11/11 Links Pt2: The day the eaters starved the haters; Labour’s cowardice on Israel and Islamism; Gal Gadot to bring Golodryga and Levi’s ‘Don’t Feed the Lion’ to the big screen

From Ian:

The Class of 1984 By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
How did we get here? In large part, this is what these kids have been taught. And 61.4 percent said their professors make their political leanings clear in the classroom (34 percent disagreed). And we don’t have to guess what those political leanings are. Aside from having seen all the academic radicals and their enthusiasm for campus protest, multiple polls confirm that progressivism dominates among professors, while the conservative professor is just about an extinct species. What concerns me is the 34 percent of students who, in all likelihood, are being indoctrinated without knowing it.

Okay, I promised some sunnier news. First, we’re winning the trans sports war. Asked about whether trans athletes should be allowed to participate in sports leagues “designated for a gender that is different from their assigned gender at birth,” 33.2 percent said yes, and 53.5 percent said no. Insanity reigns only so long as it goes unopposed.

And then there’s this: Despite the students’ overwhelmingly negative view of Israel, it doesn’t seem to be much of a priority anymore. When asked about what causes they attended rallies or protests in support of over the last year, “pro-Palestine” makes up only 11.7 percent, behind social justice (19.7 percent), LGBTQ rights (17.6 percent), pro-abortion rights (15.7 percent), anti-ICE (21.4 percent), and anti-Trump (17 percent). The only left-wing causes less popular than “pro-Palestine” were climate change (11.2 percent) and opposition to data centers (8.9 percent).

I don’t really take the waning importance of Israel as an indication of what’s in the minds and souls of college students. I read it more as the sign of a cultural trend. We’re moving away, however slowly, from “Free Palestine” and onto the next outrage. American attention is famously transient, and Israel-bashing has gotten slightly stale. And after things go stale, they rot.

Joshua Namm: The Entertainment Industry Hates Us. So why Do We Put Up With It?

On October 31 Michael Che, the host of “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live, said that Israelis voted “in record numbers” which was, he said, “great to see, regardless if you’re on the right side, the left side or the genocide.”

Get it?

The audience, of course, happily laughed at the comment (because none of this is about humor anymore: humor is now a public ritual in which laughter serves as a public declaration of absolute obedience to the narrative).

It was so important to Che that the audience get it that he actually pronounced it “gen-o-cide.”

Che also has a history of spreading blood libels against Jews.

Variety made it worse in its reporting, by having a headline that read: “SNL Weekend Update Finally Weighs in on Israel.”

They uncritically repeated the charge without any examination of why Israel went to war in Gaza. All that mattered to them was that SNL step in line and bash the Jews.

That the accusation of genocide is itself a lie, and 100% false, never matters to any of these people.

That made me think about a topic that I’ve been meaning to write about for years: the constant antisemitism of Hollywood, and our passive acceptance of it.

Like so much else, pop culture is a reflection of the society that produces it. The fact that there are multiple movies/TV shows/plays which portray Jews in a myriad of negative ways reflects the status of our culture.

And, I’m not just talking about the ever-present image of Jews as nerdy, bookish, endlessly neurotic wimps, or characters from Fiddler on the Roof.

Today’s culture often goes much further. And today they also hijack, appropriate, and rewrite our history to reinforce those negative perceptions of Jews, or worse, to promote political narratives by stealing our story.

Jaroslawa Lewicka, Israel’s last living Righteous Among the Nations, dies at 91

Jaroslawa Lewicka, the last of the Righteous Among the Nations living in Israel, passed away in Haifa on Tuesday night. She was 91.

Lewicka was born in Poland in 1935 and raised by her mother, Katarzyna, and grandfather, Alexander Levitska.

She began helping them save Jews during the Holocaust at the age of six, delivering food and medicine and serving as their messenger. In 1942, when a sealed ghetto was established in the nearby city of Zolochiv, the family continued its rescue efforts. Because of her young age, she delivered supplies without arousing the Nazis’ suspicions. The family’s home was about two kilometers from the ghetto. Jarosława regularly walked the distance carrying a small schoolbag in which she concealed food for starving Jews.

Along the way, she had to evade German and Ukrainian police officers, but she continued carrying out her mission.

In 1943, her family sheltered two Jews in their home. They provided food to a group of 25 Jews hiding in the basement of a destroyed building about two km. away until the arrival of the Red Army in 1944.

In 1989, Lewicka, her mother, and grandfather were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. In 1995, she immigrated to Israel, became an Israeli citizen, and settled in Haifa.

Lewicka’s life story was documented in Maya Klinger-Cohen’s book Only Red Candies.

Read More

11/11 Links Pt1: US envoy Mike Waltz blasts UNIFIL as 'human shield for terrorists,' announces Lebanon visit; ‘Vile hatemonger’ Francesca Albanese accused of ‘hijacking’ words of Primo Levi to condemn Israel

From Ian:

Netanyahu's 1996 promise to end US aid to Israel fulfilled after 30 years, PMO claims

The Prime Minister's Office said Benjamin Netanyahu has fulfilled his 1996 promise to gradually end US financial support for Israel in a Wednesday post on X/Twitter.

Netanyahu, the PMO claimed, promised at the time to end the financial support, which then totaled $1.2 billion, compared to the current total of nearly $4 billion.

"He did just that," the post reads.

Israel is "strong enough economically to gradually end military support," 30 years after Netanyahu's initial promise, the PMO wrote, adding that this is because "today, Israel has a strong and stable economy."

"Israel and the US are making the important move from aid to partnership," the PMO said, using similar terminology to a Friday statement, in which the PMO said that it views US President Donald Trump's announcement to stop aid to Israel by the end of the year as a shift from military aid to "partnership," as reported by The Jerusalem Post.

"Today, Israel has a strong and stable economy. The move by PM Netanyahu and President Trump from aid to partnership shows the strength and sophistication of our relationship, and its ability to adapt and stand strong over time," the PMO wrote.

"This joint move by Netanyahu and Trump shows the strength of our relationship and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances," the PMO said.

The statement also used similar language to Netanyahu's May interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, in which he called for reducing US financial support to Israel down to zero, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's "affirmation" in Paris earlier this week, citing the US's top diplomat as calling the decision "something the Israelis themselves have offered us."

Rubio says Israel's economy is at a point where Jerusalem no longer needs Washington's financial aid
Rubio recently said that Israel has become sufficiently prosperous to purchase US weapons without relying on financial assistance, the Post reported at the time.

“On the question of financing, I think Israel has clearly graduated beyond that,” Rubio also said.

PMO spokesman Doron Spielman told Fox News that "while the aid has been incredibly important, the prime minister has been working with President Trump to make the correct transition out from aid towards partnership and mutual investment."

Trump claims Netanyahu personally proposed ending US aid to Israel
On November 3, Trump claimed that Netanyahu personally proposed ending the aid during a telephone interview with Fox News' Fox & Friends.

However, the Israeli defense establishment was shocked by Trump's November 3 announcement of his decision to cut off aid, and is unclear on what it implies for immediate budgetary and weapons sales issues, the Post reported on Sunday.

US envoy Mike Waltz blasts UNIFIL as 'human shield for terrorists,' announces Lebanon visit

US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz delivered a blistering attack on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) at the gala evening of the second annual Israel Hayom Summit in New York, announcing plans to visit Lebanon next week to push for fundamental changes to the peacekeeping mission in the country's south.

Waltz described the UN force as a "human shield for terrorists" and made clear that the Trump administration was seeking to overhaul its operations. "I'm going there next week to get rid of this human shield known as UNIFIL and change the peacekeeping mission that has been there for 20 years," Waltz declared. "This mission costs half a billion dollars a year, and instead of promoting peace, it has provided a human shield for terrorists," he said, adding that the goal was to turn the UN into an organization that genuinely advances peace in the region.

Turning to Iran and its network of proxies, Waltz portrayed Tehran's influence across the Middle East as significantly diminished. "The Iranian regime is weaker than it has ever been," he said, pointing to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the blows dealt to Hezbollah and developments in Lebanon as part of a broader erosion of Iranian influence. "The cancer of the Middle East is being eradicated, step by step, by a president who had the courage not to put off the difficult decisions," he said.

Waltz also highlighted growing security cooperation between Israel and Arab countries, describing military coordination between Israel and Gulf states as one of the most significant developments of recent years. "To see Israeli soldiers fighting alongside Arab soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, and to see Arab countries helping defend the State of Israel when Iran launched its attacks, would have been absolutely unthinkable just six years ago," he said.

He pointed to what he described as a significant shift on the international stage as well, noting that 146 countries had condemned Iranian attacks on civilian targets, including ships, hotels, resorts and airports, at the UN.

A substantial portion of Waltz's speech focused on the Abraham Accords and President Donald Trump's Middle East policy.

Waltz recalled that when Trump first unveiled his vision for normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries, many experts and diplomats dismissed it as impossible. "They said there could be no broader peace between Israel and the Arab world until the Palestinian issue was resolved. They called Trump's vision a fantasy. But we proved them wrong," he said.

Waltz, who attended the signing ceremony for the Abraham Accords at the White House in 2020, stressed that predictions that successive wars in the region would bring about the agreements' collapse had also proved unfounded. "First they said the Abraham Accords would never happen. Then they said they would never last. On October 7, they said the war would destroy them. Then they said the war in Gaza would destroy them, and now they're saying the war in Iran will destroy them. So what's the answer? Not only have they survived, they're expanding."

Read More

11/10 Links Pt2: The lessons of Kristallnacht and the wake-up call of Bondi; The Schwinntifada Folds; Natan Sharansky on Campus Fear and the Silent Majority; Why Bondi hero would DO IT ALL AGAIN

From Ian:

US midterms exposed frightening new reality for American Jews – time to unite and fight back

The suggestion that Jews should subordinate their own survival to a supposedly greater good carries a disturbing historical echo.

In August 1934, The New York Times reported a declaration by the Association of National German Jews, whose members said they had “always, in war or peace, placed the good of the German people and the German Fatherland above our own good”.

The declaration continued: “Accordingly, we greeted the national uprising of January 1933, although it brought rigours for us, for we saw it as the only means to clear away the damage done in fourteen unhappy years by un-German elements.”

The “national uprising” was Hitler’s accession to power. What those Jews described as “rigours” would be followed by the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

The circumstances are profoundly different. The warning concerns the reasoning: Jewish safety must never become expendable in pursuit of a supposedly higher political good.

Jewish voters who supported el-Sayed doubtless had various reasons. Some may have shared Nessel’s thinking; others may have dismissed concerns about him or considered Republican control of the Senate the greater danger. For some, an attenuated Jewish identity, expressed chiefly through universal ideals rather than attachment to Jewish peoplehood or Zionism, may also have played a part.

Universal concern is admirable. But when attachment to Jewish particularity becomes a source of discomfort, and Jewish self-preservation is viewed as an obstacle to the greater good, something has gone profoundly wrong.

Nessel’s words raise a question that reaches well beyond Michigan: when did concern for Jewish survival become a form of self-interest that Jews should be prepared to surrender?

There is nothing narrow or shameful about Jews defending their own safety, continuity, and right to exist. And no political party or individual is entitled to ask them to sacrifice any of those things.

A world that cannot make room for roughly 16 million Jews has a profound moral problem. Jewish contributions to ethics, science, medicine, and culture are extraordinary. But Jews should not have to present a catalogue of achievements to justify their existence.

Nor should tiny Israel, roughly one per cent the size of Saudi Arabia, have to prove its usefulness to earn the right to exist. Its manifold contributions to meeting humanity’s challenges deserve recognition. Its people’s right to live in peace and security, however, does not depend on them.

Michigan was not the only warning. After the Republican shellacking, Vice President JD Vance included “change our relationship to Israel” among four priorities he cited for winning back voters who had deserted his party.

The vice president of the United States was making the relationship with the Jewish state part of the explanation for his party’s electoral humiliation. He is also widely expected to seek the presidency in 2028. The pattern is all too familiar: when things go wrong, find a Jewish address for the blame. This time, the address is Israel, the lone Jewish-majority state.

Coming from someone a heartbeat away from the presidency, those words demand far more than a passing expression of concern.

Increasingly, the place of Jews in America is being called into question – a prospect many previously considered unimaginable.

Concerned Jews and Jewish groups must face these realities unflinchingly, show far greater unity of purpose, demonstrate courage and spine, develop innovative strategies, strengthen young Jews’ understanding of their history and identity, and build strong alliances.

If this is not the moment to wake up, then when is?

The Schwinntifada Folds By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. Look, it’s sickening that this happened at all. At the start of the “Free Palestine” craze, protesters wouldn’t have plainly organized an attack on Jewish-owned businesses for being Jewish-owned businesses. But they’ve grown bolder since then, winning media and political sympathy and lifting unapologetic anti-Semites into important political offices.

So if this is a kind of arms race, I’m heartened to see a significant number on our side who are ready to escalate.

I rarely give unbidden advice, and I don’t resent those who choose not to follow my counsel. But I’ve been asked, over and over, by Jews and other concerned Americans, “What can we do about the explosion in anti-Semitism?”

The truth is, it’s hard to know what to say, and my answers often come up short: learn self-defense, obtain a legal weapon, use the law to protect your rights, make a fuss, and vote for the right people—it’s not terribly inspiring. But the events of Sunday are inspiring, and I’ll say this: Look at what the Jews and their allies did in Philadelphia, repeat it, grow it, and don’t stop. Show up everywhere. Outnumber the scum and get in their faces. Above all, be brave. Don’t steer clear of targeted businesses or neighborhoods or shuls. Don’t change your life one bit to accommodate the thugs.

Think of it like this: For three years, Israeli life was upended by a brutal war. Families watched as their young men and women went off to fight the most depraved murderers on the planet. IDF soldiers hunted down their enemies from the skies and in dark tunnels and explosive-rigged buildings, and many courageous Jews have died in the process. We merely have to be brave enough to exercise our God-given rights as citizens in this free country. So, my advice is to go where you want to go, say what you want to say, and don’t back down against the likes of “Philly Bike on Your Left,” or anyone else who expects you to cower.

New Zealand’s antisemitism problem is in New Zealand, not the Middle East

New Zealanders have every right to criticize Israel, advocate Palestinian self-determination and protest peacefully. They are free to criticize any country. Those rights do not extend to threats or nationality-based harassment.

The coalition mentioned above criticized slogans such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada,” which many understand as threatening Israel’s existence or encouraging violence.

It highlighted the Free Palestine Party, which it says received $82,000 in public election broadcasting funding, and alleged that its leader, Paul Hopkinson, celebrated Oct. 7 as a victory for Palestinian resistance. It also criticized activist John Minto for reportedly publishing photographs of Israeli visitors and encouraging hostile attention toward them.

These allegations raise questions about enforcement. New Zealand designated Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist entity in 2024 and has laws addressing material support for terrorism, harmful digital communications and harassment. Offensive political speech is not automatically criminal. But have authorities examined the reported incidents, and what conclusions have they reached?

Freedom of speech is fundamental. It does not confer a right to threaten people or facilitate violence. The law must protect Jewish citizens and Israeli visitors as firmly as everyone else.

The coalition also challenged New Zealand’s media, arguing that coverage has too often relied uncritically on Hamas-controlled sources without sufficient balance or context. Journalists must scrutinize claims from all sides, report civilian suffering honestly and distinguish verified facts from propaganda.

Māori, Christian, Jewish and Iranian representatives have united around a principle beyond politics: Jews and Israelis deserve the same safety and dignity as everyone else.

The coalition calls on politicians to act responsibly, journalists to uphold professional standards and police to respond decisively to threats and violence.

New Zealand must reflect urgently on where this hostility could lead. The antisemitic terrorist attack at Australia’s Bondi Beach last December is a stark warning of the devastating consequences of hatred. Geographical isolation offers no immunity. New Zealand must act to prevent a similar tragedy on its own soil.

New Zealand cannot control the Middle East’s geopolitical realities. But it can control how it treats Jews and Israelis within its borders.

Jewish citizens and Israeli visitors must be able to live without fear. If New Zealand cannot meet that basic standard, the problem is not in the Middle East. It is in New Zealand.

Read More

11/10 Links Pt1: Will Trump Change the U.S.-Israel Relationship?; Israel's Problem with Arab Parties Isn't that They're Arab; Polls Find Most Americans Think Conflict with Iran Was Justified

From Ian:

Michael Doran: Will Trump Change the U.S.-Israel Relationship?

The assertion that America is fighting Israel's war rather than its own replaces an assessment of American interests with a theory of foreign manipulation. Yet the assertion explains nothing about how the U.S. would secure its interests once it abandons the policies and partnerships its critics reject.

Can Washington reach an accommodation with the Islamic Republic that reliably prevents it from acquiring nuclear weapons? If not, should it accept a nuclear-armed Iran? What would that outcome mean for the balance of power in the Middle East, and for the larger balance of power with China?

The purpose of American grand strategy is to maintain an international order that makes American freedom possible. That requires preserving the foundations of American power and prosperity: military superiority, economic dynamism, the dollar's central role in international finance, technological leadership, and secure energy supplies for the U.S. and its allies.

In the Middle East, oil is only part of the story. The Gulf monarchies command vast pools of capital increasingly important to artificial intelligence, data centers, and the infrastructure of the digital economy. Their sovereign wealth funds are major investors in global financial markets. They are also among the largest purchasers of American weapons, helping sustain the defense-industrial base on which American military power depends.

President Trump seeks to maintain American primacy without occupying countries or assuming responsibility for their internal political transformation, relying instead on economic coercion, selective military force, diplomacy, and capable regional allies. The objective is maximum American influence with the minimum necessary American military footprint.

That approach requires a regional balance in which Iran cannot dominate its neighbors. Iran has attacked American military installations across the Middle East, damaging aircraft, radar systems, communications equipment, and other infrastructure worth billions of dollars. Its missiles and drones threaten the bases through which the U.S. projects power. The U.S. is therefore confronting a challenge to its own military position and regional influence, quite apart from its obligations to Israel.

Report: U.S. Military Aid to Israel Won't End This Year

A week after President Trump said he and Prime Minister Netanyahu had agreed to end U.S. military aid to Israel by the end of this year, Ynet and Yediot Ahronot have learned that in the emerging security memorandum of understanding with the U.S., American military assistance to Israel will not end immediately.

Instead, the direct military aid will continue for five years after 2028, after which it will end entirely.

At the same time, U.S. funding for joint air and missile defense development is expected to rise from the current $500 million annually due to the increasing threat from drones and missiles.

The goal is to finalize a new agreement by the end of this year, before the new Congress takes office in January. However, Congress will still have to appropriate the aid funding each year.

Negotiations are being conducted by teams from both countries. The money is used to purchase weapons produced by U.S. defense companies.

Some members of Congress oppose reducing assistance to Israel since much of the money is ultimately spent in their own states and supports American defense manufacturers.

Secretary of State Rubio: Iran War Was "the Right Thing to Do"

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday regarding the war in Iran: "The President of the United States identified a very real threat to this country that's existed for a very long period of time, and he addressed it. And he addressed it even though, oftentimes, the right thing to do for the country...isn't necessarily popular but necessary."

"At the end of the day I think we can all agree...there used to be bipartisan acknowledgment that a nuclear Iran would be completely unacceptable and dangerous for the United States - not just Israel, not just the Middle East - the whole world and the United States."

"So I think the President took on something that other presidents have failed to do. And sometimes when you do the right thing - I don't know if it's popular or not, but it's the right thing to do. And presidents are elected to do the hard things - sometimes difficult things, but necessary things."

Polls Find Most Americans Think Conflict with Iran Was Justified

When wars cause major political shifts, they usually involve ground combat leading to thousands of American casualties, not a temporary $1.50-a-gallon increase in the price of gasoline, which costs a typical household about $20 a week. If that's enough to bring about a political sea change, then the electorate has lost all rationality, and presidents will be constrained to wait for an attack on U.S. soil before taking military action to defend America.

The Harvard CAPS/Harris polls asked if the Iranians were negotiating in good faith. 65% of respondents said no. Should the Iranians be allowed to control the Strait of Hormuz? 67% said no, including a majority of both parties. Should Iran be permitted to obtain a nuclear weapon? 85% said no. Was the U.S. justified in using force if the Iranians refuse to yield on these key issues? 63% said yes. The war has dragged on when voters wanted it to be won - and they still do.

Mr. Trump and his administration need to explain to Americans the reason we took on the Iranian regime, which is the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism and is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans over the past 47 years.

Read More

11/09 Links Pt2: When Marx met Hamas; Leiter: NYT spread blood libel against Jewish state, fueled false genocide accusations; ‘We’re never really going to be safe,’ Dara Horn says at Kristallnacht commemoration

From Ian:

When Marx met Hamas

The embarrassment of Israel
What is Israel today to Western civilisation’s Marxist-Islamist opponents? It is an embarrassment, a reminder of their failure. Marx and his followers never did “make the Jew impossible”. With its different social classes all proud of faith, flag and family, no land gives the lie to the Marxist worldview quite like Israel. For Islamists, Israel created in two generations what its neighbours could not in fourteen centuries: simply, a decent place to live. Envy always comes out sideways.

The alt-right is now shot through with antisemitism of its own, but when the Green Party equates Zionism with racism as official doctrine and calls for a single Palestinian state, its members should know that this implies annihilating Israel as a Jewish nation. Its activists seek the establishment of a Palestinian state by “all available means”.

As Jake Wallis Simons outlined in his book Never Again: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, the West’s opponents are interlinked and interdependent. Antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Putin apologism, Hitler-revisionism, Tehran-backed terror. They appear to be opposed but are mutually-reinforcing. Aleksandr Dugin, dubbed Putin’s philosophical guru, has praised the “conservative revolutionist” Osama Bin Laden while Russian assistance to the messianic Iranian regime is well known.

Of course, like its western equivalent, Islamic antisemitism flourished centuries before Karl Marx came on the scene. Aside from the enforced second-class dhimmitude of Jews (and Christians) in the traditional Islamic hierarchy, Islam’s colonisation of Spain was followed by ferocious pogroms which saw the slaughter of thousands of Jews. But the postcolonial New Left has blended Marxism with historic regional enmities to create a toxic brew.

After the Palestine Liberation Organisation became a paid-up KGB client (literally: it took $200,000 a month through the 1970s), its job was turning international socialism against the state of Israel — and, inevitably, Jews. As Wallis Simons describes, Yasser Arafat “shamelessly ventriloquised Israelophobic propaganda, railing against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, the chief form of which is Zionism.” Arafat (and Moscow’s) eliding Palestinianism with anticolonialism was a “genius […] sleight of hand”. Since its aim was ejecting Jews from their ancient homeland, it was also the opposite of the truth. In his PhD thesis at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, his successor Mahmood Abbas would argue that Zionists engineered the Holocaust as a pretext to establish Israel, exaggerating the number of Jewish dead sixfold. Our Labour Government has just granted him an embassy in London.

By the end of the 1970s, Palestinianism was engaged in a parallel assault on truth in the universities. In Orientalism, Palestinian-American academic Edward Saїd applied the same Marxist hierarchy of oppression to the postcolonial world, again eliding the restored ancient Jewish state with imperialism while bemoaning the failure of the (actually imperialist) Arab armies to destroy Israel in the Six Day War. Combining Islamic grievances and Marxist philosophy, this Third-Worldism has ruined much of the Western academy.

The Modern Age in arms
Faced by the Islamo-Marxists, our era begins to feel like the moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Men At Arms when the English Catholic protagonist Guy Crouchback hears the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that 1939 non-aggression treaty between Stalinism and Nazism:

… everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome, there was a place for him in that battle.

The enemy is in plain view once more. Socialism has returned to its roots, seeking the annihilation of peoples. What is to be done? The treatment must include our education system. Restoring western immunity to such mind-viruses means teaching our shared Judeo-Christian philosophical heritage, whence our sense of self arose. To save the tree, rejuvenate civilisation from the roots.

When tikkun olam comes at the expense of solidarity with Israel

There is no need to abandon tikkun olam to preserve Jewish solidarity. Secular Israelis volunteer in Africa and other remote regions, provide free medical care, assist local farmers, and share professional knowledge. They do so out of humanism and moral responsibility, without renouncing their national identity.

But perhaps American Jews who place tikkun olam at the center of their identity should ask themselves a difficult question: What happens if the assumption that the world will embrace us because of everything we have done to improve it proves wrong?

Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri, devoted her life to helping Palestinians. She helped patients from Gaza reach Israeli hospitals for treatment and worked tirelessly to promote coexistence.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered her in her home. Her story is a heartbreaking reminder that goodwill and generosity cannot guarantee protection against those who reject the possibility of coexistence.

By all means, continue to practice tikkun olam. Help the disadvantaged, fight discrimination, and contribute to a better world. But don’t abandon your insurance policy along the way.

Israel is the one Jewish state, the national home of the Jewish people, and ultimately the place that provides Jews everywhere with a measure of collective security and refuge.

Its survival should matter just as much to a Jew living in Detroit or Miami as it does to one living in Tel Aviv.

Mamdani’s plan to fight antisemitism omits NYC college campuses, critics claim

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to combat antisemitism glaringly omits tackling rampant, anti-Jewish hatred at local colleges and universities, Jewish faculty and staff at CUNY and NYU said

The Mamdani administration’s “Strategy to Combat Antisemitism,” released in September, makes scant mention of colleges and universities, though City Hall said it met with all with Jewish leaders “from all corners of the community” including parents, students and educators.

“In a city that is home to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of public and private universities and colleges, the near absence of higher education from the Strategy is a significant omission,” the CUNY Alliance for Inclusion and the Faculty and Staff Against Antisemitism at NYU said in a joint statement to The Post.

“Those commitments should extend meaningfully to New York City’s colleges and universities.”

The faculty groups said antisemitism in higher education cannot be understood solely through claims regarding hate crimes and physical insecurity.

Antisemitism can also seep into the structures of academia including departments, faculty governance, academic associations, professional networks, labor unions, graduate-worker organizations, and others that determine “whose scholarship and viewpoints are treated as legitimate topics for discussion and debate.”

The CUNY and NYU groups also warned that bashing of Israel and Zionism can explode into antisemitism.

Mamdani himself is a fierce critic of Israel and his report was previously criticized for not mentioning Zionism once in its 33 pages and for refusing to adopt a formal definition of what constitutes antisemitism.

Read More

11/09 Links Pt1: Fauda's Triumph: Confronting the Reality and Brutality of October 7; Brian L. Cox: The ICJ and the Genocide Convention: Is the Court about to change the law?

From Ian:

Fauda's Triumph: Confronting the Reality and Brutality of October 7

The events of the worst day in Israel's history come back to Doron in flashbacks while he pursues a Hamas team in Marseille. Again, the plot tracks reality: In 2025, German, Austrian, and British intelligence, working on Mossad tip-offs, intercepted a Hamas plan to mark the second anniversary of October 7 by massacring Jews in Germany and Austria. If Fauda has retained its knack for trendspotting in terrorism, we should note that in season five, Hamas recruits and trains French leftists as terrorists, much as the PLO did with German leftists in the 1970s.

Fauda offers a real-time reflection of realities that are violently reshaping the Middle East. For Israelis, the fifth season attempts to incorporate a trauma that is still ongoing. The war with Iran is not over. The political reckoning has yet to come; Israel did not hold its first post-October 7 elections until Oct. 27, 2026. Fauda also opens a well-crafted window into the core of a society that Arabs widely despise, distrust, and fear, even as security collaboration is quietly maintained behind the scenes and public ties thaw at the state level. This is important for two reasons.

The Jews of the Mista'aravim can pretend to be Arabs because they are Arabs, culturally speaking, just as European Jews are culturally European and many American Jews, as Frederick Seidel wrote in Sunrise, can pass as "just another/Greek nose in street clothes in/Harvard Yard." More than half of Israeli Jews are descended from Arabic-, Turkish-, Kurdish-, and Persian-speaking communities that never left the Middle East. The official discourse of Arab states denied this for decades and presented Zionism as a European invasion and Israelis as ginger interlopers. American universities, much of American media, and even some Democratic Party candidates still push this line even after the Abraham Accords.

Second, Fauda is candid in ways that Arab shows are not allowed to be candid. The heart of the Israeli state is its legendary security apparatus. Fauda shows a heart riven by human weakness and, especially in the fifth season, broken by strategic failure. It shows Jews as human beings. It shows the reality, obvious to anyone who visits, that the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are intertwined in a small and crowded space, and that they are closest to each other when it comes to the issues on which they are also furthest apart, religion and security.

The motor of the fifth season is the compatibility of the Arab tribal concept of tha'r, blood revenge, with the Jewish tribal concept of nekmat dam. One of the first scenes shows Eli, who has become a religious settler after losing his wife and children on October 7, and his Bedouin friend Salem (Bian Anteer), whose son died with Eli's family, praying in parallel. This is presented in the matter-of-fact way that these things occur in Israel. We do not have to be either happy or clappy when we see them praying. The series is a hard watch, and there is no happy ending; every season of Fauda ends with a small victory that defers the tide of chaos at great personal cost. But it is good to see things as they are, and surprising that a TV series, of all things, should capture so much reality.

The episodes in which we see Hamas murdering Jewish civilians came with a trigger warning. In truth, the fictional representation pulls every punch; you can compare it with the real footage that circulates online. Raz and Issacharoff chose to lessen the impact of the atrocities and show only as much as was needed to justify the response. In this, and not for the first time, Fauda shows that the difference between civilization and barbarism is not a plotline or character conceit.

Khaled Abu Toameh: What Really Lost the US Mid-Term Election? President Trump's Failure to Win Iran's 47-Year War

Iran's participation in discussions about "regional peace" does not, in the slightest, indicate that the Iranian regime is prepared to abandon the policies that have helped it comfortably to destabilize the Middle East for decades.

Had Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords, it might have benefited from a really powerful security partnership – with Israel and the United States. Israel possesses extensive experience in intercepting missiles and drones, sophisticated intelligence capabilities and advanced military technology. Combined with American military power, these capabilities could have offered Saudi Arabia a level of protection and security cooperation that Turkey and Pakistan are unlikely to match. Riyadh's refusal to take that step has left the kingdom pursuing alternative security arrangements whose effectiveness seems hapless at best.

If Saudi Arabia cannot count on its partners to demonstrate military solidarity when it is attacked, what exactly is the purpose of the [Mecca Joint Defense Agreement]?

Rather than demonstrating that attacks against Saudi Arabia carry consequences for Iran and its proxies, the three countries appeared to be asking -- if not begging -- Iran for permission, or at least appealing to its goodwill, to stop the attacks. The Iranian regime doubtless -- and understandably -- interprets such diplomatic efforts not as evidence of regional strength, but as a sign that its neighbors are scared and reluctant to confront it.

For a regime such as Iran's that has repeatedly used military threats and proxy warfare to advance its interests, an approach based primarily on appeals and negotiations only reinforces that intimidation and terrorism work.

The international community should not confuse the eagerness of Iranian officials to host diplomatic meetings with any meaningful change in the regime's dangerous regional policies.

There can be no lasting regional security of any kind while the current Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, retains the ability to threaten its neighbors through armed proxies, maintain its program to acquire nuclear weapons, and brutalize its own people.

US President Donald J. Trump, unless he truly finishes the war that Iran started 47 years ago instead of just saying he did -- and eliminates Iran's bloodthirsty regime -- will sadly go down in history as a failure rather than as one of the great leaders of all time. This can happen only if he eliminates not just Iran's nuclear threat but also eliminates Iran's current regime. Otherwise we will all be here in ten minutes to deal with Iran's new nuclear program again.

Trump's party did not lose the midterm elections because of the war; they lost it because he actually chose not to win it. He evidently allowed himself to be persuaded by Vice President JD Vance and other isolationists that diplomacy with terrorists can be a viable plan. As Trump himself might say, "That is not how it works." Iran already proved as much with the fatal delay caused by the catastrophic Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding that Vance negotiated and that did not make it to sun-up.

Trump and other international leaders in Europe and the Middle East need to stop treating the Iranian regime as a potential partner in "regional stability" and start treating it as the principal source of instability that they must finish confronting -- not accommodating.

Read More

11/08 Links: Israel, the Palestinians and the Myth of Deterrence; When “End the Aid” Isn’t Enough: The Rising Political Movement to End Israel Itself; Israeli city sues Iran for $65 million in war reparations

From Ian:

Israel’s politicians must put national unity before personal ambition

A 79-seat government would strip away those excuses. No small faction could dictate national policy or threaten the government's survival whenever its demands were rejected. More importantly, neither bloc would be able to unilaterally force policy on the other bloc.

Most importantly, such a coalition could finally address key issues threatening Israel's future.

With Shas participating, a unity government can negotiate a realistic, enforceable framework for haredi military and national service that respects legitimate religious concerns while ensuring a fairer sharing of the national burden.

Instead of unilateral judicial reform legislation and mass protests, a unity government can pursue meaningful reform through broad consensus, safeguarding judicial independence while clarifying the proper balance between the courts, Knesset, and government.

Israel needs a comprehensive program to create affordable housing. Such a program needs to address land availability, planning delays, infrastructure, construction costs, and housing supply. Young families should not have to choose between financial security and owning a home.

The country needs a coherent national policy regarding Judea and Samaria, balancing historical and security interests with demographic and diplomatic realities. Decisions of such consequence cannot depend on the survival needs of a narrow coalition.

Israel must rebuild and modernize its education system, strengthening mathematics, science, technology, engineering, English, and civic education. Every Israeli child, regardless of background, deserves the skills necessary to participate in a modern economy.

These challenges require long-term thinking, difficult decisions, and the parliamentary strength to withstand pressure from special interests.

A broad unity government offers that foundation.

The "just not Bibi" obsession of the change bloc has contributed to political paralysis and divided the nation. Israel has endured two successive governments that left approximately half the population feeling excluded. The Bennett-Lapid government alienated much of the Right, while the most recent Netanyahu government alienated much of the opposition.

Israelis with opposing political views fought together in Gaza and Lebanon, suffered tragedies together, and demanded unity following the October 7 massacre. On October 8, we promised ourselves that Israel would never return to business as usual. We understood that political division, institutional complacency, and failures of leadership had exacted an unbearable price.

Netanyahu, Eisenkot, Bennett, Lapid, Liberman, Smotrich, and Deri must decide whether their personal ambitions and grievances matter more than the country's future. They do not need to agree on everything. They must agree that Israel's security, prosperity, and social cohesion transcend their disagreements.

A unity government will require painful compromises, but compromise is not weakness. It is the essence of responsible democratic leadership.

The arithmetic is there: 79 seats. The national challenges are undeniable. What remains to be seen is whether our political leaders have the courage to put the country and national responsibility before personal ambition and ego.

Israel has voted. It is time to stop campaigning and start governing.

As Kalman Liebskind remarked in Makor Rishon, Israel faces a historic opportunity to end its internal political warfare. Failure to seize it now might have consequences for generations.

When “End the Aid” Isn’t Enough: The Rising Political Movement to End Israel Itself

A quick look at a social media post from the newly-elected Democratic Rep.-elect Dariavila Aliza Chevalier is all it takes to understand what awaits Israel in the wake of Tuesday’s Democratic swing in America’s Midterm elections. Mere minutes after Pres. Donald Trump announced an end to American foreign aid to Israel, Chevalier posted on X: “Military aid is not enough. We need to end U.S. taxpayer funding for Israel’s war crimes, a full arms embargo, and the Palestinian right of return.”

Huh?

While there is nothing new about cutting American economic assistance, demanding an arms embargo, and weaponizing the term “war crimes,” Chevalier’s insertion of the phrase “Palestinian right of return” is a new form of escalation. Because while the majority of newly-elected Democrats may actually be centrists like Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Texan James Tallerico, Chevalier’s words still managed to lay bare the dramatic shift of antisemitism and antizionism across American culture and politics.

New Demands
What’s so telling about Chevalier’s rhetoric is both the timing and intent. Her message is chilling: Nothing but the coordinated dismantling of Zionism — in this case a “return” of Palestinians to their former homes presumably occupied by Jews — will satisfy incoming Democrats. Particularly those, like Chevalier, who are part of the party’s Israel-obsessed far-left fringe. Indeed, fellow Congressional newcomer Colorado Rep.-elect Melat Kiros spoke nearly the exact same words during an appearance on PBS this summer — she advocated for a “one-state” solution, an end to Israel as a Jewish “ethnostate” and that right of return for Palestinians. She even went one step further, provocatively suggesting Palestinians be awarded “reparations as a result of the [Israeli] genocide.”

Three months on, Chevalier was particularly clever to tether these “right of return” demands to Trump’s aid announcement. While the media was busy framing Trump’s move as a watershed moment in U.S.-Israeli history, Chevalier turned the ending of one era into the demand for a new one. It’s an era filled with anti-Zionist totems such as “war crimes,” a “one-state solution” and — most chillingly — an end to Israel’s Jewish majority. As she turns political performance into protest, Chevalier makes clear that nothing will ever satisfy protesters like herself except Zionism’s uncontested defeat.

Yes, extremists such as Kiros and Chevalier are still Democratic party outliers. But like so much of woke culture and identity politics, these extremists exert outsized power and influence by ensuring they’re the loudest voices in the room.

Jake Wallis Simons: Why the UN should pick a Palestinian over a Jew to be its next chief

Nusseibeh, formerly the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the UN, understands the dangers of tyranny: the UAE was the most heavily targeted Gulf state during the Iran war. Surprisingly, she also understands Jews, having studied Israeli and diaspora studies at university in London. She speaks Hebrew, as well as Arabic, French and English.

Unlike most of the UN, she was unequivocal in her condemnation of October 7. In addition, she has backed the Abraham Accords peace agreements, and consistently called for the Jewish state’s full integration into the Middle East. “There is an outstretched hand, despite all of this misery, in the region to Israel,” she insisted in September last year, as war raged.

This openness is something of a family tradition. Her grandfather (who opposed Nazism) and uncle (who opposed suicide bombing) were both prominent Palestinian figures who maintained close relationships with their Israeli counterparts. Her father, an adviser to the Emirati ruling family, has an extensive private library that includes a rich section on Jewish history.

Sure, she isn’t perfect. At times, Nusseibeh has been deeply unfair, calling Israel’s campaign in Gaza “inhumane” as early as November 2023, and – bizarrely – condemning the “cruel” evacuation orders issued by Israeli troops to protect Palestinian civilians from the fighting.

Moreover, human rights groups have denounced her because of the UAE’s alleged support for Sudanese rebels, who are battling the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned regime in a bloody war that has been described as genocide (the UAE denies this).

Yet international diplomacy is about shades of grey. In the absence of clean options, this unlikely candidate may prove the best hope of sanity in the madhouse.

Read More

11/07 Links: From France to America, hatred of Israel is eroding the West; US Jews urge unity, but Israelis must live with the consequences; Britain’s colonial legacy undermines its moral lectures against Israel

From Ian:

The Upside of Aiding Israel

Israel's American critics fundamentally fail to understand their own country's interests. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt met Saudi monarch Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1945, the United States has sought to prevent any other power from dominating or destabilizing the Middle East's energy reserves. This has been a core U.S. interest whether we were exporting oil or needed imports, because stable oil markets are critical for a functional global economy that benefits Americans. For its part, Israel does not want to be dominated by any of its neighbors, so it too opposes aspiring regional hegemons. The two have worked closely together for decades because of this confluence of geopolitical interests, more than anything else.

Washington did this not because of Holocaust guilt or scheming Shylocks, but because of Israel's strength. The strategic partnership only took root after Israel became too powerful to ignore. During the Cold War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger realized they could use Israel as a lever to pry the Soviets out of the Middle East. Nixon prized allies who could handle smaller adversaries on their own, and the Jewish state proved more than capable of doing that. But Israel was socialist and therefore poor, so at first it needed significant amounts of aid for the partnership to achieve its full potential.

The alliance has been helpful ever since. Without Israel's strike on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in 1981, the United States might have faced a nuclear Iraq 10 years later. The 2007 strike in Syria prevented the nation's civil war from turning into a nuclear nightmare. Israelis and Americans have fought all kinds of Islamist terrorism side by side.

Some Americans on both sides of the aisle want to blame Israel for the floundering campaign against Iran. But as Trump made clear on Wednesday, his concern about the "death to America" crowd acquiring nuclear weapons has to do with preventing an attack on Washington, not Tel Aviv. Israelis rightly fear a nuclear Iran too, which is why the IDF was a capable partner during the fighting.

Ironically, Israel is exactly the kind of ally the America First crowd claims to want. It has the same enemies as the United States, sustains a military that complements American power, and tries to take care of as much of its own affairs as possible without involving U.S. forces. Many Americans who are not sympathetic to Trump’s views also want to reduce our involvement in the Middle East, which is not feasible without relying more heavily on the Jewish state.

Israel is important for other American interests too. The competition with China for global technological leadership is fierce, and Israel is a world leader in a variety of fields, including cybersecurity and biotechnology. When U.S. policymakers gather allies and partners to stay ahead of America's enemies, the Israelis are at the table.

The relationship has taken different forms while still benefiting both countries. Transitioning from aid to joint partnerships could be appropriate. Earlier this year, Benjamin Netanyahu stated that American aid to Israel should eventually come to an end as Israel grew wealthier.

But there is a difference between helping a friend grow more self-reliant and abruptly cutting off 20 percent of an ally's defense budget in the middle of a war. One choice is prudent. The other? Madness.

From France to America, hatred of Israel is eroding the West

The defamation of Israel and delegitimization of Jews/Zionists is boomeranging on the Western world.

Let’s begin with France, which is being consumed by a toxic brew that blends Marxism, Islamism, Palestinianism, and antisemitism into a potent assault on the state and on French culture and civilization.

The ideological depravities that undergird the deepening chaos have long and deep roots in French society and politics, particularly in France’s perverted policies toward Jews and Israel.

This is the elephant in the room that French President Emmanuel Macron and his predecessors will never admit to: that their ideological elevation of the Palestinian cause into a monster master political storyline has willy-nilly birthed a narrative of nihilism, a swell of anti-civilizational contempt wearing a keffiyeh that goes far beyond Israel.

The moral inversions that excuse October 7 as “resistance” and heroize calls to “globalize the intifada” now excuse the torching and looting of iconic French buildings and boulevards. The diplomatic grandstanding at Israel’s expense (“Palestinian statehood now!”) and the indulgence of Islamo-fascist and leftist mobs who hail Hamas have started aeonian fires of self-immolation and devastation.

My late father, Prof. Henry H. (Zvi Meir) Weinberg, was a scholar of French literature and a keen observer of socio-cultural trends in France. He passed away in Jerusalem almost 20 years ago (after serving as an MK in the Knesset for Natan Sharansky’s immigrant party).

Psychological warfare against the Jewish state
Forty years ago, he wrote a book called The Myth of the Jew in France 1967-1982 in which he dissected the techniques by which highbrow publications such as Le Monde and the upper echelons of French literary society pursued a long campaign of psychological warfare against the Jewish state.

Under the mask of high-minded objectivity and fealty to human rights, they adopted narratives fiercely hostile to Israel, inevitably sliding into the murky waters of anti-Jewish prejudice.

My father chronicled the lifting of taboos on public expression of antisemitism in France – beginning with the writer and philosopher Voltaire and the Encylopaedists of the 18th century; to the French laboratories for “scientific” racism and national socialism of the 19th century; leading to French collaboration with the Nazis under the Vichy regime and subsequent far-right French preoccupation with Holocaust denial.

Other notable markers on the way: president De Gaulle’s notorious “Sermon to the Hebrews” in 1967; French policies of appeasement toward Palestinian terrorism under presidents Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s and 1980s; the vehemence and consistency of French attacks on Israeli policy ever since the First Lebanon War (1982); and the malicious depredation wrought by fashionable antagonism to everything Israeli peddled by French intellectuals.

Since then, the “myth,” or defamation, of the Jew and the Zionist in France and other high-minded democracies has only darkened.

Read More

11/06 Links Pt2: What Boy George taught me about being Jewish; By backing El-Sayed in the midterms, Democrats betrayed the liberal values they claim to defend

From Ian:

What Boy George taught me about being Jewish

Four decades later, the rules of conformity have changed, but the pressure to conform hasn’t. Look at almost any gathering of celebrities and you’ll see the same familiar symbols: red-hand pins, kaffiyehs, and carefully rehearsed declarations about Gaza. Artists who spent their careers celebrating individual expression suddenly seem reluctant to express an individual opinion. For many, the easiest option is to follow the crowd or remain silent.

Boy George chose neither. He watched in horror as Hamas massacred young people dancing at the Nova music festival on October 7. He released a song, “We Will Dance Again,” in which he sings, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.” He refused calls to boycott Israel, and endured condemnation from former friends and colleagues. And then he got on a plane and came to Tel Aviv.

The man once considered a radical for challenging society’s conventions about gender is now considered a radical for standing with the Jews. But there’s no contradiction. He is doing precisely what he did 40 years ago: refusing to let the dominant culture tell him what to think.

The eyeliner hasn’t changed. Neither has the courage.

As Dara Horn observes, the essence of Jewish survival has never been the ability to fit in. It has been the determination to stand apart when standing apart is the right thing to do. To question the powerful, challenge conventional wisdom, and refuse to trade truth for acceptance.

Boy George isn’t Jewish, but he has spoken about his deep kinship with the Jewish people. Perhaps he recognizes something of himself in our story.

Last night, as he stood before thousands of Israelis — religious and secular, left and right, gay and straight — I thought about what a remarkable lesson this was for my daughter. Not just about standing up for Israel. Not even about standing up against antisemitism. But simply about standing up. About having the courage to be different, the confidence to think for yourself, and the moral clarity to say what you believe even when everyone around you insists that you’re wrong.

We Jews have been doing that for thousands of years. And it has never been particularly fashionable.

Last night, a 65-year-old man in a sequin hat reminded us why it matters. And he made it look fabulous.

How China Weaponizes Jew-Hate

Using both its profitable blockbuster social media app TikTok and the nonprofit networks of Shanghai-based American citizen Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans (founder of Code Pink), China has been able to foment Jew-hatred and unrest on the streets not only of the United States but also the United Kingdom.

Notably, the Chinese-funded People's Forum is out to end not only Israel but also America. At the 2024 People's Conference for Palestine, the organization's Forum executive director Manolo De Los Santos, who advocates for Cuba, also called for the complete destruction of the United States: "We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts, and those one million cuts have to come from every sector of struggle in this room."

According to the US House Ways and Means Committee: "Evidence suggests that The People's Forum and Code Pink have been funded and influenced by Mr. [Neville Roy] Singham and the communist Chinese government, both of which are foreign principals."

Historian Dara Horn suggests that tyrants and totalitarian regimes, to maintain or gain further power, promote the "Big Lie" of Hitler's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that the Jews are "evil." Evil in what way? Just fill in the blank with whatever you like, like a Rorschach test.

It probably helps to select a target that would rather just be left alone under its fig tree, a target disinclined to retaliate – as China already succeeded in doing by oppressing the peaceful Tibetans and enslaving and torturing the Uyghurs.

Now China has lit upon the Jews, who do not even live there, but who, as author and documentary filmmaker Pierre Rehov pointed out, are politically useful.

"These lies are all part of the foundational Big Lie: that antisemitism itself is righteous. If the Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist, resistance against them is not only moral, it is good!... The only thing that varies is what you value the most. Say you're a religious Christian, then you are lied to that Jews are destroying Christianity, or that they killed Christ. Say you're a human rights activist, then Israel's the world's worst violator of human rights, and it doesn't matter that you're being told this by the Islamic Republic of Iran." — Dara Horn, interview, Times of Israel, September 3, 2026.

The Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal: when Islamic sectarians took over

The role of West Midlands Police is the hinge on which events swing from the bleak yet familiar tale of Islamic sectarianism into one of almost unimaginable incompetence and deceit. West Midlands Police’s justification was found in a ‘confidential report’ that it claimed had been made with the help of Dutch police, based on a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam the previous November. The report claimed that, after the match, Maccabi supporters had thrown ‘innocent members of the public into the river’ and had ‘intentionally targeted Muslim communities’. It alleged that police in Amsterdam had been forced to muster 5,000 officers to deal with the supposedly rabid threat.

More than a few eyebrows were raised when this report was leaked to the press, in late November last year. The scenes in Amsterdam had indeed made international headlines – but for a very different reason. Maccabi supporters were subjected to what members of Amsterdam’s local Arab population called a ‘Jew hunt’ on WhatsApp. It was Maccabi fans – not Amsterdam residents – who were thrown into the river, and it was Maccabi fans who were violently assaulted, in what Amsterdam’s own mayor referred to as an anti-Semitic attack.

The ‘confidential report’, it transpired, was the product of West Midlands Police’s own imagination. Its contents, unsurprisingly, were refuted by Dutch police as soon as it came to light. In January, it was revealed that the police force had consulted eight Muslim organisations in Birmingham prior to banning Maccabi supporters – three of which were mosques that had a history of promoting anti-Semitism. In the same month, West Midlands Police chief Craig Guildford admitted that the force had used AI in compiling its dossier against Maccabi supporters. This had led to a non-existent fixture against West Ham United being offered as ‘proof’ of the supposed violence of the Israeli fans. Guildford ‘retired’ from the force soon after (however, he is currently the subject of a gross-misconduct investigation by the police watchdog). More recently, in October, Conservative MP and shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy claimed that West Midlands Police suppressed intelligence that local Islamists had planned to arm themselves in preparation for Maccabi supporters.

Timothy himself was the subject of one of the most remarkable events of the whole grim affair. An Aston Villa supporter who grew up in Birmingham, he visited Villa Park on the night of the match. A large crowd of Muslim men had gathered outside the stadium. ‘Officer, take this dog away’, one of the men said to a police officer, gesturing at Timothy. The policewoman duly interrogated Timothy before leading him away. It was a chilling sight.

The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters was a toxic synthesis of the various forces that many people feel are tearing the country apart: the breakdown of policing, an increasingly hostile and powerful Islamic sectarianism, and the official appeasement of anti-Semitism. Britain has never quite been the same since.

Read More

11/06 Links Pt1: Holocaust survivor dies from Bondi Beach terror attack injuries, raising toll to 16; The fashionable one-state ruse to destroy the only Jewish state

From Ian:

The fashionable one-state ruse to destroy the only Jewish state

After the Green Party adopted its policy that “Zionism is racism”, Prime Minister Andy Burnham correctly, if belatedly, labelled this “antisemitic”, telling Labour councillors to end power-sharing agreements with Green colleagues who do not reject it. With his customary courage in leadership, the Greens’ Zack Polanski attempted to duck the issue entirely, dodging his own conference to lose the contest for Sir Keir Starmer’s former parliamentary seat, then saying he would have voted against the “imperfect” motion. One is reminded of Brave Sir Robin, from the film Monty Python And The Holy Grail – he who nearly fought the fierce dragon of Angnor, and almost stood up to the vicious chicken of Bristol: “When danger reared its ugly head/He bravely turned his tail and fled”.

Identifying as an anti-racist sits at the core of any Good Person™’s self-image. So too, lately, does a monomaniacal, existential loathing of Israel. This creates an irreconcilable dichotomy, because as every Good Person™ knows, antisemitism is bad – in theory. One must be seen to oppose it, or at least make generic noises to that effect, while avoiding any awkward specifics. But how, then, to advocate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish majority state?

Enter the fashionable ruse, deployed in the Green motion, of the one-state solution. Simply place the Jews and Palestinians together, in one big, happy democracy. Why, it’s so obvious, it’s a wonder they’ve wasted all these decades attempting anything else. Surely the only thing that has been prolonging the conflict is not furious rejection on the Palestinian side of any continuing Jewish presence in the region, including that the majority of Israeli Jews descended from families ethnically cleansed from the Arab and Muslim world since the Second World War. Nor the poisonous Islamist adoption of Nazi-brand antisemitism. Nor the reciprocal hostility that has undeniably arisen in Israel, feeding the ultra-nationalist Right. No, it’s just that the silly things haven’t tried living in Kumbaya-flavoured unity.

One wonders whether the One-State Solutionists would be so keen on the idea if (a) Jews in this putative federation would likely outnumber Palestinians, rather than vice-versa; and (b) Israel was actually, not purportedly, genocidal towards its antagonists – rather than vice-versa. And when I say one wonders, I mean one does not wonder at all.

Israel exists precisely because Jews can’t trust a non-Jewish majority to protect them, and as evidenced by Hamas’s 2023 pogrom, the only reason a real genocide isn’t happening right now is that Israel has borders and a military.

The one-state solution is a classic example of the abstract utopianism long indulged in by a certain type of leftist, without skin in the game and safely shielded from the consequences, eager to risk catastrophe for others to gratify their own particular ideological fetishes. Call it the Lord Farquaad phenomenon, after the preening princeling from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”

Curiously, no prominent One-Stater has proposed the same remedy for the long and lethal quarrels of the Indian subcontinent. Then again, there are no Jews involved. True, some of the loopiest also seem to think a one-state solution is the answer to Russia’s war on Ukraine, but most would be rightly appalled by the notion.

The number of countries in which Arabs constitute the majority or largest plurality – not including Palestine, whose national status remains unresolved – is 18. The number of countries in which the same is true of Muslims is 50. The number of Jewish majority countries: one.

Rowan Dean: Australia’s shameful era of progressive antisemitism

Hallelujah! I opened my newspaper on Friday to read, in black and white, the two words I never thought I would hear any Australian academic or Labor appointee ever dare utter. Two words I have spent the last 15 years of my life writing about, warning about, raging against, and shaking my head in despair about. Two words that have poisoned this country, two words that have torn this country asunder, and two words which have been ignored, mocked and denied.

Progressive antisemitism.

In June 2014, I published an article in The Spectator Australia called Dinner Party Antisemitism in which I warned, quote, how ‘even otherwise intelligent and normal people will often reveal their hatred over a few glasses of wine’.

Dinner party anti-Semitism
I went on to define ‘dinner party antisemitism’ and how to spot it. I wrote: ‘Dinner party antisemitism crosses all political boundaries, age groups, geographical and socio-economic divides, and is just as likely to occur in a trendy inner-city restaurant, at a Western suburbs barbeque or within the elegant confines of a plush North Shore dining room.’

In other words, progressive antisemitism. That was over 12 years ago. And I have often spoken at many functions, on TV shows, in print, at conferences, and, yes, at dinner parties, about how the so-called left-wing progressives – I actually think regressive is a far more accurate description – but those of the so-called intellectual left – there’s another oxymoron for you – the luvvies, the lefties, with their moral posturing and self-assured sanctimony and eagerness to tolerate Islamist and third world antisemitism posed a terrifying threat to this country. Frequently I was laughed at, more often simply ignored, especially when I was on the ABC.

But this morning – finally – Jillian Segal, the antisemitism envoy, has belled the cat, with an updated and damning report into Australian antisemitism, in which she says…
‘Modern, progressive antisemitism is the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today. It serves to justify and legitimise antisemitism, providing it with intellectual and cultural credibility and, ultimately, making it fashionable. It does this by effectively laundering far-left antisemitism and Islamic extremism through a progressive lens, such as social justice and human rights, together with traditional antisemitic tropes, giving fundamentally extremist ideologies an apparently acceptable face.’

Finally. There you have it folks, from the official Labor-appointed antisemitism envoy. As the Australian newspaper continues…
‘“Progressive antisemitism” has been identified as the most corrosive form of anti-Jewish hate in Australia, under special envoy ­Jillian Segal’s sweeping new ­agenda to drive discrimination and bias against Jews out of universities, the health sector, media, and the arts.’

The Australian prime minister wants to turn down the temperature

For all the talk of lowering the temperature, one word is missing: consequence.

If an Islamist preacher incites violence, the law should respond. If a Marxist activist unlawfully threatens someone, the law should respond. If a far-right agitator does the same, the standard must be identical.

There must be no ideological indulgences or special treatment for fashionable causes.

Australians need confidence that police, prosecutors and governments enforce the law impartially, rather than allowing political pressure to determine which conduct attracts scrutiny. Even the perception of selective enforcement damages trust. Distrust breeds the resentment that political leaders claim they want to reduce.

The horror of the antisemitic Bondi massacre, threats against elected representatives and allegations of attacks on MPs should not be conflated or assigned a common motive. They do, however, underline the importance of protecting citizens and public officials alike.

How many more tragedies or threats will it take before the government demonstrates that public safety matters more than the sensitivities of political movements?

To those who believed the hatred and intimidation of the past three years were merely a Jewish problem, history offers a warning: it never ends with the Jews. Antisemitism is not simply an isolated prejudice. It can be a warning sign that the social rules protecting everyone are weakening.

What a society tolerates risks becoming normalized. What becomes normalized can enter the mainstream. Each outrage makes the next less shocking until behavior once considered unthinkable begins to seem ordinary.

Jewish Australians have warned about the danger of antisemitism masquerading as political activism. Those warnings deserve to be taken seriously not only because Jewish Australians are entitled to safety, but because the principles at stake protect every citizen.

When intimidation is excused as righteous protest, it does not remain confined to one community. A democracy that makes exceptions for hatred undermines the very freedoms it claims to defend.

Albanese is right that Australia needs to turn down the temperature. But temperatures do not fall because a prime minister repeats a phrase at a press conference.

They fall when leaders hold allies and opponents to the same standards, when unlawful threats attract consequences and when Australians can trust the law will be enforced without fear or favor.

If Albanese wants to lead, he could begin by acknowledging that his own political side is not immune from inflammatory rhetoric. He could challenge extremism in movements he sympathizes with, rather than leaving the impression that civility is principally a duty for his opponents.

The prime minister does not need another speech about turning down the temperature. He needs to demonstrate that there are consequences for those who deliberately turn it up. And perhaps, for once, he could lead by example.

Read More

11/05 Links Pt2: Laundering Libel; After US elections, Iran knows its strategy is working — against everyone but Israel; Mr. Vice President: The Problem Was Not the Iran War. It Was the Ceasefire

From Ian:

Laundering Libel

The false characterization of Zionism as settler colonialism did not begin as neutral scholarship. It took shape as a Soviet-led campaign against Israel’s existence driven by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and was later propagated by activist academics who gave it scholarly veneer. In 1965, Fayez Sayegh, the founding director of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center in Beirut, published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, mapping the political vocabulary of 20th-century decolonization onto Zionism. Sayegh, then a member of Kuwait’s delegation to the United Nations, was the principal author of the 1975 U.N. resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The General Assembly revoked that resolution in 1991, but by then the idea had found a home in academia, where it has flourished ever since.

Maxime Rodinson’s essay “Israël, fait colonial?” (“Israel, a colonial fact?”) appeared in 1967 as the lead piece in a special issue of Les Temps Modernes, the influential journal founded and edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, France’s most celebrated philosopher at the time. The issue, running to hundreds of pages, focused on a single question: Was Israel a colonial state? Sartre’s journal lent that question the prestige of the European intellectual left. Its contributors divided on the answer, but Rodinson’s essay, later published in English as “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?,” proved influential and helped carry the framework into Western academic discourse.

Its timing was telling. The journal issue appeared before the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel did not yet control the West Bank or Gaza. In other words, the colonial charge did not begin as a criticism of the occupation. It was aimed at Israel’s very existence—which is why South Africa traces Israel’s “colonization” back to 1948. Most of the writing from the communist world and the Global South that cast Israel as a colonial state came after the war. Over the following decades, versions of the claim spread through universities, activist groups, NGOs, and international institutions, and each repetition gave it another layer of apparent authority.

But repetition is not proof. The settler-colonial characterization depends on substantial historical erasures. Jews are a people whose national identity originated in the land of Israel and who maintained both a presence and a connection there through centuries of exile and persecution. Zionism had no imperial mother country directing Jewish migration for its own economic or strategic benefit. No metropole extracted colonial wealth. Jews arrived from numerous countries—often fleeing persecution in those very countries. For many Jews, Zionism represented refuge, national restoration, and self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

“Colonizer” and “colonized” cannot simply be assigned as self-proving identities and then substituted for historical analysis. Yet that is the framework South Africa brought to the International Court of Justice. Once again, a false narrative about Jews, developed outside of law, had entered an official legal proceeding.

South Africa did not ask the ICJ to examine the Gaza war solely as a conflict following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre. Its application asked the judges to view the allegations within a much longer history. At the January 2024 hearing, South Africa’s ambassador invoked an “ongoing Nakba” produced through “Israel’s colonization since 1948.”

Why 1948, when the relevant narrative should begin on Oct. 7, 2023? The settler-colonial framework is designed to perform substantial legal work before one even reaches the alleged elements of genocide. It attempts to fix the parties’ identities as colonizer and colonized and to stretch the timeline back to Israel’s establishment in 1948. It also attempts to thread a revisionist continuity through the Jewish national project from the establishment of Israel, to subsequent wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the present war.

The point of the imposed narrative through-line is to supply an asserted criminal motive that is integral to Israel’s very existence: Israel’s military conduct can be understood not primarily as conduct in a war initiated by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, but as the latest stage of an allegedly eliminatory colonial enterprise.

Settler colonialism, however, is not a crime under the Genocide Convention. Nor is it an element of genocide. Its importance to South Africa’s argument is subtler. It is the narrative through which South Africa asks the ICJ to interpret the evidence of genocide.

That is particularly consequential because genocide requires specific intent: the intent to destroy a protected national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such.

The ICJ has imposed a demanding standard when genocidal intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct. In Croatia v. Serbia, the ICJ held that the inference of genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available from the conduct alleged. Alternative explanations therefore matter. Israel has maintained that its military objectives included defeating Hamas, preventing another Oct. 7, dismantling Hamas’ military infrastructure, and recovering the hostages Hamas had taken. These objectives matter enormously to a legal inquiry asking whether genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference from Israel’s conduct.

The settler-colonial narrative short-circuits that inquiry. Once Israel is defined as an eliminatory project since 1948, there is no need to weigh why Israel acted as it did after Oct. 7; the premise has already supplied the answer. Conduct that the war itself could explain is instead read as evidence of an eliminatory purpose supposedly built into Zionism since 1948. The false narrative ends up doing the work that proof of specific intent is supposed to do.

Then comes the second stage of laundering. The accusation acquires a case name, a docket number, written pleadings from sovereign states, hearings broadcast live from the Peace Palace, judicial orders, and a permanent place in the international legal record. None of those things proves the accusation. But each institutional layer increases the distance between the narrative, along with its ideological origins, and evidentiary defects.

The provisional-measures stage marked a particularly significant transformation. In January 2024, the ICJ was not deciding whether Israel had committed genocide. It was deciding whether interim measures were warranted as the litigation proceeded.

Among other requirements, the ICJ considered whether it had prima facie jurisdiction, whether at least some of the rights asserted under the Genocide Convention were plausible, whether those rights were linked to the requested measures, and whether there was a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice.

The ICJ found plausible the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts, and South Africa’s right to seek Israel’s compliance with the Genocide Convention. That was not a finding that genocide had occurred. It was not a finding that genocidal intent had been proved. And it was not a ruling on, much less an acceptance of, the settler-colonial narrative through which South Africa had framed its case.

But outside the courtroom, South Africa called the order a “decisive victory” and said it established that Israel’s actions were “plausibly genocidal.” Plausible rights became a plausible case, a plausible case became plausible genocide, and plausible genocide became apparent judicial confirmation. The legal proceeding added another layer. And then came integration. The provisional order began to be invoked in arguments that third states were now “on notice” of a danger of genocide and therefore faced obligations concerning their relationships with Israel.

The ICJ proceedings became part of disputes over arms transfers and military assistance. Civil-society organizations invoked the litigation in challenges to arms exports.

The ICJ was not necessarily the cause of each subsequent governmental decision, lawsuit, boycott, divestment demand, or diplomatic condemnation. But the mere existence of the proceeding supplied a powerful new source of institutional authority. The result is a loop: The narrative enters a legal proceeding; the proceeding generates consequences; and those consequences are then invoked to authenticate the narrative. That is the recursive structure of juridical narrative laundering, and it explains why the process does not require a final judgment.

Money laundering succeeds when dirty money can circulate as legitimate wealth. Juridical narrative laundering succeeds when an unproved accusation can circulate as legally validated fact. By that measure, the merits judgment may come almost too late. The accusation can accomplish much of its diplomatic, legal, economic, and reputational work years before a court decides whether it is true.

Melanie Phillips: Not waving but drowning

For Muslims, hatred of Israel is the obsession that drives out all other concerns. Now this unhinged tunnel vision is being promoted by Vance too.

Unforgivably, he has now undermined the war against Iran by all but urging immediate surrender.

But the reason Iran was a losing electoral issue was that Trump had not won the war. Instead, he abandoned it at a crucial juncture, declaring victory when Iran remained undefeated and able to push up the price of oil as a weapon of its war against America.

And a major force behind America’s policy of preemptive surrender was reportedly Vance.

Now Vance blames voter anger against Israel for the Republican rout. He fails to observe that this anger was fueled by the lies and distortions about Israel and the war that have been allowed to spread unchecked—not least by him.

The scene is now set for a titanic struggle on both sides of the American political divide. In the Democratic Party, centrists will struggle with anti-West, anti-Israel Muslims and leftists. In the Republican Party, conservatives will struggle with radical Jew-haters, white supremacists and conspiracy nuts.

The momentum is with the hard-left, the Jew-haters and the Islamists because the centrists on both sides of the aisle lack a moral and intellectual spine.

The outlook for America’s alliance with Israel is therefore ominous. That’s the real menace in the sudden ending of America’s $4 billion in military aid to Israel.

This is not in itself the blow that many have taken it to be. The suggestion came from Israel itself and is absolutely the right decision. That’s because, by transitioning to joint U.S.-Israel military projects, it transforms the Jewish state from being viewed as a demeaning supplicant into a partner.

This will free Israel, which is now urgently developing its own huge arms industry, from the stranglehold of dependency by which successive U.S. administrations have lethally curtailed Israel’s ability to defend itself.

The reason Israel wanted this was that it saw the catastrophic erosion of support for it among the American public. And that’s the ominous point.

The red-green alliance is destroying Britain and Europe because there’s now a critical mass of their public that has been left ignorant and unable to think because of an education system that’s gone Marxist and nihilist.

America has been afflicted by the same instruments of chaos for years. Now those forces have conquered the citadel.

Most people don’t like extremes. That’s why Trump was elected: to defeat the lunatics of the intersectional left.

The best argument for Trump was that the alternative was unconscionable. Now the unconscionable have captured Congress and much of America’s governing class.

Blue wave? America isn’t waving but drowning.

NYPost Editorial: Philly’s Nazi-laden boycott proves it was never actually about Palestine — just the Jews

A despicable Nov. 8 protest against Jewish-owned restaurants in Philadelphia proves that the alleged bright line between antizionism and antisemitism is a dirty lie.

Philly bicycle activism group On Your Left is launching a bike-by protest in support of Boycott CookNSolo drive to shut down six restaurants in the tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, all owned by Jews.

“These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” On Your Left demands.

These eateries, it says, must “die,” along with the “political ideology of Zionism.”

Zionists? Of the four restaurant owners called out by name for death or expulsion, one is Israeli-American; the other three are American Jews, but that’s all boycotters need to know.

One target, Marti Lieberman, who runs a popular mac’n’cheese spot, explains that her business has nothing to do with Jews, Israel or Zionism — except that she sometimes wears a Star of David necklace.

So, for the boycotters, simply being Jews is enough to make these people “disgusting humans” who should be driven out of business.

More damning still: The protest date, Nov. 8, coincides closely with the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazi thugs burned more than 1,400 synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses.

The organizers admit they knew this, but excuse themselves their event is the day before Kristallnacht.

Read More