07/14 Links Pt2: The Road to Forty-Four Percent; Melanie Phillips: Why liberalism cannot defend Britain; The unfathomable darkness of the Church of England

From Ian:

The Road to Forty-Four Percent By Abe Greenwald

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To move beyond terrorism, he had to reframe the terrorist threat as a minor nuisance or a thing of the past. He did both. Obama insisted that ISIS was just the jihadist “jayvee team” and could be dispatched with a few drones. Never mind all the talk about radical Shiites—it was time to offer Iran our “open hand.” As for the multiple terrorist threats that Israel faced, they were best dealt with by creating a little “daylight” between the U.S. and the Jewish state.

And that was that. It was as if the War on Terror was a bad dream. And so we would spend more than a decade wiping from our minds all concern about Islamist ideology and jihad.

Toward the end of this period, Donald Trump entered politics and commandeered the national consciousness. To the extent that anyone thought about terrorism anymore, it was to point out that the real terrorist threat came from white racists in Trumpland.

By the time Hamas massacred 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, the attacks of 9/11 were multiple epochs beyond us. Those long-ago media students of Islam and terrorism were now students of Trump and Covid. And those are the ones who hadn’t been replaced by a generation that wasn’t even alive during the War on Terror.

In the West, that younger generation had been shaped by a grab-bag of leftist ideology to despise America and Israel and support the enemies of both. After October 7, all consideration of Islamic radicalism would be refracted through the prism of Israel. The millenarian bloodlust of jihadists was excised entirely and replaced with a story about genocidal Zionists.

Protests made up of mostly non-Muslim Westerners would go on to march and chant in support of Islamic terrorists. And in doing so, they would normalize Jew-hatred and justify jihad and make the West safe for Muslims to declare their affection for Hamas.

For those punks and fools of the West, the path to virtue wasn’t found in distinguishing between Islam and Islamism. Their virtuous mantras sought to collapse that distinction. And far from feeling good about their country, they urged the Muslim minority—and everyone else—to share in their hatred of it.

Democrats split ahead of vote whether to cut $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel

The Congressional Progressive Caucus broke with House Democratic leadership on Tuesday in the latest example of support for Israel dividing the Democratic Party.

Hours after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to colleagues saying that he would oppose an amendment to end $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Progressive Caucus, sent a competing letter urging House Democrats to reject the aid to Israel.

“The Democratic Party needs a new approach to Israel and Palestine,” Casar wrote. “The American people are crying out for an end to U.S. tax dollars subsidizing Israel’s military.”

“After the Israeli government has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza and helped lead the United States into a destabilizing, deadly war with Iran, we are called to act,” he stated.

The House is expected to vote later this week on an amendment from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to strip funding for Israel from the 2027 national security and State Department appropriations bill.

Massie lost his primary in May, in an election that focused in large part on his opposition to U.S. aid to Israel. He has used much of his remaining time in the House to pursue anti-Israel measures, including calling to re-investigate the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty and amendments to strip out Israel-related provisions from annual appropriations bills.

The Jewish state receives about $3.8 billion annually in U.S. aid, including $3.3 billion in foreign military funding to purchase arms and $500 million for cooperative missile defense programs.

Massie’s proposal to end most of that aid, which also includes some spending on humanitarian programs, has further divided a Democratic caucus in which support for Israel has become a major fault line and cost several incumbents their seats in primary challenges from the anti-Israel left.

In his letter on Tuesday morning opposing the Massie amendment, Jeffries acknowledged the difficult political calculus that many Democrats face and called for a “major reset” of U.S.-Israel relations.

“There are good faith reasons that will result in members voting in a variety of different ways with respect to the amendment,” Jeffries wrote. “Moving forward, it is my strongly held view that for the good of Israel and the Palestinian people, American policy in the Middle East must change.”

EXCLUSIVE: Two New Law Firms Threaten New York Times With Shareholder Suit Over Gaza ‘Rape’ Story and Softball ‘Investigation’ of Platner, Accuse Times of ‘Pushing False Narratives’

A growing coalition of law firms representing a New York Times Company shareholder is demanding the publisher turn over its "books and records" for an investigation "into whether the company's board has abdicated its basic oversight duties" following a string of controversial Times reports that sought to discredit Israel or support anti-Israel Democratic politicians such as Graham Platner, according to a demand letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

If the Times does not produce the materials by July 21, a lawsuit will be filed in the New York County Supreme Court, according to a letter sent Tuesday by a coalition of lawyers representing the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a nonpartisan think-tank and beneficial Times shareholder. It is the second time that lawyers from the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC)—and now several other firms who recently joined the effort—have demanded access to the news organization's internal data and communications, accusing it of rampant anti-Israel bias and advocacy on behalf of prominent anti-Israel Democratic politicians like Platner—who withdrew in disgrace last week from Maine's Senate race—as well as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The stockholders, the letter says, aim "to investigate whether the [Times] Board is engaging in any form of oversight to ensure that the New York Times remains a news reporting agency worth anything to its stockholders, rather than becoming viewed by the public as a simple propaganda arm that selects its articles and reporting in a way that ignores truth in favor of pushing false narratives."

The prospective lawsuit could provide a new avenue for accountability at the Times, which has been largely dismissive of a rash of criticism over recent reporting on Israel and how it handled its investigation of Platner's alleged sexual misconduct. The paper has offered competing and often contradictory defenses for these articles, leading the shareholders to question if the Times board is flatly "ignoring company quality and compliance policies" that are meant to produce neutral, fact-based journalism. The inclusion of two new prominent law firms—Grant & Eisenhofer and Schall, Brown & Schwartz—on NJAC's campaign suggests that the Times may face difficulty dismissing their fresh concerns, which extend past mere anti-Israel bias to now encompass velvet-gloved reporting on two high-profile, anti-Israel Democrats.

"A Board doing its job does not watch its company get caught, publicly and repeatedly, publishing material that violates the company's own written standards, and say nothing," the letter states. "The violations themselves are for the newsroom to answer; the Board's attention to those violations, or its ignorance of them, is what NCPPR seeks to inspect." To do so, lawyers are demanding the Times hand over scores of internal records related to its reporting on Israel and Platner, including any private discussions the Times board may have engaged in about the coverage.

NJAC's initial May 29 letter came on the heels of a lurid and outlandish report, now widely discredited, from Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that accused Israel of raping two Palestinian "journalists" in separate incidents with a carrot and a dog. The NJAC raised concerns about the quality of the board's oversight prior to the publication of the column, which relied heavily on a Hamas-linked organization for the dog rape allegation, according to multiple reports, including in the Free Beacon.

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07/14 Links Pt1: Arabs, not Jews, are the real colonizers in the Middle East; The Manufacturing of an "American Doctor"; Royal Commission, Royal Omission

From Ian:

Arabs, not Jews, are the real colonizers in the Middle East

The Jewish people, returning to their ancestral homeland after centuries of exile and persecution, represent the reclamation of indigenous rights in the face of repeated conquests. Jews maintained an unbroken presence in the land, however small, and their national revival drew on deep historical, religious, and archaeological ties – connections that predate Arab arrival by millennia.

Nowhere is this distortion more evident than in the construction of a distinct “Palestinian” identity. I’m not the first to posit that the notion of a separate Palestinian nationality serves primarily tactical purposes. It functions as a strategic tool to sustain opposition to the Jewish state and advance broader Arab cohesion, rather than reflecting an ancient, organic peoplehood distinct from the surrounding Arab world.

This ideology emerged in modern times as a mechanism to delegitimize the sole sovereign Jewish entity in the region, framing Jewish self-determination as an alien intrusion.

Consider the visual reality of any regional map. Vast Arab-majority countries surround tiny Israel, home to the Jewish people. The contrast is stark: a constellation of Muslim-majority states, products of historical expansion, arrayed against the Jewish homeland.

This is not a case of a powerful empire oppressing a minority indigenous group, but rather the opposite: the world’s smallest, most unique native civilization defending itself against the lingering impulses of one of history’s greatest imperial forces.

The greatest feat of rhetorical sleight-of-hand has been convincing much of the globe that this expansive legacy represents a vulnerable underdog fighting for liberation, rather than a continuation of efforts to extinguish Jewish sovereignty.

This imperial Arab history provides essential context for today’s debates over indigeneity and justice. The Jewish return to Israel, far from colonialism, is decolonization, the restoration of a people to their biblical and historical cradle after successive foreign dominations, including Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman, and British periods.

Israel’s success as a vibrant democracy, technological innovator, and refuge stands in sharp contrast to the challenges faced by many neighboring societies still grappling with the aftereffects of authoritarian legacies and rejectionism.

The Palestinian cause, in this light, appears less as a pure liberation movement and more as an extension of historical patterns of denial toward Jewish rights. By insisting on a narrative that erases Jewish indigeneity while promoting a fabricated national story for tactical gain, it perpetuates conflict rather than seeking genuine coexistence.

True peace would require acknowledging the Jewish people’s ancient ties, the realities of regional history, and the right of Israel to exist as the fulfillment of self-determination for an indigenous nation.

The real colonial dynamic in the Middle East stems from those expansive conquests that reshaped identities and suppressed diversity across North Africa and beyond. Israel, by contrast, embodies resilience and revival, the Jewish people’s determination to reclaim and rebuild in their eternal homeland, contributing to the region while defending against ongoing threats.

They are the colonizers. Recognizing this truth does not diminish legitimate aspirations for peace or prosperity among all peoples, but it demands intellectual honesty. Only by confronting historical realities can we hope for a future where the Jewish state is accepted not as an anomaly, but as the rightful, indigenous presence it has always been.

Eitan Fischberger: The Manufacturing of an "American Doctor"

“American Doctor,” opening in theaters August 14, presents Feroze Sidhwa as a neutral American physician with no personal stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framing doesn’t survive contact with his own record:
Sidhwa has told MSNBC he has no connection to the conflict whatsoever, yet his own writing going back to 2007 describes decades of activism rooted in what he himself has called a Zoroastrian religious duty to oppose Israel, alongside years spent editing books and essays for Hamas-sympathizing academic Norman Finkelstein.

He has repeatedly and specifically denied ever seeing Hamas inside Gaza’s hospitals, telling the BBC that in his account no one who has ever set foot in Gaza has witnessed it. The record at every hospital where he has volunteered says otherwise.

At European Hospital, where Sidhwa insists he saw no trace of Hamas, the IDF says it found a Hamas tunnel running directly beneath the building, the same tunnel where senior Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar was killed in a May 2025 strike, along with the bodies of other terrorists and a cache of weapons and intelligence material.

At Nasser Hospital, Sidhwa himself confirmed on Democracy Now that one of two people killed in a March 2025 strike on a recovery room was Ismail Barhoum, the man the IDF identifies as Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, and argued the strike was illegal anyway. Freed Israeli hostages say they were held inside that same hospital, and Hamas’s own Interior Ministry ran policing operations out of it.

The personal website that now anchors Sidhwa’s media career, complete with a press kit, went live on the exact day his New York Times op-ed was published in October 2024, suggesting the “reluctant-witness” persona was a planned rollout rather than an accident of timing.

Israeli think tank urges tougher measures against Turkish consulate, limiting diplomatic presence

A new policy paper published by the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy called on the Israeli government to take a series of steps to reduce the Turkish consulate’s activity in Jerusalem and limit the status of its representatives.

Among the recommendations are revoking diplomatic benefits, canceling work visas, restricting freedom of movement in Israel, removing immunity from diplomatic vehicles, and reexamining the activity of Turkish institutions operating in the city.

The paper, written by retired ambassador Ran Yishai, who heads the center’s research division, includes 10 policy recommendations. According to the author, their purpose is to reduce what he defines as hostile Turkish influence in Jerusalem and strengthen the implementation of Israeli sovereignty in the city.

At the center of the document is the claim that the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem does not function as an authorized representative office to the State of Israel, but rather as a body operating mainly with the Palestinian Authority. For that reason, the paper argues, there is no justification for Israel to continue granting its representatives the full range of benefits normally extended in diplomatic relations between states.

Yishai says that for years Israel allowed the Turkish consulate to operate in Jerusalem in a manner that went beyond its official status. In his view, the consulate serves as a central hub in Ankara’s policy in the city and acts in a way that denies Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.

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07/13 Links Pt2: Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’; The people who know nothing know everything; "He's a Lying Liar." Haviv SLAMS Ro Khanna's Political Stunt in Israel

From Ian:

Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’

Human rights groups are tolerating terrorism against Israel, the UK’s independent reviewer of terror legislation has said.

Jonathan Hall KC said Left-wing activists regarded violence towards supporters of Israel as a “kind of exemption” because their brains had been “scrambled by Gaza”.

He said that many civil liberty NGOs had abandoned their “traditional” focus on “domestic issues” and instead become “sucked in” to an obsession with the Palestinian struggle.

Speaking at an event at Parliament, he said that some human rights groups had “lost this really precious neutrality and ability to be consistent” on the subject of Israel.

Mr Hall said: “I’ll be able to tell you from my own experience, I barely have any engagement with these sorts of groups. You’d think that Amnesty UK would be right in the forefront of saying: ‘There is an amendment to this legislation, what should we do?’ No, they’re involved in really defending one particular sort of protest.

“And I think that it’s an example of something that we’ve seen with the Palestine Action group response, where people on the whole get their brains scrambled by Gaza.

“So they tolerate behaviour, very violent behaviour, which they would say, if it was being done by the extreme Right or an Islamist group, ‘yes, of course that would amount to terrorism’. But they seem to regard it as a kind of exemption.”

Earlier this year, six Palestine Action activists were cleared of committing aggravated burglary after a break-in at the UK headquarters of an Israeli-owned arms company.

The six activists were found not guilty over allegations that they had used or threatened unlawful violence.

They had used an old prison van to ram-raid an Elbit Systems factory in Bristol in the early hours of Aug 6, 2024, and attacked police officers with sledgehammers, according to Avon and Somerset Police.

They “genuinely believed” their demonstration at the factory would help the Palestinian cause in Gaza, the court heard.

Mr Hall urged humanitarian groups to “pull themselves back from the brink and remember what they really are there to do”.

He said he had spoken to senior executives at British NGOs who are “worried about the direction of travel” but are being “pushed” in that direction by younger members of staff.

Lee Smith: The Culture of Loserdom

The United States saved Egypt from a humiliating defeat in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered French, British, and Israeli forces to evacuate the Suez Canal, which they’d easily taken from Egyptian forces. But not even Nasser’s Soviet patrons could save him in 1967, when Israel destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground, seized Sinai, and remade the Middle East in six days. His successor Anwar Sadat lost the 1973 war when Ariel Sharon nearly encircled Cairo and only Henry Kissinger’s intervention stopped him.

And then Sadat turned it around, briefly. He won a Nobel prize for making peace with Israel, got back the Sinai—and then terrorists killed him for it. The country’s only other Nobel prize winner, novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the throat on a Cairo street for writing a book that Egyptian terrorists didn’t like. In other words, Egypt cannot abide winning. And thus, naturally, Egypt renewed the contracts of Hossam Hassan and his twin Ibrahim, thereby rewarding the coach responsible for one of the most spectacular chokes in sports history and consequently one of the most repulsive displays of sporting conduct.

People, nations, aren’t supposed to lose like Egypt does, by embracing loserdom as a collective gestalt deployed to blame others for the failures that are only their own. Perhaps the most crucial job of any parent, and coach, is to teach their children how to lose gracefully and what to learn from it so that they may reap victory in the future. Sports is part of that tuition—even the best teams lose sometimes. You can do everything right, execute every play perfectly, but the other side, the other athlete, is simply better. Or you were better, but the calls went against you, or the weather was bad, and that’s just the way it goes.

But if you wanted to breed psychopaths, if you wanted to build a mummy army fed on a strict diet of resentment, you’d tell them nothing is their fault because every outcome is controlled by a mysterious force: colonialism, or Zionism, or voodoo, etc. And then, when things went against them—and things always go against those whose minds and souls are cut to fit the jagged-edged pattern of paranoia—they’d erupt in fits of predictably maniacal rage.

It’s the instrumentalization of those pathological furies that drives the politics of the Middle East. For instance, because of Egypt’s will to lose, Washington pays Cairo $2 billion a year not to send the millions of young men who blame the Jews for everything, from Mossad dolphins to soccer defeats, to their death in another war with Israel. It’s the same throughout the Muslim Middle East, which is why from Iran to Gaza, the Palestinian cause—the global standard of loserdom—is celebrated like victory.

And now the third-world migrants who have overrun Europe’s shores have brought the same culture to the continent. After Morocco’s loss to France, for instance, North African immigrants surrounded an Amsterdam hotel believed to be hosting Israelis and shouted threats, holding them responsible for the loss. And here, in the United States? It’s not a good sign that the man elected to run America’s greatest city can’t tell winning from losing and gives evidence he thinks like the third-world mobs drenched in resentment, that Egypt was robbed.

The people who know nothing know everything

I knew the evening was in trouble when the hostess described the table as “a safe space for difficult conversations.”

Nothing good has ever followed such words.

A safe space for difficult conversations is usually a space in which everyone is free to express precisely the same opinion, provided they do so using slightly different therapeutic vocabulary. Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them.

The dinner was being held in an immaculate apartment overlooking the city. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lighting was flattering, and the books had been arranged not alphabetically but morally. Edward Said sat beside Frantz Fanon. Judith Butler leaned against a large volume on decolonising architecture. There were several books about Israel, none by Israelis, historians, military analysts, Arabic speakers, Hebrew speakers, or anyone who had recently burdened themselves with the region’s chronology.

The apartment belonged to Oliver and Beatrice, who had invited 12 people for what they called “an evening of food, friendship and necessary conversation.”

I had been included, I later realised, as the necessary conversation; the one in need of “education.”

Beatrice greeted me at the door with the expression of a person welcoming a recently rehabilitated extremist.

“We’re so glad you came,” she said, touching my arm. “We were worried you might feel uncomfortable.”

“I’ve been to family weddings,” I replied. “I’ll survive.”

The other guests had already assembled around a huge island bench. They held champagne flutes and spoke in low, solemn tones about suffering in places they would never visit.

There was Julian, an international lawyer who specialised in commercial leases but had recently developed strong views on the laws of armed conflict. Nadia worked in branding and referred to herself as a storyteller. Marcus was a documentary producer whose documentaries had never been produced. Eleanor taught postcolonial literature and had perfected the academic art of converting adjectives into accusations. Simon was in finance and considered himself politically courageous because he had once criticised capitalism at Davos.

There was also Theo, a surgeon, who knew nothing about Israel but knew it with clinical confidence.

I was introduced around the room.

“This is our pro-Israel friend,” Beatrice announced.

When celebrity ignorance gets a stage

You can criticize Israeli settlement policy in Judea and Samaria. Plenty of Israelis do, loudly, in a free press, which is more than can be said for any of its neighbors. That is a real debate, and I welcome it.

But a nation that has voluntarily relinquished more territory than it currently holds is a strange poster child for expansionism. Name another country in history that won defensive wars and then handed the land back just for a signature on a peace treaty.

I’ll wait.

That’s the thing about Casablanca’s Oxford speech: It is the statement of a man who has never had to know anything, explaining to a room full of university students who the Jews really are. He got the biography of his subject wrong because he never learned it. He got the map wrong because he never looked at it. Although he does note that some of his closest friends are Jewish.

The danger isn’t that a rock singer holds uninformed opinions and mumbles through them to an audience who knows even less. Everyone is entitled to those. The danger is the machinery around him: the host who says “100% agree” without a beat, the comment sections calling it brave, the prestigious institutions handing Casablancas a lectern, the total absence of anyone in the room asking a single factual question.

When ignorance gets a stage, applause and an Oxford invitation, while the people it targets get stabbed on a London street, we are not having a policy debate. We are watching a line move.

So, I’ll say it again: Say something. You don’t need a position on settlements to notice that the facts here are wrong and that the target, once again, is the Jews.

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07/13 Links Pt1: Trump admin launches campaign to dismantle ICC; Lindsey Graham: A voice of moral clarity falls silent; Trump: ‘We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,’

From Ian:

Twenty-six years after Camp David, Israel needs a new security doctrine

At Camp David, we negotiated with the man who was then regarded as the supposed partner, the only figure who was allegedly willing to sit down and negotiate with Israel (while the rest of the Palestinian leadership rejected the very idea outright). Yet we still reached a dead end. The result of those concessions was not peace, but the outbreak of the Second Intifada, a planned wave of terrorism that claimed the lives of more than one thousand Israelis.

By demonstrating a willingness to make those concessions, we created an extraordinarily dangerous precedent, one in which the international community came to regard Israeli territorial concessions as the natural starting point for every future negotiation.

That precedent must be erased. It must be erased from the pages of our diplomatic and security history, and it must be made clear that those proposals are null and void and cannot serve as the opening position for any future discussion.

The lesson of the Camp David Summit (2000) is even deeper and more relevant today. The summit definitively shattered the assumption that territorial concessions, in and of themselves, would bring reconciliation. It proved that the root of the conflict is not the scope of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, but the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Even at the point of Israel’s maximum willingness to compromise, it became clear that a historic compromise was not the objective of the other side.

From this understanding emerges the diplomatic doctrine that Israel must adopt for the decades ahead: lasting arrangements are not achieved through territorial gestures, but are built upon strength, deterrence, and security.

The only practical foundation for any future arrangement will emerge only when a profound change in Palestinian consciousness takes place, one that includes full recognition that Israel is a permanent and indisputable reality, with no intention of withdrawing or relinquishing its right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Only when the other side becomes convinced that it cannot defeat Israel or alter reality through terrorism, international pressure, or rejectionism, and that the continued illusion that the Jewish presence in the region is temporary bears no fruit, will the foundation for a stable and realistic arrangement truly be laid.

The key to peace lies not in the breadth of Israeli concessions, but in the strength of Israeli deterrence and the depth of Palestinian recognition of our legitimate existence here.

Turkey, Israel, and the New Ottoman Empire

What Is Behind Erdogan’s Antagonism Toward Israel?
So, why has President Erdogan shifted Turkey away from being a regional partner of Israel to one of its chief antagonists in the Middle East and on the world stage?

There seem to be two leading causes of Erdogan’s anti-Israel posture: His personal animus toward the Jewish people and his regional ambitions.

As an Islamist politician, Erdogan has been influenced by the ideological circle that surrounds him, which is contemptuous of Jews and views the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and establishment of the secular Turkish state as part of a secret Jewish plot.

The existence of Israel as a Jewish state in what is viewed as a traditionally Muslim region only amplifies this dislike and suspicion of Jews.

Aside from Erdogan’s personal ideology, Turkish society has become more open to public expressions of antisemitism in recent years, which has allowed the Turkish strongman to use his public opposition to the Jewish state as a means of garnering more votes among the Turkish public.

Perhaps even more consequential than antisemitism in the worsening of relations between Israel and Turkey are Erdogan’s long-term regional ambitions, which place him in direct confrontation with the Jewish state.

As opposed to other leaders who ruled Turkey before him, Erdogan subscribes to the idea of “neo-Ottomanism,” which aims to position Turkey as a leading force in the Sunni Islamic world.

As the Ottoman Empire controlled much of the Middle East for hundreds of years, Erdogan seeks to return Turkey to this position of power by spreading its influence (and sometimes even its military forces) into neighboring states.

This expansion of Turkey’s role in the Middle East can be seen over the past 10 years, with Turkey sending forces into Iraq to fight ISIS (against the wishes of the Iraqi government), establishing itself militarily in Qatar, extending its influence in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israeli Arab communities, placing a foothold on the Red Sea, and becoming the patron of the new Syrian government since the fall of the Assad regime in 2024.

With the recent diminishment of Iran’s position in the Middle East, Erdogan is even more determined to increase Turkey’s influence in the region and become the new hegemonic power.

So, how do Turkey’s regional ambitions affect its relationship with Israel?

First, Israel’s own security needs can come into direct conflict with Turkey’s desires. This is most clearly seen in Syria, where Israel has established a buffer zone along its border due to its suspicion of the new regime, while Turkey has openly embraced it.

Second, in Erdogan’s view, by becoming increasingly and publicly hostile to the Jewish state, he is leveraging the anti-Israel sentiment of the Arab street to catapult Turkey into being the leading voice of the Muslim world, at the expense of more moderate regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Thus, it appears likely that as Erdogan’s Turkey becomes a growing force in the Middle East and seeks to dominate the region, it will increasingly become more antagonistic toward Israel.

However, as opposed to this remaining a problem for the Jewish state, Turkey’s regional ambitions will likely become a problem for all Middle Eastern states that do not wish to become subservient to one hegemonic power in the region.

Half Won, Half Lost By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. Trump now seems to understand that the whole negotiation saga was an Iranian ruse. So we’ve gone back in time. The U.S. is once again pounding Iran from the air, and Trump just announced that we’d be reimposing a blockade on Iranian vessels.

But given this administration’s penchant for stopping short of victory, it’s hard to see where this goes, even in the next few days. And why is it that Iran won’t play along with the U.S., abide by the MOU, and collect the billions it has been promised?

The man who’s had the clearest understanding of this war from the start is Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. While Bolton is a committed Iran hawk, he’s been sounding the alarm about Trump’s lack of strategy since the run-up to the operation. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Bolton argues that the U.S. and Israel have weakened Iran’s government to the point that there is no cohesive Iranian leadership to make a deal. “This disarray explains why some in Iran are again reportedly plotting to murder Mr. Trump,” he writes, “while others are still negotiating with his representatives.”

I’m sure Bolton is correct about the difficulties posed by our semi-victory. But there’s another piece of the puzzle: our semi-failure. American planning blunders have done their part to make a tidy exit impossible. The U.S. was unprepared for and ultimately checked by the Iranian threat on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has argued that energy markets will organically overcome this challenge. That could be, but he’s not so confident that he’s ready to leave the strait in the regime’s hands.

So the U.S. has fought itself into a perverse Goldilocks zone where we won just enough and lost just enough to prevent our leaving. The administration has taken a long, winding path merely to reach this point of clarity. I’ll take it, with the hope that the president finally commits to total victory. But I expect that getting from here to there will involve at least as many foolish diversions.

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07/12 Links: Lindsey Graham, a stalwart supporter of Israel in the Senate, dies at 71; Sinwar predicted Israel might respond with nuclear strike; The PA's War Against Jewish History

From Ian:

In memo before October 7, Sinwar predicted Israel might respond with nuclear strike

Yahya Sinwar, the late Hamas leader who masterminded the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre, assessed ahead of the onslaught that Israel might respond with a nuclear strike on the Gaza Strip, but chose to carry out the invasion anyway, according to a newly revealed document written in the terror chief’s own hand.

The memo, written in August 2022, was obtained by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, and excerpts from it were published by Channel 12 on Sunday. A similar document was revealed last fall, though several details were not present in previous reporting.

According to Channel 12, Sinwar laid out specific operational plans, including numbers of fighters to be deployed to particular junctions, envisioning 25 simultaneous breaches of the Israel-Gaza border fence, to take control of 25 different junctions. He envisioned “well-trained squads” carrying out each of these infiltrations, with each squad numbering 100 fighters.

Sinwar also planned for a further 2,210 fighters to attack 221 small communities in the south, and a further 1,600 for eight larger ones. He wrote that 1,200 fighters would be deployed to attack Israeli cities, and 2,000 to attack army bases. The total fighting force he imagined would have numbered some 10,000 terrorists, none of whom would have been privy to the entire scope of the plan.

The figures are significantly higher than the number of Palestinians who actually invaded from Gaza on October 7, which the Israel Defense Forces estimates at around 5,600, of whom about 3,500 were Hamas fighters, along with some 580 fighters from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, and about 1,400 other Gazans.

“The goal is to expel the settlers with their vehicles,” the terror chief wrote in the memo, referring to the residents of Israel’s south. He wrote that “priority” should be given to children and women, while ordering that “the men aged 17-50 are to be taken hostage” and that “all phones must be taken, along with any additional documents they are carrying on their person.”

The Channel 12 report emphasized Sinwar’s awareness of the likely costs of the attack, noting that he did not profess certainty that Iran, which backs Hamas, or the Islamic Republic’s other regional proxies such as Hezbollah, would join in the onslaught, as the terror group is widely believed to have hoped they would.

Moreover, the terror chief estimated that Israel would “not hesitate to use all means and weapons at its disposal” in response to the mass murder, adding: “They may even use an atomic bomb, no less.”

“But first, it will be surprised by the attack and enter into chaos,” he wrote, describing the assault as “a campaign of life or death,” and calling for “a popular operation of returning to the villages and recapturing them symbolically.”

WSJ: Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate over Hormuz

For the Iranian regime, keeping a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be more important than the tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the Trump administration. Iranian officials believe the country has finally emerged as a regional hegemon and is seeking to cement its new status by securing permanent arrangements to control the vital waterway - and dominating the Persian Gulf economies along with it.

"This is the only way: recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz," warned Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament's national security commission. "The Strait of Hormuz will only open with 'Iranian arrangements,' not American threats," added the parliament's speaker and the lead negotiator with the U.S., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

This attitude heralds a rocky future, with continuing uncertainty for global energy markets and a Damoclean Sword of renewed strikes hanging over the Gulf monarchies. "The Islamic Republic will become even more of a gangster regime. Its takeaway from the war is that concessions are won through coercion - by attacking its neighbors, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and driving up the price of oil," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Iranian regime views the oil-rich Gulf monarchies as belonging to its own natural sphere of influence - a sphere denied to it by America ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tehran's drive to institutionalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects its ambition to establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East.

Iran's perception of itself as a new regional hegemon is delusional given how much its military has been degraded, how much its network of proxy forces in the Middle East has been weakened, and how much its economy has been suffocated in recent months, said Salman Al-Ansari, a Saudi geopolitical analyst. "All it has left is bullying, piracy, noise and the ability to act as a spoiler. These are not the qualities of a hegemon, but of a thug."

For now, the Iranians have limited themselves to largely ineffective attacks on American military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

"Fundamentally, the Iranians don't believe that Trump wants to go back to war, so they are going to just push and push. They are really thinking that he is not going to wallop them at all," said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official.

Masih Alinejad: The Iran the Funeral Cameras Don't Show

In the months since supreme leader Ali Khamenei's death, I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran.

They are messages of disbelief, relief and, when people feel safe enough, joy. But they are still afraid. They are always afraid.

The carefully choreographed seas of mourners at the funeral are an illusion. I know from experience how they are assembled through force.

The total expense of the week-long funeral - including security deployments of roughly 150,000 police, temporary infrastructure, transportation, accommodation for thousands of out-of-town participants, free 24-hour metro and bus services, catering, and a week of public holidays - could approach $800 million.

Why does the system that denounced extravagance pour hundreds of millions into a funeral?

For a supreme leader who was considered a titan of a global movement, the absence of every major world leader is an embarrassment.

This was not mourning. This was a regime staging a display of strength for an audience that is no longer watching.

Many of those attending the funeral genuinely want revenge. During the funeral, crowds of mourners hung an effigy of President Donald Trump. From the funeral stage, regime loyalists repeatedly vowed revenge.

Placards carried by mourners displayed prominent Americans, with red crosshairs or target marks over their foreheads. The captions read, "Sooner or later, your heads will roll."

When the Islamic Republic threatens to kill you, believe them. As a former journalist in Iran, I was forced into exile for criticizing the regime, only for Iranian intelligence operatives to plot my assassination in New York - a plan foiled by the FBI at the last minute.

But before that, the regime threatened me publicly with posters, cartoons, and effigies. For the Islamic Republic, propaganda is the prelude to action.

This is Iran's reality: a population who have learned to perform grief when required, and who express their true feelings only in whispers, anonymously, or not at all.

I have been the keeper of those messages for years. They fill my phone. They fill my social media. They are the Iran the funeral cameras do not show.

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07/11 Links: Coordinated anti-Israel propaganda campaign blindsided the West after Oct. 7; Trump: 1,000 missiles are locked and loaded and aimed at Iran; One detail changes the whole Ro Khanna story

From Ian:

Coordinated anti-Israel propaganda campaign blindsided the West after Oct. 7, author says

Shortly after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Warren Kinsella began noticing what he considered the fingerprints of a professional propaganda campaign.

A Canadian political strategist who has worked for decades in war rooms advising prime ministers and political campaigns in Canada, the United States and Israel, Kinsella makes that case in his new book, “The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda.”

According to Kinsella, Hamas and its networks, along with their Western followers, had thousands of social media accounts primed, protest banners ready, and talking points translated into multiple languages long before the IDF’s response to the carnage had even begun.

Kinsella believes that what may appear to be spontaneous outrage on Western streets and social feeds is, in fact, a coordinated political operation that could only be executed by state actors and professional agitators.

His new book claims Jew-hatred is being mainstreamed by outlaw states and extremist groups who use tools of modern campaigning such as message discipline, cash payouts and logistics training. These actors push slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” so quickly and uniformly that they cannot be dismissed as organic, Kinsella said.

And, he says, Western democracies have barely begun to respond.

“Almost immediately after October 7, I looked around and quickly formed the opinion that what I was seeing was an organized, professional-style political campaign, pushing out this vile, hateful propaganda against Jews, the Jewish state and Western democracy,” Kinsella, a resident of Prince Edward County, Ontario, told The Times of Israel. “I spoke to other political people I know, and they all had the same reaction.”

In October 2023, “there were thousands of protests around the planet using the same slogans,” said Kinsella, who is also a columnist for the Toronto Sun and founder of the Daisy Consulting Group.

That, to Kinsella, was either “one hell of a coincidence” or evidence of central planning.

Kinsella sees that conclusion as central to the book’s thesis and points to comments by US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who has accused Iran of seeking to fund and encourage anti-Israel protests.

“The bad guys,” he said, “have unlimited resources and armies of propaganda,” with which they have successfully convinced Westerners that Israel is an “apartheid state” and a “white supremacist colonial state bent on destroying a powerless non-white minority.”

Kinsella’s documentary film “The Campaign” — which complements the book — was first screened in Toronto on March 30. Last month, it was shown in Tel Aviv at Israel’s largest documentary film festival, Docaviv, and at Canada’s Parliament Hill for legislators.

Nova Festival survivors face torrent of abuse

Survivors of the Nova festival massacre on October 7 are facing a torrent of online abuse from bots believed to be manned by Iran.

Thousands of coordinated fake accounts linked to hostile state actors have targeted those who attended the festival, at which 364 people were murdered by Hamas and dozens more injured or taken hostage in 2023.

Social media platforms are failing to remove abusive posts, comments and videos about the survivors, according to a new report monitoring the abuse and shared exclusively with The Telegraph.

The report, set to be published by Fighting Online Anti-Semitism in the coming days, documents a “sustained and multi-layered digital campaign” against survivors of the attack.

The researchers said the “coordinated” campaign was intended to erase, distort and justify the events of Oct 7, not only by challenging the facts of the massacre but also the survivors themselves.

They pointed to social media posts calling for the death of survivors, denying their experiences and labelling them with racist, sexist and other highly offensive slurs.

Conspiracy theories have abounded ever since the massacre, suggesting that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired on its own citizens to justify a ground assault on Gaza.

“The phenomenon ranges from complete denial – claiming the attack was a staged event involving ‘crisis actors’ and fake blood – to posts and comments that shift blame onto the IDF,” the report states.

The organisation believes Tehran is behind the campaign of abuse.

Holocaust author said book was ‘canceled’ because he wouldn’t bash Israel, US

A book about the Holocaust was “canceled” after the author said he refused his editor’s insistence that the introduction include criticisms of Israel for committing “war crimes” in Gaza and the Trump-led US for creating “concentration-style prisons” for migrants.

Rafael Medoff, the author of the book “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said he refused to publish what he believed were falsehoods editor Craig Yoe wanted to put in the book contracted to be published by Dark Horse.

Prior to the current controversy, Dark Horse published two of Dr. Medoff’s other books, “Whistleblowers” and “Cartoonists Against Racism” without incident.

It was only after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel that Yoe began demanding that Dr. Medoff denounce Israel as the price to be paid for publishing his new tome “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said Medoff and the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs.

“The book was canceled. I was canceled,” Medoff, who has written op-eds for The Post, said.

Yoe sent a Sept. 1, 2025 email to Medoff saying he “thought long and hard” about adding a separate “note” in the book to unload on Israel and the US before its planned publication.

Yoe said Trump is “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons, is sending American residents to gulag type prisons in other countries without constitution guaranteed trials,” Yoe said.

“At the same time,” he added, ” a country populated by an ethnic religious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a prime minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Medoff sent a detailed response to Yoe objecting to slamming Israel and the US, saying the claims Yoe wanted to print were “factually inaccurate” and would politicize the book.

Head of PEN America, a free expression group, quits because it’s against Israel boycott

Dinaw Mengestu, the head of the free expression group PEN America, resigns after the group said it was against cultural boycotts in an article about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination.

Mengestu tells The New York Times it is “unethical” for his free speech group to oppose cultural boycotts because it’s discriminatory to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

He accused PEN America of “defending some rights while not defending others.”

PEN America’s Thursday article focused on Israeli and Jewish writers “facing rising isolation and exclusion.”

The article said the group believes boycotts threaten free expression, but recognizes the right to boycott.

PEN America says its mission is to “protect free expression” and the “freedom to write.”

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07/10 Links Pt2: Howard Jacobson: “Had we been living in Berlin, what would we have done?; The trillion-dollar campaign to conquer the West; Andy Burnham’s shameful pandering to anti-Israel bigots

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The trillion-dollar campaign to conquer the West

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after Oct. 7, 2023—even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on—weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally coordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-Oct. 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80% of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organizations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organizations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have cooperated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

New Ted Cruz-aligned organization takes aim at right-wing antisemitism

Allies of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are launching a new political organization aimed at countering antisemitism within the Republican Party, Jewish Insider has learned, led by Arielle F. Klepach, a former assistant U.S. attorney and senior counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center.

The Front Line (TFL) will operate as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, meaning the group will not have to disclose its donors and can spend unlimited sums toward political activity, provided campaign finance is not its primary purpose and it does not contribute directly to campaigns.

A source familiar with the matter told JI that those behind the organization, which Cruz is not directly involved with, raised several million dollars to fund the operation. Klepach will run the operation as executive director.

In a statement on her hiring, Klepach said she was enthusiastic to join an effort focused on preventing Republicans from mimicking what she described as Democrats’ embrace of anti-Israel sentiment.

“There has been a surge of antisemitism across America, which first engulfed the left and is now threatening the moral integrity and political unity of the conservative movement and the Republican Party,” Klepach said. “I am excited to lead The Front Line’s efforts to defeat right-wing antisemitism before it takes conservatives down the same path of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and pro-Sharia advocacy that has taken the left.”

TFL’s mission statement describes the group as “an issue advocacy organization aligned with the positions of Ted Cruz dedicated to countering right-wing antisemitism, by making antisemitism disqualifying in the Republican Party and conservative movement, through activities across political, policy, and digital spaces.”

Sanders compares Israel with Sudan and Russia

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has long accused Israel of “genocide,” compared the Jewish state with Sudan and Russia in a statement on Thursday.

“One might have hoped that, after thousands of years of war, humanity could have come up with a better way to resolve conflicts than killing and mass destruction,” the Jewish senator said. “Unfortunately, that is not the case. There is now more war and bloodshed raging across the world than at almost any point in decades.”

In a statement ostensibly about “civil war and genocide in Sudan,” Sanders noted Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “without provocation” and what he said is “genocide” in Gaza.

“In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 innocent people and taking 251 hostages,” he said. “In response, Netanyahu and the Israeli military did not simply wage war against Hamas. They waged war against the entire population of Gaza.”

He accused the Jewish state of destroying “virtually the entire physical infrastructure of Gaza.”

Hamas is known to embed deliberately among the civilian population and to use it as human shields.

Five paragraphs into the statement about genocide in Sudan, Sanders finally mentioned Sudan, before pivoting to U.S. President Donald Trump.

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07/10 Links Pt1: US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling; Pro-Israel UK MP Ann Widdecombe, murdered; CPJ Staff Packed With Anti-Israel Agitators

From Ian:

Brian Cox: Hamas announced it is stepping down in Gaza. It’s time for Canada to step up

The Board of Peace that is tasked with managing the transition of authority in Gaza welcomed Monday’s announcement that Hamas has dissolved its government, yet the Board nonetheless insisted that its assessment will be “guided by actions, not promises, to meet the critical needs of the people of Gaza.”

If Hamas does not voluntarily disarm and refrain from a governing role in Gaza, these non-negotiable objectives may yet require overwhelming military force to achieve. This means the prospect of intense—even deadly—combat operations remains.

Despite the dangers on the horizon, the potential for this plan to finally achieve durable peace in Palestinian territories is worth the risk.

But doing so will require commitment, resolve, and skilled military capabilities. This is why the Canadian Armed Forces are especially well suited to the task.

One potential roadblock is the current strain in relations between Canada and the United States. Despite current tensions, the government still maintains that “Canada has had no closer friend and ally than the United States” for over 150 years.

And although the peace plan is an American-led initiative for which Trump is appointed chair of the fledgling Board of Peace, the United Nations Security Council has welcomed the board and authorized establishment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF).

This provides international legitimacy to the peace plan, which is a point the government can emphasize to the domestic constituency in light of current diplomatic tensions with America.

Last fall, the Carney government along with Australia, France, and the UK recognized the State of Palestine even though it doesn’t currently qualify for traditional criteria of statehood. Committing robust military capabilities to the ISF in Gaza represents an opportunity to pursue a credible two-state solution.

The Carney government insists that “Canada is a strong supporter of the Middle East Peace Process” and that its approach to the conflict “is guided by its historic and unwavering commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace and security.”

If Canada is genuinely committed to long-term peace while also supporting “free and fair elections in Palestine in which Hamas must play no role,” political rhetoric, humanitarian aid, and capacity building simply will not be enough.

The consequences of failure are predictable: perpetual conflict, resurgence of Hamas and other Iran-backed regional proxy militias, and eventually a repeat of the October 7 atrocities followed by catastrophic large-scale hostilities.

A coalition of the willing must seize this moment by demonstrating the resolve needed to convert wishes to results.

The time is now for Canada to step up, join in, and take on a decisive role to foster genuine peace in Gaza and beyond.

US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling

Two influential US congressional panels have launched a major inquiry into the New Israel Fund (NIF), JNS reported on Friday.

According to the report, the House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees are examining allegations that the American-based leftist organization potentially violated federal tax laws by funneling non-profit capital into partisan political operations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an official warning obtained by JNS, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) detailed how NIF may have breached its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status “by providing millions of dollars in funding to groups that engaged in political campaign activities in the 2019 Israeli elections."

US internal revenue laws strictly forbid public charities from intervening in foreign or domestic political races either directly or indirectly.

According to congressional investigators, the NIF covertly backed radical anti-Netanyahu networks.

“NIF provided approximately $356,000 to Zazim, an Israeli organization that ‘operated a transportation system that brought thousands of Bedouin voters’ to the polls that were part of the opposition party to Prime Minister Netanyahu," the lawmakers noted. They also revealed that the organization “also provided approximately $95,000 to Adalah, a group that ‘provided legal representation to the Joint Arab List,’ an alliance of Arab parties that centered their campaign around ousting Prime Minister Netanyahu in favor of his opponent, Benny Gantz."

Further compliance failures were flagged regarding a 2019 court filing indicating that the NIF actively interfered in the sovereign electoral map by securing signatures for a legal petition to block a right-wing legislative candidate. “When the Israeli Supreme Court banned the candidate, ‘NIF called it a victory for democracy,’" the chairmen noted.

The leftist organization has historically presented itself as an entity dedicated to bolstering civil equity, asserting that it has disbursed over $300 million to various left-wing frameworks since 1979. However, the prominent visual on their web portal showcases Arab MK Ayman Odeh, leader of the radical anti-Zionist Hadash-Ta'al faction.

Odeh, despite being an elected member of the Knesset, has made countless anti-Israel statements, including comparisons between Israeli hostages and Hamas terrorists.

Rep. Jim Jordan indicated to JNS that the evidence points to blatant meddling. “The law is the law. You’re not supposed to be using this for electioneering activity," he stressed. “It looks like they were.

Downstream of the Lie By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
I’m not talking about the dupes who believe anti-Israel propaganda. I mean, rather, those Israel supporters who blame the shift in public opinion on Israel’s failed communications strategy over the past three years.

They act as if anyone else is doing a better job of getting populations to distinguish between lies and truth. Falsehoods and loony theories have come to proliferate everywhere at all times. Look at recent history: Most of the country believed that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. Most bought into the story that Covid came from a wet market. The 2020 election showed that Americans generally thought Joe Biden was cognitively fit for office. As recently as 2024, Gallup found that a majority of Americans were opposed to banning “gender-affirming” care for minors. And most still think the government is lying to us about aliens.

In such cases of broadly shared misinformation, we tend to blame those peddling the lies, not those who just didn’t scream the truth loud enough. In fact, truthful protestations are repurposed by the liars as further proof of a cover-up.

Look, I don’t really think Israel lost the information war to begin with. As I’ve argued before, the information Israel needed to get across was that it’s not going anywhere and will do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.

But what’s more important is that the psyop against Israel isn’t ultimately about Israel. It’s a disinformation nuke aimed at the heart of America. Just look at what it’s already done to our social cohesion. Same goes for the Charlie Kirk conspiracy theory, which is itself an anti-Semitic spinoff of the op against Israel. History shows that the promulgation of anti-Semitism can be a death sentence for free societies.

To save our country, I suggest we start looking abroad at who would stand to gain from this kind of crack-up. Never mind the incentive structure of clicks and views. That’s all downstream of the problem’s source. It’s the U.S. that’s losing the information war. And the way to win it is to take the fight straight to our enemies.

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07/09 Links Pt2: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies; Jerusalem voted the seventh-best city in the world; Elie Wiesel’s hidden world of letters, loss and friendship

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies

Say this for Rahm Emanuel. He may have about as much chance of being nominated for the presidency in 2028 by the Democratic Party as he does of being elected pope. But he knows how to retain the attention of the national media by manipulating contacts inside the Beltway.

That’s the only way to explain why someone who is not even being included in way-too-early polls about presidential preferences could get the kind of massive coverage he got for a speech given this week in Israel, when those far ahead of him in the contest struggle to be noticed.

On July 7, The Washington Post devoted three full articles to previewing Emanuel’s July 8 talk at Tel Aviv University. The Post, The New York Times, CNN and the rest of the corporate press then followed up with even more coverage of the speech after the fact. Those articles not only depicted it as deeply relevant to the current debate about the U.S.-Israel relationship going on in his party, but also to the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

A rerun of failed ideas
But what made this public relations coup even more remarkable is the fact that the much-ballyhooed address consisted of little more than a recycling of the conventional wisdom of his long-past political heyday. Emanuel’s speech was more or less a rerun of what passed for foreign-policy establishment canon in 1995 and 2015, put forward as a formula for peace in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Once you strip away Emanuel’s attempts to claim both the credibility and credentials to demand that Israelis discard everything their lying eyes and ears have been telling them about their nation’s struggle to survive a multifront war launched by Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries, all you’ve got is what we might term a piece of political nostalgia.

Emanuel calls his big idea the “23-state solution” because it is based on the notion that the Arab and Muslim world can cajole the Palestinian Arabs to make peace. But that’s just window dressing for what is the same two-state solution that his former bosses, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, foolishly expended so much political capital trying to force into being. Contrary to liberal myth, that formula was thwarted not by Israeli intransigence but by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians—enabled by much of the Muslim and Arab worlds, in addition to Western leftists—to countenance any future but one in which Israel is erased.

The context here is the fact that the former U.S. ambassador to Japan (2022-2025), mayor of Chicago (2011-2019), White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), U.S. congressman from Illinois (2003-2009), investment banker (1999-2002) and senior adviser to Clinton (1993-1998) believes that his already impressive résumé ought to be rounded out by a stint as commander-in-chief. The man renowned as a serious policy wonk, albeit one with a predilection for profanity and a notorious temper, may have much to say about a lot of different topics. Yet when it comes to Israel—a subject he claims intimate knowledge of—Rahm is nothing but a blast from the discredited past.

That’s why the truly significant aspect of the speech and the massive coverage it generated isn’t what it says about the 2028 race, efforts to prevent the Democratic Party from becoming the anti-Israel party or even the one that is comfortable with antisemitism. Rather, it points toward the fact that while Israelis have absorbed the lessons of the last 33 years of history, including the Oslo Accords disaster, the Second Intifada, the fruits of the withdrawal from Gaza and the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, supposedly smart people, including those like Emanuel who know a thing or two about Israel, have learned nothing.

Adam Louis-Klein: Rahm Emanuel’s shocking speech to fracture the bond between Israel and the diaspora

Emanuel does not share a fate with Israelis, and certainly not with the "Zionists" whose forced exodus from social networks, whose professional discrimination in the academy and elsewhere, he frames as a the natural consequence of Israel itself. He speaks from a thousand miles above, insulated from the antizionist abuse that is raging across the West.

His open attribution of collective guilt toward Jews – discriminatory in its very essence – is hardly surprising. It's increasingly treated as the common sense of liberal politics. “Netanyahu is harming Jews” is a common refrain, even though it lacks all logical sense. Netanyahu could be Hitler – as antizionists daily imagine him to be, as they mouth old Soviet slogans – yet targeting ordinary Jews as “genocidal” would still be unacceptable, and blame would lie with those who did so.

The casual rhetoric of blame reflect a deeper problem: the systematic concealment of antizionism, of Israel-hate, as something that could actually be the structural cause not only for changes in Israel's “reputation,” and not only for the violence against diaspora Jews, but for the crises in the Middle East themselves. Why, exactly, is Israel in a permanent state of war, which includes occupation and ongoing reciprocal violence? Why, exactly, does the question of whether the United States should be entangled in these wars come up in the first place? Violence against Israelis here is taken as natural and given.

While Emanuel claims to want Arab states to recognise Israel's right to exist, to integrate Israel into the region, he seems uninterested in the moral stakes of anyone seeking to annihilate a state in the first place. He seems oblivious to the social media accounts with millions of followers screaming with joy at the sight of Iranian missiles falling on Israeli civilians. Somehow none of that causes any moral outrage, since he has saved it all up for “Netanyahu” – the villain of his decadent fantasies.

The absence of any actual engagement with global antizionism is not merely a lacuna in the discourse: it is one that serves to reproduce that violence itself. By refusing to name the cause, and refusing to hold its principal actors accountable, ongoing wars are continually given justification, while blame is displaced onto Israel. This ongoing habit of evasion and non-accountability around antizionism – including refusing to say its name – causes harm to Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians alike.

Emanuel's politics does not seek peace; it seeks moral legitimacy and it exploits Israel as a tool to achieve it. His tone of superiority is not incidental. Like the old German Jews who looked down upon the traditional Eastern “Ostjuden” with contempt in the early 20th century, the liberal American Jew, insulated from antizionist abuse on the ground, now proclaims their civilisational superiority to the primitive Israeli.

I doubt that such a relationship is meant to lead to a memorandum of understanding.

Chief Rabbi urges Church of England to reject ‘genocide’ report ahead of Synod vote

The Chief Rabbi has urged the Church of England’s governing body to reject a controversial report accusing Israel of genocide, warning it threatens decades of Jewish-Christian relationship-building.

Sir Ephraim Mirvis spoke out before next week’s General Synod debate on whether the Church should formally engage with A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, also known as Kairos II, as part of its efforts to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The report, produced by Palestinian Christian organisation Kairos Palestine, describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a “genocidal war” and claims the Jewish state is a “colonial enterprise built on racism”. It also accuses Israel of apartheid and settler colonialism.

In a statement published on X following reporting by The Times, the Chief Rabbi said: “The content of Kairos II is deeply concerning, and I would hope the Synod will see it for what it is. While it is important to recognise the suffering of Palestinian Christians, this document does so in a way which can only harm the cause of peace.”

He added: “It presents a one-sided account of a complex conflict, downplays the historical experiences and legitimate concerns of Jewish people, and offers little more than political activism dressed up as theology.”

Mirvis continued: “It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood – using extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state, and to oppose existing peace agreements in the region.”

He warned that “at a time when Christian-Jewish relations require nuance, trust and a willingness to engage with complexity, Kairos II risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building.”

The Chief Rabbi concluded: “Meaningful progress begins when the dignity, aspirations and suffering of all peoples are acknowledged. Kairos II takes us further away from that goal, not closer to it.”

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07/09 Links Pt1: BHL: Post-Oct. 7 isolation of Israel a ‘historic moral failure’; Israel’s ‘medical malpractice’; Australia’s Treatment of Jews Is a Warning to the World

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy calls post-Oct. 7 isolation of Israel a ‘historic moral failure’

The diplomatic isolation of Israel during the war in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre will go down in history as a moral failure and a defeat of humanity, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said on Thursday.

“The absence of support for Israel will be considered by future historians as a moment of huge disgrace for the West,” Lévy told JNS in an interview in Tel Aviv. “It is a defeat of humanity and a moral defeat. It is the loss of any moral compass.”

Lévy, who lives in Paris, rushed to Israel the day after the Oct. 7 attacks and the following year penned Israel Alone, a book about the lack of diplomatic support for the Jewish state in the West.

“I was beyond shocked,” he said.

He was back in Israel on Thursday to deliver the keynote address at the annual conference on contemporary antisemitism hosted by the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa. The gathering is the largest annual academic conference on modern-day antisemitism, drawing an estimated 550 participants, including 250 in-person presenters, with others joining virtually from abroad.

The 77-year-old French intellectual, commonly known as BHL, decried the surge in antisemitism, which he called “unprecedented in my lifetime,” noting that he rarely gives lectures in France for security reasons and that the only safe place for him to speak in the United Kingdom is a synagogue.

“Even if I come to speak about philosophy or non-Jewish issues, the only safe place for me in the U.K. is a synagogue,” he said.

Lévy noted that he has lived under police protection in Paris for more than two decades, since the publication of his book about the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

Mindful of the growing exodus of Jews from Western European cities, Lévy said he is determined to fight back.

“Europe would have no future if Jews stepped back,” he said, blaming a toxic mix of “stupid, illiterate, and barbaric anti-Semites” and a French leadership whose stance on Israel often adds fuel to the fire.

“The situation gives me the will to resist, to fight, and to win,” he said.

Amb. Michael Oren: Israel Is Not Isolated, Not Bloodthirsty

I was asked if Vice President JD Vance was right in saying that, apart from the U.S., Israel has no friends in the world. I answered "no," and listed the many friends Israel has in South America, Africa, the Arab Gulf, and India, a country with a population four times that of the U.S.

If I was asked "is JD Vance right when he said that Israel 'can't just kill (its) way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]?'" - the answer is even more adamantly: "No!"

The charge that Israel uses brute force to resolve all its security problems is firstly and historically false. This is the country which, in 1949, signed armistice agreements with four Arab countries that only a year before had tried to destroy us. In 1967, that same country offered to return almost all of the sizable territories we captured in the Six-Day War in return for peace with the Arab leaders who once again sought to annihilate it.

This is the country, Israel, which returned the Sinai peninsula, an area more than three times its size, in return for peace with Egypt. We are the nation that signed a peace agreement with the arch terrorist Arafat who for decades specialized in murdering Israelis. He soon went back to murdering Israelis and still we sought peace with him.

Israel is the country which, arguably more than any other in the world, has done more to avoid having to kill our way out of our security problems. Still, there are some problems that Israel has no choice but to address with force. As Vice President Vance knows full well, there is no diplomatic solution for Israel's problems with Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran - enemies sworn to wipe us off the map.

Though we must never cease striving to preserve our crucial alliance with the U.S., we must respectfully but forcefully correct American leaders when they spread falsehoods about Israel, defame our national character, and distort our history. Israel defends itself when it must but makes peace whenever it can.

Ruthie Blum: Israel’s ‘medical malpractice’

Israel ought to have its head examined. Its bleeding heart could use a check-up, too. Because something is clearly wrong with a country that repeatedly deploys its extraordinary medical expertise to preserve the lives of people who later dedicate themselves to harming it.

The latest diagnosis comes courtesy of an astonishing revelation this week by Avi Shushan, former spokesman for Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center-Ichilov Hospital, on the Channel 14 program “Sheva” with co-hosts Yehuda Schlesinger and Yaakov Bardugo.

According to Shushan, about seven years ago, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was gravely ill, the Mossad requested that an Ichilov specialist be dispatched to Ankara to treat him. The physician, Shushan said, did not travel as a private citizen offering personal assistance. He went, rather, “on behalf of the State of Israel.”

If true, the story is remarkable enough on its own. Israel, a country Erdoğan has repeatedly vilified, extended a helping hand when he needed one.

The gratitude wasn’t exactly forthcoming.

Turkey and Israel aren’t officially enemy states. They maintain diplomatic ties, even if relations have deteriorated dramatically. But Erdoğan’s words and deeds have long placed the neo-Ottoman-emperor wannabe firmly in the camp of Israel’s adversaries.

He has transformed Turkey into a political home for Hamas leaders. He has hosted members of the terrorist organization’s senior ranks and defended them as “freedom fighters.” He has backed flotillas aimed at breaching Israel’s blockade of Gaza. He has accused the Jewish state of crimes against humanity while embracing some of the most vicious antisemitic rhetoric in the international arena.

After the Oct. 7 massacre, when Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, burned and kidnapped innocent men, women and children, Erdoğan did not condemn the perpetrators. Instead, he portrayed Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement and attacked Israel for defending itself.

The man who, according to Shushan, was kept alive by an Israeli doctor, repaid Israel with hostility.

But Erdoğan isn’t an anomaly; he’s merely the latest patient in a long-running Israeli medical drama: a country that keeps curing those infected with a lethal hatred of the Jewish state.

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07/08 Links Pt2: Foreign donors ‘funding hate on Britain’s streets’; Platner suspends campaign; The Democrats’ Real Red Line; Israel extends Venezuela aid mission after request from interim president

From Ian:

Top New York Times Editor Joe Kahn Distances Newsroom From Kristof Dog-Rape Column—‘Wouldn’t Have’ Run It

The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.

The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as "Hamas propaganda," "fabricated," and a "baseless blood libel." It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.

"It wasn’t edited by the newsroom," Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, "we probably wouldn’t have." Then he provided a more definitive answer: "No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece."

Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, "Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?" she answered, "Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors."

Kingsbury did also make the point that "The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column."

Federal judge rejects CAIR bid to block Florida terror designation

A federal judge declined on Monday to block Florida’s planned designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a domestic terrorist organization.

CAIR and its Florida chapter sued last week after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to designate the organization under the statute, arguing the law violates the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs also sought a temporary restraining order to prevent enforcement pending the outcome of the case.

U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker denied the request, writing that he was “not persuaded that relief must be afforded before defendants are heard.”

On Tuesday, CAIR and CAIR-Florida asked Walker to reconsider, arguing the designation could take effect as early as July 8 and would force the organizations to “shut down their operations in Florida and will substantially impair CAIR’s ability to pursue its mission nationwide.”

CAIR is represented by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was recently indicted on charges including wire fraud, false statements to a bank and conspiracy to commit money laundering over its alleged use of donor funds to pay informants embedded in extremist groups.

UK group hosts speakers who celebrated October 7 attacks

The UK’s largest Palestinian cultural centre hosted two speakers who have openly celebrated the October 7th terror attacks, Metro can reveal.

Palestine House in central London platformed Latifa Abouchakra and Batool Subeiti at a ‘Lessons of Resistance’ panel event last week.

The controversial activists have both praised the deadly October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas in 2023, calling it a ‘moment of triumph’ and ‘unprecedented revenge’.

Subeiti, a pro-Iranian political commentator, was also given a central role in Palestine House’s educational programme for children on ‘resistance’ and history.

During the event last Thursday, panellists appeared to defend a Palestine Action activist convicted of criminal damage, while Subeiti spoke about ‘martrydom’ as a form of ‘victory’.

The Community Security Trust (CST) called Abouchakra and Subeiti’s role in the evening ‘deeply troubling’ while a representative of October 7th victims said it was ‘heartbreaking’ they were given a platform.

Palestine House is a six-storey building in Holborn, central London, which opened in 2025 as a ‘cultural embassy’ and ‘gathering hub’ for Palestinian identity.

The centre regularly speaks out on political issues, with founder Osama Qashoo erecting a ‘Stop the Genocide’ flag at the building earlier this year.

Last Thursday, Palestine House and Shia student society Absoc for Justice held an event exploring how the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, in 680CE ‘continue[s] to inspire resistance to injustice today, including in the context of Palestine’.

However the decision to invite Abouchakra and Subeiti to the event has sparked outrage from antisemitism campaigners because of their history of support for October 7th.

On that day in 2023, Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostage, sparking years of conflict in the Middle east.

To get the latest news from the capital, visit Metro's London news hub.

Abouchakra, a presenter at the banned Iran-backed channel PressTV, told viewers on the day of the attacks that the violence was ‘the homecoming of at least 1,000 Palestinians from the resistance factions into the fragile Zionist entity’.

In an Instagram post on the same day, she said: ‘Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity.’

ITV News was forced to apologise later that month after they platformed Abouchakr as British Palestinian concerned about prejudice without explaining her background.

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07/08 Links Pt1: US strikes 90 Iranian military targets, hours after Trump says ceasefire a ‘waste of time’; Rahm Emanuel’s anti-Israel bash won’t win over the jew-hating Dems

-From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Trump must not abandon his promise to people of Iran as collapse of Tehran deal looms

Trump is right that dealing with this regime is a waste of time. He is also right that a regime that shoots protesters in the street cannot be trusted to reform itself through polite diplomacy.

The conclusion, though, cannot be to abandon the Iranian people until the next round of negotiations collapses or the next oil shock alarms global markets.

The conclusion must be that regime change in Iran is not the only strategic and moral horizon that fits the reality before us. Such change cannot be imposed by outsiders; it must be Iranian-led.

It must respect Iran’s people, history, culture, and future but must be supported by the free world with sanctions on killers, technology to break censorship, documentation for accountability, diplomatic isolation of regime officials, and refusal to reward Tehran for surviving crises of its own making.

A free Iran would not solve every problem in the Middle East, but it could transform the region in ways no memorandum with the Islamic Republic ever will.

It could weaken Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias sustained by Tehran’s money and ideology. It could allow one of the region’s great civilizations to rebuild.

This is not something that can be done by one power alone; it requires collaboration, and must remain the clear goal of every actor involved.

In January, the Iranian people were told help was coming; six months later, they deserve more than silence, bargaining, and regret.

JO Investigation: Massive Gaza Archive Targeting Israelis is Being Run by "American" in Saudi Arabia

Key Findings:
An anonymous operator claiming to be American but based in Saudi Arabia runs one of the largest Gaza “war crimes” archives—82,000+ videos and images—whose authenticity and chain of custody remain unverified.
The operator feeds purported evidence to the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, which has been linked to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.
Despite claiming American identity, the operator calls Americans “complicit in genocide,” urges U.S. soldiers to disobey orders, and demands U.S. officials stand trial at The Hague.
The operation runs from Saudi Arabia—a kingdom that has received extensive U.S. and Israeli security assistance, including protection during the 2026 Iran conflict.
The archive’s sophisticated infrastructure—dual websites, 2.4 terabytes of torrents, encrypted submissions, Icelandic privacy protection—suggests resources beyond typical grassroots activism.
The operator’s language shifted from singular “I” to plural “we,” raising questions about who is actually running the operation and whether it represents a coordinated network.

Seth Mandel: Karim Khan and the Perils of Anti-Israel Obsession

Khan’s case against Israel was a sham—he canceled important fact-finding trips in order to file the warrants before he could be outed as an office pest. The ICC report establishes “the accuser’s credibility,” which puts all past testimony and reporting in an even more damning light. The internal investigation also found Khan’s belated denials to be “devoid of credibility.”

From the Times, which obtained the internal report:
“First, she said, there was overfamiliarity during a work trip to London, then incidents in his office in which ‘he would grab and paw at her breasts, try to access her pelvic area, and suck on her ear or neck,’ according to a summary of the U.N. investigation’s findings obtained by The Times.

“Eventually, she said, the advances progressed to unwanted sexual activity. She told investigators that ‘the power dynamic between them meant that she could not say no.’”

Now, why would someone with access to this report want to ensure that such details saw the light of day before the ICC made its final decision on Khan’s job?

Most likely, the answer is: because there is reason to worry that court members’ anti-Israel fervor is such that they may still try to protect him. But now the public knows what the ICC believes Khan did, and it would destroy the court to leave him as chief prosecutor.

It is yet another example of the dangers of the world’s obsession with Israel. the UN’s refugee agency has been coopted by Hamas. The Committee to Protect Journalists is facing an internal revolt over the possibility that the organization might stop referring to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists as “journalists.” The International Committee of the Red Cross’s callous disregard of Israeli hostages and its participation in Hamas’s own public mistreatment of those hostages has disgraced its work.

Unfortunately, I could go on. But the point should be clear. Allowing anti-Zionist radicals to hijack human-rights groups has left genuine humanitarianism and genuine justice hobbled. This is the destruction left in the wake of an industry that destroyed itself because it was solely focused on destroying Israel.

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