07/28 Links Pt2: Saving the West from the Evils of Hamas; A 'Respected' Medical Journal's War Against Doctors; Why is the left in denial about Islamist homophobia?

From Ian:

Fighting the New Antisemitism

Shaikh sees a need to “inoculate” students from elementary school age against falsehoods by teaching basic facts about the Jewish people and Israel. He and Michaelis visit high schools as guest speakers, and Shaikh has helped build “a trauma-informed, culturally educated” chatbot designed to screen for potential behavioral threats, such as whether an individual is an extremist risk and might need to be referred to Parents for Peace.

There are fundamentals to consider, too. As Michaelis understands it, teachers are allowed “to intentionally radicalize students,” and “teachers’ unions are rabidly antisemitic.” Schoep recognizes the left-wing emphasis on “oppression” as “the exact same rhetoric I once weaponized as a neo-Nazi leader and what fuels extreme far-right ideology.” The fixation on “whiteness, blackness, brownness” and “divisive terms like ‘white privilege’” only serves to “create racism” and “radicalize entire generations.” This worldview also turns adherents against Jews and Israel, while being divorced from the realities of Jewish identity, history, and diversity.

At the college level, Jeffery observes, undergraduates “taught to hate their own ancestors, history, culture and the overall idea of Western civilization” will also hate Jews and Israel, “because the Jewish people helped build the West.” Without serious change, “it’s not the external enemy the U.S. will be fighting 50 years from now” but “the internal one.”

Universities have spent the past several decades “teaching a frame in which the West is the permanent aggressor, and any non-Western grievance is sacred,” Burmawi says. “Holocaust skepticism and ‘Israel is genocidal’” follow from that. The solution is “teaching why the West produced human rights, individual dignity, limited government, the abolition of slavery, and . . . the Judeo-Christian root” of those ideas. “A generation that knows what built their freedom is far harder to recruit into burning it down.”

Lobell echoes these points: “People who hate Israel and the Jews typically hate America, too.” In her view, there’s a “silent majority” that recoils from radicalism, and politicians should remember that.

Noting that “you can’t fight what you can’t define,” Hafeez urges adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism at the state and federal levels. Further, there must be a “bipartisan realization” in Washington “that those who come to America to live and study must accept our values of a diverse and pluralistic society” and leave Jew-hatred behind.

Al-Aqidi says public officials must resist “Islamist groups . . . insisting that every law or government statement addressing antisemitism also includes Islamophobia.” That “false equivalence . . . shifts attention away from anti-Jewish hatred” and allows political Islamists to “recast themselves as the primary victims.”

Burmawi makes the most compelling case for what’s needed to counter the growing danger of antisemitism and anti-Zionism:
The instinct I see in much of the American Jewish establishment, to fight this by pleading for tolerance, is a losing strategy. It misreads the enemy entirely. You cannot tolerance-seminar your way out of a theological conviction or a critical theory catechism. Reasonableness reads as weakness to people who’ve been taught your existence is the problem. . . . Stop apologizing, and stop asking for permission. The single most persuasive thing the Jewish community can do for other Americans is to model the confidence I call “re-Zionization.” Israel is, right now, the most compelling argument in the world that a nation can be unashamed of its own survival, can name its enemy, can refuse the endless-grievance trap, and still be moral. Most Americans, especially young ones, aren’t antisemitic, they’re demoralized. They’ve been taught that any civilization defending itself is “supremacist.” When they see Jews who won’t accept that framing, who say plainly “our existence is not up for debate,” it gives them permission to defend their own civilization too. Jeffery likewise urges the Jewish community to stop taking “a very apologetic view towards Israel. . . . If someone wants a Jewish person to condemn Israel to be socially accepted, then that’s wrong, and it must not only be rejected but also confronted.” Efforts to educate non-Jews about Israel’s centrality to “Jewish identity” must continue, along with increasing engagement with “non-Jewish allies, who are already battling the lion in its own den.”

Combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism in American society isn’t a favor to Jews. Such efforts are part and parcel of preserving Western civilization. The problems underlying the turn against American Jews and Israel are multifaceted, so there’s no single solution. But clearly, given the recent polling, a rethink is necessary. And the first step must be winning back younger generations of Americans.

Saving the West from the Evils of Hamas

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released an official video that repeated his false narrative that a "genocide" had been committed.

In Mamdani's world, it is Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu that brought on devastation in Gaza, not Hamas.

Listening to Mamdani, you might think it was Netanyahu that started that war on Oct. 7. You might be led to believe that it was Netanyahu who savagely murdered 1,200 in Israel that day.

Or that it was Netanyahu who fired rockets at Israel, built tunnels with aid money, and used his own citizens as human shields in orchestrating the war against Israel.

Why do people continue to reject overwhelming evidence that Israel has been defending itself against brutal terrorists, when it appears clear and compelling?

One reason is psychological "cognitive dissonance" when facts conflict with deeply held beliefs. Protecting one's identity and staying aligned with one's family and community usually overwhelmingly trumps the truth.

We are in a perfect storm when it comes to the rejection of the truth.

For years we were fed with new ideological frameworks that include newly created concepts like "Islamophobia" but have left out antisemitism almost entirely, despite the fact that statistics show that the Jewish community is the most targeted group for racism and discrimination.

It's going to take generations to overcome the distortion and denial that has taken place since Oct. 7.

Gerald M. Steinberg: A 'Respected' Medical Journal's War Against Doctors

[T]he pro-Hamas lobby is circulating a mass petition calling for the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association.

The petition – which blames the Israeli doctors for alleged bias and omits any mention of Hamas' war crimes – was amplified in June by once-respected UK medical journal The Lancet, clearly crossing the line between professional medical publication and blatant propaganda.

Far from providing medical evidence or reflecting professional ethics, the petition, as echoed by The Lancet, recycles political slogans and ancient blood libels, accusing Israel of "genocide" and the destruction of Gaza's health system. Of course, there is no mention of the overwhelming evidence of Hamas's systematic militarization of hospitals and other civilian medical facilities – all actual war crimes.

In promoting this campaign, The Lancet copied the accusations of fringe activist NGOs including the People's Health Movement (PHM), Doctors for Gaza (Artsen voor Gaza), and the "Health Advisory Council" of the so-called Jewish Voice for Peace. Even a cursory review makes clear that the petition touted by this ostensible medical journal is not remotely about medical ethics.

By parroting these NGOs and violating fundamental requirements for a scientific journal, The Lancet does not make even a minimal attempt to examine their credibility and embrace of terror.

Unsurprisingly, this isn't the first time journal editor Richard Horton has used The Lancet to publish anti-Israel propaganda. From 2001 to 2014, a majority of the publication's output regarding Israeli and Palestinian issues – 58.3% of its 264 items – took the form of political commentary rather than medical research.

The Lancet dismisses any mention of Hamas' responsibility for Gaza's medical plight as mere Israeli claims, despite extensive documentation.

Additionally, neither this medical journal nor the NGOs leading the petition have ever asked any other civilian medical associations to condemn their home states' military operations. The list includes Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and other actual violators of human rights and international law.

With Horton and The Lancet again at the forefront of a hate directed at Israeli doctors, and under the thin facade of scientific publishing, an effective response is necessary that will get the attention of the journal's Dutch publisher, Elsevier.

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07/28 Links Pt1: Eli Lake: Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal with Iran; How global elites weaponize anti-Israel hostility to conceal misconduct and crime; It’s time to demythologize the mystique of Palestinianism

From Ian:

How global elites weaponize anti-Israel hostility to conceal misconduct and crime

The dismissal of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, a British-Pakistani lawyer, by the court’s member states marks a watershed moment, not just for international law, but for our understanding of how modern “lawfare” is weaponized as a personal shield.

For months, the global public was led to believe that Khan’s aggressive pursuit of arrest warrants against Israeli leadership was a principled stance on human rights. However, the timeline tells a far more cynical story.

The allegations of coercive sexual misconduct against Khan were formally reported internally to senior ICC officials and the court’s independent watchdog before he launched his lawfare campaign and sought arrest warrants against Israeli officials.

Confronted with an impending career-ending scandal, Khan played the ultimate survival card: he targeted the Jewish state.

By aggressively seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, Khan orchestrated a calculated diversion. This move was designed to align him with the Western political Left and their Islamist coalition allies, who command significant influence over mainstream media narratives.

The strategy was clear: leverage anti-Israel bias to frame any subsequent scrutiny of his personal behavior as a retaliatory, politically motivated attack. In the early stages, the tactic worked seamlessly. The mainstream media accommodated this narrative, focusing on institutional friction rather than the severe allegations of misconduct that have now led to his formal dismissal.

This playbook, using hostility towards Israel as an emergency exit from domestic or personal ruin, is becoming a disturbing trend among contemporary leaders. On May 27, 2026, the offices of Spain’s Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the EU’s anti-Israel-in-chief, were raided by the police.

This escalation follows the formal indictment of his wife on corruption and influence-peddling charges. There are other ongoing corruption charges against those close to Sánchez, including the recent indictment of Spain’s former Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero over corruption linked to Venezuela and oil schemes.

Sánchez’s relentless diplomatic assaults on Israel may be initially seen as aligned with his coalition’s Leftist ideology, or as a professed concern for the human rights of the oppressed.

However, more vicious attacks on Israel also serve a highly functional domestic purpose: convincing a progressive base that internal judicial scrutiny is merely a shadow campaign directed by Jerusalem.

In Persian culture, there is a precise term for this behavior: riya (ریا). Riya is the practice of flagrant hypocrisy, where one projects a false public image to conceal a darker reality. In Iran, modern history has taught citizens a painful truth: the louder a public figure performs ideological purity, the larger the crime they are attempting to hide.

Under the Islamic Republic, a mafia cartel operating under a religious guise, hyper-demonstrative piety is the standard armor for systemic financial and political corruption. The legendary Persian poet Hafez famously identified riya and deceit as the absolute pinnacle of societal moral decay.

Steps toward accountability
Today, Western elites are recycling this ancient vice. Antisemitism is a chronic human disease akin to latent tuberculosis. It exists asymptomatically across millions.

However, when activated by political opportunity, it breaks out into lethal destruction, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the atrocities of October 7. The contemporary Western Left and its Islamist allies have seamlessly repackaged this bias under the acceptable veneer of “anti-Zionism.”

Brian L. Cox & John Spencer: Arresting Netanyahu in America Would Be Illegal

This is what Mamdani left out. He will commit a criminal offense if he orders the prime minister to be arrested during a visit to New York City, as Netanyahu is expected to do in September to attend sessions at the UN General Assembly.

Here is why: New York law establishes that restraining another person is a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in prison. It becomes a class E felony if the restraint exposes the person “to a risk of serious physical injury.”

The law defines “restrain” as restricting “a person's movements intentionally and unlawfully.” There is no question the act would be intentional. The Constitution makes the rest clear. It would be entirely unlawful.

The ICC may have issued a warrant, but it has no legal force in this country because America never ratified the Rome Statute. President Bill Clinton signed it, but the Bush administration withdrew the signature, and no president has ever submitted the treaty to the Senate. Without Senate approval, the Rome Statute has no legal standing in the United States.

There is no ambiguity. An ICC warrant cannot be enforced anywhere in this country. Attempting to act on it would be unlawful.

Although Mamdani only exercises governing authority within New York City, Ro Khanna’s call for President Trump to arrest Netanyahu extends beyond the confines of a single municipality. Regardless of the location, arresting the prime minister on the basis of ICC warrants would also constitute the intentional tort of false imprisonment.

The decisive element in a civil suit for false imprisonment under these circumstances would be that the defendant acted “without lawful authority.” Because ICC proceedings are not recognized by a country such as the United States that hasn’t ratified the Rome Statute, no governmental official has “lawful authority” to implement warrants issued by the international tribunal.

Any attempt to detain him would trigger federal jurisdiction. Israel and Netanyahu could take the offenders to federal court, and the financial and diplomatic fallout would be enormous.

Mamdani claims New York City is a “city of international law.” It is not. It cannot be. And no mayor can declare it otherwise.

The Big Apple is a metropolitan area in the State of New York, which is part of the United States of America. This means New York City is a city of constitutional law, just like every other municipality in the country.

And Ro Khanna asserts “America needs to cooperate with the ICC” because “it’s a matter of a rules-based international order.” This is false.

The “rules-based international order” is built on consent. While the United States agrees with most of the substance of the Rome Statute, this country has not acquiesced to the court’s jurisdiction by virtue of ratifying this multilateral treaty.

As such, arrest warrants issued by the ICC have no legal effect in America. This means arresting Benjamin Netanyahu would violate the rules-based international order as well as constitutional law that applies domestically across the United States.

Yisrael Medad: Going on a narrative offensive: It’s time to demythologize the mystique of Palestinianism

Rewiring the narrative
Historically, the relative success in the turnabout on Israel and Zionism has been a long process. Even if we ignore Jewish anti-Zionism thinking, amongst Jews as well as non-Jews, or take into consideration general anti-Jewish sentiment whether racist or religiously-motivated, surely we are in a very different place as regards control of the narrative.

In a recent piece posted in the +972 Magazine, we learn that France’s Rima Hassan, European Parliament member representing the La France Insoumise party, wants to break four taboos in the French public debate on Palestine.

They are: recognizing Zionism as a colonial ideology; defending the right of return; discussing the legitimacy of armed struggle; and moving beyond the two-state paradigm.

That is not a simple alteration of a narrative but, as the chant that has been increasingly sounded at anti-Israel rallies is formulated, Zionism must be eliminated. We are back in the 1950s and 1960s with the “Throw them into the sea!” sloganeering.

Yet, because of the internal squabbling in Israel over policies, the fundamental truths of the Zionist narrative have been misplaced in our public diplomacy material, as well as the fierce willingness to engage in confronting the waves of lies and fabrications assertively. It appears the “in” thing is to appear at the Oxford Union in evening dress.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, however, provides another problem. Appalled by Hasan Piker’s claim of how much better Hamas is than Israel, he writes in the LA Jewish Journal on July 16 that Piker’s political voice promotes a “toxic narrative … untethered from reality.”

Piker, he continued, is an example of how “Palestinians’ allies have led [the Palestinians] to the dark side of their national aspirations – destroying Israel rather than building their own potential state.”

Greenberg does not address that toxicity’s success. He does not ask if that negativity should be a cause to punish those exploiting such a message or if, and he is a rabbi, an ethical conclusion could be drawn that should advance the idea that an Arab Palestine state would be immoral.

There exists a major underestimation of the damage and danger the Palestine narrative dominance represents. And now that the pro-Palestine camp has reduced the rhetoric to a zero-sum situation, demanding our elimination and that our existence as a Jewish state must be denied, the hasbara (public diplomacy) approach of defense and explaining Israel’s actions needs to be refashioned.

Money is available. According to reports, since October 2023, upwards of $100 million has been allotted to hasbara efforts, most on social media platforms. I probably haven’t seen all the output, but I am confident little of it was framed in an attack mode.

We need to be past that stage of weak, explanatory public diplomacy. Attention must be shifted. The burden of proof and defense must be placed on the pro-Palestine side. Should a Palestinian national identity of less than 100 years be preferred over a 3,000-year Jewish national identity?

Were not the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the real colonization process in the Middle East?

Who is truly engaged in an “ethnic cleansing” if not Palestinianism? Who initiated genocidal violence, beginning in 1920? Should not the side that violates agreements be punished? Should a constant rejection of diplomacy and willingness to compromise be tolerated?

It is time to make major changes in attitude and approach and to reassert Zionism’s narrative.

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07/27 Links Pt2: London’s mayor has crossed a far more dangerous line than Mamdani; UK Solicitor General Spoke at Rally Where Protesters Chanted "Khaybar, Khaybar"

From Ian:

Israelis fail to understand anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S., Israeli public opinion researcher says

Israelis generally don’t grasp the extent of the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States, Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli public opinion researcher and columnist, told Jewish Insider.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum this month hours before more than 100 House Democrats voted to cut U.S. military aid to Israel, Scheindlin said that most Israelis feel that warnings of slipping U.S. support have been repeated for years but haven’t come to fruition.

“Israelis for a long time have been told ‘you have to worry about the America-Israel relationship’ and nothing ever really happened — they sort of took it for granted that the relationship would always be there, and in many ways they still do,” Scheindlin said. “From the Israeli perspective, there’s a little bit of a sense of crying wolf. We see that in the 53% who still think that the relationship will be fine.”

She said most Israelis today view Republicans as pro-Israel and Democrats as anti-Israel and have little understanding of the range of views within both parties. And she said they don’t believe Israel’s own actions have any bearing on U.S. criticism of Israel.

Supporters of opposition parties, she continued, believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “personally has undermined the relationship” — but that the issues in the relationship largely end with Netanyahu.

She said that the strong support in Israel for President Donald Trump took a nosedive with the ceasefires in Iran and Lebanon, with many Jewish Israelis feeling that Trump had forced a premature end to the wars and didn’t let the U.S. and Israel carry them to their conclusion or fulfill their main objectives.

But she said that most Israelis still see issues in the relationship as a “disagreement that will pass” rather than a true crisis or turning point. She said a majority of Israelis still feel the U.S.-Israel relationship will survive — and many are too concerned with their own daily lives and the ongoing impacts of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to give the relationship much thought.

“When you ask about the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s somewhere between repressing it and complacent and fearful — but also they have been told year after year for quite a long time, ‘Watch out for this relationship,’ and then America continues to come through in so many ways,” she said.

Dave Rich: Mayoral missteps

The Mayors of New York and London have both weighed in on the Gaza genocide claim in the past week, calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested if he visits either city. In both cases it is an empty threat and an opportunistic piece of political theatre. At a time when Jews have been violently attacked in both cities, the two mayors would be better off trying to protect their Jewish residents rather than engaging in this kind of reckless posturing.

First, the facts. There is an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Netanyahu (and for then-Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant), for allegedly commissioning war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants the US government to enforce this warrant if Netanyahu visits New York, because, he says, Netanyahu is “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” When Channel 4 news asked London Mayor Sadiq Khan if he would do the same, he concurred, calling Netanyahu “a perpetrator of genocide… he’s broken the law and I think justice needs to happen.” “People who commit genocide”, Khan went on, “are not welcome in London.” We’ll come back to that.

This is a classic bait-and-switch, because the ICC warrant that Mamdani and Khan want to be enforced is not for genocide. On the contrary: when the ICC issued the warrant they explicitly rejected a request for it to include the crime of extermination, because the evidence did not support it. Even if Netanyahu were to be arrested and convicted under the ICC warrant it would not prove that Israel is guilty of genocide, because that is not what the ICC has charged him with. This distinction might seem trivial; after all, being accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity is bad enough. But “genocide” is a political label that Israel’s enemies have been trying to attach to it for decades, as a shortcut to declaring the entire Israeli state illegitimate. If the Israeli Prime Minister is guilty of war crimes, it would be a matter of personal disgrace; whereas if the Israeli state has committed genocide, then the entire nation is damned. This is why Israel’s opponents are determined to make everything seem like evidence of genocide. Anything less simply will not meet their political needs.

This is part of a campaign to rebrand Zionism - the Jewish desire for national self-determination in the ancestral Jewish homeland - as a racist, supremacist ideology and a manifestation of European settler colonialism, that has genocidal intent woven into its founding ethos. The sobering scale of the devastation and loss of life in Gaza provides a golden opportunity to make this label stick, so everything must be about genocide, even when, as with the ICC warrant, it isn’t.

The now-disgraced ICC prosecutor who instigated the warrants, Karim Khan KC, who is no friend of Israel, resisted the pressure to go along with the “genocide” charge as recently as May this year. In a telling exchange, he advised a bemused and frustrated Mehdi Hasan that the evidence for genocide simply isn’t there, and “it would be a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamour. You move based upon evidence.”

Not just a reckless prosecutor, but a reckless Mayor too. The belief that Israel is committing a genocide, and that it deliberately kills children and has starved Palestinians, is the driving force behind the rise in antisemitism in the United Kingdom and the United States today. This is the central narrative of the protests that regularly feature antisemitic and violent rhetoric on London’s streets. It is the excuse offered by Palestine Action members when they smash up offices in London or arms factories around the country. And it appears regularly in the antisemitic incidents reported to CST, when ordinary Jews going about their lives in our capital city are abused and harassed by random racists. “Oh, you’re Jewish - you must support genocide”, is what a fellow student said to the university-age daughter of a friend of mine, on discovering there was a Jew in their class.

Both Mayors have condemned antisemitic attacks in their cities. Presumably they would fiercely reject any suggestion that their behaviour might encourage, even unwittingly, the violent extremists and antisemites who are making Jewish life in London and New York so difficult right now. But if they don’t want it to look that way, they should take more care over their language, and be much more visible in demonstrating their opposition to antisemitism. When ambulances belonging to Hatzola (a Jewish-run ambulance service for the whole community) were set on fire in Golders Green in March, Khan visited a different Hatzola base in another part of London the following day, rather than rushing to the scene of the attack. When a series of synagogues and other Jewish community premises were attacked by Iranian-directed arsonists in April, London’s Mayor was nowhere to be seen. It was left to the Metropolitan Police to hold a press conference outside one of the targeted synagogues. After criticism for this absence, Khan held a private visit to Finchley Reform Synagogue a couple of days later; but then, when two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green allegedly by an Islamist terrorist at the end of April, Khan, again, did not turn up in person to show his solidarity.

London’s mayor has crossed a far more dangerous line than Mamdani

The ICC warrant itself also rests on increasingly shaky foundations. It was issued by former chief prosecutor Karim Khan just days before allegations of sexual misconduct against him became public. Earlier this week, ICC member states voted overwhelmingly to remove Khan from office following his suspension.

One might have expected the backlash to Mamdani’s remarks to discourage other political leaders from embracing similar rhetoric.

Instead, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has chosen to follow the same script.

The timing makes his comments all the more disturbing. Only days earlier, Khan visited London’s Nova Music Festival exhibition and urged visitors to remember “the horrors of that awful day” on October 7. Yet within a week he publicly declared Netanyahu “a perpetrator of genocide” and insisted he should be arrested if he visits Britain.

“As a perpetrator of genocide,” Khan said, “I think he’s broken the law. And I think justice needs to happen, and that means him being brought to book.”

Unlike Mamdani’s remarks, these comments carry genuine diplomatic significance. Britain is legally bound by the Rome Statute and has long presented itself as a champion of the international legal order. When the mayor of one of the world’s leading capitals publicly calls for the arrest of the democratically elected leader of a close ally, it lends credibility to an ICC process that many legal experts and democratic governments have questioned.

It also comes at a moment when antisemitism has become disturbingly commonplace across Britain. In the past year alone, Jews have endured stabbings in Golders Green, attempted arson attacks on synagogues, the destruction of Hatzolah ambulances, and the killing of two Jewish men in Manchester during Yom Kippur. Against that backdrop, rhetoric that singles out the Jewish state’s leader while ignoring the world’s countless genuine war criminals risks reinforcing an already dangerous climate.

Demonising Israel has become an easy route to headlines and political applause. Mamdani turned it into political theatre in New York. Sadiq Khan has now elevated it into something with potentially serious diplomatic consequences.

When elected leaders compete to lambast Israel, they do more than dominate the news cycle. They help normalise the hostility that Jews increasingly confront on the streets of New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver and beyond.

Mamdani’s comments generated headlines. Sadiq Khan’s could shape policy. That is why London, not just New York, should be where the real alarm bells are ringing.

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07/27 Links Pt1: Collapse of the Blood Libels; Hamas and its two million hostages; Guterres cements ‘infamous legacy’ with second term for UN rights chief

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: Collapse of the Blood Libels

Sometimes I think I am not angry enough, but the scale of the problem is almost too huge to be angry at, collectively. Towering rage must be split into smaller rages at each of the component parts of the blood libel machine. The fantastical Lancet “studies” salivating over hundreds of thousands of imaginary dead Gazans. AirWars’ pearl-clutching reports, drawing conclusions of civilian targeting in Gaza without a tenth of the evidence needed to draw said conclusions. Amnesty, B’tselem and all the other NGOs, releasing fraudulent genocide conclusions achieved only by changing the definition and parameters of genocide. The paid media squad of hacks, twisting and distorting and murdering the truth just to get one over on the Jewish state. South Africa, ripping apart the genocide convention at Iran’s behest, making it harder to punish real genocides in future.

The whole sorry mess sickens me, and now the great indictment of Israel is coming apart, one revelation at a time. This fact is not being reported by a single damned one of the media outlets that have spent years screeching over the war in Gaza to the exclusion of almost all else. Famine, deliberate attacks on hospitals, the slaughter of journalists and children, and systematic obstruction of aid: each allegation was broadcast as settled fact and then used to prove genocidal intent. The same newsrooms and universities that thundered these charges have shown remarkably little interest in the evidence that now destroys each of these allegations.

It is incredible. There is no aspect of the genocide allegation that has not collapsed.

Start with the famine claim. In August 2025, the IPC used two ways of measuring malnutrition in children: weight compared with height, and the size of a child’s upper arm. Gaza had no local data showing how those two measures matched up, so the IPC used an estimate from elsewhere in the region. It assumed the weight-and-height measure would find about twice as many malnourished children as the arm measurement.

The first large Gaza survey to use both measures found the reverse. Of 1,335 children surveyed in 2026, 0.5% were identified as acutely malnourished by weight and height, while 1.3% were identified by upper-arm measurement. That survey cannot tell us exactly what conditions were like in 2025. The later survey cannot recreate conditions in 2025, but it exposes the rotten foundation beneath a verdict presented to the world as scientific certainty: a key assumption behind the famine declaration had never been tested in Gaza itself.

The food figures are equally awkward. Official COGAT-based data show that about 1.01 million tonnes of food entered Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 17 January 2025, against an estimated requirement of 825,000 tonnes. From the October 2025 ceasefire to 7 June 2026, 1.78 million tonnes entered, against a calculated need of roughly 643,000 tonnes.

Of course, food crossing a border does not guarantee it reaches every family. Roads were destroyed, distribution failed, aid was looted, and Israel’s two-and-a-half-month block on aid in spring 2025 was a grave error. However, those qualifications cannot rescue the claim of a continuous Israeli policy to starve Gaza. The quantities of food that entered Gaza are simply too large.

The hospital narrative has also disintegrated. American intelligence independently confirmed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used al-Shifa for command operations, weapons storage, and to hold hostages. Hamas accounts now describe armed men, including senior officers, sheltering inside the hospital during an Israeli siege. Hospitals remained protected, and Israel still had to obey the laws of war, but the moral fairy tale of innocent hospitals attacked by the brutal IDF is dead. There is now endless evidence in the public domain of Hamas using hospitals for military purposes.

The casualty statistics have fared no better. The claim that 70 per cent of the dead were women and children became a fixture of global coverage. OCHA’s July 2026 snapshot, based on Gaza Health Ministry figures for 71,444 identified fatalities, placed those categories at 45.2 per cent. Adult men make up over 50% of the fatalities, from a pre-war adult male percentage of approximately 25% of the population. Not all adult men can be counted as combatants, but a figure repeatedly cited as proof of indiscriminate slaughter is now shown to be false when applied to the overall toll. The “hundreds of thousands” of dead under the rubble have likewise not materialised. That number is completely implausible, given Gaza’s mechanism for reporting the missing and the financial compensation incentives to use it.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Hamas and its two million hostages

When I spoke out against these trends, I was attacked viciously. I realised that many in the so–called pro–Palestine movement are deeply anti–Palestinian, for they are only interested in platforming and embracing views and experiences that conform to their beliefs. That a Gazan like myself – who lost family members in the war, who is largely deaf in his left ear following an Israeli bombing in 2001 and who has been on the front lines of providing humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza – could be dismissed for sharing the “wrong views” was an alarming sign of the degradation of this Western–based activism.

Furthermore, large segments of the Arab and Palestinian communities in the diaspora became their own worst enemies, enforcing conformity and promulgating extreme positions. They remained silent lest they be called traitors, sell-outs or Zionists. Speaking out against Hamas was somehow viewed as supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, endorsing the horrors experienced by Palestinian civilians or adopting Netanyahu’s and Israeli talking points, or as a betrayal of the Palestinian right to resist Israeli injustices. This simplistic reductionism was picked up by Hamas, which immediately registered the support for its actions in diaspora communities, particularly in the West and in the US, where political leverage matters most. The failure to call out Hamas weakened genuine pro–Palestine advocacy, which by default became associated with celebrations of October 7, finding excuses for Hamas’s heinous acts of terror, refusal to humanise Israeli victims of the attack (including hostages) and the abandonment of political aims that are actually achievable. Instead, a form of mass psychosis took hold of activists, academics, journalists, advocates, politicians and average individuals, all blinded to Hamas’s criminality against both Gazans and Israelis.

Undeterred, I have decided to proceed with sharing my truth. I saw and experienced Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza and witnessed its tactics, strategies and manipulation of an entire people. For nearly two decades, a fascist Islamist terror organisation has been holding over two million Palestinians as hostages to its suicidal, nihilistic project.

Launching the most brutal single-day attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and knowing the kind of devastating and deadly retaliation that this was going to elicit, was a deliberate, reckless endangerment of the Palestinian people: a betrayal.

The decision to launch the October 7 attack destroyed Palestinian lives and aspirations, but it was not the first such terrible choice.

It was a choice to reject the Oslo peace process and the 2000 Camp David proposal; it was a choice to squander the opportunity opened in 2005 by Israel’s withdrawal of settlements on a vanity resistance project that went nowhere for two decades; it was a choice after the 2006 elections to Islamise Palestinian society and waste opportunities to establish new civic and democratic life; it was a choice to antagonise moderates in Israel with suicide bombings, turning many of them against the peace process and helping the rise of the Israeli far right.

It was a choice to align the Palestinian people of Gaza with the likes of Hezbollah, Qatar, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood – failed ideologies and regional projects – just as previous generations of Palestinians aligned themselves with Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union and Gamal Abdel–Nasser’s pan–Arabism; it was a choice to keep Israeli hostages in Gaza for two years rather than surrendering them earlier to avert large–scale death and destruction and to save what could be saved of Gaza’s people and infrastructure.

I do not speak and have never claimed to speak on behalf of Palestinians or Gazans. No one can make this claim, for there is no single voice or entity that can capture or represent the diversity of Palestinian communities across the Middle East and the world. My account and my analysis are steeped in lived experience, connection to the land and extensive relationships with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Still, the cautionary lessons and observations that I discuss will be acknowledged by many in the Gaza Strip, and by Palestinians elsewhere, who often keep quiet.

I share my story in the spirit of seeking justice for my people. This story details Hamas’s horrendous impact on the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to freedom and independence. I experienced the tragedy of seeing my native homeland descend into chaos and disarray, a collapse that occurred in large part because of a group of Jihadi fascists who destroyed the Palestinian national project. This is why I focus on speaking out against Hamas.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Trump's Saudi Nuclear Horror Show

The [US-Saudi civilian nuclear] agreement threatens to weaken decades of US non-proliferation policy, ignite a regional arms race, embolden America's adversaries, and create security risks that future generations may be powerless to reverse.

The most controversial aspect of the proposed agreement is that it reportedly allows Saudi Arabia to develop domestic uranium enrichment capabilities under safeguards that fall short of the stringent standards previously demanded by Washington. While low-enriched uranium is used to fuel civilian nuclear reactors, the same technology can eventually produce highly enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons.

"[W]ithout a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible." — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, CBS News, March 15, 2018.

These words should have ended any discussion about permitting uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. They reveal that Riyadh views civilian nuclear capabilities not merely as an energy project but also as a potential strategic hedge against Iran.

[G]overnments change, regimes fall, alliances split, and today's friend -- even as a member of the Abraham Accords -- may not be tomorrow's ally.

[E]xtremist Islamist organizations continue to view the kingdom as both a battlefield and a prize. No one can predict Saudi Arabia's political landscape 20 or 30 years from now. A future period of instability, succession crisis, or regime collapse could deliver sensitive nuclear facilities, technology, or materials to actors whose goals are fundamentally hostile to the United States and its allies.

The greatest danger, therefore, is not Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or the current Saudi leadership. The greatest danger is the uncertainty surrounding whoever may rule the kingdom decades from now. Nuclear technology lasts far longer than political regimes.

The proposed agreement also abandons the "gold standard" that has guided US civilian nuclear cooperation for decades. Under the 2009 US-United Arab Emirates (UAE) nuclear agreement, Abu Dhabi accepted strict conditions that prohibited domestic uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing while granting comprehensive international oversight. These restrictions significantly reduced proliferation dangers.

The Saudi agreement reportedly discards many of these safeguards. It also reportedly does not require Riyadh to adopt the International Atomic Energy Agency's Additional Protocol, which allows inspectors short-notice access to undeclared facilities to detect clandestine nuclear activities.

The UAE would likely seek to renegotiate its own agreement. Turkey and Egypt would almost certainly demand similar privileges. Russia and China could use the American precedent to justify weaker safeguards in their own nuclear partnerships across the Middle East and beyond.

Instead of strengthening the global non-proliferation regime, the United States would be weakening it with its own hands.

Peace with Israel is not a prize awarded by Arab or Muslim countries. It is not something that should require American bribes in the form of nuclear technology or strategic incentives.

Peace serves Saudi Arabia's own interests. It enhances regional stability, strengthens economic development, attracts foreign investment, and improves security for all parties. Arab and Muslim states should pursue peace with Israel because it benefits their own people -- not because Washington offers dangerous concessions.

The United States should not become the architect of the next Middle East nuclear arms race.

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07/26 Links: Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’; Ruth Was Right; Karim Khan is gone. The ICC’s antisemitism remains; Ex-Dem NY gov compares Mamdani to famed segregationist

From Ian:

Adam Louis-Klein: Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’

False accusations of genocide are nothing new. In 1993 Hutu intellectuals at the National University of Rwanda accused the Tutsi-associated Rwandan Patriotic Front of genocide. They circulated inflated casualty figures in an open letter to Pope John Paul II and others. The RPF did commit war crimes, but these accusations were propaganda. A year later, the Hutu regime carried out a genocide of the Tutsis.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was an “anticolonial” genocide. Just as the Oct. 7, 2023, attack was hailed by many anti-Zionists as an uprising against Western imperialism, the Rwandan genocide used accusations of genocide to legitimize its own execution.

I am an anthropologist studying indigeneity, postcolonialism and ethnic violence. On Oct. 7, I had been off the grid for months, pursuing field research in the Amazon. When I logged on to my computer on Oct. 9, I realized to what degree these vocabularies had become a weapon against Israel and the Jewish people.

The genocide accusation against Israel has traveled far and wide since Oct. 7, but its intellectual sources have rarely been scrutinized. Every major iteration of the accusation, I learned, flows from an academic framework that presents the accusation of genocide in Gaza as a consequence of Israel being a “settler colonial” state founded by Europeans who don’t belong in the Middle East. The network of academics behind this framing—whose ideas inform nonprofit organizations like Amnesty International and B’Tselem—is especially conspicuous in the Journal of Genocide Research.

That publication has been a proponent for changing, extending or rejecting the legal definition of genocide enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, formulated by Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. A. Dirk Moses, the journal’s senior editor since 2011, argues it is useless to distinguish intentional killing of civilians from collateral damage caused by strikes against terrorists. Colonial states are founded on dispossession, he argues—and when indigenous peoples “resist,” they are simply destroyed in the name of security.

Amnesty International turns Mr. Moses’ erasure of moral distinctions into a novel combination: Israel harbors “dual intent,” a neologism reading Israel as engaged in lawful warfare and genocide at once. For a permanently illegitimate colonial state, even legal self-defense spells genocide.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian at Brown University, is the highest-profile scholar to accuse Israel of genocide. He claims the support of a cast of characters ranging from Raz Segal, who less than a week after Oct. 7 described Israel’s entire history as an ongoing genocide, to Amos Goldberg, who has more frankly acknowledged that depicting Israel’s essence as genocidal doesn’t jibe with legal standards. All of them see Israelis as colonists.

As in Rwanda, anticolonialism and genocide inversion have converged. Israel is imagined not only as a state accused of genocide, but as a people whose identity as foreign settlers makes genocide their destiny.

Ruth Was Right

REVIEW: ‘If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews’ by Ruth R Wisse
To encounter Ruth Wisse is to learn from her, and I was blessed to be her student for the first time a decade ago. She, an eminent scholar of literature at Harvard, spent a weekend with us, a group of Jewish students in the Tikvah Fund’s then-nascent Collegiate Summer Honors program, doing what comes most naturally to her: teaching. She did so in her inimitable way. One of my friends described it precisely, remarking that Wisse was three-quarters Harvard professor, raising novel interpretations of the texts before us with erudition and articulateness, and one-quarter your bubbe at the Shabbat table speaking plain truths about the world. That persona made her all the more endearing and perhaps even more effective; from among her students that weekend I now count multiple brilliant young litigators, several professors and teachers, and a prolific member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

Declaring what is plainly, if painfully, true about the world is today rarely conceived of as the role of the professor. Wisse’s willingness to do so, that weekend and throughout her career, qualifies her as something more akin to a prophetess. With clear descriptions of the world taking shape in the late 20th century, courageous denunciations of its comforting misapprehensions and false pieties, and a call for Jews (and indeed all Westerners) to examine the crumbling foundation of liberal universalism, Wisse delivered a most unwelcome set of prophesies in 1992’s If I Am Not for Myself. Committing heresy after heresy among liberal Jewish company, she proclaimed that Soviet antisemitism was transmogrifying into Arab anti-Zionism; that "in misguided effort" Jews are "tempted to try to elicit from bystanders and witnesses the same pity" they had seen other victims enjoy; and that antisemitism "continues to be regarded as a disreputable sentiment achieving a certain legitimacy only when it travels under the cover of anti-Zionism."

No wonder the publisher Wicked Son deemed it worthy of republication in 2026, with new front matter including a preface from Wisse herself. These revelations, scoffed at in their time, could have been copied-and-pasted into the bewildered social media posts of Jews after October 7, 2023, confronting the liberal West’s failure to consign anti-Jewish politics to history. Indeed, anti-Jewish politics have only gained prominence since throngs of barbarians gathered throughout the West to celebrate the Hamas-led massacre and blame the Jews for their own misfortune. If Jewish families didn’t want to be burned alive, perhaps they shouldn’t have dared to live in a particular place at a particular time—to be colonizers, the newest category of un-person invented to ensure Jewish children would once again endure medieval horrors without weighing too heavily on the conscience of the enlightened liberal West.

Some definitions are necessary to understand Wisse’s simple but penetrating thesis. She speaks often of "liberalism," by which she means the consensus postwar view that humanity was on a positive moral trajectory, with reason prevailing over dogma and peace generally prevailing over war. Without castigating liberalism’s political manifestations—individual liberty, the rule of law, and so on—Wisse takes aim at liberal universalism, or the view that everyone, even avowed enemies of the Jews, could be reasoned with and ultimately pacified. Once-ubiquitous demands for Israel to give up "land for peace" exemplified this view; in hindsight they would be quaint if they hadn’t been so destructive.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel’s envoy to Britain: ‘I’ll feel safer back home, where there’s no anti-Semitism’

In April 2025, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, the acting head of mission at the Embassy of Israel in London, came within inches of a terrorist who was embarking on an attack. "I remember it very well," she says. "I was being urged by security to leave the embassy because I was the last one out at the end of the working day. And as I left, within two minutes he was climbing the fence." She was speaking on her phone at the time and didn't pay any attention when she brushed past Kuwaiti migrant Abdullah Albadri, whose head was wrapped in a red-and-white keffiyeh and sunglasses. Albadri, 34, told his mother, "I chose the path of martyrdom," then traveled to Kensington and tried to enter the embassy armed with two knives. Thankfully, he was tackled by police. In May, he was found guilty of terror offenses.

Grudsky Ekstein says Israel's leadership cannot comprehend the levels of antisemitism on Britain's shores. "Anti-Semitism is on the rise. We've seen the murders at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester and the stabbings in Golders Green. What Jerusalem doesn't see is such a clear link between those attacks and that permissive environment" which allows antisemitic rhetoric and blatant misinformation - like the lie that Israel has been committing "genocide" - to spread unchallenged.

The media, she points out, plays a major role in this incitement. "Broadcasting 'death to the IDF' chants on the BBC [during the 2025 Glastonbury Festival] was massive, because before that, I wasn't aware of the slogan. Since then, do you know how many protests I have seen with that 'death to the IDF' chant?"

Grudsky Ekstein is relieved to be returning home. On a day-to-day basis, she says, she often feels safer in Israel than Britain, regardless of the threat of missiles and terror. Does she have a final message to Britain before she leaves? "Put yourself in the shoes of Israel," she replies. "I know that there is a great empathy for the Palestinians. I get that. But you should understand that our democracy is also one that needs a friendly hand."

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07/25 Links: To Win the Peace, We Must Fund the War; Trump’s Lebanese Fantasy; Ireland Rebranded; 9/11 Families want to ban Mamdani from sacred 25th anniversary ceremony

From Ian:

To Win the Peace, We Must Fund the War

Donald Trump said Thursday that he is readying "a massive attack" on Iran, but the most consequential battle this week was on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders, Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, spoke to the Senate Appropriations Committee about a bill to offset the costs of the Iran conflict. The House passed a defense act including those funds the next day, but the Senate package remains in limbo.

Senators on both sides of the aisle raised questions not just about the funding itself, but also about the strategy for dealing with Iran and for some of Hegseth's unrelated but controversial decisions. Grandstanding in front of the cameras is par for the course in Washington, but even the Democrats should want to pass this bill.

For most Democrats, a no vote is a no-brainer. Even before anti-Jewish and pro-appeasement forces began to gain momentum, the party generally has viewed defense spending with skepticism for decades. Most members do not want to cast votes that could be seen as endorsements of Trump's campaign to cripple Iran's nuclear and conventional long-range missile programs. Even if they want to see the threat from Iran reduced, supporting the Obama-era nuclear deal is practically an article of faith in the party. And opposition parties usually fare best when they oppose whatever the president wants to do.

But, even so, there are strong reasons to let through the funds. The first is that blocking the supplemental will not compel U.S. forces to withdraw. Caine echoed an earlier warning from Admiral Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, that the services will cut elsewhere to keep up the fight. That includes reducing operations in other parts of the world, canceling training, cutting back on equipment and weapon purchases, and potentially even letting go of servicemembers who want to reenlist.

As the editors noted Wednesday, moreover, the campaign's estimated $37.5 billion cost is a reasonable price for taking the fight to a vicious and fanatical enemy. Even if the overall cost surpasses $100 billion, as some anonymous Washingtonians believe it will, defeating the "death to America" crowd would be money well spent.

A delay on the Hill might even prolong the war. The Iranian strategy is to hold out until economic and domestic political pressures force Trump into more concessions. The House, which voted on Wednesday for the Iran supplemental and on Thursday to limit Trump's war powers, is already sending mixed messages. Congress could inadvertently lead the mullahs to believe their strategy is working and encourage them to hold out longer. The surest way to peace is for the Iranians to conclude that antagonizing the United States is a losing proposition, not a pathway to further gains.

Lee Smith: Trump’s Lebanese Fantasy

So when Trump says that Lebanon has “been a very badly treated place and country, and we’re going to have it properly treated and treated with the respect it deserves,” he should know that Lebanon’s biggest problem is Lebanon. Sure, Hezbollah is an Iranian implant, but the Islamic Republic having the final word on matters of war and peace for more than three decades is evidence there’s something deeply wrong with Lebanon and its political culture that can’t be fixed with infusions of U.S. taxpayer money.

Thus, when Lebanese President Joseph Aoun visited the White House this week to ask for money, he was selling a mirage. The “ultimate objective” of the framework agreement, he said, is “ending the state of hostility between Lebanon and Israel forever.” But to reach that objective, “America needs to support the LAF,” said Aoun. “Without the LAF,” he continued, “everything will collapse.” And as he told a group after his meeting with Trump, the aid must be “immediate and unconditional.”

What he means is the same thing Lebanese officials have been saying since the United States started funding the LAF in 2006: You have to pay us to disarm the terror group that threatens our own sovereignty, but you can’t condition the aid on us disarming Hezbollah.

Could the Lebanese army plausibly disarm Hezbollah? If it can’t get the job done after two decades of U.S. handouts—since 2022 Washington has been paying LAF salaries directly—more cash now isn’t going to change the balance of power. The crucial issue is that the interests of the government and the army are so closely tied to Hezbollah that disturbing the status quo with an attempt at disarming it would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

Seen in this way, Hezbollah is Lebanon’s top investment vehicle. Without a terror group parked on the eastern Mediterranean that’s at war with a U.S. ally, and that poses a potential threat to offshore energy platforms while it’s engaged in drug- and human-trafficking enterprises around the world, Lebanon would have to join the long line of failed states waiting for handouts. But Hezbollah makes Lebanon the squeaky wheel that needs to be oiled, or else it’ll blow up in everyone’s face. It’s fundamentally an extortion racket.

Can’t the Lebanese make it on their own? They’re an inventive and industrious people whose diaspora has made invaluable contributions across the world—surely, they can make a go of it in their own country! Look at all the aides of Lebanese origin Trump has named to the diplomatic corps: Tom Barrack, Michel Issa, and Massad Boulos, all successful men. But that’s not how most people think in Lebanon.

The default impulse of the Lebanese, hardwired over the course of millennia, is to draw in larger powers to do their dirty work, basically treating them like the live-in maids from Sri Lanka and the Philippines that the country’s leading classes employ: Pretty up the house, but don’t disturb our daily lives by making inconvenient demands, or you’ll break something and ruin madame’s dinner party on the veranda. And so, if the Americans are paying, why go and do something crazy like fight Hezbollah and mess up the Italian leather sofa? And to keep the Americans paying, you need Hezbollah.

According to Aoun and other Lebanese in on the scam, taking on Hezbollah is a long-term process, very long-term indeed. “It’s going to take time,” says Trump adviser Boulos. “This is not easy. Nobody believes for a second that this is going to be an easy task in any way.”

Why, yes, the money is for strengthening the Lebanese military—just not for the purpose of getting rid of Hezbollah—but that’s not all Lebanon needs to rebuild Lebanese society. Because Hezbollah is Lebanese and not “a foreign mercenary force,” as Aoun told an audience of high-level administration officials at the Lebanese Embassy in Washington, Lebanon needs funding for programs to reintegrate Hezbollah’s “Lebanese citizens” back into the fabric of Lebanese society. And, added Aoun, Lebanon needs U.S. investment, lots of it—enough to at least match Iran’s decades-long “massive and sustained investment” that funded Hezbollah.

And yet, as Aoun warned, Hezbollah will continue to be an issue until the Americans “remove the root cause” for Hezbollah’s existence—the “Israeli occupation.” All Aoun means is that Trump has to pressure the Israelis to withdraw. That’s the Lebanese consensus because it’s Hezbollah’s position: Get the Israelis out, and we’ll rebuild our tunnels and restock our arms supply while the Americans pay us through you and protect us from future rounds of Israeli military action even as we prepare to renew the terror war with rocket and missile fire and plans to invade Israel’s north as Hamas sacked its south on Oct. 7.

Hezbollah is weakened, thanks to Israel, but nothing has changed with the LAF since Washington started paying it in 2006. What’s different is that the Iran war has illuminated what is real and what is fake, and who America’s allies are. The way to disarm Hezbollah is not by paying the LAF to protect it, but rather by letting Israel finish off the terror group on its border.

The Strange Story of Kurt Gerstein

When I tried to shift our conversation toward Gerstein, Tomasz gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “He was a member of the SS and part of the Nazi machine. We know his story,” he said. He was less interested in Gerstein’s biography than in his report and how it can be used to scrape the “rust” off Bełżec. “He gave us something from the interior, something about the activity of the camp, the process.”

“And was it a form of resistance for him to provide that kind of information?” I asked. Tomasz shook his head and sighed heavily. “That’s a good question. ‘I’ve seen everything here,’” he said, as if he were Gerstein speaking, “‘and I must give testimony.’ That’s the essence of his resistance. He was the witness. He went inside the Holocaust. He touched evil and he talked about his experience. He told the truth. He broke the silence. ‘I gave information to diplomats and embassies,’” he says, again as if he were Gerstein speaking. “‘I tried to do something. A little—but something.’”

After the war, Gerstein’s widow, Elfriede, and a handful of archivists created Kurt Gerstein House, an educational institution for children in Germany. They also built a collection of Gerstein’s personal documents and papers, including his report on Bełżec. Gerstein’s descendants and future generations of archivists kept adding to the collection, collaborating with organizations around the world to unearth ever more documents and to frame his story in a wider context. The House shut down in the early 2000s, though, having gone bust. The collection was then donated to the Evangelical Church of Westphalia.

Today, the collection is managed by the archivists Ingrun Osterfinke and Martin Kamp in Bielefeld, a small city in northeast Germany. They struck me as a dynamic pair, jumping between German and English to fine-tune individual words throughout our conversation, ensuring that no meanings were lost. I asked them if Gerstein is better known in Germany than he is in the United States.

“I can’t think of any situation where Germans nowadays are really familiar with the fate or the figure of Kurt Gerstein,” Martin said. “It’s very obvious, when we’re doing a tour through our archives, and we talk about the Gerstein collections, that not many people know anything about him.” This surprised me. Why isn’t he famous, like Oskar Schindler or Anne Frank? “The popularity of Oskar Schindler and Anne Frank is based on the successful media processing of their stories,” Martin said, dryly. “I’m pretty sure that before Schindler’s List, comparatively few people knew the name and story of Oskar Schindler. Plus, Anne Frank’s diary is an unusually dense and well-written source that documents the persecution of the Jews in Europe on a personal level and through the eyes of the victim. I have to say …” He leaned back in his chair, as if to let his thoughts settle. “I have to say that I find the comparison with Kurt Gerstein a bit difficult. He’s a much more ambivalent figure than Schindler. Schindler saved the lives of hundreds of Jews, which was personally dangerous for him. Whether Kurt Gerstein really joined the SS only to gain insight into the murder machinery and to inform the outside world is open to doubt.”

“And figures like Anne Frank or Oskar Schindler are easy to understand,” Ingrun added. “Anne Frank’s diary is a real, singular document, and Oskar Schindler’s success is measurable. He saved a measurable number of people. Kurt Gerstein didn’t succeed measurably. His efforts to inform the Allied nations didn’t succeed. His actions and his motivations are all complex and not easy to comprehend,” she said with a resigned laugh. With all these thoughts in mind, I asked how they thought Gerstein resisted Nazism, if at all?

“That’s a very difficult question to answer,” Martin said. “It basically depends on whether you believe Gerstein’s statements to be true. And maybe that’s what we can learn from his story: that categories like perpetrators, bystanders, and resisters, and even victims, can be extremely difficult to define.” We discussed this point for a moment. As someone who was almost certainly sympathetic to the Nazis at the start, and who then turned on them, and who then joined the SS for uncertain reasons, and who then gathered information on the Nazis’ murderous activities, and who then failed to achieve anything with that information, and who finally ended his own life after going into Allied captivity voluntarily, Gerstein, you could argue, was a perpetrator and a bystander and a resister and a victim.

Ingrun took a slightly warmer view. “If we believe everything in Gerstein’s Report,” she said—and from the way that she talked about him, I think that she did—“then he resisted Nazism in not giving up his beliefs, his convictions, and his conscience.”

It is clear that Kurt Gerstein never looked away from Nazism or its crimes. He committed himself to telling the truth because it was the truth, he constantly interrogated his convictions, and he set out to gain knowledge however he could and to inform others of the crimes he witnessed. The ripples of these simple acts spread through the generations in ways that he could never have predicted. His report has been used as evidence in trials against Holocaust perpetrators and Holocaust deniers, for example, and by historians trying to understand what the Holocaust was and how it happened. He may not have been able to save any lives or stop any part of the Holocaust. But he did successfully resist the possibility of it being forgotten.

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07/24 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: A tsunami of lies; Global Intifada, Local Mayor; Streeting’s cynical smears against Israel prove he’s not fit for office

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A tsunami of lies

The threat posed by Mamdani needs to be identified correctly. He’s using far-left populism to advance the destruction of America. But he doesn’t want to replace it with a rainbow-hued nirvana. He wants to replace it with Islam.

Despite his adherence to Shia Islam, Mamdani’s behavior corresponds to the strategy of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has set out how it will conquer America by infiltrating democratic institutions and using them to push the Islamist agenda.

Mamdani constantly makes references to Islam. He has cheered the growth of Islam in the city, repeatedly visits mosques and Islamic centers including ones linked to the Iranian regime, and said that America should follow the example of Islam and Mohammed’s teaching on migration and sanctuary.

Not only does the mayor need to be called out as an Islamist plant; action needs to be taken against him as a danger to America.

Pointing out that Mamdani could be denaturalized and deported, the head of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, has said that the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate evidence that before becoming an American citizen in 2018 he “knowingly provided funds or services to Hamas or another terrorist group—and concealed this from immigration authorities.”

The monumental onslaught on truth and facts about Israel has knocked the West off its moral compass. A despairing Ferguson wrote that, as a teacher, his aim was to ensure that people learned the lessons of history, including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it’s adopted by a modern state. “Yet today,” he laments, “I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized.”

Ferguson implies that reason itself has been defeated. Such demoralization, while entirely understandable, risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Truth is being defeated because none of the custodians of the public sphere is standing up for it. People need to start calling out the agents of this contagion and holding their feet to the fire. And that includes Jews calling out Jewish anti-Zionists, too.

Andrew Fox: Streeting’s cynical smears against Israel prove he’s not fit for office

The High Level Military Group, comprising retired senior officers and officials from Nato countries, entered Gaza and questioned IDF personnel. Its submission to the International Criminal Court described Israel’s civilian-harm precautions as unprecedented and rejected the claim that the conduct of operations showed an intent by senior leaders to starve civilians or commit unlawful killings.

That judgment is also mine: Israel’s institutional policy is to operate within the law of armed conflict. No serious military observer expects a force in a long, brutal war to avoid all individual crimes. Gaza has credible cases requiring investigation and, where proved, prosecution.

Amid the social media outcry, no evidence whatsoever has been presented of a systematic policy of targeting or massacring civilians, nor of deliberate or carpet bombing. At the same time, we may certainly identify incidents that may indicate individual war crimes. The distinction between individual criminality and state policy is elementary. Streeting blurs it.

The most revealing absence from his analysis is Hamas. Gaza was not a neutral city over which Israel chose to pour fire. The IDF confronted a battlefield Hamas had spent years engineering. It built an extensive tunnel system, concealed shafts and weapons in civilian structures, booby-trapped buildings and roads, fought from densely populated areas, and denied the IDF clean targets. My own analysis of Gaza’s destruction found that much of the damage stemmed from ground manoeuvres, engineering demolitions, and the neutralisation of IEDs and tunnels, rather than air strikes alone.

Armoured bulldozers, explosive breaches, and tunnel collapses produced the lunar landscape now presented on social media as self-evident proof of criminality. Those images record a battle within a militarised enclave. They are not a legal judgment.

Hamas designed this terrain both tactically and narratively. By embedding military infrastructure throughout the civilian environment, it forced Israel into destructive urban combat and then presented every collapsed building and civilian death as evidence of criminal intent. Its information operation depends on removing Hamas from the frame. Streeting has obliged. He spoke of Israeli standards without addressing the adversary’s tunnels, IEDs, hostages, or the systematic exploitation of civilian sites.

Britain should scrutinise its allies and friendship does not require silence. Criticism from a defence secretary must be grounded in military analysis, not in televised devastation and casualty figures whose legal significance is routinely misunderstood. Streeting’s job now includes understanding how an enemy weaponises law, media and civilian suffering against democracies. A minister susceptible to that approach will impose impossible standards on allies, only to see those same standards used against British troops in the next urban war.

Streeting should ask the Ministry of Defence lawyers and operators for a serious review. If he still believes Israel fell below British standards, he should publish the basis: which incidents, which intelligence, which legal test and which British comparator. If he cannot, he should withdraw the charge. A defence secretary who cannot distinguish the horror of urban warfare from evidence of unlawful warfare is unfit for office.

Editor's Notes: Germany’s ‘good Jews’ thought they were safe, New York should pay attention

On Tuesday night, the mayor of New York posted a two-minute video to explain that he cannot arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

He had been promising to arrest him since December 2024. At some point, the city’s lawyers told him what any first-year law student could have told him, and so he made a video. That was the news in it. The other hundred seconds were the reason he bothered.

Israel was targeting neonatal care centers. It was starving countless people. It was gunning down hundreds of aid workers and journalists. Americans were paying for the bombs that do the killing. Netanyahu was the architect of a horrific genocide, a war criminal, not welcome in New York City. Washington should arrest him instead.

October 7 did not come up. There is only one “bad” country outside the United States, and it’s Israel. Not China. Not the Islamic Republic of Iran. Not North Korea. Only Israel.

By Wednesday morning, Zohran Mamdani was at City Hall suggesting New Yorkers go protest Netanyahu at the United Nations in September. Protest, he said, is one of the bedrocks of this city. He also said he is committed to representing all New Yorkers, whether they agree with him or not.

The UJA-Federation, which does not usually talk this way, opened its statement with “Shame on you.” The Orthodox Union said the video “endangers Jewish New Yorkers” and that the mayor peddles “lies and misinformation that risk inciting further violence against Jews.” Gadi Eisenkot, who has spent his political career trying to get Netanyahu out of office, called it “pure antisemitism, with no basis in fact.”

Eight months ago, 33% of Jewish voters in the city put him there.

That number is what sent me into the German archives. Jews backing a movement that hates them is not a new story. I wanted to know how close the match was.

More of it matched than I wanted. Some of it does not match at all.

Max Naumann
Max Naumann was not a crank. Berlin attorney. Captain in the Bavarian Army. Iron Cross First and Second Class, 15 months at the front. When he founded the Association of German National Jews in 1921, respectable people signed up, including the chief editor of one of Germany’s biggest daily papers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes he had money behind him, from established quarters of German Jewry.

His theory was that antisemitism is a reaction. Germans were not born hating Jews. They were reacting to things Jews did. To the Eastern European Jews showing up with foreign manners. To Zionists saying out loud that their loyalty was somewhere else. To Jewish writers who made fun of German patriotism. Take away the provocation and the hatred goes with it.

Everything else follows from that. If Jews cause it, Jews can stop it. Naumann wrote it out in his first bulletin in September 1921: Every decent antisemite admits decent Jews exist but calls them exceptions, and he will stop being an antisemite once we prove “we are not a handful of deserters but an army.”

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07/24 Links Pt1: Two Israelis killed in Samaria terrorist attack; ICC removes Karim Khan as prosecutor; Mojtaba Khamenei more interested in nuclear weapons than predecessor

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: We deserve better: Three years after October 7, Israel still waits for an investigation

Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, Israelis are still waiting for one of the most basic obligations the outgoing government owes its citizens: A full, independent investigation into the worst security failure in the country’s history.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government informed the High Court of Justice that it will not be able to complete legislation establishing its proposed political commission to investigate the failures surrounding Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

In response to petitions challenging its failure to establish the probe, the government said the legislation would instead be completed after the October 27 elections. Further attacking the judiciary, it also argued that “it is not appropriate for the court to rule on the matter or intervene in it.”

The government’s explanation for the delay should be unacceptable to every Israeli.

Much has been argued – both in the Knesset and on Israel’s streets – over whether a political commission or a state commission of inquiry is the appropriate mechanism. The coalition has repeatedly opposed a state commission, standing firmly behind its objections to an independent inquiry.

Its first argument has been that it is impractical and inappropriate to investigate the events surrounding October 7 while Israel remains at war. The second is that Chief Justice Isaac Amit is not viewed as legitimate by many members of the coalition, raising concerns that any commission he appoints would lack public confidence among a significant segment of the public. 'Scheduling constraints' prevented Oct. 7 probe legislation finalization

Even if the government’s objections to a state commission are genuine, they still do not explain why it failed to follow through on its own proposal for a political probe – one specifically designed to address those concerns by replacing Supreme Court appointments to the committee with members selected through a Knesset-led process.

According to the government’s response to the High Court, the legislation could not be finalized because of “scheduling constraints.”

That justification is nothing short of insulting.

Members of this government have spent nearly three years hearing the pleas of bereaved families demanding a commission of inquiry. They have heard them inside the Knesset. They have heard them outside their homes and offices, where grieving relatives have stood for months demanding answers, accountability, and transparency.

Some of those Israelis lost sons, daughters, spouses, parents, and friends on October 7. Others fought for up to 505 days until their loved ones returned from Hamas captivity. All have carried an unimaginable burden while waiting for the state to confront its own failures.

Responding to those families by citing legislative scheduling conflicts is a slap in the face.

The explanation becomes even harder to accept when viewed alongside the coalition’s legislative blitz carried out during the Knesset’s final weeks before its dissolution.

In those weeks, the coalition found time to pass legislation it considered politically essential: A bill preventing the enforcement of draft orders against ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, legislation enshrining Torah study as a fundamental value in Israel’s Basic Law, a bill restructuring the powers of the attorney-general, and sweeping reforms to Israel’s broadcasting sector.

In passing said bills, the government demonstrated that when legislation is considered urgent by the prime minister, it can move with remarkable speed.

Trump admin’s $200 million to Red Cross offers chance to press it over Oct. 7 hostages, B’nai B’rith tells JNS

The Trump administration should use Thursday’s announcement that it is providing more than $200 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, to demand that the ICRC “show accountability for its shameful performance during the Israeli hostage crisis,” Rabbi Eric Fusfield, director of legislative affairs at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS.

The U.S. State Department stated that the aid to the ICRC and IFRC will go toward disaster and humanitarian assistance. “Today’s contributions support organizations that respond quickly when disasters strike, provide unparalleled access to people in need in conflict settings, and leverage preexisting worldwide disaster and humanitarian response infrastructure,” it said.

Fusfield told JNS that “the ICRC failed every test with respect to Israelis held captive by Hamas terrorists.”

“They never met with the hostages, never assured them comfort or medical supplies, never demanded proof of life and never did anything to speed their release,” he said. “The ICRC has much to answer for, and the U.S. and the international community should demand those answers.”

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07/23 Links Pt2: Antizionism Kills: the danger of Zohran Mamdani; Jake Sullivan Can’t Sleep; Rachel Moiselle: Why Ireland Became Europe's Most Antisemitic Country

From Ian:

Due to blogger's wobbly, yesterday's (22nd) links are in the comments here.

NYPost Editorial: We know why Mamdani keeps banging the Israel drum — vibes are all he can offer his base

Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally felt compelled to admit he couldn’t order Benjamin Netanyahu arrested, so his consolation prize for his fanbase was a new Oval Office-style address late Tuesday where he repeated the whole litany of post-Oct. 7 pro-Hamas agitprop — without, of course, even mentioning the genuine atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.

When you can’t deliver substance, go big on vibes.

The “arrest” thing was always pure fantasy, a story the global left-Islamist alliance tells itself about “international law.”

Neither the United States nor Israel ever signed on to the International Criminal Court under which the bogus “indictment” was laid; indeed US law forbids honoring any ICC warrants.

If Mamdani didn’t know the truth before Tuesday, it’s because he didn’t want to; either way, he kept talking about arresting Netanyahu because the idea cheers his pals and irritates his enemies.

Which is why the “oops, I can’t” speech had to repeat all the “genocide” lies in spurious detail, including fury over a starvation that never happened and a slaughter of aid workers that never took place.

From the start of his campaign, Mamdani’s mayoralty has rested on visions of magically transforming New York City into a Big Rock Candy Mountain of free stuff, social revolution and bitter tears for the enemies of the socialist agenda: homeowners, rich white people, Zionists.

But delivering on his material promises is another matter.

Mamdani’s Netanyahu bluster is a smokescreen for his real goal: crushing Americans’ freedom

For 25 years, US administrations on both sides of the political aisle shared the concern that corrupt nations would use the court to bypass the fairest justice system in the world and subject Americans to politically motivated prosecutions.

As a result, the court holds no power or legal authority over our nation.

After all, we have the US Constitution.

Article II gives the president primary control over foreign affairs, and the Supremacy Clause means that federal law overrides state or city actions in that arena.

The Founders vested this power in the federal government alone, specifically to prevent rogue local officials like Zohran Mamdani from dragging the nation into diplomatic disasters.

Moreover, the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002 blocks state or local agencies from cooperating with the ICC.

Congress passed the ASPA precisely because lawmakers feared ICC harassment of American troops and officials for political reasons.

Mamdani knew all this — and that, under New York State law, he’d have been exposed to possible criminal prosecution for unlawful imprisonment or official misconduct if he actually ordered Netanyahu’s arrest.

So on Tuesday, he had no choice but to roll back this particular Trojan horse he’s been using to conceal his real agenda.

For him, this episode was just the first skirmish of a much longer war.

He was testing globalization’s dangerous waters by using an easy scapegoat, Israel’s Netanyahu, for cover.

And now everyday Americans will be the guinea pigs for his project.

This is a long play: If Mamdani’s advocacy succeeds and American mayors and governors start acting on ICC papers, it hands legitimacy to a corrupt foreign court — and to adversaries that could target our service members with warrants at home and abroad.

Mamdani was willing to demand the arrest of a foreign head of state under ICC law, and on Tuesday he indicated he would advocate the same for his constituents who are subject to ICC warrants.

The recent incident at Park East Synagogue was instructive.

When members held an event about Israel inside its doors, Mamdani allies attacked it — and Mamdani himself used ICC propaganda to blame the victims for being harassed.

The mayor’s willingness to weaponize ICC decrees against New Yorkers engaging in First Amendment protected activities was shocking and dangerous.

On Tuesday, he made his mission and agenda clear: He wants foreign governance supplanting US sovereignty.

He’s advocating a globalized rule of law influenced by adversarial nations to “impart justice” on Americans.

Our service members, leaders and everyday citizens will be left vulnerable to the weaponized warrants of nations that despise us if he gets his way.

A mayor playing diplomat to appease a radical base is dangerous enough.

But a mayor actively working to erode the sovereignty that protects his constituents is a threat to the republic itself.

Huckabee calls Mamdani an ‘evil antisemite’

U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee lashed out at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, calling him an “evil antisemite” in the wake of his recorded message branding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”

“Would be easy to say NY Mayor is just an ignorant bigot, but he is not dumb,” Huckabee tweeted.

“He’s an evil anti-Semite who deliberately lies about serious things like ‘genocide’ to stoke Jew hate. If anyone should be arrested, it’s the Mayor of NY for incitement. NYC should be ashamed,” the diplomat said.

Eve Barlow: Antizionism Kills: the danger of Zohran Mamdani

I am a British Jew who fled antizionism in 2014. I told my story. I am calling upon you: Soviet Jews, Yemeni Jews, Iraqi Jews, Egyptian Jews, Libyan Jews, Polish Jews. We need your stories. I cannot tell them for you. Tell your story of fleeing antizionism. The same sickness with the same lies of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonizing” is spreading like wildfire in an ignorant America among the same racists who pushed you to flee. The same lies recycled - lies that existed decades before any war in Gaza. The ignorant do not know. They are on social media. Tell your story. I will share it. We need your testimony. Do not hide. I need you. We all do.

Today is Tisha B’Av; the day many Jews partake in fasting to mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by our enemies. Last night, Mamdani did as predicted. To prove he is not an antisemite, he tweeted a sunny Tisha B’Av greeting to Jewish New Yorkers, wishing them a peaceful fast and reflecting on Jewish resiliency, mere hours after calling their people’s elected leader a war criminal who should be arrested. This is an abuse tactic known as narcissistic love bombing. Mamdani may pretend he’s no antisemite, but he is proudly antizionist. Antizionism is racism. Name it.

It is mad living in a time when those of us with pattern recognition and strong lived experience look at Mamdani and the DSA and see the Cold War, while the progressives see utopia. There is a smokescreen between us and them, and we are so behind in figuring out how to bring the wall down.

Antizionism is not criticism of a government. It is the organized denial of Jewish self-determination - the only people on earth whose right to a state is treated as uniquely illegitimate. No other nation is subjected to this singular campaign of eliminationist rhetoric. It is Jew-hatred with a progressive veneer, and it kills. It kills by gaslighting victims into silence. It kills by normalizing the idea that Jewish self-defense is the real crime. It kills by creating the moral permission structure for the next October 7, the next synagogue attack, the next Jewish student forced to hide their identity.

Listen to Jews, or make the same mistake the German citizens of 1938 made while that era’s charming violent man smiled for the cameras.

One day it will be as shameful to have been an antizionist in this period as it was to have been a Nazi in the 1930s. The patterns are the same. The cult is the same. The stakes are civilizational. Shake off your attachment. Antizionism is a hate movement. And hate, when left unchallenged, always kills.

Please watch this video, maybe my most important to date, and share it as widely as you possibly can. We are in big, big trouble. Jeremy Corbyn was a mere chopped liver cracker in comparison.

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