convinced “that nonviolence doesn’t work,” Hamid argued that Hamas’s violence was a legitimate expression of Palestinian frustration.

But in what world does frustration justify mass murder?

Moreover, in his essay, Hamid ignored the inconvenient history of Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas rejecting peace deals. He left out Hamas’s ideology, codified in the organization’s charter, which advocates killing Jews.

He was silent on the inculcation of hate in Palestinian schools. And he also ignored Hamas’s hijacking of international aid to raise an army, dig tunnels, and build a rocket arsenal.

By ignoring the threat that Hamas posed to Israel, Hamid was free to accuse Israel of using excessive violence and committing war crimes in its war against Hamas. Over the course of a year and a half, Hamid argued his case, often using discredited information that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

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09/29 Links Pt1: What Bibi knew; A Two-State Solution Was a Casualty of October 7 for This Generation; Oslo Was Never Owned by the Palestinian Public

From Ian:

A Two-State Solution Was a Casualty of October 7 for This Generation

The possibility of a two-state solution for this generation was a casualty of Oct. 7. It is hard for me to understand how anyone can honestly say that they would not protect themselves if their neighbor had already killed one of their children and threatened to do it again as soon as they had the opportunity. It is sad that self-preservation has become something Israel, and increasingly Jews, seem to have to argue for.

When Oct. 7 came, the people of Israel rose up and came to the aid of their county. They searched for hostages, killed terrorist before they were able to rape, kill and maim even more people, and collected the blood and remains of so many dead so they could be buried and their families could have graves to visit and mourn.

Once you've seen the videos taken on GoPros by the terrorists on Oct. 7 or hear the glee in the recorded conversations where they tell family about what they are doing. Once you've seen the horrific scenes and participated in the cleanup of massacres like the Nova festival, can you support allowing a border state to Israel that would be governed by the group that planned and committed this atrocity?

Even hearing about the work that was done from people whose eyes are haunted and dead is enough for most people to know that so many were killed on Oct. 7 and the two-state solution was also a casualty. This generation will never support such an approach.

For so many years, Israelis in bordering towns both north and south lived with rockets raining down on them constantly. They raised their children with an uncertainty borne of constantly needing to run to a bomb shelter. But this seemed to be the price to pay - the necessary reality of having neighbors who wanted us killed and world opinion who wanted Israel to exercise never-ending restraint. This, too, broke after Oct. 7. Many woke up to see that accepting such a life was impossible going forward. That protecting its citizens was the most important consideration. It feels like Israel and this generation is done hoping and conceding.

Oslo Was Never Owned by the Palestinian Public

On Sept. 13, 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords' Declaration of Principles at the White House. Days before the ceremony, Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of mutual recognition. The PLO recognized Israel's right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism. The killing was supposed to stop. It did not.

On that day, Jordanian television aired a prerecorded Arabic address by PLO chief Yasser Arafat. He reminded his listeners that the Palestine National Council had resolved in 1974 to establish a national authority over any part of the land that Israel vacated in a phased plan to eventually take over the rest. Oslo, in his telling, was a stage in the struggle, not a substitute for it.

Palestinians are scheduled to vote in November under rules requiring candidates to accept the PLO's commitments in Oslo. In a poll published Aug. 12 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 2/3 of Palestinians opposed requiring election candidates to accept the PLO's commitments, including its agreements with Israel.

The frameworks now being assembled for Gaza rest on similar architecture. Yet agreements built on the Western model, in which a document creates obligations that outlast political changes, require something the Middle East has rarely supplied: A party able to carry out a commitment after the leader who made it is gone.

The practical conclusion for Jerusalem and Washington is that the next agreement should be judged by what the public demonstrably accepts, and its security terms should be enforceable by Israel without depending on anyone's goodwill.

Pools, marble and mansions: Inside 100 Palestinian luxury homes in West Bank A photography book published by Regavim showcases 100 privately owned Palestinian villas and estates across the West Bank, seeking to challenge what the organization describes as a selective international portrayal of Palestinian life.

Titled Real Estate Under Occupation, the book features swimming pools, fountains, marble staircases and landscaped grounds. Regavim, an Israeli NGO that campaigns on land use and construction enforcement, said its field coordinators photographed all the featured properties in a single day.

In Shuqba, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah, the team documented an estate that Regavim described as covering 4,800 square meters, with a central swimming pool, landscaped lawns, shaded entertaining areas and a large courtyard.

In Nahalin, southwest of Bethlehem, the book features a neoclassical property listed at 1,120 square meters, with seven balconies, a turret, a fountain and an ornamental pool.

In Khirbet Zif, in the Hebron Hills, the organization documented gated compounds with swimming pools, gardens, guest accommodations, saunas, security cameras and private access roads. Other properties featured stone columns, electric gates, orchards and private parking.

The measurements are those supplied by Regavim; they should not all be read as interior living-space figures.

The introduction uses sarcasm to place terms such as “oppression,” “severe deprivation” and “daily hardship” alongside photographs of luxury homes. Regavim said it aimed to show how selective imagery could influence public opinion and foreign policy, while acknowledging that poverty existed.

The photographs document individual examples of wealth. They do not establish how common such wealth is across the Palestinian population. In its May 2026 economic update, the World Bank reported that economic activity in the West Bank remained substantially below its pre-October 2023 level, despite modest growth in 2025.
Report PDF

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09/28 Links Pt2: The Quiet Islamic Colonization of America; Bondi survivor takes his warning to the UN’s doorstep; Germany’s academic centre for the denial of antisemitism

From Ian:

Pierre Rehov: The Quiet Islamic Colonization of America

For 25 years, American counterterrorism policy has been organized around the image of September 11: a terror cell, an aircraft, an explosion. Billions went into intelligence, airport screening and wars abroad. Across those same years, a slower project advanced through channels that no security agency was built to monitor: one moving through universities, lobbying organizations, municipal, state and national politics, and the vocabulary of civil rights. It required nothing more explosive than money, patience and a working knowledge of how an open society such as the United States functions.

The Muslim Brotherhood grasped the possibilities long before Washington did.

Millions of Muslims have no interest in seeing political Islam govern anyone, and many may have even crossed an ocean to escape it. The organizations that claim to speak in their name are another matter, and their central achievement has been to make the two indistinguishable, so that a political network registers as a whole population.

The progressives think that the Islamists will boost them to power, and the Islamists think the progressives will boost them to power.

While countries in the West are always nonchalantly accused of imperialism and colonization, how come no one ever mentions the Islamic imperialism and colonization of Christian Byzantium – now Turkey – let alone the entire Ottoman Empire? How come no one ever mentions the Islamic colonization of the Coptic Christian country of Egypt, or of northern Cyprus in 1974? Or the formerly Buddhist countries of southeast Asia, such as the Maldives, Malaysia or Indonesia?

The Islamic colonization now underway in Europe and the United States carries no racial or demographic content.... The territory being taken is ideological: it changes hands whenever a political movement discovers that open institutions can be used more profitably than if they were attacked, or whenever foreign money purchases standing inside institutions that form the next generation of American elites, or whenever two movements with incompatible values find they can trade access for votes.

Americans may not notice it right away, or now, but one day, unless actions are taken as soon as possible to prevent it, they may wake up one morning to find themselves under Islamic rule.

The process is arithmetic: small concessions, each too minor to be worth a fight, accumulating across institutions, phrases and political territory until reversing the situation would demand a confrontation no one wishes to have. Europe crossed this threshold without even noticing it. America has not.

The interval, however, in which recognizing the problem still costs less than reversing it is not indefinite.

I’m from Gaza – peace will only come if we rid our mosques and schools of radicalism

Dismantling the infrastructure of radicalism and countering ideological mobilisation in mosques and schools is no less vital than disarmament. In fact, it is the fundamental prerequisite for ensuring that violence does not reignite the moment the rubble is cleared. Rebuilding mosques without altering the rhetoric that prevailed prior to October 7 means recycling the very same concepts, giving rise to a new generation that reproduces the crisis – an outcome directly opposed to the interests of Gaza, its residents, and regional stability. The Strip requires a permanent end to conflict and the attainment of its rights through diplomatic and legitimate avenues.

Achieving this demands an end to the monopoly over the pulpit and the classroom. For decades, the educational and religious systems were exploited to steer collective consciousness exclusively toward armed conflict, with pulpits utilised for factional mobilisation and attacks on dissenters. Thus, an urgent need has emerged to restore the mosque's original role as a place of worship and a hub for enlightened thought, promoting values of tolerance and coexistence – drawing inspiration from successful, developing regional models such as the United Arab Emirates.

Stripping ideological control from the pulpits requires institutional oversight and independent bodies to ensure they are not converted into tools for factional mobilisation that tear the social fabric apart. Similarly, the educational environment must be reformed and protected. This goes beyond purging curricula of incitement to prohibiting paramilitary activities within schools and insulating educational facilities from partisan exploitation, thereby safeguarding children from early radicalisation.

Nevertheless, banning extreme ideas alone is insufficient, as human consciousness cannot remain a vacuum. The success of these endeavours hinges on presenting a civil, intellectual, and cultural alternative grounded in citizenship and the rule of law. Replacing narrow ideological affiliations with full citizenship guarantees equal rights and duties under judicial and institutional frameworks, reinforcing the view of a young person as an independent individual possessed of dignity, ambition, and the capacity to contribute to society.

Disarming Hamas without ridding educational and religious institutions of their radical ideas will keep the door to conflict wide open. Gaza's future will be determined inside classrooms and atop pulpits, where a consciousness is forged that will either repeat past mistakes or lay the foundation for a generation committed to peace, development, and investment in the future.

David Collier: Simon & Schuster Run From Social Responsibility

The issue is not whether Simon & Schuster agrees with Susan Abulhawa. The issue is why the company apparently believes its social responsibility extends far enough to cancel some authors over their conduct, but feels justified in helping to bring Abulhawa to a wider audience.

These aren’t forgotten books sitting passively on a backlist.

These are new editions. A fresh commercial decision has been made. Covers are produced, publicity generated, books marketed and the reputation and resources of one of the world’s largest publishers placed behind them.

And Abulhawa herself is making the political purpose of the republications explicit.

In August, she urged supporters to pre-order the Simon & Schuster editions, announcing that her pre-order royalties would go to the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).

That deserves scrutiny. PYM has a documented history of organising and campaigning alongside Samidoun, which the U.S. government designated in 2024 as a “sham charity” serving as an international fundraiser for the PFLP, a U.S. and EU designated terrorist organisation.

This makes the publisher’s attempt to distance itself increasingly difficult to swallow. Simon & Schuster is actively republishing and promoting the books; Abulhawa is explicitly directing the resulting royalties towards politically extremist causes. If any of that money crosses over into support for terrorist networks, it opens up an entirely different discussion.

Abulhawa has openly supported terrorism. Why on earth would Simon & Schuster want to be anywhere near this?

Someone at Simon & Schuster approved that decision.

Was that person aware of what Abulhawa posted on October 7?

Did they know about her explicit embrace of armed violence?

Did they know about the “parasites,” “demons,” “cockroaches” and “ghouls?”

If they didn’t, Simon & Schuster has a serious due-diligence problem.

If they did, there is a far more uncomfortable question to answer.

Where exactly is its line?

Would Simon & Schuster commission new editions from an author who repeatedly described Muslims as parasites, demons and cockroaches, celebrated someone who massacred Muslim civilians and openly expressed support for those carrying out terrorist violence against Muslims?

If not, what principle distinguishes that hypothetical case from this one?

This isn’t about banning Susan Abulhawa. She is free to write. Publishers are free to publish her. Readers are free to buy her books.

But Simon & Schuster is equally accountable for the choices it makes.

Corporations cannot plaster their websites with promises about diversity, inclusion, safe environments and social responsibility, invoke those principles when deciding one author is beyond the pale, and then retreat behind “her views are her own” when confronted with another.

The question is no longer what Susan Abulhawa believes; she has made that abundantly clear.

The question is what Simon & Schuster believes, and whether its loudly proclaimed principles mean anything when the people targeted by dehumanizing rhetoric happen to be Jews.

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

From Ian:

David Harris: Holocaust inversion is obscene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do I say when…?”

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

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

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

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

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

How do I play defense?

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

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

This is a strategy for losers.

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

I refuse to play defense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argentina shows that fighting antisemitism requires more than condemnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

What Frederick Forsyth grasped about antisemitism and Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Campaign to Islamize Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

It was a j’accuse directed at the world.

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

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

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

We will prevail because we have no choice.

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

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

It was his j’accuse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Why ‘Fauda’ has shocked the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Does Ireland Hate Israel So Much?

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

How the UN Forges Anti-Israel Bias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s about us.

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

I’m Jewish, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are still a Jew.

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

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

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

How Propaganda Uses Emotion to Teach You What Not to See

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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09/23 Links Pt1: Son of Israel’s US envoy, a soldier, seriously hurt in car-ramming attack; Rebutting ‘NAZA,’ freed hostage says he knows what it’s like ‘to be collateral damage’; Hillel Neuer: "In the Middle East, the UN is completely irrelevant."

From Ian:

Ambassador Jeff Bartos: UN must abandon anti-American, anti-Western legacy of Durban Conference

Over the course of the past half-century, virulent anti-Western ideology has become a permanent feature of our international institutions. One of the key inflection points in this transformation took place at a United Nations conference 25 years ago: the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

The conference’s stated purpose was to confront alleged racism and bigotry. Today, the United Nations touts the Durban Declaration — the ideological framework adopted at the conference — as "the U.N.’s blueprint to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance globally." In reality, it represented the instantiation of a set of radical ideas about race, history and Western civilization as the formal dogmas of our most powerful global institutions.

Since then, the anniversary of the Durban Declaration has frequently served as an opportunity for radical bureaucrats to reaffirm and double down on their anti-Western hatred. Nearly every five years since the conference, including next week, the U.N. commemorates and revels in the falsehoods and civilizational self-hatred that the conference has propagated across the international system. The United States will not have any part in celebrating this poisonous legacy. In fact, we are urging countries to join us in rejecting this propaganda and taking a meaningful step forward in repairing the rot within the U.N.

The U.N.’s embrace of racial grievance, collective guilt, unapologetic antisemitism and fervent hostility toward our shared Western heritage is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life. It runs counter to American virtues established 250 years ago. Americans need no instruction from international bureaucracies on the principle that men are created equal. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders declared that our unalienable rights did not come from kings, emperors or any earthly government — least of all unelected globalist bureaucrats. They were inherent in man, endowed by God.

Because of the Durban conference, extremist ideologues who had long festered at the fringes of the international system were pulled under one tent, handed credentials and microphones and given the imprimatur of the United Nations.

The result was radically anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian, antisemitic and dedicated to the destruction of the very civilization that gave birth to the United Nations itself.

The Durban conference itself was a testament to the radicalism of this project. Attendees used the event as a platform to demand reparations from the United States and other Western nations for slavery and colonialism. These calls were backed by speakers such as Fidel Castro, the brutal communist dictator of Cuba, who used the conference’s stage to denounce the West for its crimes of "conquest and colonization, of slavery, of the ruthless exploitation and the extermination of hundreds of millions of people."

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