Tuesday, June 30, 2026
From Ian:
Mark Goldfeder and John Spencer: Without Evidence The U.N. Accuses Israel Of Genocide – Another Day That Ends In ‘Y’
Mark Goldfeder and John Spencer: Without Evidence The U.N. Accuses Israel Of Genocide – Another Day That Ends In ‘Y’
Its working rule is even simpler: any target Hamas hides among civilians becomes untouchable, and any civilian who dies beside it becomes proof of murder. The deeper Hamas burrows into homes and schools and hospitals, the safer it gets and the guiltier Israel looks, which inverts the very law that forbids using civilians as shields. The West Bank makes the inversion even plainer: the Commission counts 213 dead minors, tells readers that 206 were boys, and from that ratio divines a “policy of targeting boys” as “future terrorists.” A war on children does not kill boys at 97%. That statistic instead raises the obvious question: many of those “boys” were actively participating in hostilities.Turkey’s Hypocrisy Exposed by Israeli Recognition of Armenian Genocide
Of course, the Commission never asks the question. Under U.N. definitions, every person under 18 is counted as a child, whether a 10-year-old in a classroom or a 17-year-old carrying an assault rifle. Hamas, meanwhile, has long recruited, trained, and used minors, including teenagers and younger children, a practice the Commission acknowledges has been reported but expressly declines to investigate. By collapsing all persons under 18 into a single category while omitting the role of child soldiers, the report invites readers to equate every “child” casualty with a civilian who was not participating in hostilities. That omission is central to its narrative.
This is how a libel becomes a fact. The body counts originate with the Hamas-run health ministry and are relayed to the world under a U.N. logo. Human rights groups, several funded by the anti-Israel governments that demanded the inquiry, refer to it as settled. Reporters cite the groups without reading the report; policymakers cite the resulting “consensus”; and within 48 hours, the media print “deliberately targeted” as if it is an established fact. It is the same machine that once blamed Israel for the Al-Ahli hospital blast that American, British, and Canadian intelligence traced to a misfired Palestinian rocket. Anti-Israel bias does not need evidence, only an audience that has already convicted Israel.
The messenger does matter, and here it is the Human Rights Council’s only open-ended commission of inquiry, aimed permanently at a single country, on a council where roughly half of all country-specific condemnations name Israel. The world still calls it the Pillay Commission, after the previous chair who famously pronounced Israel guilty of war crimes before she was appointed to judge it. When Washington, D.C., sanctioned the council’s Palestinian rapporteur last year, the commissioners themselves resigned and promised to “reconstitute.” They did not, however, reform it, so the remedy is simple.
A bipartisan group in Congress already drafted the Commission of Inquiry Elimination Act, which would cut U.S. dollars from a permanent mandate that runs on $4 million a year and has dropped even the pretense of fairness or due process. The United States already refuses to fund discriminatory U.N. conduct, and this qualifies by any measure. The Commission titled its report “The essence of childhood has been destroyed,” but it chose the wrong noun. What this report destroys is the essence of evidence, the rule that an accusation of murder must be proven and not merely felt. After 94 pages, it still identifies no soldier, no order, no forensic proof, no battlefield investigation establishing intent, and no evidence capable of sustaining the accusation it makes.
The proper response is not to treat this report as a serious finding. You cannot defend against insanity. But we can and should stop funding it.
Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide affirms an essential historical truth. Acknowledging one of the twentieth century’s first genocides reinforces the principle that mass atrocities must be remembered honestly, regardless of political convenience.Gadi Taub: Haaretz’s ideological mission: Dismantling the Jewish state
Turkey’s genocide accusations against Israel are undermined by its own century-long denial of the Armenian Genocide. While insisting the destruction of over 1.5 million Armenians was merely a wartime tragedy without genocidal intent, Ankara simultaneously labels Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide.
History demonstrates that genocide denial carries consequences. Hitler’s infamous question, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” serves as a reminder that erasing past atrocities can embolden future perpetrators.
Yesterday, the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Announcing the decision in Hebrew, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared: “It is never too late to do the right thing.”
Less than three weeks before the Oct. 7 massacre, the Israeli daily Haaretz announced its break with the Zionist creed. Its editor-in-chief, Aluf Benn, penned a piece just before Yom Kippur eve, titled “Jewish and Democratic? It’s Time to Erase the Word Jewish.”
The paper’s regular Hebrew readers were probably not all that surprised. After all, many variations on this theme have appeared in the periodical’s opinion pages, and its aversion to nationalism and religion, as well as its infatuation with the local version of globalist ideology—the idea of a non-national, so-called “state of all its citizens”—were well known. But never before had the editor himself announced the paper’s desire to dismantle the Jewish state and put an end to the Zionist enterprise.
The editorial board must have thought that an international audience was not yet ready for the revelation, and so the English edition softened the title, cloaking Benn’s declaration in some warm Yiddishkeit. It read: “On Yom Kippur, Facing the Question: Where Is Israel Headed?”
Still, the confession in Hebrew was, in fact, long overdue. The paper has been working consistently and diligently to undermine Zionism’s moral legitimacy for many years, without admitting that this was what it was doing. It has disseminated some of the worst blood libels against settlers and Israel Defense Forces soldiers and given respectability to pundits who used its pages to argue that Israel is inherently evil.
This was never just an editorial insistence on high moral standards or constructive criticism designed to rectify wrongs. As media scholar Eli Avraham noted in his recently published book, From David to Goliath: Coverage of Israel in the International Media, Haaretz in general, and its English-language edition in particular, is not merely critical of this or that Israeli government or this or that Israeli policy. It is, rather, bent on demonizing the Jewish state as such and on legitimizing political parties, academics and organizations—both Israeli and foreign—which see Israel as “the epitome of world evil.” The paper also worked, Avraham pointed out, to erode Israeli solidarity by attacking every “positive and unifying myth.”
But it seems as though the paper also previously believed that declaring its anti-Zionist mission would be tactically unwise: that it would undermine its reputation for professional, balanced reporting and limit its ability to influence its largest target audience—liberals and especially liberal Zionists. It thus opted for an audacious strategy: It declared its supposed allegiance to Zionism. It also kept pretending to practice a form of “tough love” aimed at urging Israel to realize the so-called “two-state solution.”
For this purpose, it mostly took care to preserve for itself the possibility of plausible deniability: anti-Zionist writers, though ubiquitous in all sections of the paper—news, opinion, culture and leisure—were simply expressing their personal views. And when pushed, Haaretz could always portray its rejection of Zionism as no more than an objection to “the occupation,” to specific forms of discrimination or to the problem of church-and-state separation.
