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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05/20 Links Pt2: Jonathan Conricus: ‘The Islamist beast won’t stop at the Jews’; Progressive Rabbis’ Blind Spot; Leaving the Women’s Movement

From Ian:

Progressive Rabbis’ Blind Spot

Over the past several years, I’ve watched an increasing number of American rabbis—many of them, like me, self-identified liberal progressives—use their pulpits to call out the Israeli government and American Jewish institutions for moral failures. They frame their sermons as exercising a prophetic voice: speaking uncomfortable truths to their own community, refusing to look away from injustice even when it implicated their own people.

That’s fine, even commendable. I have done so myself and will continue to do so. The trouble starts when the same rabbis remain eerily quiet when it comes to our enemies and our so-called allies who put Jewish lives in danger. True liberalism demands the same moral standard for everyone. But when rabbis mobilize communities to condemn violent extremists in contested Israeli territories while saying little to nothing about the 92 million people who still live under a brutal regime in Iran, the battles we choose reveal our priorities.

Ask yourself a few simple questions: Why haven’t the organizations built to mobilize rabbis for human rights organized a single public action to decry the thousands of Hezbollah rockets that rained down on northern Israel, displacing tens of thousands of Israeli civilians? What moral calculus dictates that ICE raids warrant rabbinic civil disobedience but jihadist militias on Israel’s border do not? Why was it easier to find progressive rabbinic sermons demanding accountability from the Israeli government than sermons demanding, with equal force, that the international community require Hamas’ unconditional surrender and the return of hostages?

My progressive colleagues argue that spiritual leaders bear special responsibility for their own communities—that we should pay disproportionate attention where we have the most influence. One prominent rabbi compared this to a parent focusing on their child’s misbehavior rather than on other children’s actions. Fair enough. But by volume and emphasis, progressive Jewish voices have contributed to skewed viewpoints, like the one arguing that Israel’s democratically elected government (operating with the checks of an independent judiciary) and Hamas’ government in Gaza (that operates with impunity) belong in the same moral category.

When progressive rabbis describe Israel as an “apartheid state”—borrowing terminology from South Africa’s racial hierarchy—they not only mislead audiences who trust them as moral authorities but also depict a distorted reality. Israel’s democracy is imperfect, much like ours, but it has Arab citizens who vote, serve in parliament, and sit on the Supreme Court. The West Bank represents a military presence in disputed territory following multiple wars that Israel did not start. These situations deserve precise analysis, not borrowed frameworks that erase context and ultimately delegitimize Jewish self-determination itself.

The asymmetry extends beyond Israel. Progressive rabbis readily critique Jewish institutions while rarely making comparable demands of coalition partners. The pattern is consistent enough to be structural. The same rabbis who devoted multiple sermons, signed open letters, and mobilized congregants over Israel’s judicial overhaul—a genuine democratic concern—could not muster comparable energy to publicly confront progressive allies who rationalized or simply refused to condemn the events of Oct. 7.

Leaving the Women’s Movement

In the summer of 1983, the best-known Jewish feminist you’ve never heard of walked away from the women’s movement and never came back. On her way out, she published something of a manifesto. “The Tools of Guilt and Intimidation” appeared in that July’s issue of the feminist newspaper Sojourner, and in it Gloria Z. Greenfield said, “The women’s movement promised a haven for uppity women to experience respectability and self-love.” Unfortunately, she pointed out, this guarantee did not extend to all uppity women. “During the past year, I became disturbed by a pattern I saw developing in the women’s movement: as otherwise well-respected Jewish women began to confront instances of anti-Semitism within the movement, their respectability and credibility began to deteriorate.”

For several years Greenfield had been a leader in the radical feminist movement, in which the most important cohort of feminists of that moment in the 1980s—and even ours—flourished. As the mainstream media declared a traditional feminism based in party politics and legal reform dead, a newer scene was blossoming. One member rightfully called it “a movement of poets,” made up of the writers who were publishing the books that became staples of the women’s studies courses that had been proliferating since 1970, the bestsellers at the new feminist bookstores established as part of this burgeoning women’s culture (or “womyn’s culture”).

Greenfield would become the most well-known publisher working on books by women who took “the personal is political” to a new extreme, transmuting their complicated relationships with American society and even one another into the tell-all fiction, poetry, and anthologies that defined an enduring strand of the era’s feminism, like Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Black feminist Audre Lorde; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Chicana writers Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga; and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology edited by Black feminist Barbara Smith. Smith was the most prominent member of the Combahee River Collective, the group that coined the term identity politics in 1977, and this idea that one’s activism, views, and even interpersonal etiquette should emerge from social markers like race, class, and gender fueled the multicultural, lesbian-identified group of writers. It was a coterie whose work would be revived decades later by Tumblr, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter, touted everywhere from The New York Times to women’s and teen magazines. The group’s iconic status has been renewed, yet again, in the wake of Oct. 7, as heroes of the leftist battle to take down the Jewish state.

Greenfield, meanwhile, is a documentary filmmaker who has made six movies defending Israel and the West. She is currently screening her latest, A Collective Descent into Evil: The Lethal Obsession with Jews and the Jewish State, which features influential right-leaning voices including Ruth Wisse, Gil Troy, and Melanie Phillips. “The more I experienced the feminist movement, the more I realized that it wasn’t just specific people, that it was the whole movement that was unhealthy. And I didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” says Greenfield.

Decades before Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour declared that Zionists could not be feminists or before U.N. Women took two months to condemn—or even acknowledge—sexual violence against Jewish women on Oct. 7, and videos of young women gleefully tearing down hostage posters flooded the internet, Greenfield was the original, most important, most public feminist who left the left for the same reasons that so many Jewish women are contemplating leaving today.

Growing up, Greenfield’s father told her and her sister “that if the Jewish people and/or the state of Israel were ever in trouble, that we had to go fight. And that really formed who I am,” she says. He was an attendant at a mental institution; her mother was a custodian. Greenfield was born in 1950 in Coney Island and raised on Long Island. Much of her early activist energy went toward feminism: She received her Bachelor of Arts in communications with a minor in women’s studies in 1974 from the State University of New York at Oswego and started several women’s organizations before cofounding Persephone Press with Pat McGloin and Marianne Rubenstein in 1976. At first, the house was devoted to publishing books about women’s spirituality, like its breakout hit, A Feminist Tarot, before it shifted to titles with a more confessional, confrontational ethos.

The world has been completely upended for my Jewish daughters

Ever since Oct 7 2023, British Jews – my family among them – have had to contend with two appalling realities. Firstly, that abuse and attacks against them were excusable for some because of the actions of the Israeli government (actions which have been the subject of highly effective smears and untruths), and secondly that anti-Semitism is now a fact of everyday life in Britain.

The first problem is troubling enough. No British-Nigerian would ever have racism against them justified because of political violence in Nigeria. No Chinese-Brit would ever be told that an attack on them was “because” of the policies of the Chinese government. The argument that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism is a terrific cover story. The truth is that if you delegitimise Israel and the reasons for it existing then your motives are inherently anti-Semitic.

The second problem carries the risk of becoming all-consuming. This applies to my immediate family, my wife’s extended family and all our Jewish friends. Anti-Semitism is a constant: on marches, on social media, in the streets, in schools, in the NHS and in workplaces around the country. This is what I witness weighing down on people every day. It’s on their mind when they call or message their loved ones after another attack on a synagogue or in a Jewish neighbourhood.

My wife asks “What have we done to deserve this?” That could have been asked a thousand years ago, but it still hurts her and her community in 2026.

“We’ve all become constantly vigilant,” says Rabbi Mordechai Wollenberg, the leader of the Woodford Forest United Synagogue where both my daughters had their bat mitzvahs. “We park our cars away from the gates. We check the CCTV more often. We are looking over our shoulders all the time.

“Community leaders don’t want to make our communities anxious. We are not going to be cowed but we are on edge, with very good reason, and we’ve not seen anything like this for a very long time.”

Another thing my wife says is that she can’t see us living in London in 10 years’ time let alone 20, and she can see our children wanting – or needing – to live abroad. She has decided to train with the Community Security Trust, the charity that provides security and advice to Britain’s Jews. Jewish schools and synagogues are already fortresses, a daily burden and fear no other faith or group has to face.

“A sentiment I am hearing more and more is that there may not be a future for Jews in this country, and for someone who values their British identity it’s hard to get my head around,” says Wollenberg. “You can tell how bad it is when the police come to visit us and our members say, ‘I’m so glad to see you, we’re so scared to go out.’”

Candidates at both general and local elections line up to declare their antipathy towards Israel, courting the worst instincts of progressives and sections of Muslim communities who appear to have been inculcated with Jew-hate from an early age.

I have to explain this political earthquake to my daughters as best I can, but I’ve lost all sense of what British politics is for, who it serves and what will come of such a topsy-turvy set of priorities. For some candidates, anti-Semitism isn’t just part of their ideology, it is their north star.

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05/20 Links Pt1: Trump admin recommits to Taylor Force Act; Thomas Massie’s Dead-End Libertarianism; San Diego shooters: Jews are 'universal enemy,'

From Ian:

Karol Markowicz: It's not both sides

I’m no stranger to the antisemitism conversation. I didn’t wake up on October 8th and realize we had a problem. Nothing that is happening right now, on either the left or right, is surprising to me. Nothing.

The liberal Jewish establishment, however, continues to be stunned. So stunned that they take days to process and comment on things that used to be routine pronouncements. The Anti-Defamation League issues an immediate statement after a shooting at a the Islamic Center of San Diego. When a mob marches through a Jewish neighborhood assaulting Jewish children, the ADL waits overnight and into the morning to say anything. If it were red-hatted white supremacists raging outside synagogues, they’d know what to say. But the masked Islamists and their leftist friends present a conundrum to them: aren’t we on the same side?

I wrote in the New York Post a few days ago how Jewish liberals have spent a century aligned with the Democratic party and have one John Fetterman to show for it. I address the “But Tucker Carlson” argument in the piece. The Post article was a companion to this video I did asking Jewish liberals where their friends are when they need them:

But the actual reality the Jewish liberal establishment can’t face is that it’s rarely ever white supremacists raging outside synagogues. The latest ADL report on antisemitism does its best to obscure this.

According to the report, there were 203 assaults on Jews in 2025 in America, including three deaths. All three murders, the shooting deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., the killing of Karen Diamond by Molotov cocktail at a Run for Their Lives event in Colorado, were all perpetrated by leftists or Islamists. There was not a MAGA hat in sight.

The numbers are so skewed, in fact, that the ADL has to present “Antisemitic White Supremacist Propaganda & Events” as a category to get the far right on the board at all, though they do have to note “Antisemitic white supremacist propaganda and event incidents were down 51% in 2025.”

To illustrate the “White Supremacist Propaganda & Events” the ADL presents a poster by the “Patriot Front” group demanding “No Zionist in Government,” another by the “Goyim Defense League” announcing the Holocaust was a lie and finally a photo of a masked man from a group called “White Lives Matter” holding a sign that reads “Juden Out.”

An idiot with a sign is not the same as a violent illegal immigrant throwing Molotov cocktails at elderly Jews. It’s just not. Pamphleteering disgusting lies about Jews is bad. Violence is far worse.

US Jewish groups urge Senate to back $1 billion bipartisan antisemitism bill

Major US Jewish organizations are calling for the quick passage of new bipartisan Senate legislation aimed at protecting Jews and Jewish institutions from antisemitism.

The Jewish American Security Act is sponsored by James Lankford, a Republican from Oregon, and Jacky Rosen, a Jewish Democrat from Nevada. It would require the federal education department to adopt a civil rights strategy to fight antisemitism and would force social media platforms to share more details about how they handle antisemitism online.

The legislation also proposes $1 billion in security funding for houses of worship and other at-risk nonprofits, a key demand in a six-point security proposal that Jewish Federations of North America has been promoting on Capitol Hill.

The legislation was announced on Tuesday as hundreds of Jewish advocates traveled to Washington, DC, on Tuesday to promote the call for the $1 billion allocation, which would triple the amount appropriated by Congress this year for security at houses of worship.

“Jewish Americans are being targeted, attacked, and killed simply because of who they are. This alarming trend demands a comprehensive, bipartisan approach that addresses both the seeds and the impacts of this vile hatred,” Rosen, who is famously a former synagogue president, said in a statement.

The bill follows several other recent attempts to advance antisemitism legislation in Congress.

In December, four progressives in the House of Representatives introduced the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act, which calls for fully funding the federal Office of Civil Rights while also repudiating the Trump administration’s tactics around antisemitism that progressives say “weaponize” antisemitism in support of a repressive agenda. It has not advanced in the Republican-led House.

DOJ announces Antisemitism Advisory Committee, national tour to combat anti-Jewish hate

The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights and chair of the Department of Justice’s antisemitism task force, will oversee the creation of the DOJ’s Antisemitism Advisory Committee. As part of the role, Terrell will embark on a 15-city nationwide tour to connect with local faith leaders and law enforcement officials about combating antisemitism.

The department described the panel in a press release on Tuesday as “a new advisory body” that will recommend strategies to the attorney general and other department leadership “on coordinated, timely, and effective responses to antisemitism.”

The committee “will consist of citizen leaders dedicated to combatting antisemitism” and individuals nominated to serve will be “subject to approval by the president,” the release said. (The task force, by contrast, is solely composed of DOJ officials.)

“Members will come from a wide range of backgrounds but share a common goal of developing innovative solutions to address antisemitism across the country,” the department said of the “forthcoming launch” of the panel.

Terrell told Jewish Insider in an interview late Tuesday that he had submitted a list of nominees to President Donald Trump after receiving the green light from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to launch both initiatives and was awaiting approval from the White House.

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05/19 Links Pt2: A Miscarriage of Journalism at the New York Times; Nearly 80% of Gazans open to emigrating from Strip; Somaliland to establish embassy in Jerusalem

From Ian:

Judge Roy K. Altman: A Miscarriage of Journalism at the New York Times

Nicholas Kristof's recent essay in the New York Times about supposed Israeli sex crimes against Palestinian detainees is a travesty - not simply because it's wrong as a matter of fact, or because it regurgitates long-debunked blood libels against the Jewish state at a time of rising antisemitism around the world. It's a travesty because it embraces the erosion of democratic norms.

We assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. We feel comfortable in that assumption because we've devised a system of laws - based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules - to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. Today, this whole system is being undermined by the proliferation of false information, especially on the internet.

It's one thing to have our geopolitical and ideological enemies pushing unverified claims about our closest allies into our cell phones. It's another thing entirely for the New York Times to offer a story that - in its disregard of basic evidence-gathering norms, its unwillingness to investigate the opposing side's position, and its inversion of common sense - violates the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that serve as the bulwark of our democracy.

Kristof accused Israel of using sexual violence against detained Palestinian prisoners as a kind of "standard operating procedure." His claim is not merely that a few rogue Israeli prison guards sometimes behave illegally, as happens in all Western democracies, including our own.

Whether in civil or criminal cases, we have for hundreds of years rejected the technique of allowing anonymous witnesses to advance salacious claims in secret. But Kristof's article relies mostly on anonymous sources whose credibility - much less their political or ideological affiliations - cannot be tested. Moreover, his reliance on anonymity ensures that no one can ever prove him wrong.

The few sources Kristof does name underscore why anonymity is so problematic. Kristof relies heavily on a report by Euro-Med, an organization with known ties to Hamas. Its leader, Ramy Abdu, has advocated publicly for "a million October 7ths," and has repeatedly peddled the allegation that Israel "harvests organs."

When a reporter in our supposed "paper of record" advances a series of allegations that are this severe and pernicious, against an entire nation, we should demand that he produce evidence to match the gravity of his assertions. Kristof has fallen well short of this standard.

The writer is a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Seth Mandel: The Truth About the Entertainment Industry and Israel

It’s hard not to enjoy seeing someone speak actual truth to actual power in the entertainment industry. So when the celebrated Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes was asked by the Guardian about his new WWII movie, Orphan, and the cultural and political implications of its subject, Nemes did the whole world a giant favor.

“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the west,” Nemes declares. He’s had enough of the “puritan, moralising, self-righteousness” from people who think of themselves as cultured and enlightened. “I think it’s all anti-humanist regression. And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading. And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism. … The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the west has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party.”

His much-awarded 2015 masterpiece Son of Saul, Nemes suggests, would not fare well in this environment, where “anything that’s Jewish is now considered… Nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole.”

Orphan is also a Holocaust movie, and despite Nemes’s mastering of the subject, this time he has yet to find a U.S. distributor. “You should be able to talk about these things without being ostracized,” he told the Guardian.

Nemes, who is Jewish, said that at conversations ostensibly about his new movie, “people [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition.”

In other words, is he, you know, a good Jew? “We know how totalitarian mindsets work. … This kind of ideology always attaches itself to the sense of being on the right side of history, being on the righteous side. There’s a very strong, moralizing, puritan surface on which this ideology can attach itself.”

Obviously Nemes is correct in every particular. But it’s worth noting that we have confirmation that he is correct from the very cohort he’s talking about.

Usually, what Nemes calls the “overclass of Hollywood” loves to portray itself as some courageous institution. But occasionally a smug buffoon like Javier Bardem will be so giddy with self-righteousness that he’ll reveal the truth.

JPost Editorial: Leiter’s blunt accuracy maybe undiplomatic, but it his criticism is valid

Sharply criticizing J Street and implying that US Senator Bernie Sanders should not be called a Jew may not have been Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter’s most diplomatic moment. But it was perhaps his most candid – articulating what many Israelis and their supporters quietly believe.

“How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?” Leiter asked of J Street, which bills itself as pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy.

His comments in Washington referred to the lobbying organization’s call to end military aid to Israel, including support for weapons systems such as Iron Dome.

“If they said that they were pro-Palestinian, I wouldn’t have a problem meeting with them,” he said. “I meet with pro-Palestinian groups. But when you come and say in such a two-faced manner, ‘We’re pro-Israel, we’re pro-democracy,’ there’s a democratically elected government in Israel. You don’t like [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, make aliyah, vote in the next election, and express yourself. Don’t say you’re ‘pro-democracy’ and decry and defy the position of the democratic government of Israel.”

Even as we reject Leiter’s reference to J Street as a “cancer” – believing it is possible to disagree without resorting to toxic rhetoric – we agree with the thrust of his criticism.

Israel is now in the 956th day of a war forced upon it on October 7. The very least it could expect from an organization calling itself pro-Israel is not to lobby against the sale of arms needed to defend itself or accuse it of genocide. That’s a low bar, and one that J Street failed to clear.

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05/19 Links Pt1: Is a ‘New Middle East’ Still Possible?; Was Israel’s War on Iran a Success?; IDF reservist killed in southern Lebanon; Republican senators urge Trump to dismantle UNRWA, citing Hamas ties

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Is a ‘New Middle East’ Still Possible?

The real question hanging over the Middle East at the moment is what comes next in the post-Iran-War period. The outcome of the Iran War could resemble that of the 1991 Gulf War. Following that conflict, the state system of the region grew weaker, and extremist groups, led by Al Qaeda, filled the vacuum.

Speaking about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President George HW Bush said, “What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. Such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children’s future.”

However, the world order that was ushered in after 1991 did not live up to this aspiration. In the Middle East, in particular, it is clear that it did not. Instead, the Gulf War opened a Pandora’s box, unforeseen at the time. The chaos of the 1990s enabled Osama Bin Laden to plot attacks and receive shelter from the Taliban in Afghanistan. A weakened Saddam Hussein regime did not go away, but limped on until the US invasion of 2003. Various regimes in the region, including Assad in Syria and the Iranians, exploited the chaos in Iraq after 2003. After the Arab Spring of 2011 and the resultant Syrian Civil War, ISIS emerged in Syria and Iraq.

Now, in 2026, we are at a new turning point. Iran is weakened, but it may continue to limp along just as Saddam Hussein’s government did. Iran’s attacks have transformed the Gulf states. They are investing heavily in US armaments, $17 billion in recent purchases, according to The New York Times. Air defenses and armaments will only go so far. A tighter and more formidable security architecture in the region is also needed, which will mean closer partnerships with countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, and Turkey. The Gulf states may not all agree on which of these four regional countries is the best partner, but they are already seeking them out.

A major question for a changing Middle East is whether a weakened Iran will ditch its proxies. Iran has been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq over the last few decades. Are all those groups strong enough to stand on their own without Tehran’s support? Hamas and Hezbollah have fought Israel for years and taken losses, but they are still in control of parts of Gaza and Lebanon. The Houthis appear to be cemented in Yemen as well. Iraq, which has a new prime minister after six months of uncertainty since elections in November, will find it hard to disarm Iranian-backed militias.

Depending on how the recent conflict with Iran is resolved, the likely trend in the Middle East will be a gradual shift away from the chaos that defined the era from 1991 to 2023. The October 7 war has led to a stronger Israel and also led to other countries stepping up to more assertive regional roles, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as countries that are further away, such as Pakistan. Pakistan has sought to mediate between Iran and the United States, for instance. The next era in the region will focus on the state-to-state relations among these regional powers.

Amit Segal: Was Israel’s War on Iran a Success?

Assessing this new reality, Hayman warns that Khamenei is more radical than his father and is no longer bound by the previous religious decree prohibiting the production of nuclear weapons. Because the Iranian leadership will likely conclude that “only nuclear deterrence can prevent the next war,” Hayman asserts that the defense establishment must operate under the working assumption that a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons project is already underway.

Israel’s political ambition was the overthrow of the Iranian regime, whereas the IDF’s stated military objective was limited to the attrition of its capabilities.

Hayman’s article also reveals that it took Iran a full 40 hours of aggressive pressure to compel Hezbollah to enter the current campaign. Initially, Hezbollah attempted to deceive both Israel and the Lebanese public into believing their strikes were purely “symbolic.” To create the illusion of compliance with demilitarization agreements, the group intentionally withheld fire from south of Lebanon’s Litani River until March 5. However, Hayman notes that Hezbollah had secretly maintained combat infrastructure and fighters in that southern zone the entire time.

Although Hezbollah has been significantly degraded militarily, Hayman warns that retaining just 10 percent of its pre-November 2024 capabilities still leaves it with a formidable arsenal of approximately 15,000 rockets and missiles.

This looming threat is compounded by a frustrating tactical reality on the ground. Late last week, the U.S. announced a 45-day extension of the ceasefire in Lebanon. Yet, despite this truce on paper, the conflict continues; now the IDF operates under severe American constraints, with President Donald Trump largely prohibiting strikes in Beirut and the Beqaa valley.

Meanwhile, over the past two weeks, drone attacks and cross-border incidents have killed seven Israeli soldiers and civilians, wounding dozens more. While the establishment of the “Yellow Line” buffer zone in southern Lebanon has mitigated some direct fire, holding this territory places IDF forces on the ground at significant risk, Hayman writes.

He concludes with stark recommendations for the path forward. If diplomacy is the chosen route, an airtight, highly “stringent nuclear agreement” is an absolute necessity. Conversely, if the decision is to resume the war, it must be explicitly defined as a campaign to eliminate threats—with the Iranian nuclear program targeted first. While Trump currently appears to be leaning toward the military option, Hayman issues a clear warning regarding any future operation: “Aerial strikes alone will not be enough.”

Seth Mandel: Don’t Cry for Qatar

The Iran war has been pitched mostly as a battle of economic wills: with rising gas prices in the U.S. and cratering oil revenue in Iran. Who will blink first?

But it’s just as important to recognize how each side’s junior partners can influence the broader war strategy. Case in point: This afternoon, President Trump announced he was postponing the next round of planned Iran strikes because the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates told him negotiations had made real progress.

And who knows. Maybe it’s even true. But the timing is interesting. Yesterday, the New York Times’ correspondent in Doha published a fascinating article on how the Iran war was crushing the Qatari economy. It turns out that second to Iran, Qatar has the most to lose from a prolonged conflict and the most to gain from a deal.

The article sketches out the Qatari economic miracle. And it is quite the success story. But Qatar’s success has been terrible for the world. And a deal that Qatar is happy with would likely be a deal whose terms are to America’s detriment.

Qatar, let’s remember, does not have clean hands here. When the current phase of the larger U.S.-Iran-Israel war kicked off, on October 7, 2023, the Saudis and Emiratis were engaged in a diplomatic program that was bringing progress and peace to the region—and included concessions for the Palestinians too.

Hamas crushed all that. Which means Hamas’s patrons crushed all that—chiefly Iran, but Qatar too. The understanding that Israeli leaders had with the Qataris was that their involvement would bring stability to Gaza. Instead, it brought some of the worse war the region has seen.

Qatar contributes to any misery one might find in the Middle East but none of the progress. During the Gaza war, Qatar was at times startlingly useless. It had found itself in a position of power because of its wealth and because of its determination to use that wealth for evil purposes. Yet it was mostly unhelpful in putting out the fires it helped start.

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05/18 Links Pt2: László Nemes Says an “Orgy of Antisemitism” Is “Overtaking the West”; Israeli ambassador: J Street a ‘cancer within Jewish community,’; Rashida Tlaib’s Nakba Denial

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Bill Maher deserves praise, not gratitude, for telling the truth about Israel

For a full eight minutes, he let the hypocrites have it, highlighting the fact that “no one blinks” when an editor from the progressive magazine The American Prospect calls Israel a “brainwashed psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race.”

He then pointed out that Jew-bashing is the one thing that the left and right have in common these days, mentioning Tucker Carlson, on the one hand, and The New York Times, on the other. Though he failed to bring up the Gray Lady’s latest blood libel—penned by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, who printed the lunatic lie that Israel trains dogs to sodomize Palestinian prisoners—he did stress that ignoramuses on both sides of the spectrum see Israel as “the only country in the world doing anything bad.”

Yes, he said, taking a dig at the condition of education in the United States, “I see why the meathead manosphere and the Code Pink people are on the same page, because they both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.”

Unfortunately, according to Maher, “Jew-hatred isn’t just acceptable now; it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy.”

Ditto concerning cowardly politicians, whom he chastised for “indulging, rather than correcting, their brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents who now have an unfavorable view of Israel,” and for “not telling their woke idiots that Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide.” Oh, and for not admonishing the younger generation, “If you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.”

The above are snippets of his lengthy rant, the rest of which was equally unflinching. Given the political, sociological and cultural climate he was describing so accurately, it’s not surprising that the clip exploded—shared widely on social media by pro-Israel influencers and broadcast on Israeli TV channels.

As worthy of praise as Maher might be for his wise and witty words, however, something is disturbing about the elation they elicited. It’s one thing to give credit to those brave enough to tell the truth about Israel and antisemitism. It’s quite another to be grateful for it.

Indeed, Jews shouldn’t need to treat intellectual honesty as heroism. Nor does it behoove us to grab any morsel of sympathy with the hunger of a hostage.

It’s the height of irony that we can fight fearlessly against enemies on the battlefield, yet recoil in the face of defamation and delegitimization—and bow at the feet of defenders like Maher.

László Nemes Says an “Orgy of Antisemitism” Is “Overtaking the West”

Legendary Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes has spoken plainly about “an orgy of antisemitism overtaking the West.”

In a new interview with The Guardian published on Monday, the acclaimed director discusses bringing his latest World War II venture — a biopic on the French resistance hero Jean Moulin — to the Cannes Film Festival, but much of the piece centers on what Nemes describes as a “puritan, moralising, self-righteousness” looming over Hollywood.

Nemes, who won an Oscar in 2016 for Son of Saul, begins by considering reaction to the award-winning film, as well as 2025’s Orphan. The former follows a day-and-a-half in the life of an Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner, while the latter is about a young Jewish boy’s search for his missing father, as he instead unveils the truth of his mother’s survival of the Holocaust.

Nemes tells the U.K. publication about Son of Saul‘s award success: “I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today. Because of the politicisation of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered… Nobody would touch it with a 10ft pole.”

Orphan, which he says was “ignored” at last year’s Venice Film Festival, failed to nab an Academy Award nod for best international feature, and has so far not landed a U.S. distribution deal: “You should be able to talk about these things without being ostracized,” he continues, saying he feels “a little bit” ostracized by the industry: “Even some response [to Orphan] from the media smells of an ideological standpoint.”

On widespread boycotts of Israeli film institutions — a pledge last year objecting to the war in Gaza featured names such as Olivia Colman, Ayo Edebiri, Mark Ruffalo, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone and 1,300 others — Nemes tells The Guardian that he believes it to be “anti-humanist regression.”

He adds: “Because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading. And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism… The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party.” When asked by journalist Jonathan Freedland if he thinks antisemitism is now at its worst since Nazi Germany, Nemes responds: “I think it’s getting there.”

He describes it as an “obsession with Jews” and says, referring to Orphan‘s struggle to find a distributor, “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition.”

New York Times Blames Jews For Antisemitism—In Obituary of ADL Chief Abe Foxman

The New York Times used its obituary of the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, to promote the false narrative that Israel’s own actions in Gaza have worsened antisemitism.

The Times claims that "bigoted attitudes worldwide only mushroomed as a result of Israel’s response to a Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed more than 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers."

It went on, "The Palestinian death toll of more than 60,000 and videos broadcast worldwide of the destruction of Gaza’s buildings and of starving children set off a shift in American public opinion, with more Americans siding with the Palestinians. There was also an upsurge in antisemitic incidents."

Blaming Jewish behavior, rather than antisemites, for antisemitic incidents and attitudes is textbook antisemitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism includes among its possible examples of antisemitism, "Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible … even for acts committed by non-Jews." The Times passage meets at least two elements of former Soviet refusenik and former Israeli deputy prime minister Natan Sharansky’s "three Ds" definition of antisemitism—demonization and double standards, if not delegitimization.

In addition, it’s not even accurate that the Israeli self-defense actions, which involved killing Hamas terrorists and imposing pressure that ultimately led to the release of hundreds of live and dead hostages being held by Hamas, created the antisemitism or even any public opinion shift against Israel. The "shift in American public opinion," overstated though it has been, to the extent that it exists at all, has been driven not by Israeli actions but global trends of secularization, a rise in militant Islam, and by an intense international social media and propaganda campaign by outlets and platforms of foreign governments, individuals, and organizations—Qatar, Turkey, China, Iran. The timing predated Israel’s post-October 7 actions in Gaza, as evidenced by a former editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart, publicly abandoning Zionism in July of 2020, by the Harvard Crimson in 2022 editorially endorsing a boycott of Israel, by the Harvard student organizations that came out with their letter on October 7, 2023, stating, "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence" and "the apartheid regime is the only one to blame."

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05/18 Links Pt1: The Perversion of Martyrdom; Israeli Navy seizes Gaza-bound flotilla; Israeli attacked by group of men in Golders Green after speaking Hebrew

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Unknown Messenger

‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” These words conclude George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and are considered by many to comprise one of the finest conclusions to any work of literature. Eliot’s point is that while many dream of being linked to important achievements (as do the characters in Middlemarch), it is often the good deed done out of duty that truly lends moral significance to one’s life.

With this in mind, we may examine one story of an unhistoric act of kindness. Indeed, one might say that this act is so unhistoric, we do not know to this day the name of the person who performed it. Yet that act is also, in a sense, profoundly linked to a newsworthy event of the last month.

In the 1940s, George Deek, a member of a large Christian Arab family, worked at an electricity company in Jaffa, where his family had lived for generations. He was friendly with his Jewish co-workers and even learned how to speak Yiddish from them. Then, in 1948, as the Jewish state came into being, he was informed by Arab leaders that his family should flee. He was told that if they remained, they would be massacred by the Jews, and that only several days would be needed to crush the nascent state. George and many of his siblings fled to Lebanon, and from there throughout the world. Today, there are descendants of George’s siblings who are still considered refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and who, like other Palestinians, are denied the rights of citizenship in Arab countries in which they have been living for generations.

In 2014, a young Israeli diplomat, speaking in Norway, where he was posted, delivered a speech in accented but eloquent English about how Palestinians were persecuted—in Arab countries. Whereas the descendants of refugees in any Western country would long ago have acquired citizenship, “in the Arab world, the Palestinian refugees—including their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren—are still not settled.” They are “aggressively discriminated against, and in most cases denied citizenship and basic human rights…. The collaborators in this crime are no other than the international community and the United Nations.” In contrast to the way other refugees were treated, he argued, Palestinians were clearly being forced to suffer in these Arab countries in order to weaponize their situation against Israel:
Rather than doing its job and help the refugees build a life, the international community is feeding the narrative of the victimhood. While there is one U.N. agency in charge of all refugees in the world—the UNHCR, another agency was established to deal only with the Palestinian ones—UNRWA. This is no coincidence—while the goal of the UNHCR is to help refugees establish a new home, establish a future and end their status as refugees, the goal of UNRWA is opposite: to preserve their status as refugees, and prevent them from being able to start new lives.… In fact, Israel was one of the few countries that automatically gave full citizenship and equality for all Palestinians in it after ’48. And we see the results: despite all the challenges, the Arab citizens of Israel built a future. Israeli Arabs are the most educated Arabs in the world, with the best living standards and opportunities in the region.

This speech is posted to YouTube under the title “The best speech an Israeli diplomat ever held” and has hundreds of thousands of views. The name of the ambassador who delivered it is…George Deek, grandson of the aforementioned George Deek, who has made a career as an Israeli diplomat and recently served as Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, the first Arab Christian to hold such a position.

The Perversion of Martyrdom

Modern Islamist movements have learned to operate inside this framework. They present themselves as the powerless while pursuing a theology entirely about power: the establishment of the ummah, the recovery of historic Islamic sovereignty. They engage in martial martyrdom while being coded by the Western host as passive victims. The host’s immune system extends its protection to a force that does not believe in weakness as a permanent condition, only as a temporary embarrassment on the road to victory.

This is why so many on the Western left find themselves sympathizing with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime. By any progressive criterion—women’s rights, pluralism, freedom of conscience—these movements are reactionary to the marrow. But they are the victims of Western power. And in the secularized Christian martyrology that now dominates elite culture, that is sufficient.

Yehuda Halevi would have named this instantly. In the Kuzari, he distinguishes between suffering that purifies and suffering that merely accumulates bitterness—resentment without refinement. A truth claim that depends entirely on who is suffering, with no reference to what is being suffered for, is not a theology. It is resentment in vestments.

The early Christian martyrs died rather than worship the Roman emperor. They died for the proposition that there is an authority above Caesar. That proposition is the theological root of every liberal freedom the West currently enjoys. Now the secular heirs of this tradition are carrying placards for movements that execute people for apostasy—movements that would reinstate the very condition against which the martyrs died. The formal structure of the martyrology survives. The content has been discarded. When you remove the content from a martyrology, you do not get neutrality. You get a form available for any content. And the content that has filled it is not liberation. It is the oldest thing in the world: the strong man who claims to speak for the weak.

Pikuach nefesh—the near-absolute sanctity of human life—means that the Talmud suspends virtually every commandment to save a life. The martyrdom principle is the exception, not the rule. The Jew is not supposed to want to die. He is supposed to want to live: ve-chai bahem—and you shall live by them, not die by them.

When death becomes necessary, the martyr does not kill others, does not romanticize his death, and does not expect to win. Maimonides is explicit: One who could have found a legal workaround and chose martyrdom instead is not praiseworthy but irresponsible.

Perpetua walked into the arena in 203 C.E. She did not take anyone with her. The structure of her death—the vertical death, the death that preserved something rather than destroyed something, the death between herself and God—is still legible.

The Islamic martyr dies to conquer.

The Western campus radical taking the form of Christian submissiveness without the content performs his suffering to accumulate moral capital.

The Jewish martyr dies to preserve the integrity of a law he believes is worth more than his life, while refusing, structurally and legally, to impose that cost on anyone else.

Alan Baker: ‘Settler violence’: A buzzword used to single out Israel

Violence by hooligan groups, religious factions, political mobs, or any other group is illegal, cannot be excused, and must be condemned and punished under the law. That is a basic norm of any civilized society. It applies whether the perpetrators are politically motivated youth, religious extremists, sports hooligans, or demonstrators.

Yet when violence is linked to Israel, there is a troubling tendency to generalize isolated incidents and recast them as proof of an official, state-sanctioned policy. In that context, the phrase “settler violence” has gained currency. It is often used not simply to describe criminal acts by individuals but to suggest that Israel as a state encourages or condones violence against Palestinians. That is a misleading claim.

There is no Israeli policy that authorizes or promotes violence against Arabs. Such conduct is illegal in Israel, just as it is elsewhere, and law-enforcement authorities are expected to act against it. If enforcement is weak or inconsistent, that may justify criticism of the authorities. But lax enforcement is not the same thing as an official policy of sanctioning violence. To use the term “settler violence” as though it describes an Israeli government practice is therefore inaccurate and unfair.

Discussing violence in Israel
A wider problem is the readiness to attach loaded buzzwords to Israel in ways that amplify hostility and misrepresent facts. Terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” “illegal occupation,” “mass starvation,” and “indiscriminate violence” are often repeated as if they were settled descriptions, even when the legal and factual basis is contested. Such language can be effective rhetorically, but it also distorts public understanding by imposing inflammatory labels on complex realities.

This pattern is especially visible when comparing how violence is discussed in relation to Israel versus other societies. Around the world, football hooliganism causes assault, property damage, riots, injuries, and deaths. It has occurred in countries across Europe, South America, North America, Africa, and elsewhere.

Major political demonstrations and marches in Western capitals also sometimes turn violent, with attacks on police, damage to public property, and assaults on symbols or institutions. Yet these incidents are not typically used to brand entire countries as officially sponsoring “sports violence” or “demonstration violence.”

That contrast matters. The problem is not that violence elsewhere is ignored; it is condemned, as it should be. The problem is the double standard applied to Israel, where sporadic criminal acts by fringe groups are presented as though they reflect a national doctrine. That framing is not only misleading; it also suggests a selective moral outrage that is directed at Israel in a way not applied to others.

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05/17 Links: Holocaust survivors: Australia is no longer safe for Jews; Eurovision 2026 Highlights Europe’s Israel Divide; Simon Sebag Montefiore on the History — and Future — of British Jews

From Ian:

John Spencer: Absurd Claims of Dog Rape and Genocide

I see a correlation between those who believe absurd claims like dogs were trained to rape Palestinians and those who insist Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Both claims collapse under scrutiny and under mountains of contrary evidence. One ignores biology and basic science, including the reality that dogs cannot rape humans in the way being alleged. The other disregards the legal definition of genocide, which requires demonstrable intent to destroy a people as such. That accusation runs directly against repeated public statements by Israeli political and military leaders after October 7 that the war was against Hamas, not the people of Gaza. It also requires evidence of actions taken to fulfill genocidal intent. Instead, the easily obtained facts show Israel facilitating historic aid deliveries, establishing evacuation corridors, warning civilians before operations, moving populations from combat zones, numerous other civilian harm mitigation measures, and even vaccinating Gaza’s population during active combat under conditions no military has ever faced.

The accusation also collides with another uncomfortable reality. Even critics of Israel’s military campaign have acknowledged civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios that are historically low for dense urban warfare against an entrenched enemy operating from within civilian areas. Using even Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry figures, the available numbers suggest ratios somewhere between roughly 1.5:1 and 1:1 depending on the methodology used. Those figures compare favorably to many major urban battles and wars, including Manila, Seoul, Mosul, the Iraq War, and the Korean War just to name a few of many.

None of this removes the tragedy of civilian death. War remains brutal even when fought within the law. Yet casualty figures of this kind directly undermine the assertion that Israel’s campaign reflects an organized effort to destroy the Palestinian people.

Public debate around war increasingly turns statistics into instruments of persuasion rather than tools of understanding. Numbers are pushed into headlines before definitions are clarified. Casualty counts circulate globally detached from methodology, sourcing, combatant status, age distributions, or the conditions under which the data was collected. Large numbers create emotional reactions on their own. Most audiences have little ability to independently evaluate how those figures were generated or whether the institutions producing them have political incentives embedded within the process.

Sociologists who study statistics have long recognized that numbers are social products shaped by the organizations and people who produce them. Activists use statistics to elevate causes. Governments use them to defend policy. Media institutions amplify the figures that generate the strongest emotional response and reinforce existing narratives. In wartime, numbers often become ammunition. Selective statistics gain power through repetition long before they survive rigorous scrutiny. Figures themselves do not lie, but people routinely use figures dishonestly. As the old saying goes, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”

The genocide accusation survives largely because many people begin with the conclusion and work backward from it. Evidence that contradicts the accusation is ignored, minimized, or reframed. Actions that would normally weigh against genocidal intent are treated as irrelevant. Legal definitions become elastic only in Israel’s case. Standards applied to every other military confronting enemies that openly disregard the laws of armed conflict, deliberately embed within civilian populations, and treat civilian suffering as a strategic asset often disappear when Israel is involved.

That dynamic resembles what Natan Sharansky describes as the “3Ds” that distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism: Demonization, Double Standards, and Delegitimization.

One of the major double standards applied to Israel is the way the laws of armed conflict are removed from their actual legal framework and replaced with emotional accounting built almost entirely around casualty numbers. Civilian deaths are presented without operational context, without discussion of the target, the enemy’s tactics, the precautions taken, or what commanders reasonably understood when the action or strike was approved or taken. The numbers themselves become treated as proof of illegality.

The law of armed conflict does not function that way. Military decisions are judged based on what commanders reasonably knew before an operation or action occurred, not through hindsight after the outcome is already known. Legal analysis examines whether the target was a lawful military objective, whether commanders conducted a proportionality assessment to determine that the anticipated civilian harm would not be excessive compared to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the attack, and whether feasible precautions were taken to mitigate civilian harm under the circumstances at the time.

Much of the public discussion surrounding Gaza reverses that process entirely. Casualty figures are frequently treated as the beginning and end of legal judgment. Civilian deaths become automatic evidence of criminality regardless of the military objective, warnings issued, evacuation measures attempted, intelligence available at the time, the reliability of assessments distinguishing civilians from those actively participating in hostilities, or the enemy’s deliberate integration into civilian infrastructure. Hamas’s use of homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, tunnel systems, and dense residential areas for military purposes is often pushed to the margins of the discussion even though it shaped nearly every operational decision Israel faced.

Jonathan Turley: Why Israel’s lawsuit against Times over ‘blood libel’ has a chance

Does the “Gray Lady” have a “longstanding Jewish problem“?

That question may soon be answered in a Manhattan courtroom as the New York Times stands accused of an alleged attack piece on Israel. This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would sue the paper and columnist Nicholas Kristof for defamation over the publication of what he called a “blood libel.”

The latest controversy emerged after the Times ran a Kristof column alleging widespread sexual abuse and torture of Palestinians, including the use of dogs to rape prisoners. The government denounced the column as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.”

The Israelis allege that the column was intentionally posted ahead of the release of an independent Israeli report that found Hamas had systematically used sexual violence in the onslaught of October 7, 2023.

It is unclear whether the lawsuit will be filed on behalf of individuals, groups, or the nation as a whole. Regardless of the framing, the defamation action could allow Israel to delve into the paper’s journalistic practices and alleged bias.

Under the higher “actual malice standard,” Israeli counsel would likely need to prove that Kristof and the Times acted with knowledge of the allegation’s falsity or in reckless disregard of the truth.

The Times has been accused of such malice for years. A newspaper with an overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal readership, critics have accused the paper of pandering to its increasingly anti-Israeli base.

According to recent polls, two-thirds of Democrats (67%) now support Palestinians over Israel (17%).

The newspaper has been repeatedly called out for slanted and sometimes false reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. For example, after Israel attacked Gaza in response to the October 7th massacre, the Times reported on an alleged Israeli strike that destroyed part of the Al-Ahli hospital. The Times seemed to rush to get the allegation into print, with little supporting evidence.

The story was based on sources associated with the terrorist group Hamas, which is notorious for disseminating propaganda and false stories. It took a week before the Times retracted the claim. (It turned out to be a misfired Palestinian rocket that hit a parking lot).

The Times has been forced to make a series of retractions and apologies for such coverage. After the newspaper ran a column that it later admitted was antisemitic, Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote that “The Times has a longstanding Jewish problem … continuing into the present day in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel.”

In May 2021, a front-page story contained multiple factual errors and biased elements, including the portrayal of a Hamas militant as a civilian child. It also used a stock image of a girl to claim that she was a dead Palestinian child.

New Report Warns WHO Health-Attack Data Is Being Weaponized Against Israel

A May 2026 policy paper by the Center for Medical Integrity argues that the World Health Organization’s Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care is being used in international forums in ways that turn a public-health monitoring tool into a political instrument against Israel. The report says SSA collapses analytically distinct categories of incidents under the single label “attacks on health care,” allowing obstruction, intimidation, and direct violence to be cited together without the legal context needed to assess culpability.

The issue matters now because Gaza hospital cases remain central to diplomatic, legal, and media narratives about the war, while evidence and intelligence assessments regarding Hamas and PIJ exploitation of medical infrastructure are often treated as secondary or omitted altogether.

A Broad Database With a Loaded Label
The report explains that WHO defines an attack on health care as “any act” of verbal or physical violence, obstruction, or threat that interferes with health services during emergencies. Its own examples include heavy-weapons violence, psychological intimidation, obstruction to care, armed searches, denial of services, and “militarization of health care facility.”

That breadth may make sense for emergency monitoring. But CMI argues the word “attack” gives operational data the appearance of a legal finding. WHO has also acknowledged that both high-impact events, such as bombings, and lower-impact incidents, such as verbal threats, are included in the same framework.

The concern, CMI argues, is not merely semantic. Under WHO’s SSA methodology, certainty levels indicate confidence that an incident occurred, but they do not resolve disputed questions about perpetrator identity, legal culpability, intent, proportionality, or whether a facility had previously been used for military purposes. WHO separately says it does not collect or verify perpetrator information and that its objective is to raise awareness of attacks on health care, not to pursue accountability.

How Counts Become Accusations
The sharpest allegation in the report concerns the way WHO-linked data travels through international institutions. According to CMI, at WHO’s 158th Executive Board session in February 2026, WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean regional office cited SSA data to claim that “almost 1,000 people” had been killed in documented attacks by Israel, with nearly half that figure deriving from the disputed October 2023 Al-Ahli Hospital explosion.

CMI’s broader concern is that WHO-linked health data can omit battlefield context relevant to legal assessment. U.S. officials said in November 2023 that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used Al-Shifa Hospital and tunnels beneath it to support military operations and hold hostages. A later declassified U.S. assessment, reported by AP, said American intelligence was confident the groups used the Al-Shifa complex to house command infrastructure, exercise command-and-control activity, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.

Human Rights Watch later found that the Al-Ahli blast resulted from an apparent rocket-propelled munition of a type used by Palestinian terror groups, while saying a full investigation was still needed. HRW also said it could not corroborate the Gaza Health Ministry’s reported death toll of 471, calling it significantly higher than other estimates and out of proportion with visible damage.

The case illustrates the report’s central warning: an early battlefield claim can enter a health database, continue circulating with institutional authority, and later be folded into diplomatic accusations against Israel even after key facts are contested.

Israel itself told WHO’s Executive Board that the body was in “dire need of reform” and accused the session of fueling “yet another politicized discussion” while ignoring facts on the ground.

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