05/28 Links Pt2: VDH: Haters’ selective outrage exposes the hypocrisy of their Israel lies; Yad Vashem to open first Holocaust education center outside Israel in Munich

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Haters’ selective outrage exposes the hypocrisy of their Israel lies

Since Oct. 7, 2023, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel.

The campuses, the left-wing media and Democratic Socialist officials, following the cue of student activists and leftist professors, have painted Israel and its Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world.

This is nonsensical.

The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on Oct. 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced.

Instead, it spawned a storm of antisemitism.

The libels of genocide and ethnic cleansing being cast at the Jewish state apply far more accurately to a host of other nations.

Over the decades, we have sold arms and given billions of dollars in military aid to Turkey — yet between 1915 and 1920, the Turkish government conducted a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing against their Armenian population, for which it has never apologized and which it continues to deny.

None of the current critics of Israel seems worried that Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and ethnically cleansed Northern Cyprus of its Greek inhabitants.

There are no demonstrations anywhere in America on behalf of the far more recent “Nakba” of the Cypriot Greeks.

Did Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil ever rally his armies of idealists to damn the Islamic-driven ethnic cleansing of the ancient population of Christian Armenians, or to call for the United States to sever its joint arms deals with Turkey?

Before the 1967 war, nearly 1 million Jews were living in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, descendants of those who had been there for centuries.

But during the serial Arab-Israeli wars of the 20th century, they were almost entirely pushed out of those countries.

None appear today before television cameras, shaking the keys of their confiscated homes in Algiers, Amman, Baghdad or Cairo.

Of course, no one dares to say Arabs “ethnically cleansed” almost all their Jewish citizens.

Between 1987 and 1989, the Somali Marxist dictator Mohamed Siad Barre began slaughtering entire rival Somali clans. The eventual death toll may have reached nearly 200,000.

When Barre’s murderous regime finally imploded, thousands of Somali refugees who had either supported Barre or belonged to his clan fled to the once-despised West, especially the United States and Europe.

Among those pro-Barre refugees were apparently members of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s family, including her father, a colonel and regimental commander in Barre’s army.

It’s a bitter irony that Omar is now such a sharp critic of Israel and the United States, given that America granted refuge to her family.

Yet we are not aware that any Somalis today are now being accosted by strangers — as Jews are — and lectured about what their former leader’s regime did to those thousands of innocent civilians.

Ruth S. King: As Antisemitism Rages, Jewish Organizations Have Sidelined Themselves They did so by embracing partisan politics, rather than focusing on their core mission—protecting Jews around the world, including America and Israel.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish politician, writer, historian, and academic, once said, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” The phrase is often invoked to explain sudden, violent resurgences of antisemitic sentiment in modern times. It has now awakened with gale-force winds, and Jewish political clout and influence have disappeared.

Many Jewish organizations, some of which are political powerhouses ostensibly created to protect Jews and provide bipartisan support for Israel, have allied themselves with the “progressive” left. This is odd, as I searched all the Psalms and the “shalt not” commandments, and there is absolutely nothing about abortion rights, global warming, or transgender ideology. Furthermore, “woke” is a verb, not a Jewish mandate.

This is not the first time a single-issue political organization has picked a side in America and lost all its clout. An excellent example from the past is the old “China Lobby,” which went to the extreme right—and embraced antisemitism.

When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, he had to contend with a hegemonic institution: the powerful “China Lobby,” an influential bipartisan coalition of voters who adamantly advocated for U.S. recognition and protection of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Taiwan, and fiercely opposed diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China.

The lobby successfully influenced foreign policy, securing the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan through legislation like the Formosa Resolution of 1955.

To say the lobby was a political powerhouse is an understatement. The group forced the cancellation of Ross Y. Koen’s The China Lobby in American Politics. Macmillan had already started printing copies, but the book was withdrawn from publication in response to the political pressure. Only a few copies survived.

What happened to the China Lobby, which originated as a focused bipartisan group?

The group moved sharply to the right, collaborating with far-right isolationist and anti-communist coalitions, including early ties to militant grassroots organizations such as the John Birch Society. Among its protagonists were Senators William Knowland and Joseph McCarthy, alongside publisher Henry Luce and academic organizations like the Committee of One Million, a political pressure group that operated from 1953 to 1971.

The lobby actively allied with militant right-wing politicians to push an aggressive, pro-Nationalist foreign policy, attacking moderate U.S. diplomats and attempting to purge government officials who were deemed “soft on communism.”

Influential conservatives like J.B. Stoner advocated for radical antisemitism and segregation.

This was not the premise of the original lobby, which was concerned only with protecting Taiwan’s international status. Because it became embroiled in other political issues, it effectively came to be seen as a conservative fringe group and lost members, influence, and political clout.

For the past many years, Jewish organizations have made the same mistake. They were once political powerhouses ostensibly created to protect Jews and provide bipartisan support for Israel. Now, though, they’ve allied themselves with the “progressive” left. (Not all have done this, thankfully. Two outstanding organizations that continue to support Jews and Israel are the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) and AFSI (Americans for a Safe Israel).)

Zionism, After the Fact By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. A number of Israel-supporters have noted that the terms “Zionism” and “Zionist” are, from a present-day perspective, confusing or even insulting. As Zionism refers to a belief and a movement that sought to establish a modern Jewish homeland, does it make sense still to speak of Zionists when that homeland has existed for more than 75 years?

Coleman Hughes remarked in a recent episode of his podcast that it makes as much sense to declare oneself a Zionist today as it would to self-describe as an abolitionist. The State of Israel is a long-established fact, and American slavery has long been abolished. In this reading, perhaps the term Zionism is an anachronism that’s intended to cast a shadow of impermanence or erasure over the Jewish state.

I think Hughes makes a powerful point in comparing the relevance of Zionism and abolitionism. But it’s equally illuminating to contrast the two.

There is, after all, a reason that self-proclaimed abolitionists no longer exist while Zionists do: While there is no active anti-abolition movement, there’s a massive, coordinated, and armed anti-Zionist campaign looking to undo history and destroy Israel.

Now, let’s keep the contrast going with a little thought experiment. What if a modern anti-abolitionist movement suddenly arose? How would elite opinion respond to those actively fighting to repeal the 13th Amendment and reinstate slavery?

With fury, of course. Western liberals would be disgusted and outraged by the political organization of retrograde racists.

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05/28 Links Pt1: UN envoy slams ‘political decision’ to blacklist Israel; US Probe of UNRWA: 1,500 Staffers Suspected of Hamas Ties; IRGC plotted to assassinate Ivanka Trump

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Thank You For the Hezbollah View

Twenty years ago, the great White House Press Secretary Tony Snow gave the world a memorable moment at the podium. Helen Thomas, the senior White House correspondent and anti-Semite—she told Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Poland and Germany—was ranting and raving about Israel’s actions in Lebanon during a war Hezbollah had started a week earlier.

“We have gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine,” she said, blaming the U.S. for not forcing Israel to stand down in the face of relentless attacks against its civilians.

To which Snow responded: “Well thank you for the Hezbollah view.”

I thought of this when I saw that Alex Crawford of Sky News had once again carpet-bombed the internet with her arsenal of ignorance.

After repeating Hezbollah talking points as if she were reporting the news, critics pointed out that the reason for Israel’s counteroffensive was to stop Hezbollah from firing into its northern towns. Crawford responded: “Israel was bombing and invading Lebanon long before Hezbollah existed.”

Now, this is technically true. Israel had reason to go into Lebanon before Iran planted its proxy force there. Crawford says this is “a point repeatedly brought up by Hez[bollah] supporters.” This is also correct: The reason Hezbollah repeats this talking point is to claim that the group itself is some kind of organic response to Israeli occupation.

Thus Crawford was demonstrating a common complaint against her: that she uncritically serves up Hezbollah propaganda. Israel did not cause Hezbollah’s rise: It had, with the diplomatic support of the Reagan administration, uprooted the Palestinian state-within-a-state occupying South Lebanon.

Iran's New 'Nuclear' Weapon: What Happens If the U.S. Declines to Fight for the Strait of Hormuz

Donald Trump appears on the cusp of an agreement to demilitarize, at least temporarily, the Hormuz Strait. Ancillary to this may be certain Iranian nuclear promises and U.S. sanctions relief. Whatever the actual details of this accord are, no matter whether it later, in part or entirely, falls apart, this agreement flows directly from Tehran dueling Washington to a standstill.

An indisputable truth: A massive bombing campaign by Israel and the United States has allowed Tehran to see the incomparable utility of the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon against the global economy and its primary enemies. A reanimated Islamist regime-and we don't doubt that senior commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now think they are winning-might even refuse a generous nuclear deal because it's having so much fun humbling its foes.

If the Islamic Republic can hold Hormuz hostage, Tehran will severely wound America's self-confidence, reputation, and capacity. Even if some arrangement can be made to allow commercial traffic to pass without paying tolls, once most of the U.S. armada returns home, the odds of the warships returning aren't good. The odds of the Islamic Republic demanding tolls later are a near certainty.

The American and Israeli killings of Iran's leaders precipitated a shift within the regime, elevating those who had grown weary of what they regarded as Ali Khamenei's nuclear timidity in the face of mounting danger. A series of articles in Javan, a mouthpiece of the Revolutionary Guards, introduced a new doctrine dubbed "offensive deterrence." The series began by taking a swipe at the martyred supreme leader: "Iran's previous doctrine was defined in controlling tensions below the level of war, but the 40-day war was the starting point for deterrence through expanding the geography of crisis."

The new Iranian leaders highlighted the geographical weapon that the regime had always boasted about in its propaganda but never attempted to use: the Strait of Hormuz. The world economy's critical dependence on this route makes this source of income absolutely unsanctionable and transforms the structure of Iran's political economy from crude oil sales to sustainable transit income." Ali Nikzad, the deputy speaker of Parliament, went so far as to declare, "The Strait of Hormuz is Iran's atomic bomb."

Unless the United States is leaving the Middle East with its tail between its legs, a bloody struggle with the Islamic Republic will continue. Iran's revolutionary elite knows that. Do we?

Eugene Kontrovich: Trump Can Close Hamas's Front Office

Twenty-five U.S. senators and more than 90 representatives have urged President Trump to "take decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA." The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has supported Palestinian radicalism for many decades, in the process becoming Hamas's front office.

Mr. Trump cut UNRWA's funding in 2018 and again in 2025, citing revelations that a dozen employees participated in the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But U.N. agencies, and UNRWA especially, are designed to be insulated from accountability. UNRWA was created by the General Assembly in 1949 as a temporary mechanism to assist Arabs displaced during Israel's War of Independence. While it can be closed only by the General Assembly, strategically applied pressure from the U.S. could go a long way.

UNRWA pays its Gaza staff in U.S. dollars wired from a New York bank account. Those dollars need to be converted into Israeli shekels, Gaza's de facto currency. Hamas takes a substantial cut on every money exchange, turning UNRWA's payroll into a revenue stream. The U.S. Treasury can block the dollar transfers under existing sanction authorities.

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05/27 Links Pt2: Dara Horn: The answer to the Jewish question; The unforgivable betrayal of the Nova Festival victims; Dem congressional candidate volunteered with Al-Qaida-tied group in Bosnia

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: A Plea to Jews: Don’t Do the Anti-Semites’ Dirty Work for Them

The erasure of Jews from the public square since October 7 has been extensively chronicled and documented here at COMMENTARY and elsewhere. But it has reached a new and poisonous stage.

In the recent past, the erasure was carried out by the erasers, not by those being erased. But the purpose of an all-consuming culture of fear and suspicion is to get to the point at which people erase themselves.

I don’t blame many of the people seeking to stay out of the limelight. But this is a much worse state of affairs than one in which the anti-Semite is forced to do his own dirty work, both for Jews and for wider society.

For Jews, the reason is obvious: As history shows, no one can make us disappear. The enemy’s only hope is that we withdraw of our own free will.

Speaking of which: Internalizing fear means forfeiting freedom. As Jews, we are the world’s foremost ambassadors of liberty. We have a responsibility to act like it.

As for what this does to society: If people can pretend that what’s happening isn’t actually happening, they don’t have to look themselves in the mirror. The best hope of waking a society from a nightmare is to ensure the anti-Semites see exactly what they’ve become.

Seth Mandel: What Platner Has Done to the Democratic Party

Yet even two high-powered progressives on the outs can come together for a certain cause: Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo.

Chakrabarti declared war on Platner’s congressional critics: “Auchincloss should be primaried.” In other words, there is room either for people sporting Nazi tattoos or people who object to them, but not both, in the preferred Democratic Party of AOC’s former chief of staff. (Ocasio-Cortez’s own embrace of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories only got worse after Chakrabarti left her office, so we know she didn’t object to that part of Chakrabarti’s political persona.)

Chakrabarti and others claimed that this was Auchincloss’s way of endorsing the Republican in the race, Susan Collins. Auchincloss clarified that no, he was simply saying Nazis are bad: “Susan Collins is a rubber stamp for the worst admin in history. Claims that I would endorse her, implicitly or otherwise, ignore my track record supporting Democrats to take back both chambers. As I said months ago, I find Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his commentary about it personally disqualifying. If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary.”

But Auchincloss’s nuance fell on deaf ears. Back the Nazi tattoo guy or you might as well be a Republican.

Between Chakrabarti and Auchincloss, there is no question who has taken the more heterodox position on Nazis. After all, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is also backing Platner’s campaign, as is the party’s relevant campaign committee.

Hasan Piker, the Jew-baiting anti-American influencer popular among progressive Democratic candidates, also chimed in against Auchincloss, calling him part of the “straight up israel first democrats.”

But of course, Auchincloss didn’t mention Israel in that statement. He said Nazis are bad. Piker was, by the way, not the only left-winger to bring up Israel in response to Auchincloss. It was a telling moment: Somehow, suddenly influential progressives openly associate anti-Nazism with disloyalty to America.

Enjoy your new friends, Chuck Schumer.

Taryn Thomas was a committed member of the pro-Palestine movement. Then she went to Israel

Her post opened the floodgates. In November 2025 she then posted a video online talking about how her views had shifted. “By the end of the month, the video had reached millions of views. As it spread, my social world began shrinking. Classmates steadily cut me off, people blocked me, and I became the target of online exposure campaigns and cyberbullying.

“I lost every single friend,” she says. Classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”

The weight of it all left her “deeply depressed”.

“Then my therapist came across the video and decided to end our professional relationship, asking me to find a new provider after learning about my views as a Zionist.”

She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”

She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.

The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period was the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.

“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learnt from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”

‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’
Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza, and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”

But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”

As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it, too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.

“I’m not Jewish; I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”

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05/27 Links Pt1: Trump suggests he may not sign Iran deal without Abraham Accords commitments from Gulf countries; Somaliland’s president: ‘Anyone who doesn’t like our alliance with Israel can mind their own business!’

From Ian:

House lawmakers urge Trump to dismantle UNRWA over alleged ties to Hamas

More than 90 House members, led by Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), urged U.S. President Donald Trump to dismantle the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, citing longstanding allegations tying the agency to Hamas and other terrorist groups.

“Rather than resolving the refugee crisis, UNRWA has perpetuated and expanded the problem through its unprecedented policy of conferring refugee status across generations—transforming what was once a finite humanitarian issue into a permanent and growing political challenge,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter sent to the president. Most of the signatories were Republicans.

Established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1949, UNRWA provides education, healthcare and social services to Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Unlike the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which generally limits refugee status to those directly displaced, UNRWA extends eligibility to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars as well as their descendants.

The lawmakers argued that the agency’s structure has entrenched Palestinian dependency while discouraging host governments from pursuing long-term solutions.

“By fulfilling these needs, UNRWA has reduced incentives for host governments to pursue long-term solutions, leaving millions dependent on the agency and prolonging the refugee crisis,” the letter states. “Additionally, UNRWA has faced longstanding concerns about its educational curriculum, which has been found to promote antisemitism and glorify terrorism.”

“This has raised serious questions about the agency’s role in radicalizing Palestinian youth,” the letter adds.

The United States and several other countries suspended funding to UNRWA after Israel uncovered documentation alleging that staff members participated in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The lawmakers said the allegations following Oct. 7 reinforced broader concerns about the agency’s operations and neutrality.

Former BBC pundit who ranted about ‘chosen people’ was in Iran negotiating team

A former BBC commentator who ranted about the “chosen people” believing they “have exceptional rights to the whole region” on Radio Four’s Today programme was part of Iran’s delegation during negotiations with the US in Pakistan, the JC can reveal.

Sayed Mohammad Marandi was seen alongside senior Iranian regime officials including chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi during the talks last month.

Marandi appeared on multiple BBC programmes between 2017 and 2024, and on other UK broadcasters’ news shows.

He has used his platform to promote Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist group – which he described as “heroes” in a Channel 4 interview – and made extreme statements about Israel, which he has accused of carrying out a “Holocaust” in BBC and Sky interviews.

Now the shadow culture secretary is calling for greater scrutiny of pundits on British television.

Tory MP Nigel Huddleston described his repeated appearances as “deeply concerning” and said broadcasters must improve due diligence over contributors’ positions.

“Public service broadcasters have a responsibility to deliver impartial news. The BBC is guilty of breaking its own rules if they present people as objective commentators when they may, in fact, have an agenda and bias, as appears in this alarming case.

“We expect and require our national broadcaster to have rigorous due diligence processes regarding who they put on air and to be transparent when someone has a clear agenda,” he said.

During one interview on BBC HARDtalk, presenter Stephen Sackur described the pro-regime figure as “an experienced Iranian academic and sometime adviser to his government during international nuclear negotiations”, as well as “a consistently loyal defender of the government in Iran”.

Amin Abu Rashid acquitted by Dutch court of financing Hamas, convicted of sanction evasion

Alleged Hamas financier Amin Abu Rashid was acquitted of providing funds to the Palestinian terrorist organization, according to a Wednesday ruling by the Rotterdam Court, but was convicted of evading sanctions and continued management of a prohibited organization.

Abu Rashid was sentenced to a suspended sentence of six months, with a one-year probationary period, a far cry from the three-year prison sentence sought by the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service (PPS).

There was not enough evidence that the 58-year-old Leidschendam transferred approximately €8 million to Hamas between 2010 and 2023, according to the court. While prosecutors argued that the organizations that Abu Rashid worked with were affiliated with Hamas, the court wasn't convinced of the ties to the terrorist group.

While there was no disagreement that the funds were funneled into Gaza, the court said that it wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Hamas specifically benefited over general Gazan recipients. The evidentiary threshold was also not met for proving that Abu Rashid knew that the funding destination was under the control of Hamas.

The court viewed an expert's testimony on the matter as insufficient, and having been based on news articles and reports by the US and Israel. The court also expressed concern that the expert held a bias against the defendant.

Abu Rashid was convicted of continuing the operation of the al-Aqsa Foundation through the Israa Foundation, the former of which was sanctioned by the European Union until 2014. The removal of the al-Aqsa Foundation was done as the organization ostensibly dissolved, but it did not follow through with that measure. According to the court, the defendant remained the de facto manager of the Israa Foundation, continuing the banned group's operations.

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05/26 Links Pt2: Republicans are fighting a battle for their souls Democrats already lost; Bondi inquiry condemns online abuse of Jewish witnesses

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Republicans are fighting a battle for their souls Democrats already lost

Democrats embrace anti-Zionists
The situation is different among Democrats.

To take just one example of how Democratic primary voters are trending, the nominally pro-Israel Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), whose anti-Trump credentials could not be better (he was one of the attorneys for the dubious effort to impeach the president in 2019), is seen as an almost-certain loser in his effort to hold his seat.

He is opposed by Brad Lander, the former Controller of New York City, whose tenure in that office was widely deemed a disaster. But Lander, who, like Goldman, is Jewish, is endorsed by Mamdani and is a rabid Israel-basher. He even recited a Quranic verse in an appearance at a mosque that attacked Christianity while also repeating the familiar blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” and “apartheid.”

Yet according to the latest polls, Landers leads the incumbent in the deep-blue district with a significant Jewish population by an astonishing 57% to 23% margin.

Across the nation, similar results can be seen. Indeed, the antisemitic Platner is coasting to his party’s Maine Senate nomination, because his lead in the polls scared Gov. Janet Mills (who had been recruited by the party establishment to oppose him) out of the race.

It’s possible to imagine a future in which younger GOP voters hold onto their antagonism for Israel and the Jews, as well as tolerance for antisemites, and wind up being the dominant force in a post-Trump party. Yet even Vance has to know that holding onto his friendship with Carlson will be a problem in the 2028 presidential primaries against an opponent who will be able to appeal to the GOP’s evangelical pro-Israel base.

On the other side of the aisle, pro-Israel candidates face a base that has been marinating in the intersectional ideology that falsely identifies Jews and the Jewish state as “white” oppressors. And they will be operating in an environment in which liberal media, like the Times, will not only be legitimizing Jew-hatred but openly celebrating it.

The persistent appeal of people like Carlson and other Jew-haters for many on the right means that a battle for the soul of the Republican Party will be waged in the coming years, and the outcome is far from certain. But the awful truth is that the same battle has already played out among Democrats in recent years. And condemnations of outliers like Galindo notwithstanding, it has already been lost.

JPost Editorial: Belgium's ban on ritual circumcision is the same as making Jews second-class citizens

Jews have lived continuously in Belgium for 800 years, and an estimated 30,000 live there today. They are no longer being made to feel welcome.

How can we say this? Because the country is going ahead with the prosecution of two mohels, those who perform ritual circumcision, a Jewish rite mandated by the Torah and performed since the time of Abraham.

You can’t want Jews in your country and outlaw ritual circumcision. The two are mutually exclusive.

Circumcision is not some obscure or optional ritual in Judaism. It is among the oldest and most defining commandments in Jewish life, a covenantal act performed for millennia under empires, kingdoms, dictatorships, and democracies alike.

A country that effectively criminalizes that practice is not merely regulating medicine; it is placing itself in direct conflict with the continued flourishing of Jewish communal life.

Add to that statistics from one of the Anti-Defamation League’s Belgian partners showing that antisemitic incidents in the country rose by 80% in 2025, that Belgium remains one of the few EU countries without a dedicated national action plan to combat antisemitism, and that it is consistently among the harshest critics of Israel in Europe, and a picture emerges of a country not exactly eager to make Jews feel at home.

This is especially troubling given Belgium’s history. According to Yad Vashem, some 66,000 Jews lived in Belgium when the Nazis occupied the country in May 1940, and approximately 28,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. One would think that history alone would make Belgian authorities especially sensitive to measures perceived by Jews as an assault on their religious identity.

Earlier this month, Antwerp’s Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered the prosecution of two mohels on charges of intentional assault and battery with malice aforethought against minors and the unlawful practice of medicine.

Non-medical circumcision is not outlawed in Belgium, but it must be carried out with the involvement of a doctor. Mohels, trained in the ritual, are not necessarily doctors. A judge is set to decide on June 18 whether the two men will stand trial.

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05/26 Links Pt1: What Democrats and ‘America First’ Influencers Don’t Get About the Israeli Consensus on Iran; UN Watch bombshell report: UN envoys accused of foreign funding and ethical breaches

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Democrats and ‘America First’ Influencers Don’t Get About the Israeli Consensus on Iran

Moreover, they’re warning that should the general shape of affairs remain as they are now, the Israeli opposition intends to inaugurate a more hawkish foreign policy and one that is less compliant with American demands.

To i24 News, Yair Lapid, the left-most of Bibi’s main rivals, “insisted that Israel must preserve its freedom of military action, regardless of American decisions. ‘Israel is a sovereign state, not an American protectorate,’ he declared, calling on Netanyahu to make it clear to Donald Trump that Israel would not be bound by any agreement that jeopardizes its security.”

Regarding the idea that any cease-fire deal with Iran would also apply to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Avigdor Lieberman fretted that “our soldiers simply have their hands tied in Lebanon.” Even Benny Gantz, who was Netanyahu’s rival in past elections but has expressed openness to working with him again, said simply that until Hezbollah drones stop attacking Israel, “no plane should take off from Beirut.”

The lesson here isn’t that Bibi is really a dove or that Yair Lapid is really a hawk. It’s that those terms aren’t useful in this debate because Israeli public opinion maintains something close to a mainstream consensus on the country’s basic security needs. Netanyahu and his rivals may have different ways of dealing with their American would-be counterparts, but they all pledge to uphold that consensus.

Almost as if on cue, Netanyahu had the IDF hit Hezbollah positions in Lebanon hard. For his part, Trump seems to want to prevent the appearance of public discord with Israel. When initial reports of the deal’s outlines were coupled with stories of the Arab states’ influence over the timing and terms of the deal, Trump demanded that those Arab states also join the Abraham Accords and sign normalization agreements with Israel. The message: We’re all on the same team, aren’t we? If you really want peace in the Middle East, prove it.

We learn two things from this. One is that when politicians claim to have a problem only with Netanyahu and not the Israeli mainstream, such a claim is completely untenable, at least regarding the Iranian threat specifically. Two, that if Netanyahu’s rivals put more daylight between themselves and Trump, it won’t necessarily be due to the lobbying of Democrats or the weirdly pro-Iran “America First” crowd.

You can rearrange the pieces all you want, but in the end Israelis are going to support taking out the threats they face. That means resolution, not cease-fire, in both Lebanon and Iran. If you want to be seen as solving the problem, you’ll have to actually solve the problem. Israelis won’t be fooled by anything less, no matter who is president and who is prime minister.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Gaza Roadmap: A Diplomatic Fantasy That Keeps Hamas in Power

Hamas remains armed, organized, and committed to its declared goal of destroying Israel through jihad (holy war). Yet instead of confronting this reality, international diplomats continue to indulge in dangerous fantasies about negotiating Hamas out of existence.

[Nickolay] Mladenov [former United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process] added that the biggest obstacle to full implementation of the ceasefire remains "Hamas's refusal to accept a verified decommissioning, relinquishing coercive control, and permit a genuine civilian transition in Gaza."

That Mladenov is appealing to the UN Security Council to pressure Hamas reveals the core flaw of the entire approach: the "Board of Peace" and its international sponsors continue to view Hamas as a rational political actor rather than what it actually is: a jihadist terror group.

Mladenov's roadmap repeatedly speaks about "reciprocity," "verification," "implementation mechanisms," and "phased decommissioning."

Hamas's charter states that "Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it," and mandates jihad as a religious and individual duty for all Muslims to "liberate Palestine."

Hamas [in the "roadmap"] is even being allowed to remain armed and influential during the early stages of the transition process....

This is unacceptable and contradicts the very spirit of the UN Security Council Resolution 2803, on which the roadmap claims to be based. The resolution authorizes a temporary International Stabilization Force and requires the complete demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, including the full disarmament of Hamas and the destruction of all its military infrastructure.

The message being sent to Hamas is unambiguous: continue holding your weapons, continue ruling the Gaza Strip through intimidation and terror, and the international community will keep negotiating with you.

The latest roadmap explicitly states that the proposal "does not call for immediate surrender or unilateral disarmament." Instead, it outlines a "phased, Palestinian-led internationally verified process."

Hamas... has already made clear that it rejects the proposal altogether.

Hamas is again telling the world openly that it has no intention of disarming. It wants to remain in power so it can continue pursuing, with the help of the Iranian regime, its jihad against Israel.

Hamas also seems to understand something that many Western diplomats and officials refuse to acknowledge: armed Islamist groups are not removed through conferences, committees, or UN resolutions. They are removed through force. The only countries capable of removing Hamas militarily are Israel and the US.

While diplomats hold meetings in Cairo, New York, Doha, and Ankara, Hamas uses time to entrench itself, rearm, regroup, recruit, and tighten its control over the Gaza Strip's population.

Republicans press Trump to permanently dismantle UNRWA

Republicans in both chambers of Congress are urging the Trump administration to move to permanently dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, with a new letter from House Republicans calling for a reworking of Palestinian refugee programs in the region.

In a letter sent to President Donald Trump on Tuesday, more than 90 House Republicans, led by Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), called for a “broader view of the agency’s operations — not only in Gaza, but across the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria” and for the administration to ensure that the U.S. does not “continue to rely on failed systems that have further entrenched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

The U.S. stopped funding UNRWA in early 2024, after revelations that several UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and Congress has continued to impose statutory bans on such funding since then, in spite of efforts by Democrats to reinstate funding for the aid agency.

“Ultimately, UNRWA has not been a force for stability but has instead perpetuated the refugee crisis and reinforced the conditions that have allowed terrorism to persist,” the lawmakers wrote. “We strongly urge your administration to take decisive action to fully dismantle UNRWA and transition its functions to more credible and trusted partners that are demonstrably free of ties to terrorism and committed to transparency, accountability, and peace.”

The letter suggests transferring funding for Palestinian refugee programs to their host countries directly or to other non-governmental organizations.

The letter states that UNRWA has “perpetuated and expanded” the Palestinian refugee crisis by conferring heritable refugee status across generations, “transforming what was once a finite humanitarian issue into a permanent and growing political challenge.”

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05/25 Links Pt2: The Enormous Blast Radius of the NYT’s Dog-Rape Debacle; Retired police officer awarded for bravery during Tree of Life shooting

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Enormous Blast Radius of the NYT’s Dog-Rape Debacle

Kristof relies on such NGOs as well. One of them is the Committee to Protect Journalists. That organization has, as we have detailed here at COMMENTARY, kept a running list of supposed “journalists” killed by Israel during the war, many of whom are later revealed to have been terrorist operatives for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad all along. Those revelations come from the “martyrdom” notices of the terror groups themselves, as the researcher Salo Aizenberg has persistently pointed out. When that happens, CPJ tends to delete the terrorist’s name from its list of “journalists.”

The Washington Free Beacon argues, persuasively, that this process deeply undercuts CPJ’s credibility as a source and as a gatekeeper of sources for folks like Kristof. I agree. As I wrote two weeks ago: “The problem is that it’s easy for an organization like CPJ to quietly delete someone’s page from a false list well after the fighting stops and the hoax has outlived its usefulness. So that’s what they do.”

Others have focused on the fact that Kristof also relied on information from Euro-Med, an organization with ties to terrorist figures and which has perpetuated all sorts of weird science-fiction anti-Israel hoaxes. Because of that history, I tend not to think of Euro-Med as an NGO at all, though technically it is. Euro-Med is despised even by many Palestinians who see it as nothing but a shield for Hamas and therefore an enemy of human rights. But perhaps the point of the story is that more established NGOs have become just as corrupted as organizations like Euro-Med, and that they do belong in the same category after all.

In fact, CPJ’s impact could plausibly be considered more deleterious to democracy and human rights than Euro-Med’s precisely because it carries a sheen of legitimacy that Euro-Med never has and never will.

I would go a step further and suggest that the behavior of groups like CPJ incentivize the establishment of other groups that exist solely to feed journalists bad information. CPJ’s fall from grace is a major story all its own. That it enables the creation of bad actors that never had any grace to lose is just part of that story. The same is true of the Times.

This is not merely a story of one journalist behaving unconscionably. It’s a story of Western institutional collapse and the dreary remnants that rise from the rubble to perpetuate all the evil things its predecessors got away with.

Germany supported Hamas-linked organization for years without tracking funds, audit finds

Until 2019, the German foreign office supported an aid organization with close ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood without knowing how the funds were actually being used.

This information appears in a newly released confidential audit by Germany’s Federal Court of Auditors, which the Institute for Secular Law (Institut für Weltanschauungsrecht or IFW) has been trying to obtain for five years.

Until now, unsuccessfully.

The audit concerns state funding for the organization Islamic Relief, purported to have ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The now-public documents reveal, according to ifw advisory board member Seyran Ateş, “a shocking naivety on the part of the Foreign Office.”

Islamic Relief Germany (IRD) had long been regarded in Germany as a respected Muslim charity organization. Several consecutive German governments, including former chancellor Angela Merkel’s second, third, and fourth cabinets, provided IRD with millions of euros in funding.

IRD was a member of the German aid alliance Aktion Deutschland Hilft, and gained prominent supporters for its “Meals for Orphans” campaign, including former President Christian Wulff and his successor Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

However, in 2019, the Foreign Ministry stopped funding the organization, and, in 2020, IRD’s membership in Aktion Deutschland Hilft was suspended.

Foreign Office funded Islamic Relief largely 'blindly'
On April 15, 2019, the German government noted that both Islamic Relief Germany and its parent organization, Islamic Relief Worldwide, had “significant personnel connections to the Muslim Brotherhood or organizations close to it.”

The government also admitted that since 2014 it had known that “Islamic Relief Worldwide,” including its German branch IRD, was banned in Israel, regarded as “part of the financial system of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood movement,” and therefore classified as a “terrorist organization.”

It is worth noting that the IRW is also banned in the UAE, due to its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The German government refused to provide detailed information on how public funds given to Islamic Relief had been used, instead referring to an ongoing audit by the Federal Court of Auditors.

The audit report was nevertheless classified as confidential.

Young German anti-Zionists can no longer hide from their families’ Nazi past Story by Daniel Johnson

“Was my father/grandfather/great-grandfather a Nazi?” This variation on the question “Daddy, what did you do in the war?” has suddenly become urgent for millions of Germans, thanks to a decision by the US National Archive to make some 11 million Nazi party membership cards available online. The German weekly paper Die Zeit has made the full archive easily searchable for anyone with a subscription.

Hitherto, many Germans kept their family history during the Third Reich a closely guarded secret. Covering one’s tracks was made easier by the Federal Republic’s strict data protection laws, underpinned by a culture of denial and evasion that was already emerging even as Hitler committed suicide in 1945.

Allied investigators working in defeated and occupied Germany were struck by how a ruling party that had numbered over 10 million members appeared to have vanished overnight. Even decades later few Germans would willingly admit to having been a Nazi.

Now a younger generation has the opportunity to discover the truth about their forebears simply by accessing the newly released online party records, without having to go through a complex and deliberately obstructive process to obtain such information.

For more than 80 years, the gatekeepers of the German Federal Archives tried to shield individuals and their families from contamination by the nation’s putrid past. Now these self-appointed censors are under pressure to follow the American example and publish all official files for the Nazi period.

This new debate about the release of information is, though, only one aspect of the bigger question of how postwar generations of Germans should deal with a uniquely heinous past that is ever more temporally remote. Eight decades on, righteous anger at the ancestors who brought about the German catastrophe has been eclipsed by resentment at the perception that the sins of the grandfathers are still being visited upon their descendants.

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05/25 Links Pt1: Trump: Iran agreement will be ‘great and meaningful’ or ‘there will be no deal’; Flotidiot: Engaging with IDF was main goal, not humanitarian aid

From Ian:

Trump: Iran agreement will be ‘great and meaningful’ or ‘there will be no deal’

U.S. President Donald Trump pushed back on Monday against critics of the potential agreement being negotiated with Iran, writing on his Truth Social account that any such accord “will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal.”

Trump continued, “It will be the exact opposite of the [2015] JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that!”

The White House said in a social media post on Sunday that negotiations with Tehran are progressing smoothly. The statement followed an announcement on Friday by Trump that Iran and “various other countries” had “largely negotiated” an agreement to end hostilities.

“The negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner, and I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal in that time is on our side. ... Both sides must take their time and get it right. There can be no mistakes!” the White House posted, quoting Trump.

The post included an attached statement from the president saying that the relationship between the United States and the Iranians was becoming much more “professional” and “productive.

“They must understand, however, that they cannot develop or procure a nuclear weapon or bomb,” Trump said.

Reportedly, the proposed deal with Iran includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz and easing sanctions to allow Tehran to resume oil exports. In return, Iran reportedly committed not to advance its nuclear program.

Trump defended the potential deal in a Truth Social post on Sunday, saying that if an agreement is reached, “it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon.”

The president continued: “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals! President DJT.”

Iran will play Trump, and he will get his revenge, US evangelical leader predicts

The Islamic Republic of Iran is likely to “double-cross” U.S. President Donald Trump in any agreement it reaches with Washington, and he will eventually retaliate, American evangelical leader Mike Evans said on Monday.

The remarks by Evans, founder of Jerusalem’s Friends of Zion Museum, come amid high-stakes negotiations aimed at ending the war and addressing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“If Iran double-crosses Trump and makes a fool out of him—and I believe they will—he will get his revenge and he will finish the job,” Evans told JNS in an interview in Jerusalem during a visit to Israel. “Donald Trump plays the long game; while they are playing checkers, he is playing chess.”

Evans predicted that another round of fighting could break out next year following the U.S. midterm elections and said that by 2028, the Islamic Republic, which has ruled Iran for nearly half a century, would have fallen.

Evans said Trump’s weekend call for Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, to join the landmark 2020 Abraham Accords was “extremely realistic” and could be achieved by next year.

He attributed Trump’s steadfast support for Israel to his evangelical Christian base and downplayed recent public opinion polls showing declining support for Israel in some sectors of American society.

“Most of it came from Gaza, which fed and fueled the narrative,” Evans said. “Once there is calm, there will be healing. It will take some time to re-educate.”

He acknowledged the PR challenges Israel faces after more than two and a half years of war on multiple fronts.

“You are draining a swamp filled with alligators and hoping the alligators don’t bite, so there will be some setbacks amid the successes,” he said. “You can’t gauge moral clarity by public opinion.”

Filing submitted against Hamas at ICC on behalf of Palestinian from Gaza

A filing has been submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on behalf of a Palestinian from Gaza calling for 14 Hamas leaders to be investigated for war crimes committed against the Palestinian people, an American lawyer said last week.

The legal move, which was made in December, has gone unanswered even as ICC prosecutors have reportedly requested a warrant for the arrest of Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

The filing, the first such against the terror organization on behalf of a Palestinian, was made for a Gazan who lost his spouse, children, a parent, nieces and nephews during the two-year war sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, according to his legal team.

“The atrocity crimes perpetrated by Hamas against [REDACTED] family members, and against substantially all of the Palestinian civilian inhabitants of Gaza, constitute grave breaches of international criminal law,” the filing reads. “Yet to this day, there has never been a disclosed OTP [Office of the Prosecutor] investigation or request for issuance of warrants for any of the Hamas leaders ... complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity that they committed against the civilian Gazan population.”

The submission lists an array of war crimes that Hamas is alleged to have committed against Palestinians in Gaza including: utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons as human shields; attacking civilians; intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects; willfully causing great suffering; destruction and appropriation of property; excessive incidental death, injury, or damage; attacking protected objects; committing outrages upon personal dignity; using, conscripting, or enlisting children; sentencing or execution without due process.

“We don’t stop seeking justice because the court does not want to respond,” attorney Elliot Malin of Reno, Nevada, told JNS last week. “We will continue kicking on the door until they deliver justice for the victims.”

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05/24 Links: Ruth Wisse Warns Now of 'the Organization of Politics against the Jews.'; Trump's deal with Iran must be more than promises; Anatomy of a blood libel

From Ian:

Elliot Kaufman: Ruth Wisse Warns Now of 'the Organization of Politics against the Jews.'

The anti-Israel obsession has metastasized into what Ms. Wisse calls "the organization of politics against the Jews."

That's her definition for the tendency that called itself antisemitism in Germany and anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union. "It shifts blame, directs it against a specific target, and it is the greatest coalition-builder," Ms. Wisse says. See Iran and the old Arab League for evidence-or see many U.S. colleges, where ritual denunciation of Israel has for years been an organizing principle of campus politics. What happens on campus doesn't stay on campus.

Ms. Wisse says "the combination of the Jews' small size and inflated image" has long made them the ideal scapegoat. Exploitation of that combination is now ubiquitous on social media, soaking into the new youth culture. "Demagogues recognize the opportunity," she says.

In the face of anti-Israel propaganda, Ms. Wisse detects a liberal Jewish yearning for powerlessness and the moral purity that comes with it. "It's a loss of moral confidence." She worries more, however, about a similar yearning and loss of confidence among Americans writ large.

Jewish leader calls on Hochul to send in National Guard for NYC Israel Day Parade

A prominent pro-Israel activist is calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul to dispatch the National Guard to the Big Apple to help protect marchers at the upcoming Israel Day Parade in the wake of a troubling increase in antisemitic incidents.

Americans Against Antisemitism founder Dov Hikind said he’s a supporter of the NYPD but thinks local cops could use a boost — not just along the parade route in Manhattan but in the general vicinity of the march, as people carrying Israel flags or wearing pro-Israel gear could become targets of violence.

“We need to make sure bad things don’t happen,” said Hikind, a former state Assembly member who represented heavily orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. “We want to make sure there is safety for the Jewish community. I’m calling on Governor Hochul to bring in the National Guard to help the New York City Police Department.”

Hochul has periodically dispatched the National Guard soldiers to man major transit hubs to assist in crime prevention.

But the head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which hosts the 61st Israel Day Parade, said it is working closely with the NYPD and is not requesting Hochul to send in the National Guard.

“I have full faith and confidence in the greatest police department in the world, the NYPD, under the exceptional leadership of Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who has done a tremendous job ensuring the safety and success of major events and parades across New York City, including the Israel Day on Fifth parade in recent years,” JCRC CEO Mark Treyger told The Post.

“Commissioner Tisch, the NYPD, and all of our law enforcement partners have left no stone unturned in preparing for next Sunday’s parade.”

Brendan O'Neill: Anatomy of a blood libel

The rude intrusion of such medieval imagery into our supposedly modern societies feels disquieting in the extreme. In the past two months alone, we’ve seen the rise and rise of the Judenhund libel; we’ve seen a 23-feet tall effigy of Benjamin Netanyahu, stuffed with 14kg of gunpowder, being set alight in a Judas-burning in Spain; we’ve seen a Jewish girl have her hair violently yanked by a seething mob yelling ‘Bitch!’ outside a synagogue in Brooklyn; and we’ve seen a Jew in England being allegedly assaulted by a man calling him a ‘baby killer’. Animal-themed libels, Jew-head burnings, Jewish women being subjected to the ritualistic humiliation of hair-pulling, as if it were the 1930s again – isn’t it remarkable how much ‘criticism of Israel’ looks, feels and smells like hatred for Jews?

And yet, horrified as we should be by the resuscitation of the zombie monster of medieval Jew hate, we also need to clock what is new; what is distinct about anti-Zionism. It is so clear now that anti-Zionism is not just some iffy ideology that occasionally crosses the line into anti-Semitism. It is not simply the mask Jew hatred wears, to try to doll up its low-IQ loathings as virtuous politics. No, anti-Zionism is its own ideology of hatred, and one that poses a very real threat not only to the physical health of Jews but also to the spiritual health of Western civilisation itself.

The dog-rape story might echo the Judensau mocking, but it is very much a libel of the modern, anti-Zionist era. It has joined the feverish accusations of genocide and settler-colonialism as one of the key means through which the Jewish nation is delegitimised and treated as a criminal entity deserving of erasure. Where medieval mockery and libels were motored by a religious animus that treated the Jew as a sickly pox in Christian Europe, anti-Zionist libels are underpinned by a dystopic vision of the Jews as a swaggering, violent people whose demented devotion to their ancient sovereign rights is harming not only Palestinians but world peace itself.

The Jew was once hated for being weak – now he is hated for being strong. He was once hated for supposedly being hunched and ashen-faced – now he is hated for being upright and armed. He was once hated for not being European – now he is libelled as a European settler of Arab lands. He was once laughed at as non-white – now he is branded as the ‘hyper-white’ thief of other people’s territory. He was once mocked for fucking pigs – now he is mocked for making other people fuck dogs. He was once told he did not belong in Europe – now he is told he doesn’t belong in Israel. The very elites whose ancestors expelled Jews from our nations now cry for the erasure of the Jewish nation, all the way ‘from the river to the sea’. And when they have nowhere to go – not here, not there – they’ll be branded a cosmopolitan menace whose very landlessness is a threat to human normalcy. It is the sheer cruelty of Jew hatred, the trickery of it, that alarms those of us who are clinging for dear life to our moral faculties.

‘One of the marks of anti-Semitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true’, wrote Orwell. We are back there again. In fact, there is something dispiriting even in the sight of Jews and their allies – spiked included – having to point out the mechanical impossibility of dogs being commanded to rape humans. ‘Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies’, wrote Sartre. ‘They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.’ This, right here, is the moment we are in. The anti-Semites are revelling in the vision of Jews and their friends being compelled to discuss dog penises and human anuses. This in itself is a victory for the scum. They are amusing themselves. They are enjoying this. It is obscene.

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05/23 Links: Will There Be “Blood Libel”?; Trump: Agreement with Iran ‘largely negotiated,’; IRGC plot to assassinate Ivanka Trump; Flotidiots beaten by Spanish police

From Ian:

Inside Israel’s secret operation to turn Hezbollah’s beepers into bombs

The whole world was shocked out of its wits on September 17-18, 2024, when the Mossad brought the mighty 150,000-rocket-wielding Hezbollah terror army to its knees in an instant with a “fleet” of exploding beepers. Or, rather, almost the whole world, excluding the Mossad operatives and defense officials who ran the operation, such as “Adam Feyn,” who recently published a book in Hebrew, Hoda’ah Goralit (Fateful Message), about the operation and gave his first English-language interview about it to The Jerusalem Post.

In his interview with the Post and in his book, Feyn made a series of stunning dramatic reveals about the operation.

These include how the Mossad lured a Hezbollah operative into an ambush to prevent him from exposing the beepers; the true story regarding how close Iran was to uncovering the plot; fleshing out how hard it was to get Hezbollah to lower its suspicions sufficiently for it to buy the beepers; showing how unwitting third parties were used by the Mossad to sell Hezbollah on the beepers; how the Mossad later tried to make good to such innocent third parties where it could; and how the Mossad’s gym and many other leisure areas were effectively converted into a beeper assembly line when the agency had to jump the pace of its production and had insufficient space to do so using its standard operations areas.

During the interview and in the book, Feyn also provided new insights into, and details of, key strategic moments when top Mossad or other Israeli officials gambled and took history in one direction instead of another, despite the “right” choice being covered in a haze of fog.

Feyn only recently retired from the defense establishment after decades in operations, including as one of the top managers with unique insider information about the beepers operation. He may still do other future work with the defense establishment, and so published the book under a fictional name to protect his identity. Another twist regarding the book is that Feyn wrote it as a partially fictional account, but which is meticulously based on the insider history of what actually happened, which only he and a small number of other top Mossad senior managers and defense officials know.

The best way to understand the breakdown of truth and fiction in the book is that the vast majority of the actions taken by the Mossad officials mentioned in the book, especially Mossad chief David Barnea (referred to only as the Mossad chief), actually happened, but sometimes in the book one character is a composite of multiple real agents to simplify the storytelling, which would otherwise become cumbersome and kill some of the pace. Such is the difference sometimes between Hollywood versions of intelligence operations and the real world. In both versions, the final result can be awesome and truly sweep readers or viewers off their feet. But in the real-life version, the culminating drama comes only after painstaking and agonizingly slow steps and meticulous spy tradecraft which laymen would never understand or tolerate.

The Mossad lured a Hezbollah operative into an ambush to prevent him from exposing the beepers
According to the book, around July 2024 the Mossad chief (Barnea in the real world) called the air force chief (Tomer Bar in the real world), who sent a senior air force operations colonel to a critical Mossad meeting, usually one not attended by outsiders (including the IDF). The Mossad officials at the meeting warned the colonel that a Hezbollah operative was getting too close to figuring out that the beepers were booby-trapped and requested that the air force kill him to save the operation. This was only around two months before the beepers were activated. In the book, the air force colonel responded to the Mossad officials by saying he needed the agency to trick the Hezbollah technology reviewer into leaving Beirut and also to give the air force his exact location when he left.

Next, the book said that Israeli defense and intelligence officials fooled the Hezbollah operative into traveling to southern Lebanon, where they bombed him. Questioned about such operations, Feyn told the Post, “it’s highly sensitive. The situation was problematic. There was more than one problematic situation that the Mossad had to deal with. Sometimes the problems went away on their own or more easily, and sometimes the Mossad had to act.” This operation did not end Hezbollah’s suspicions.

Major investigation: Intelligence failures let Akram family shooters enter terror hotspot prior to Bondi massacre while avoiding surveillance

Australia’s top spy agency’s assessment of the alleged Bondi attackers in 2019 demanded travel alerts be placed on them and their file revisited if they associated with extremists - but in a catastrophic failure, the men were able to move freely through known terror hotspots.

An investigation has uncovered a series of failures that meant that Sajid and Naveed Akram slipped through the cracks of law enforcement and security agencies prior to the Bondi terror attack on December 14, 2025.

In a critical lapse, the Australian Federal Police and Border Force, which sits within Home Affairs, were aware of the Akram’s travel to known terror hotspots but did not pass the intelligence onto ASIO or NSW Police, which issued the gun licenses.

It can be revealed that the Akrams travelled to Uzbekistan - a known gateway to terror hotspot Afghanistan - in late 2022 or early 2023.

The investigation, conducted for the upcoming book Bondi Terror, also discovered that ASIO’s travel alert was only placed on the Akrams' first port of call, rather than their final destination.

This is a matter that is likely to come under scrutiny by the Royal Commission this week.

ASIO conducted a thorough assessment of Naveed Akram in 2019, which included several interviews with his father Sajid.

The spy agency concluded that while Naveed was associating with dangerous individuals, neither were considered to be violent extremists themselves.

But it’s understood the ASIO assessment stated if the Akrams were found to be associating with ‘persons of interest’ again, the assessment would need to be revisited and the inquiry re-opened.

This never occurred in the subsequent years.

The 2019 assessment was signed off at a middle-ranking level and was not reviewed by senior officials.

ASIO also required that travel alerts be placed on the Akrams' movements.

However, the alerts placed on the Akrams were only for their first port of arrival, not their final destination.

Some senior figures have suggested this was inadequate.

Israeli soldier killed by Hezbollah drone near Lebanese border

An Israel Defense Forces soldier was killed in a Hezbollah explosive drone strike in Israeli territory near the Lebanese border while he was on operational activity in northern Israel, the military announced on Saturday night.

The fallen soldier was identified as Staff Sgt. Noam Hamburger, 23, a technology and maintenance specialist in the 9th Battalion of the 401st “Iron Tracks” Brigade.

Hamburger, from the northern Israeli coastal town of Atlit, was the ninth Israeli soldier killed since a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect on April 16, 2026.

In the same incident, another soldier was seriously wounded and a noncommissioned officer sustained light injuries, the IDF said. Both were evacuated to a hospital for medical treatment, and their families were notified, it added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conveyed his condolences to Hamburger’s family.

“My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the family of Staff Sgt. Noam Hamburger, of blessed memory, who fell near the northern border,” Netanyahu said. “Noam, of blessed memory, from the town of Atlit, fought heroically to defend our communities and citizens against the Hezbollah terrorist organization.”

The premier added that “on behalf of all citizens of Israel, we embrace Noam’s family and loved ones, and wish a speedy and full recovery to his comrades who were injured in this difficult incident.”

Ten IDF soldiers were wounded on Wednesday from direct hits by explosive drones in Southern Lebanon, two severely, the military said. They included the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade, Col. Meir Biderman, who was hospitalized in serious condition. His condition improved over the Shavuot holiday weekend, doctors said.

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05/21 Links Pt2: Hatred of Israel and the Degradation of the West; The Doom Loop of UK Anti-Semitism; The Tiki Torch Has Been Passed; Mamdani Paid Multiple Visits to Holocaust-Denying Sheikh

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Hatred of Israel and the Degradation of the West

Good-faith criticism of Israeli leaders and policy has for years been giving way to something darker. It's a conviction that Israel, alone among the nations, was a mistake to begin with and has no right to exist now. The fashionable frenzy that is today's loathing of Israel is a sign of the degradation of the West.

Societies that value critical thinking and reasoned moral judgment do not make a fetish of demonizing one small country and its people while imagining that peace, justice and freedom would somehow be achieved if only the country and its people were made to disappear.

Israel has been living under the endless drizzle of orchestrated propaganda and media hostility over the course of its 78 years, while still managing to transform itself into a military, technological and economic powerhouse - as well as one of the happiest countries in the world.

Moral judgments should be made about Israel according to the same standards by which we judge other countries faced with similar circumstances. It's when Israel is demanded to be a saint - and then, as it invariably falls short, is damned as the worst sinner - that we lose our sense of perspective and proportion.

The Tiki Torch Has Been Passed By Abe Greenwald

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The Dems are now the party of the forgotten Jew-hater. Leading Democrats today, unlike Trump, praise neo-Nazis and anti-Semites round the clock. How could they not? The anti-Semites are their supporters, candidates, and elected officials. There’s Mamdani, Platner, El-Sayed, and other colorful figures.

For example, there’s Texas Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo, who pledged on social media last week to “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.” She added: “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

If there’s still a quiet part that Dems are not supposed to say out loud, Galindo seems to have said it. Major Democrats have summoned herculean courage to condemn her remarks about imprisoning Jews and castrating them for pedophilia.

But everything else goes. So-called moderate party leaders and potential presidential candidates are denouncing AIPAC, Israel, “the Epstein class,” etc.

They’re also going out of their way to praise Jew-haters across the aisle. Yesterday, the career anti-Semite Thomas Massie lost a Republican congressional primary election in Kentucky. Just a week ago, Massie posed for a picture with a supporter who was wearing an “American Reich” sweatshirt complete with a Reichsadler-esque logo. Last night, after his defeat, Massie’s first public comment was “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

Democrat Ro Khanna, a 2028 presidential hopeful, couldn’t bear to see such a fine man go down. “My good friend @RepThomasMassie lost tonight,” he wrote on X. “He lost because he had the guts to stand up to the Epstein class and against the war.” Nor could Khanna miss the opportunity to hoover up Massie’s anti-Semitic base. “I say to this voters who feel rejected by Trump,” he went on. “We welcome you. Join our coalition to take on a rotten system and stand for the working class over the Epstein class.”

An hour later, perhaps realizing he forgot to mention AIPAC, Khanna posted: “The message is clear: if you take a stand against war, AIPAC, & the Epstein class, you have no place in the Trump coalition. But the future of the Democratic Party that is done with the establishment is yours to shape.”

The message is clear, alright: There are only good people on one side—on the other, there are Jews. When you blame an election loss on a rigged system, it’s a threat to our democracy. When you blame it on a system rigged by the Jews, it’s “guts.” And if you blame the pesky Jews for everything, you’ll find a home in the Democratic Party.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the tiki torch has been passed to a new generation of Democrats.

Seth Mandel: The Doom Loop of UK Anti-Semitism

Today’s Telegraph continues on this theme with an extraordinary column by George Chesterton, whose wife and children are Jewish. (Memo to Keir Starmer: You should probably read the Telegraph, you might learn something.) Chesterton’s older daughter was bat mitzvahed in 2023; his younger daughter is currently taking lessons for her own upcoming celebration. In between the two events, Britain has changed for the worse—but the signs, Chesterton says, were there even before the Hamas attacks in October 2023.

That first bat mitzvah took place earlier in 2023, and when Chesterton’s daughter started talking about it, the Nazi taunts from her classmates immediately followed.

“Hearing that my daughter was having a bat mitzvah was the trigger—until then most of her school year had not even known she was Jewish,” he writes. “It’s a measure of how far our society has allowed hatred of Jews to spread that abuse in early 2023 seems almost innocent compared to today.”

We should pause a moment on that first line: “Hearing that my daughter was having a bat mitzvah was the trigger.” Anti-Semites like to claim that Jews are to blame for their own discrimination. This argument has been extremely common after October 7, when bigots and their apologists portray anti-Semitism as “just anti-Zionism” and a reaction to Israel’s own policies. Chesterton’s article is a reminder that such triggers are always a pretext: Are the Hitler taunts his daughter’s fault for having a bat mitzvah? Anything Jewish, whether related to Israel or not, is a trigger for anti-Semites. Western societies just happen to be at a place now where there’s always someone triggered by Jews being Jews.

Chesterton’s other daughter wasn’t spared either:

“Around the same time, my younger daughter, then aged 10 and in primary school, had been compelled to declare which ‘side’ she was on by fellow pupils, the clear implication being that the children asking her were on the side of Palestinians. As with her big sister, this was because they knew she was Jewish. It was a primary-school purity test. She came home one day and explained someone had scratched Israel out of the school atlases.”

Totally healthy society, where 10-year-olds are subject to anti-Jewish purity tests in school.

The adults experienced it too, of course. Chesterton talks about his and his wife’s friends being quick to signal their virtuous anger at Israel when the war started so that they would pass the same purity test. But the family’s experiences were never limited to conversations about Israel:

“One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2024, my wife, who is a photographer, was trying to book a taxi to the Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, where she was due to be taking pictures at an event. Eight times, a different driver picked up the fare then mysteriously dropped the job once they realized what the destination was. In the end, I drove her to work because nobody else would.”

George Orwell’s ‘Antisemitism in Britain’ has sadly aged very well

Afew weeks ago, as I looked at footage of a pro-Palestine demonstration – I forget which one, they’re all blurring into one – and noted the prevalence of the nice, genteel, middle-class protesters, a phrase popped unbidden into my head: “The stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism.”

The words were Ezra Pound’s, in conversation with Allen Ginsberg in 1967. During the war Pound had broadcast, from Italy, the vilest antisemitic propaganda; this was his way of apologising for it. Leaving aside the question of whether his contrition was genuine or not, the choice of the adjective “suburban” was telling. It suggests something tamed, polite even; not the wildness of the countryside or the jostle and bustle of the city, but something tree-lined, respectable.

I also thought of this when a friend sent me a link to George Orwell’s 1945 essay Antisemitism in Britain. For an 81-year-old, this essay is looking surprisingly youthful. (One surprise: it begins by saying that “There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain”; the current figure is some 277,000.) A quote from it has been doing the rounds on social media lately: “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”

This is usually cited in opposition to the recent opinion piece in the New York Times about dogs being trained to rape; but it has, and will continue to have, other applications.

Orwell’s essay, though, also makes much of the respectability of those who make antisemitic comments: “Naturally the antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable ‘come-back’, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people – doctors, for example – with no apparent economic grievance.”

I can believe it. There has always been this strain in British antisemitism, something of middle-class virtue; and I think of Dulwich, the suburb itself, as leafy as can possibly be imagined; and the famous school, the college, that sits within it, like a country house; and its (currently) most famous alumnus, Nigel Farage, who, it has been often alleged, spent much of his time there making hissing noises at fellow Jewish pupils, and racially abusing anyone with darker skin than him.

“A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time,” writes Orwell in the same essay.

“He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark.”

And I think of my own public school, Westminster, where two of the school’s intellectual elite, the Queen’s Scholars, asked me if I was Jewish, and when I said I wasn’t, replied: “Then you won’t mind saying, ‘Jews are the scum of the earth, and up with Adolf Hitler.’ They’re only words, go on, say them.” I demurred.

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05/21 Links Pt1: Donald Trump, do not negotiate with the devil in Tehran; Hunting the Terrorists of October 7; Argentine ex-prosecutor charged with cover-up in 2015 death of AMIA bombing investigator

From Ian:

Donald Trump, do not negotiate with the devil in Tehran

The countdown to the regime’s fall
Two years ago, I put up billboards all over Israel. The billboards displayed a countdown clock similar to the one in Tehran that counts down the days until Israel’s destruction. The Iranian regime set its clock for the year 2040.

I wanted to send a message back to Tehran: regimes built on terror do not last. I put up billboards around Israel with a countdown clock set to October 28, 2028, predicting the end of the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran.

October 28 is a famous date in Iran because it recognizes Cyrus the Great Day.

The poison chalice
The only solution is to squeeze Iran tighter. The mullahs cannot be reasoned with through negotiations.

The good news is that the world’s tolerance for terror is extremely low, and the business of terror is being exposed. Islamic wokeism is collapsing. The Iranian people themselves are exhausted by decades of corruption, isolation, and religious tyranny. That is why the vast majority of the Persian people have turned against the regime. That is also why some of the most popular words heard in Iran are “Uncle Trump” and “Bibi.”

Ayatollah Khamenei once referred to his forced acceptance of a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War as “drinking the poison chalice.” He did it because economic collapse and military pressure had left him no choice.

Iran needs to drink the poison chalice again.

You can’t negotiate with demons
You cannot kill a demon with a bullet.The ideology driving terror in Iran will not disappear. This is an ideological war, a media war, a proxy war, and a spirit war. It is a battle against principalities and powers, against demonic spirits.

And you can be sure of one thing: demons lie.

Iran has no intention of honoring its promises. The spine of the regime will have to be broken, either economically or militarily.

Seth Mandel: Hunting the Terrorists of October 7

It is deliberately reminiscent of previous shadow campaigns. The name, NILI, is an acronym that was also given to a World War I Jewish spy network, though for most readers the article will likely call to mind the retributive campaign against the participants of the Munich massacre at the Olympics in 1972.

Putting names on the list and then finding and eliminating the terrorists is extremely difficult work. It can sometimes take years to get IDF approval for a single target. That’s because the campaign is meticulous in its adherence to legal rules that govern such considerations. Even if the campaign “feels retributive” to the average person, former U.S. Air Force judge advocate Rachel VanLandingham told the Journal, “the law doesn’t disallow that.”

As the aforementioned case demonstrates, Israel is even careful to abide by the rules of the cease-fire deal, in which it can respond to attacks but refrains from initiating them.

That is one element of the moral framework of this campaign. Another is the message: Jewish blood comes at a cost. Those who kill Israelis will be hunted down and given earthly justice. No one is allowed to get away with doing what these Palestinians did on October 7. “Agents run the images through facial recognition programs to sift for names, the officials said, and comb through intercepted phone calls. They view location data from cell tower logs and interrogate Gazan detainees to uncover who did what.”

Hamas itself has helped the process because so many terrorists videotaped and broadcast their demonic campaign of slaughter and torture. That makes it easier to find them. To my mind, it also makes it more important to find them and deliver justice.

That the Gazans’ crimes of that day were on par with those of the Nazis and of the pogromists of the Russian empire is indisputable. That the perpetrators were so proud of their work, and that they (incorrectly) assumed it would inspire Arabs within Israel to do the same, is civilizational poison, and must be treated as such. And that Israel is dispensing justice while so carefully hewing to laws, norms, and agreements is a reminder that this battle can be won.

Israel's Campaign to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker

On Oct. 7, 2023, a video surfaced of an Israeli woman screaming, "Don't kill me," as she was hauled away on a motorcycle between two kidnappers. Noa Argamani spent 245 days captive in Gaza. After her release, two men seen in the video holding back Argamani's boyfriend were tracked down by Israeli intelligence officials and killed in separate airstrikes. The men were crossed off a list of thousands of names kept by an Israeli task force created to kill or capture all who planned or joined in the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli officials said.

Hundreds have been struck from the list, in one of the most personal and highly technical targeting campaigns in the history of warfare. Security forces mark men for death if they find at least two pieces of evidence showing they took part in crimes during the Oct. 7 attacks, according to Israeli security officials. Hundreds of Gazans charged with participating in the Oct. 7 attacks are in Israeli custody awaiting trial. The parliament recently passed a bill to establish a special military tribunal.

The task force killed Hamas fighters who paraglided into Israel on Oct. 7, others who raided border communities, and those who participated in the killing of hundreds of revelers at the Nova music festival, where Argamani and her boyfriend were kidnapped. On Feb. 4, Hamas operative Muhammed Issam Hassan al-Habil was killed by a drone that fired at his car in Gaza. The Israeli military and security services said they learned through interrogations that Habil was responsible for the death of Noa Marciano, a female soldier taken hostage and killed in captivity.

Michael Milstein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer on Palestinian affairs, said, "In the Middle East, revenge is an important part of the discourse. It is about how serious anyone in your environment sees you. Unfortunately, this is the language of this neighborhood."

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