10/29 Links Pt2: The Orwellian rewriting of the October 7 massacres; Blaming the Jews for Everything in Michigan; Anti-Israel activists have ‘co-opted’ American Psychological Association

From Ian:

The Orwellian rewriting of the October 7 massacres

On October 7, 2023, 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza. In proportional terms, that would be the equivalent of roughly 8,400 killed and 1,750 kidnapped in Britain. Nor can those numbers convey the suffering of the victims of rape and other sexual violence.

And then came the Orwellian plot twist. Before the dead had been buried, while the hostages were being brutalised in Gaza, and as Israel’s military response was taking shape, the account of what happened began to change, manipulated by Hamas and its allies, enablers, and useful idiots in the West. History was turned on its head. The deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust was blurred, rationalised, justified, celebrated, and, in certain quarters, dismissed as a false-flag operation.

I saw this again recently when I addressed a large university audience in Europe. Fifteen students, strategically positioned around the room, offered a case study in chanted slogans substituting for thought. They robotically repeated accusations of “Nazi-like genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “settler-colonialism”, more intent on reinforcing one another’s certainties than examining the outrageous, unexamined claims they made.

More consequentially, over time, some governments that should have known better began sacrificing high-minded principle for street-level politics. Students at so-called elite universities in the US and UK revealed how little they knew, or cared, about the facts. Too many media outlets seemed quicker to question the evidence staring them in the face than to scrutinise Hamas’s fictionalised claims. Organisations that professed universal concern for women and children were conspicuously missing in action, or raised the evidentiary threshold to new heights, when the victims were Israeli. And the United Nations once again showed how far it had strayed from its founding ideals. It was not until September 2025 that the General Assembly endorsed a declaration condemning Hamas’s October 7 attacks, while some ostensibly neutral UN staff working on relief efforts in Gaza were revealed to be Hamas sympathisers or even moonlighting as Hamas terrorists.

Hamas had announced its intention to destroy Israel long ago. On October 7, its attackers acted on that aim with unprecedented ferocity, in full view of the world, in some cases gleefully recording and sharing their crimes with family and friends. Yet, in the story that took hold in many quarters, democratic Israel became the villain, the aggressor, and even the alleged perpetrator of genocide. Terrorist Hamas, meanwhile, was sanitised as a resistance movement and its reports treated as gospel. Its killers were romanticised as freedom fighters and, in some circles, all but fetishised.

Western capitals rightly supported Ukraine as it defended itself against Russia’s illegal invasion. Yet too many could not, or would not, recognise Israel’s need to fight back powerfully against the aggressors on its own border. Instead came sanctimonious lectures from Dublin to Madrid, Paris to Oslo, and Brussels to Ottawa, as if Israel were confronting a foe that cared a whit about the laws of war.

Strip away the rhetoric, and what many seemed to be saying was something else: for the sake of our streets, our electoral fortunes, our domestic political pressures, and our wider Middle East interests, appease. Sacrifice your interests for ours. Trust the untrustworthy. Be good Christians (!) and turn the other cheek.

Then, in September 2025, London, Paris, Ottawa, and Canberra recognised a Palestinian state without agreed borders, a unified government, or control over its territory – while hostages remained in Gaza. What a sense of timing! What an unearned gift! What shameless pandering!

Meanwhile, amidst this diplomatic circus, history, geography, and reality all got upended.

First, history. Before the attack, Israel maintained neither settlements nor a permanent military presence inside Gaza. It had dismantled its settlements and withdrawn its forces 18 years earlier, giving Gaza’s leaders their first chance ever to chart the strip’s future. They could have chosen Dubai or Singapore as a model. Alas, they did not.

Second, geography. Striking how collective amnesia sets in whenever there is discussion of Gaza’s “encirclement” by Israel. Lo and behold, Gaza has a second border. It’s with Egypt, an Arab and Muslim-majority country. Yet many neglect this inconvenient fact. Why does Egypt maintain such a formidable Gaza border fence, topped with layers of concertina wire?

And third, reality. The “experts” in government, universities, social media, and think tanks presume to know exactly what Israel is not supposed to do. But what, precisely, would they have had Israel do after October 7? Leave a genocidal foe in power on its doorstep? Abandon the hostages, some of whom would endure brutal captivity for more than two years? Defer to Hamas’s use of civilians to shield its fighters and ignore the vast armed infrastructure it built above and below ground? Pretend that Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood had no interests of their own in the conflict? It is easy to preach restraint and question strategy from a distant armchair. It is harder to say what Israel should have done against an enemy determined to destroy it.

Yet for all the second-guessing, all the libellous accusations of genocide, Israel demonstrated two things: military resolve and an effort to limit civilian harm.

It fought a war on seven fronts to weaken its declared enemies and restore the power of deterrence. In that fight, it showed any number of wobbly, flaccid Western nations what valour, patriotism, and resilience look like.

To be sure, there were tragic civilian deaths. Every such death is an incalculable loss. Israel nevertheless sought to minimise civilian casualties as best it could in an immensely difficult, weaponised, and confined environment. In fact, Israel risked the lives of its own soldiers in that effort rather than relying solely on air power. It also permitted humanitarian assistance, albeit with interruptions, much of which, alas, was seized by Hamas for its own use and profit.

Hamas started a war. It was a naked act of aggression. And then, along with fellow travellers, it methodically convinced much of the world that it was the innocent victim of the very war it began. George Orwell, where are you?

David Bell: My report on antisemitism in education is based on hard evidence – now let’s implement its findings

What matters is what emerges when that evidence is considered together. The survey responses, testimony and wider evidence presented to the review consistently point to antisemitism being a real issue among young people and within schools and colleges.

Antisemitism is rising in wider society and it has filtered into our schools. You do not need to look far to see deeply troubling cases involving Jewish pupils and teachers. Statistics are important, but we do not need a single statistic to tell us that antisemitism is present – it is clearly visible.

Questions have also been raised about my impartiality when conducting the review. I did not come to this review with an agenda or narrative I wanted to promote.

Instead, throughout this work I have been led by the evidence presented to me, and I would encourage anyone questioning its conclusions to engage with that evidence in full.

Free speech and open debate are vital, especially in schools and colleges where young people are learning how to navigate these types of conversations.

Young people should be able to discuss difficult and contentious political questions, including the actions of the State of Israel.

That's why I don't believe asking schools and colleges to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism will inhibit legitimate debate. Applied in a way that respects their legal duties, including on equality and freedom of speech, it should help institutions distinguish legitimate criticism from antisemitism.

Debate must be encouraged in education, but school and college leaders also have a responsibility to ensure political expression is appropriate, particularly in the classroom, and that they meet their legal duties.

My conclusion is clear – antisemitism is a serious problem in our schools and colleges, and we must tackle it in a coherent and comprehensive way. My report is a start in that direction so now it’s all about implementation.

WSJ Editorial: Blaming the Jews for Everything in Michigan

A common theme of antisemites throughout history is to blame the Jews for any and every social ill.

Now this has reappeared in America with a new ad for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed that blames grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel.

The ad features a couple agonizing over high prices at a supermarket. The wife tells her husband that "you're going to have to put those eggs back" because "we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians."

Later the husband asks about the Israelis, "Don't they get universal health care too?" "Yeah, they do. And we're paying for that too probably," she replies. "Might as well put the bananas back."

The unmistakable message: Americans are paying more and making personal sacrifices because the U.S. is supporting Israel's alleged genocide against Palestinians.

Most Michiganders are smart enough to know that Israel isn't responsible for inflation, but the ad is intended to feed grievances on the far left and right.

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10/29 Links Pt1: JPost: Netanyahu, Eisenkot, Bennett must put Israel first and talk unity; Shin Bet probes Qatari, Turkish funding to boost Arab turnout in Israeli election; Israeli ship sinks in Black Sea after being hit by 3 suicide boat drones

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Very Little Is Likely to Change after Israeli Election

The first thing to say about Tuesday's election in Israel is that the country is having one. Competitive, lawful, on schedule. That's more than can be said of the Palestinian Authority under the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005 but has bypassed elections ever since. It's more than can be said for Hamas, which won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, went to war against its domestic political opponents, and has ruled through fiat and fear ever since.

It's difficult to take Israel's inveterate critics seriously when they demand a "Free Palestine" without registering the slightest audible objection to the tyrannies in Ramallah and Gaza; or when, in the name of freedom and equality, they seek to abolish the Middle East's only functioning liberal democracy.

For an election widely billed as the most important in the country's history, very little is likely to change, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Not one of the leading contenders wants a Palestinian state. Not one of them is going to remove Israelis from the West Bank or issue a blanket ban on settlement construction. Not one of them wants anything less than an assertive military posture toward Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran.

Of the many intellectually flabby critiques of Israeli policy since Oct. 7, the idea that Israel should have traded its physical security for the sake of some added dollops of liberal pity is among the flabbiest. Israel doesn't exist to showcase Jewish victimization. It exists to end it.

At stake is whether a people who have borne the burden of Hamas's terror and Iran's missiles and a nonstop state of emergency and the unceasing chorus of global condemnation that is one part ignorance, two parts bigotry and three parts self-delusion should have a government worthy of their sacrifice, steadiness and courage.

After Oct. 7, Israelis Were Forced to Choose between Two Bad Options

Politicians on the left and right in the U.S. these days often seem more focused on Israel, its treatment of the Palestinians, and its policies in the Middle East than on the usual local concerns, like the number of children in a classroom or unemployment. This preoccupation is a puzzle to many Israelis.

Do Israelis really not care what the world thinks about them? No. They care a lot. But what concerns them even more is what their enemies think. Israelis want the Western world to love them but their enemies in the Middle East to fear them.

In the days after the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas, most Western countries displayed a deep empathy for Israel. But the coin had another side. Hamas's invasion and the slaughter signaled to the neighborhood that Israel had lost power. Western love moved Israelis, but their enemies' dissipation of fear aroused existential anxiety.

Three years later, the successes of the Israeli Army rehabilitated the army's deterrent power in the Middle East. The trouble is that the actions that restored Israel's image in the region have severely damaged its image in the West. Any restraint that Israel might have shown to maintain Western sympathy would have prevented it from restoring the fear felt by its enemies. And everything it did to establish fear eroded sympathy. The catch is that it can't have both.

After Oct. 7, Israelis were forced to choose between two bad options. Going to war against a terrorist army requires ground operations amid a civilian population - a blueprint for large-scale death and devastation. But not going to war would have left Hamas with the ability to repeat the massacre, signaled to Israel's enemies that it had lost the ability to defend itself, and stripped Israelis of confidence that they could continue building a future in their own country.

There is broad agreement in Israel: the war and its justifiability are not topics of public debate in the current election. Israel was required to choose bad over worse but judged as if it had chosen bad over good.

Israelis Are Broadly United on Attitude to Country's Enemies

Despite the inconclusive result of Israel's general election, it remains highly unlikely that replacing Netanyahu with Eisenkot would have any profound impact on the many security challenges facing the wider Middle East. When it comes to issues surrounding Israel's security, there is little to distinguish between the two main contenders for the premiership in terms of their uncompromising approach to defeating Israel's many foes.

Eisenkot, 66, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who served in Netanyahu's war cabinet after the Oct. 7 attacks, is just as much a hawk as Netanyahu when it comes to defending Israelis from the many regional threats they face. He shares Netanyahu's view that Israel must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons at all costs, and that it is vital to disrupt and degrade Tehran's terrorist infrastructure throughout the Middle East.

Following the national trauma of Oct. 7, it is a prerequisite for almost all Israeli voters that whoever leads their country regards the defense of the Jewish homeland as their number-one priority. So far as the wider Middle East is concerned, the next Israeli government will be equally robust when confronting its many foes.

Israel will continue to target any attempt by Iran to reconstitute its nuclear program, the majority of which has been reduced to rubble. Likewise, Israel will continue to press for the complete disarmament of Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and will maintain its efforts to disrupt the activities of Hizbullah and other Iranian-backed terror groups in the region.

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10/28 Links Pt2: Giving Up the Word "Zionism"; How did eco-idealists of the 70s descend into Israel-hating Greens of today?; Abdul El-Sayed: tribune of America’s Islamo-left

From Ian:

Giving Up the Word "Zionism"

Should Jews retire the word "Zionism" since it has become a lightning rod of hate?

Our enemies will persecute us given the chance. They don't play by the rules. They don't use evidence and reason. They are committed to their conspiracy theories, their resentments, their violence and their insatiable need for destruction.

The demands they place on us right now involve changing who we are - the names we choose for ourselves, our commitment to Israel. That alone should be reason enough to say "no."

There will be no relief if we give up the word "Zionist." The enemy will not pocket the win and go home. When it comes to antisemitism, every conciliation brings only further demands.

Zionism was the most important movement of Jewish liberation in thousands of years. It gave us back our homeland, our confidence, our spine.

To be a Zionist is to assert that Jews not only have rights, but also a home and a future.

To give up on that, of all words, is to concede the argument - to implicitly endorse the libel that Zionism is a genocidal, colonialist, supremacist belief.

But the first reason to say we are still Zionists is that it should be a necessary, reflexive response to anyone who wants us to submit to external pressure, as a precursor to pressing us on other things: our identity, our communities.

That's reason enough to say that, yes, we are Zionists. Look into our eyes. We won't give up the word.

Stephen Pollard: Jonathan Powell’s flawed approach to Israel is more dangerous than his wife’s views

Powell uses the Good Friday Agreement to buttress his view that the way to end conflicts is to talk to the other side. In 2008, for example (he left Number 10 in 2007) he said that Western governments should talk to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. His 2014 book is actually called Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts.

Powell’s approach is not merely naïve; it entirely misunderstands the nature of the Middle East conflict. The IRA were, like Hamas and Hezbollah, murderous terrorists. But the IRA wanted Northern Ireland’s status changed, not every Unionist dead. Meanwhile, Article 7 of Hamas’ covenant says that: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews."

Were it not for what Abba Eban famously called the Palestinians’ habit of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, it might have been that Powell’s penchant for negotiating with terrorists had worked: Oslo showed that the PLO could be negotiated with. But Hamas cannot.

The two most significant acts over Israel since Labour took office have been recognition of a Palestinian state last September and then, a year later, the imposition of sanctions on Israel.

The former is classic Powell. Even if we take it at face value, and ignore the domestic political pressures driving Middle East policy (Labour’s fear of the sectarian Muslim vote), the idea is at best naïve, at worst pure folly.

It is based on the notion that recognition without any quid pro quo arrangement is a statement of intent designed to build trust.

In reality, all it did was give a propaganda win to Hamas, who could claim that decades of talking got nowhere and it took the October 7 massacre to force the UK and other Western nations to recognise a Palestinian state.

But while Powell’s approach may be misguided, even he could see that Miliband’s decision to sanction Israel could only be counter-productive, showing Israel that the UK can no longer be trusted or even counted as an ally.

Sarah Helm may be a valid target for opprobrium, but her marital status is not what matters. It’s what her husband does that is important.

How did eco-idealists of the 70s descend into Israel-hating Greens of today?

So, what changed? Bale suggests that the most significant shift is in foreign policy. For years, he explained, the Greens saw the US as “the acme of rapacious and hegemonic industrial capitalism”, opposing Britain’s lucrative involvement in the global arms trade and its willingness to project military power overseas. Under Polanski, “Israel has taken over from the USA as the party’s bête-noir.”

Since taking the reins, Polanski’s leadership has seen the party criticised both from within and without for majoring too much on left-wing populism and too little on ecology and conservation, according to Bale.

Shahrar Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party from 2014 to 2016, described to the Jerusalem Post an "authoritarian shift” under Polanski, with party veterans increasingly uneasy about the direction of the party. “The rot [has] set in more deeply from Polanski’s tenure as leader,” Ali said. “Now we’re seeing the old guard like Caroline Lucas and Adrian Ramsay, and some of the MPs, notably Ellie Chowns, getting far more agitated around the direction of the party.”

Ali also pointed to insufficient guardrails and oversight as party membership has grown. “During the last 12 months, the party’s seen a huge increase in membership but a corresponding lack of control regarding who is entering the party and why. There are a lot more pro-Palestine campaigners, Corbynista types who were kicked out of the Labour Party because of antisemitism.”

Peter Cardwell, a Talk TV presenter, former government special adviser and author of Political Animals, offered a more damning indictment, telling me: “Islamist entryists have taken over the Greens and they have become a single-issue party. Even some of their MPs believe the antisemitic ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy is one with which they cannot be associated.”

Cardwell, who hosts an evening show covering UK politics and current affairs, added: “It seems quite a while since anyone I’ve interviewed from the Green Party has actually brought up anything to do with the environment.”

He contrasted the current trajectory of the party with past leaders, or “harmless eccentrics” such as Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas, who were at least impassioned defenders of Net Zero and public spirited representatives who truly cared about the core mission of the Green Party.

Greens are no longer a party of peace after ‘Zionism is racism’ motion

Deny, distort, and allege bad faith whenever Jews report antisemitism – it is a familiar, if disturbing, playbook from the Corbyn years. I fought against antisemitism in my own party then.

But even Jeremy Corbyn didn’t preside over a party where so many members actively voted for a discriminatory policy that is so utterly unbothered with actual peace for actual people in Israel and Palestine.

Let’s be clear – peace is the only lasting solution to the conflict in the Middle East, and it will be achieved by leaders and activists in Israel and Palestine. It will not be achieved by the Green Party of England and Wales – not least when its policy, and some of their politicians, won’t disavow “armed struggle”, and want a nation state to be actively “dismantled”.

Their policy is beyond even that advocated in mainstream Palestinian politics, and by the Palestinian Authority. I know more than most how the conflict in the Middle East is imported onto the streets of Britain.

Dealing with several antisemitic terrorist attacks in my constituency, Finchley & Golders Green, taught me that building more cohesive communities is the only way through. Politics as a unifying force, not a divisive race to the bottom.

The publication of the Bell Review underlines just how irresponsible the new Green Party is. Political discourse that favours simplistic slogans over nuanced and sensitive engagement creates a climate where antisemitism can be normalised. Three in five Jewish children surveyed had experienced or witnessed antisemitism in their school.

Our politicians cannot muddy the water by denying antisemitism or rejecting Jewish experiences.

Cllr Thompson’s views are extreme, out of step with the diverse communities she is supposed to represent, and do nothing to advance peace – not in Israel and Palestine, and not on the streets of north London.

The Green Party has turned its back on those of us who yearn for peace. I expect, if they haven’t already, those who yearn for peace will soon turn their back on the Green Party.

Israel-Palestine for Absolute F*cking Morons: Also Known As: Good versus Evil for Idiots

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10/28 Links Pt1: The ‘Israeli apartheid’ libel has completely fallen apart; Attacker shouting 'Allahu Akbar' killed outside Israeli Embassy in Serbia

From Ian:

The ‘Israeli apartheid’ libel has completely fallen apart

Yet even through all the mess and uncertainty, one thing shines bright: Israel is not an apartheid state. What was staggering yesterday was the speed and ease with which the voluble defamers of the Jewish State switched from calling it an apartheid hellhole to giddily sharing clips of Arabs and Bedouin people riding their camels to the polling station to put pressure on Netanyahu. These people know they’re lying, don’t they? Or I guess they might just be thick.

The idea that Israel is an apartheid state is such a flagrant lie you almost have to admire the nerve of those who propagate it. There are 2.1million Arabs in Israel. They have the right to vote, the right to stand for office. They have the same rights as Israeli Jews to healthcare, welfare and labour representation. They serve as High Court judges, senior diplomats, commanders in the army. They play in Israel’s national sports teams.

Indeed, I had to chuckle last month when the digital army of emotionally incontinent Israel-haters started frothing over an evil Israeli footballer who simulated the firing of a gun to celebrate his goal against Austria. They backed off a little, doubtlessly bewildered, when they discovered his name: Saied Abu Farchi. They backed off a little more when it turned out he wasn’t pretending to fire a gun at all – he was mimicking a snooker cue. The Guardian published a retraction. It was a hilarious little implosion of the Israelophobic lie machine. Not an apartheid state. Not a gun-loving people.

Comparing Israel to South Africa is not only wrong – it is also a grotesque falsehood that both demonises the world’s only Jewish nation and minimises the true savagery of Apartheid-era South Africa. South African blacks were subjected to a totalitarian system of dehumanisation. They were forbidden from voting in national elections. They were even stripped of citizenship. Expressly racist laws granted them ‘citizenship’ only in Bantustans (various ‘homelands’ fashioned by the racist government). It was a legal framework engineered for one malicious purpose: to violently strip millions of human beings of every democratic right and every ounce of dignity.

It is a crime against the historical record to use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel. And to describe the West Bank, where of course things are more complicated given the interweaving strips of Palestinian land and Israeli land, but where there is nothing that remotely resembles the horror of South Africa-style Apartheid. What Israel’s critics do, time and again, is rummage through the barbarism of history in search of labels they might stick on the Jewish State. ‘Settler colony’, ‘apartheid’, ‘genocide’ – in the gobs of Israelophobes these are not substantiated accusations but demonising libels, their aim less to explain than to exterminate the Jewish State’s legitimacy.

Everyone agrees critical thinking is good. So let’s have some of it in response to all those headlines about how the Arabs in a supposedly anti-Arab apartheid state might soon have a whip hand over the future government. The keffiyeh mob are too drunk on their racist defamations to let the light of truth in, but everyone else should give it a whirl.

For pro-Israel diaspora, Israel’s Arab voters are a point of pride. For Israeli Jews, they’re a national security threat

The results hadn’t even come in and Israel’s supporters abroad were already touting the strength of the country’s democracy by highlighting the high participation of its Arab minority.

“Israel’s Arab citizens, men and women, are turning out in historic numbers to vote. They can vote, run for office and serve in the Knesset — rights denied to many Arabs and women across much of the Middle East,” tweeted Democratic US Rep. Josh Gottheimer.

“Our critical ally in the fight against terror, Israel, is the only democracy in the region, and today shows it,” he added.

Gottheimer is one of the most staunchly pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress, and an increasingly lone voice among Democrats, which also includes Rep. Tom Suozzi.

“Today, 5.5 million Jewish, Christian, and, notably, Arab Israelis participated in the only democracy in the Middle East,” Suozzi tweeted, employing a common argument used against those who accuse Israel of apartheid.

“The elections in Israel today are a further reminder of the shared values of our two nations. Am Yisrael Chai,” he added. People wait before casting their ballots at a polling station in the Arab Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm on October 27, 2026, on the day of Israel’s legislative election. (AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP)

Another foreigner — albeit one temporarily in Israel — tried to offer the country similar accolades for the voting rights it grants to its Arab citizens.

“Today is election day in Israel… Arabs vote same as Israelis. Contentious process, but it’s a democracy — not many of those in this region!” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee wrote.

Outside the equation
The American envoy tellingly suggested that Arabs are not Israeli citizens, and he later acknowledged his poor choice of words.

But his initial detachment of Arabs from the rest of the country is one made and regularly accepted by the Jewish public in Israel when discussing the minority community’s political representation.

It is why headlines have characterized Tuesday’s election results as inconclusive, even though a majority of voters backed parties determined to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, thanks to an unprecedented 19 seats from the two Arab-majority parties. Left to right: Yair Lapid, Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Golan, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman meet at Lapid’s Tel Aviv home, September 26, 2026. (Lihi Lapid)

The anti-Netanyahu bloc is regularly crafted to omit the Joint List (12 seats) and Ra’am (7 seats), leaving it with a minority of 48 seats, after some 90 percent of the vote was counted on Wednesday.

This framing partly owes to the bloc leaders’ own remarks — Yashar party chief Gadi Eisenkot, B’Yachad chairman Naftali Bennett and Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman have all ruled out a coalition with the Arab-led parties.

Added criteria
The more Palestinian nationalist Joint List has shown little appetite for such a political partnership, but has expressed eagerness to collaborate with the other anti-Netanyahu parties to at least replace the longtime prime minister who relentlessly demonized Arab voters in the latest campaign and appointed far-right ministers who advanced measures against their communities and their Palestinian brethren beyond the Green Line.

But the more pragmatic Ra’am party is desperate to join an anti-Netanyahu coalition, and its leader, Mansour Abbas, took a series of steps to kasher his faction in the eyes of the Jewish public, including by bringing former senior police commander Yoav Segalovitz onto Ra’am’s Knesset slate.

Abbas has also for years recognized Israel as a Jewish state, meeting a key criterion laid out by Eisenkot for political partnership.

But in the lead-up to Tuesday’s election, Eisenkot added a new condition — recognizing Hamas as a terror group that Israel must destroy.

Attacker shouting 'Allahu Akbar' killed outside Israeli Embassy in Serbia, police say

An assailant armed with two knives attacked a member of Serbia's Gendarmerie guarding the Israeli Embassy in Belgrade shortly after midnight Wednesday, prompting the officer to fatally shoot the attacker in self-defense, according to Serbian authorities.

The assailant, who was a minor, allegedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" — or "God is great" in Arabic — as he slashed the officer in the face, leaving the officer "slightly injured."

Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said authorities are treating the incident as a terrorist attack, adding that security forces had been monitoring the assailant.

Dacic said the attacker supported ISIS and displayed a black flag bearing the terrorist group's symbol on his Instagram account. The attacker was believed to be Serbian and from the town of Sabac, Dacic added.

Israel's foreign ministry confirmed the "attempted terrorist attack," and said the incident was under investigation by the relevant authorities.

"The attacker was neutralized by local police. No embassy personnel were injured, and the mission was closed at the time of the incident, which occurred late at night," the statement said.

According to Serbian prosecutors, an unidentified person wearing black clothes opened the door to the security booth outside the embassy around 12:15 a.m. local time.

Prosecutors said the attacker then walked toward the officer inside, identified as D.S., and threw one of his knives in his direction, hitting the officer in the left cheek.

D.S. then retrieved his service weapon and fired multiple rounds, killing the attacker on the spot, according to the office of the Higher Public Prosecutor in Belgrade.

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10/27 Links Pt2: Yes, We Have No Bananas But please don’t blame the Jews; How UK Sanctions on Israel Ignore the Oslo Accords; As Paris lectures Israel, riots leave its Jews fearing for their safety

From Ian:

David Frum: Yes, We Have No Bananas But please don’t blame the Jews.

Do supporters of Israel have to deny the false accusation? Okay, here goes. U.S. military aid to Israel is set at $3.8 billion a year from 2019 to 2028—about one-20th of 1 percent of the total federal budget. In 2024, Congress approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies—of which, nearly two-thirds went to Ukraine, about $15 billion went to Israel, and about $9 billion was directed to humanitarian relief, including assistance for Gazan civilians displaced by the war that Hamas started. (The rest went to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region.)

Almost all U.S. assistance to Israel takes the form of credits that Israel can use only to buy American-made equipment. This assistance provides at least two direct and immediate benefits to Americans. First, it buys the United States access to Israeli military technology. By partly underwriting the development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, the U.S. has gained the use of battle-tested systems that also protect American lives. Second, this assistance lowers the per-unit cost of U.S. systems. The United States buys up to 48 F-35 fighters a year. Israel has bought 75 and is considering an estimated 25 more. Foreign orders allow U.S. arms manufacturers to improve their economies of scale. At a time when other NATO allies are canceling their orders of American equipment because they no longer fully trust the U.S. as an ally or supplier, Israeli orders enhance the efficiency of American defense production.

Meanwhile, all U.S. aid to Israel amounts to a fraction of what Israel’s critics wish to spend domestically. Despite the implications of that El-Sayed ad: Americans spend $1.1 trillion a year on groceries. Canceling aid to Israel would deliver the equivalent of about 30 hours of that spending. Per Mamdani’s complaint that Israel is to blame for bad housing in New York City: The city’s housing authority estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance at almost $80 billion, or about 20 years’ worth of U.S. assistance to Israel at present levels. Expanding Medicare to cover all American citizens would cost perhaps more than $32 trillion in additional federal spending over the first decade. Covering even one month of this plan would take 70 years’ worth of aid to Israel.

By blaming the Jewish state for the price of bananas in Michigan, the super-PAC ad calls to mind political tricks older and more disturbing than the one attributed to Johnson. In 1899, Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the 19th century, gave a speech blaming the Habsburg empire’s economic troubles on its Jews. “Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance,” he argued. “And in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.”

As with the rising cost of living in the U.S., the problem Lueger was concerned with was real. His voter base of artisans and craftspeople was coming under immense pressure from factory competition. There was not much Lueger could do about his voters’ distress. But he could point them toward a politically useful target. Now, with a modest update of Lueger’s language, an outside PAC’s closing argument in one of the most watched Senate races of 2026 blames a familiar “they/them.”

How UK Sanctions on Israel Ignore the Oslo Accords

The announcement by British Foreign Minister Ed Miliband that the UK government intends to impose sanctions on products manufactured by Israeli businesses in Judea and Samaria reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The stated justification for the sanctions is the claim that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria constitute a major obstacle to achieving a "two-state solution."

Yet the UK Foreign Minister appears to be totally ignorant of the fact that neither the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian leadership, nor any other international determination, contain any commitment to a "two-state solution." Instead, the parties committed to negotiating an agreement on the "permanent status" of the territory that could ostensibly lead to one, two or three states, or any other agreed solution. But neither the UK nor any other authority has the right to impose any solution on the parties.

In light of the UK's misguided fixation with the "two-state solution," one may ask why the UK has never imposed sanctions on Palestinians who have repeatedly rejected the "two-state solution" and openly engaged in advocating, financing and supporting terror? Why did the UK not impose sanctions on Yasser Arafat for rejecting the peace deal brokered by U.S. President Clinton in 2000, or on Mahmoud Abbas for rejecting the 2008 peace deal offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert?

On the issue of Israeli citizens constructing homes, the UK Foreign Secretary appears to be ignorant of the terms of the Oslo Accords, which allow Israel to build in the part of the territory it administers (Area C), just as the Palestinian Authority builds in Areas A and B under its jurisdiction. The accords contain no provision preventing planning, zoning, and construction by the parties in areas under their respective jurisdiction.

Countries that supported the Oslo Accords are now adopting policies, at the behest of the Palestinian leadership, that fundamentally undermine the accords. Invalidating the accords could mean invalidating the Palestinian Authority itself.

How Anti-Zionism Harms Palestinians

Moderate Palestinians know that you cannot build a Palestinian state by destroying its Jewish neighbor.

The only viable path to long-term self-determination is a political process that recognizes the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state.

The refusal of anti-Zionist Palestinian leaders to accept offers of statehood from 1937 onwards has condemned the Palestinian people to decades of war, insecurity, poverty and statelessness.

The BDS movement has also been disastrous for Palestinians. By calling for Israel's destruction, its advocates signal to the Palestinians that they should abandon all attempts at coexistence with their Israeli neighbors because their state will soon disappear.

This fuels impossible dreams. Naturally, Israel's refusal to bend in the face of such rejectionism only further embitters Palestinians committed to BDS strategy.

Before Oct. 7, 163,000 Palestinians were employed in Israel and in Judea and Samaria. Their income accounted for 20% of Palestinian GDP, injecting $4 billion into the economy.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics noted that 22.5% of employed Palestinians in Judea and Samaria worked in Israel or in Israeli communities in 2022.

After Oct. 7, Israel suspended all work permits. While some have been reinstated, more than 100,000 jobs for Palestinians have been lost.

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10/27 Links Pt1: Netanyahu and His Main Opponent Disagree - but Not on Israel's Security; Gal Gadot: ‘Each of us has the chance to make a difference at the polls’; Danon tells Albanese she’s ‘liar, fraud, stain on United Nations’

From Ian:

Netanyahu and His Main Opponent Disagree - but Not on Israel's Security

Israelis will vote on Tuesday in the first national election since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot the leading candidates.

Eisenkot has said he would end Hamas's rule in Gaza within 18 months - whether through President Trump's peace plan or by force - and told Israel Radio he supported building Israeli communities in the West Bank and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. "I am adamantly opposed to a foreign army between the river and the sea," he said, referring to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The statements leave little separating him on security issues from Netanyahu. Netanyahu's opponents "are basically saying the same thing in a more elegant way," said Tamar Hermann, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.

Israelis remain concerned about the prospect of another Oct. 7-like attack and support continued troop presence in Gaza and Lebanon. There is now greater support for building Israeli communities in the West Bank compared with previous years, according to polls.

Nicole Lampert: Even the Israeli Left can see the West is deluded about a two-state solution

And now for most Israelis, whatever their political persuasion, the blinkers have come off. And as much as we see the conflict through a particular lens – through the suffering of the Palestinians – that is just a small part of the picture. Zoom out and you see Hamas growing in power in the West Bank without having disarmed, a radicalised population, and Iran – hurt but not broken – still intent on destroying the country.

Many Israelis feel that we in the West have on the same blinkers that blinded them to the enemies who harboured so much hatred. And that by being blind to the threat around us, we are encouraging it against them and ourselves. “As long as I hear voices coming Europe and America saying that Hamas is a legitimate organisation and they are only freedom fighters who want to liberate their people, I know there is no way for both me and the people in Gaza to have a better future,” says Hila. “We will be tangled in that story and all that is happening is Hamas is gaining its money and power.”

Her cry was echoed even more forcefully from Alon Davidi, the Netanyahu-supporting mayor of Sderot, the nearest city to Gaza which had endured regular rockets from the Strip since Hamas took over in 2007 but has seen a 10 per cent rise in its population since the ceasefire with Hamas.

“With the Muslim Brotherhood influence in London, I am afraid for you, not for me,” he warned. “There is a challenge in understanding that the Islamist radical organisations really want to finish you.”

But understanding doesn’t solve the big issues. These are the issues that Israelis, as divided as they are on internal affairs, are mostly concerned by: the wars that Israel has been enduring for the past three years with Hamas, with Hezbollah in Lebanon, with the Houthis in Yemen and with Iran – the ultimate ringmaster of the three terrorist groups.

All may have been simmering, rather than raging, but they have not gone away.

So if Netanyahu – the man who presided over the intelligence failures that precipitated October 7, who allowed the extremists in his coalition to have a dangerous amount of power, who ignored the pleas of the hostage families and who oversaw his country becoming increasingly regarded as a pariah in Western countries – wins the election it is for this reason.

Many Israelis still feel safer with him despite everything. His endorsement from Donald Trump has felt like a guarantee of America’s support for at least the final two years of the US president’s term.

And if they choose his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot – a former IDF chief who is seen as just as hawkish but without the baggage – it won’t be because he looks at the Palestinian issue in a different light, but because it will be more of the same.

Israelis see that Hamas is still a danger which won’t disappear by itself, however many times Western governments pretend a few stern words will do the trick. “We want peace, of course we do,” says Hila. “We don’t want our children and grandchildren to grow up under the shadow of bombs and rockets. But how do you have peace when there is no partner for it?”

"The Pattern" Theory of Antisemitism Explains a Moral Sickness

The Pattern is a theory of antisemitism proposed by the physicist David Deutsch. It is "a contagious, irrational pattern of thinking about morality that has persisted for millennia, characterized by a compulsive need to legitimize hurting Jews for being Jews." "Legitimization" means "acting to protect [the hurting of Jews] from being deemed morally wrong, dishonorable, taboo or intolerable."

Legitimizing the hurting of Jews is how a lot of antisemitism works these days in the West. Relatively little of it involves physical violence. Most of it involves making contorted and bizarre arguments, in polite or virtuous language, in order to defend, at any cost, regimes or groups or actions whose main purpose is to hurt Jews.

The most common version now is that Israel is committing a genocide, and that the war on Hamas is driven by Israeli zeal for killing Palestinian children. Such a position regularly leads people to excuse and lessen actions of Hamas on Oct. 7 and of Palestinian terror in general.

Antisemitism is not in fact principally a hatred, as coherent as an ideology. When hating or detesting Jews is widespread too, the Pattern posits, this is "a consequence, not a cause, of the need to legitimize hurting Jews." German composer Richard Wagner had an inkling of what was at work in him and his brethren. In 1850, he described "that unconscious feeling, which manifests itself as the People's inherent disgust at Jewish existence." The impulse precedes the manifestation.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained the predisposition toward antisemitism: "In Saudi Arabia, everything bad was the fault of the Jews. When the air conditioner broke or suddenly the water stopped running, the Saudi women next door used to say the Jews did it." That there were no Jews there made no difference.

Why it works like this, only in relation to Jews, is not yet explained. But for some reason, it always does. Antisemitism is capable of uniting and mobilizing unbelievably widespread and disparate blocs. Only the Pattern accurately describes the uniquely bizarre moral contortions, contradictions and flagrantly illogical arguments required for ensuring that pathways to harming Jews remain open.

Only through recognizing that the Pattern is a moral sickness can we begin to see its magnitude and power. As Deutsch says, where there is sufficient evil, you will likely see the Pattern. "No demographic is exempt from it."

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10/26 Links Pt2: Sir Simon Schama: A howl against rising global antisemitism; Amanpour’s journalistic legacy at ‘CNN’: Neither truthful nor neutral; The BBC is anti-Jewish. Who can be in any doubt?

From Ian:

Liel Leibovitz: Abdul El-Sayed ad is vile, unapologetically Nazi drivel blaming Jews for everything bad

If you’ve ever shopped at a normal American supermarket, you’ve probably heard normal Americans having the following normal American conversation:

Normal American 1: Should we buy some bananas?

Normal American 2: We can’t afford bananas, because all of our money goes to help Israel commit genocide against innocent children in Gaza.

What’s that you say? No actual American talks like that, because Americans aren’t brainwashed zombies who believe everything is or should be about Palestine?

Nor are they antisemites who think Jews control American politics with their dirty money?

Tell that to Cenk Uygur.

Having recently been denied entry to the United Kingdom — even the pro-Palestinian Brits found his Jew-hatred excessive — the media gadfly turned to what he does best: defaming a certain Semitic minority.

Over the weekend, he released a new ad for Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, in which two Americans who look like they were cast by the Tucker Carlson fan club are moping around their local grocery store and complaining they can’t afford anything — from proper healthcare to a dozen eggs for their kids — because the federal government funnels so much of their cash to Israel.

Get that, Michigan voters? The Jews are to blame for all of society’s ills.

The Jews are our misfortune.

It’s such vile, unapologetically Nazi drivel that it’s tempting to laugh it all off, especially as the bloated buffoon who produced this bit of schlock is best known for such moral nadirs as his warm interview with David Duke and his denial of the Armenian genocide.

But Uygur’s ad strikes a deeper chord.

It reminds Jewish Democrats that no matter how hard they try to fit in, their party now truly and deeply hates them.

It’s a timely reminder, too, for Jewish Michiganders.

NYPost Editorial: Ilhan Omar hurls the ‘genocide’ charge at Israel — but it belongs much closer to home

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s apparent lies about her family and finances are bad enough, but nothing is as outrageous as the way she slanders Israel with the “genocide” libel when her own father in all likelihood took part in Somali dictator Siad Barre’s real genocide.

Omar in her memoir calls her father Nur Omar Mohamed an “educator,” yet it looks like the only educating he did was teaching Barre’s enemies lessons in brutality as a colonel in the Somali Army in the 1980s.

The Barre regime committed horrific atrocities against the Isaaq clan, killing at least 200,000 and displacing another 900,000 in a massive ethnic cleansing.

The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and virtually every other authority agrees that the campaign against the Isaaq was genocidal in intent and in practice: Government forces strafed fleeing civilians, planted land mines at wells and systematically raped girls and women.

There can be little doubt that Omar’s dad was involved in the genocide. As historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told The Post, “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.”

Nur Said and his family escaped Somalia as “refugees” following the collapse of Barre’s dictatorship, gaining asylum in the United States in 1995 — improperly, it seems, as war criminals are not entitled to refugee protections.

Omar has long been blatantly antisemitic, with comments like “Israel has hypnotized the world” and saying Jews bought control of US policy because “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”

But with her own family’s bloody history, it takes real chutzpah to join in the “genocide” slurs, e.g. by insisting Jewish students at Columbia University are “pro-genocide” and routinely condemning Israel’s supposed “genocidal” campaign against Palestinians.

Omar’s scandals include messy finances and a possibly fraudulent marriage as well as serious questions about the legitimacy of her citizenship, but this hypocrisy takes the cake.

UK antisemitism watchdog GnasherJew exposes 40 antisemitic healthcare workers in NHS

An investigative resource published on the UK watchdog GnasherJew website has exposed approximately 40 medical professionals across the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) who have used their public social media platforms to disseminate antisemitic rhetoric, propagate conspiracy theories, and celebrate violence against civilians.

GnasherJew is a team of Jewish online investigators who identify, expose, and report on antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and extremism. The watchdog group's page of Antisemitic Healthcare Professionals states, “Over recent years, we have exposed doctors, healthcare providers, and other medical professionals for posting antisemitic content on social media, supporting terrorism, and discriminating against Jewish people.”

The dossiers listed on the page detail extensive online activity by practicing doctors, consultants, surgeons, and therapists.

Among the cases documented on the page is Dr. Mazin Fageir, a senior trauma and orthopedic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

GnasherJew’s compiled dossier on him included screenshots of his X/Twitter posts showing that he shared a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing an armband with a Star of David and pushing a coffin draped in a Palestinian flag into an Auschwitz concentration camp oven beneath the phrase "ARBEIT MACHT FREI," which translates from German to “work sets you free” and was the sign on the gate at the front of the camp.

Dr. Fageir praises Hamas rocket fire on Israeli homes
In another post from May 2021, during Israel’s war in Gaza known as Operation Guardian of the Walls, Dr. Fageir replied to a post reporting a rocket striking a civilian home in Givatayim, saying, “May you live under rocket fire forever, amen,” and adding that Israeli citizens would be “wiped out one day.”

The page also includes a dossier on Dr. Nizar Ali Mhani, an NHS consultant orthodontist and Cardiff University honorary clinical lecturer.

In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Dr. Mhani posted material comparing the actions of Hamas to the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, writing, “Would anyone have the audacity or idiocy to ever suggest that the brave Jews who resisted the Warsaw Ghetto genocide used civilians as human shields because they used bunkers and tunnels?”

Another case involves Dr. Asaad Nemer Shamallakh, an anesthetist practicing within the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

Following the outbreak of the war, Dr. Shamallakh published a Facebook post on October 8, 2023, mourning family members, including his uncle and multiple children and women, who he wrote were killed in a missile strike. Writing, “Yes, the Zionist succeeded in gouging out our eyes with them, but he ignited fire and a hell in our souls that will not calm down until we are victorious, take revenge and regain our freedom and our homeland,” he added that after initial grief, “infants, girls and women from the Shamallakh family were the victims of the pigs today... and then you ask why we hate them and fight them with our nails and teeth? Yes, tears fell profusely, and hearts were broken, but we soon returned to the battlefield.”

In another October 8, 2023 post, set against a red background, Dr. Shamallakh wrote: “I swear that the battles of Badr, Uhud and Khandaq, militarily speaking, are a drop in the ocean of the Palestinian battle now. You are the Companions of the Prophet.”

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10/26 Links Pt1: Israel’s moment of truth: Knesset election pivotal to future US-Israel relationship; Israel Is Just the Pretext, The Real Target is the West; UN commission accuses Israel of war crimes in West Bank

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Liberal Jewish insecurity doesn’t come from Israeli policies

For years, liberal American Jews have sought to find a pretext to justify injecting themselves into Israeli election contests, in which those who share their blind faith in reviving the failed “two-state solution” myth have consistently been defeated. Some, like the left-wing J Street lobby, make no bones about their desire to override the verdict of Israeli democracy and to repeat the catastrophic mistake made in 2005 by the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip. They seek that for the far larger and more strategic “West Bank.”

As far as Gaza is concerned, that not only led to the creation of a Hamas terrorist state, but set in motion the events that would lead to the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, as much as the miscalculations of the Israeli military, intelligence and political establishment.

It is entirely true that both Israeli and Diaspora Jews should recognize the need to care about and defend each other, despite the fact that—aspirational rhetoric about Jewish unity notwithstanding—they don’t understand or really know that much about each other.

But the notion that “bad” nationalistic and religious Jews in Israel are embarrassing and hurting “good” liberal American Jews dedicated to coexistence is a misnomer. Whatever you may think of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those who support the current government, their primary responsibility is to defend a still besieged and beleaguered Jewish state. It’s not to make suicidal concessions to opponents who don’t want peace just so American Jews can feel better about themselves.

Diaspora Jews have every right to express their opinions about Israeli politics and policies, albeit while also showing a little humility about the fact that the Israelis are doing the fighting and dying required to ensure their nation’s survival.

American responsibilities
Instead of second-guessing their brethren, American Jews should realize that their role in the battle against international antisemitism is not to stand on the sidelines kibitzing about Israelis doing wrong. It’s to speak up and defend their own communities from people like El-Sayed, Uygur and Piker, as well as institutions that tolerate and encourage the hatred and bigotry that results in violence against them, not to mention targeting their children on college campuses.

A more realistic and productive approach to “shared responsibility” is not for liberal Jewish denominations to pat themselves on the back for not joining in antisemitic boycotts of Israel promoted by the left. Nor is it to prepare to help Democrats or even those Republicans who are hostile to the Jewish state to override Israeli voters if they don’t cast their ballots the way they want them to.

Rather, it is to deploy all of their energy and strength in confronting a growing antisemitic movement on their own front door. If they were truly interested in shouldering their responsibility to defend Jews, then they would be holding accountable those groups and politicians who prioritize partisan goals over Jewish security and well-being, betraying their constituents by supporting El-Sayed.

The failure of liberal advocacy and faith groups to mobilize against the rise of antisemitic politicians like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and their “progressive” allies is evidence of their inability to focus on what truly matters. That moral bankruptcy gives the lie to the high-minded rhetoric they deploy when bashing Israelis who don’t conform to their notions of how Jews are supposed to behave when attacked.

As they’ve made clear over and over again, these enemies of the Jews make no distinctions between the “good” Israelis that Jewish liberals root for and the “bad” ones like Netanyahu and his allies. Their complaint isn’t really about what Israel does but what it is: a Jewish state in the Middle East. And that intolerance for Jewish sovereignty and power is what is also motivating the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism Americans have experienced.

If liberal denominations and their supporters want to exercise responsibility for the Jewish future, they’d stop trying to second-guess Israelis and concentrate their minds on opposing the haters around them. If they don’t, their failings will be their own fault, not that of the Israelis.

Bassam Tawil: Israel Is Just the Pretext, The Real Target is the West

Why should anyone expect peace between the Palestinians and Israel while Palestinian leaders glorify terrorism and armed groups continue to attack Israelis?

Above all, how can there ever be peace in the Middle East if the Iranian regime is standing on its feet and supporting the jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel?

[A] central obstacle to peace: the continuing willingness of Palestinians to celebrate violence against Israelis while presenting terrorism as supposedly legitimate national resistance.

This central obstacle is not all that different from what we are seeing this month in France, as well as Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania and even South Korea, where there virtually are no Palestinians or Jews.

Israel is just the pretext. If you think that a Palestinian state, or an election defeat of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or even the disappearance of Israel itself — would solve anything, you would be wrong. What the West is up against is the desire of Muslim extremists, with a leg-up from Marxists, to overthrow the "corrupt" West and replace it with Islamic Sharia law and eventually global caliphate. Only after this transformation will the world have the "peace" part of the "Religion of Peace." Until then, as the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, vowed, "there will be struggle" (lit. jihad).

These statements, coming from terrorist groups backed by the Iranian regime, reveal a political culture in which murdering Jews is not merely celebrated as an achievement and the terrorists are elevated as national heroes — the same wish holds true for all "infidels" wherever they are.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre demonstrated the devastating consequences of an extremist Islamist ideology that treats people of other religions, in this instance Jews, as a legitimate target. In Nigeria, Islamists treat Christians as legitimate targets. In India, they treat Hindus as a legitimate target. In France and the West, they treat democratic governance as a legitimate target. It is the same war. A few clearly terrified leaders in the West — in France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Spain — might think that if there were a Palestinian state, it might keep the mob quiet for a while. Yes, until breakfast. That is also why US President Donald Trump should not make a "deal" with the rulers of Iran.

Hamas and other likeminded jihadists have no problem murdering civilians — whether in the US on 9/11, the London transit system, the Barcelona and Madrid attacks, Paris's Bataclan Theater, Nice on Bastille Day, German Christmas Markets, the Manchester concert or anywhere else. They are convinced they will be rewarded for it, not just by European politicians in this life, but by Allah in the next — so that no matter how many babies or elderly people they kill torture or mutilate, it is all good.

Iran's regime has recently slaughtered more than 36,500 of its own citizens, and continues to kill — so why should they care if they inflict the same horrors on anyone else?

Palestinian factions such as Hamas and PIJ, like the protesters throughout the West, continue to regard violence as a source of pride and a means of advancing their primary objective — in Israel, the elimination of the "Zionist entity" (Israel), and in the rest of the world, overthrowing man-made (as opposed to Allah-made) infidel democracies.

The silence of the Palestinian Authority — and other Arab and Muslim leaders — is also significant. No public statements condemning the Hebron attack have been issued by Palestinian leaders or representatives or any other Muslim world leader. They object only when it is their territory that is being bombed — which it often is by other Muslims.

Why does Moody’s rate France above Israel? The economic gap deserves scrutiny

Moody’s decision to keep France’s credit rating well above Israel’s raises a question: How much weight does the agency put on each country’s economic performance?

The US-based credit rating agency affirmed France’s sovereign rating at Aa3 over the weekend. Israel remains at Baa1, four notches lower. Both ratings are investment grade, meaning they fall within the categories generally considered suitable for mainstream institutional investment. The difference nevertheless signals that Moody’s considers lending to France substantially safer.

Sovereign credit ratings assess a government’s ability and willingness to repay its debt. They can influence borrowing costs and determine which investors are permitted to buy a country’s bonds.

Such assessments necessarily extend beyond a comparison of growth and debt figures. War, political stability, institutions, and access to financing all matter. Even so, the contrast between the French and Israeli economies deserves closer scrutiny.

Moody’s first downgraded Israel from A1 to A2 in February 2024, roughly four months after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack triggered the war in Gaza. In September 2024, it cut Israel’s rating another two notches to Baa1, where it has remained.

Israel’s economy has nevertheless demonstrated considerable resilience, acknowledged in assessments by the International Monetary Fund, the international institution that monitors economies and provides financial assistance to member countries.

France, meanwhile, has struggled with weak growth, substantial budget deficits, and political resistance to efforts to repair its public finances. Protests and unrest have added to the pressure on its government.

The question is whether the size of the ratings gap adequately reflects those competing realities.

A substantial gap in growth, debt
Consider economic output per person, a widely used measure of a country’s average prosperity.

According to the IMF figures cited here, Israel’s nominal GDP per capita is expected to reach approximately $72,400 in 2026, compared with about $51,400 in France. These figures measure output in current US dollars and are influenced by exchange rates; they do not directly measure household income or purchasing power.

The growth forecasts also differ sharply. The IMF projects Israeli economic growth of approximately 4.5% this year, while the Bank of Israel, the country’s central bank, forecasts 5.6%.

France’s economy is expected to expand by approximately 0.4%, according to both the IMF and the Banque de France, the French central bank.

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10/25 Links: The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left; There is always an idiot in the room; Nas Daily: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

From Ian:

Welcome to the era of champagne jihadism

Forget champagne socialism, we are now in the era of champagne jihadism.

The GQ poster boy of this movement is multimillionaire Hasan Piker, who has proclaimed that America deserved 9/11, that his favourite flag is Hezbollah’s and that he would ‘vote for Hamas over Israel’. Awkwardly, if he lived under Hamas, he wouldn’t be able to vote for anyone.

Champagne jihadis needn’t actually believe in God, let alone Islam. They simply need an unshakeable conviction that the West (aka the Great Satan) is the root of all evil, and that anyone fighting it must therefore be on the side of good, no matter their methods.

You can find champagne jihadis speaking from positions of privilege throughout the West. They can be found cosplaying holy war by cheering on the ‘Glorious Martyrs’ of 7 October from the comfortable surrounds of £10,000-a-year Glasgow University, where they’re probably studying queer theory – sadly not on the syllabus at schools in Gaza. Or they can be seen in New York shouting ‘long live Hamas’ during a vigil organised by Israelis for Peace to remember the Israelis and Palestinians killed since 7 October.

More recently, as rioters destroyed French businesses and historic buildings, the champagne jihadis were seen bravely manning the barricades of their verified social-media accounts. ‘Capitalism doesn’t need your grief’, commented actress and sometime Dior model Christina Ricci beneath a post lamenting the looting of a Dior store in Paris. The champagne jihadi is, in fact, the ultimate capitalist, capable of commodifying absolutely anything, including the destruction of capitalism itself. No doubt Ricci’s next Dior campaign will feature her throwing a Dior J’adore Molotov cocktail at a cop car in a $710 DIO(R)EVOLUTION t-shirt.

But the rioters are not destroying capitalism – one Bangladeshi phone shop at a time – for the love of la patrie. They’re doing it for Palestine, the flag of which has largely replaced the tricolore during the riots. I support a free Palestine, but I’m not sure how destroying a North African man’s shop in the French capital helps achieve that. Whether it’s the suffering of ordinary Gazans under Hamas or the destruction of an immigrant’s livelihood in Paris, the revolution demands sacrifice. Preferably someone else’s.

Julie Burchill: The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left

The concept of ‘suicidal empathy’ is having a moment right now. Coined by Gad Saad in his book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, it’s defined by Wikipedia as ‘a purported phenomenon in which excessive, misdirected and pathological forms of empathy are destructive for the party that exhibits them’. We see it in Western countries, whose leaders tell their shivering populations that they’re not allowed to have cheap fossil fuels because of the polar bears. We see it in young liberal women, who would have a fit if a white man whistled at them, but bend over backwards to make men from rabidly misogynistic cultures welcome in their countries – and this despite the fact that we certainly don’t need to import sex offenders when we have enough of the homegrown kind.

In extreme cases of this lunacy, we see alleged feminists voluntarily donning the hijab – the living shroud that so many brave Muslim-born women have been tortured and killed for trying to cast off. There was a shocking example of this in 2017 when Sweden’s self-proclaimed ‘first feminist government in the world’ donned hijabs and chadors on a trade visit to Tehran, in order to make themselves fit to be seen by the righteous Muslims of the Islamic Republic. They did this shortly after promising to promote a ‘gender-equality perspective’ internationally and adopt a ‘feminist foreign policy’, while ignoring the appeal by the Persian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, who had specifically asked European female politicians to defy the hijab demands when visiting Iran. Also in 2017 there was the Washington ‘Women’s March’, which involved the grotesque spectacle of many non-Muslim women voluntarily hijabing-up.

We certainly see a massive dose of suicidal empathy among the Islamo-left, from Queers for Palestine – often mocked as Turkeys for Christmas – to Owen Jones. Jones probably thinks that he’s so unique that he could sprout wings and fly if he got thrown off a Gazan roof by the local gay-haters. Do these fools honestly believe that the facts about Hamas hating homosexuals are Israeli propaganda? Or are they so bound up in The Wonder Of Me, so convinced of their exceptionalism, that they are as deluded as that strange girl on TikTok, who mused on how she would be treated if taken hostage by Hamas: ‘They would probably comfort me, make sure I had medical attention, make sure I was doing okay…’

The message is loud, clear and strikingly ignorant. Other women / gays / infidels may get raped and / or murdered, but those big angry men would see me as special. We assume that such people are simply thick, or perhaps suffering from extreme narcissistic exceptionalism. A lot of them are mad at their parents and are acting up or acting out. Is it performative social masochism, in which liberal young white folk seek to outdo each other as if in some silly and sinister sport?

David Collier: There is always an idiot in the room

Brichto says he cares about every life. Yet when Jewish people gathered to discuss the hatred threatening theirs, he promoted a film demonising Israel, mocked those who had not seen it, and questioned their concern for others.

He could have listened. Instead, he made himself out to be morally superior to the others in the room.

This from a man who has campaigned with Zack Polanski, whose Green Party has now declared that ‘Zionism is Racism’.

And having watched Naza myself, my suggestion to those in the room would be: don’t bother.

Watch October 7 footage instead. That will tell you far more about the Jewish position in today’s world and the need for a strong and secure homeland.

In the meantime, Jewish families do not have to pass Adam Brichto’s test before their fears deserve to be heard.

Perhaps Brichto should spend less time mocking those who think differently from him and more time watching October 7 footage himself.

Maybe it would make him a little less of an idiot.

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10/24 Links: Realignment and the Realities of the Middle East; Inside Israel, I see how little haters worldwide understand this election; Ireland, You're Not the Hero You Think You Are

From Ian:

Realignment and the Realities of the Middle East

Most diplomats are judged by their ability to stay out of the news, but Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack made headlines this week. Speaking at the Global Security Forum in Doha, he said, "America as the guarantor to the world, for the last 80 years, it is no longer there." Accordingly, the United States is changing its posture in the Middle East. The old arrangement, under which Americans provided security for the region's oil exports, is being restructured. "What's happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It's a message for realignment."

Barrack did not announce a change in policy so much as describe a shift that many Americans have hoped would occur for decades. The U.S. military has enabled its regional allies to break Iran's chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, but if the allies themselves could keep the Middle East relatively tranquil and allow the oil to flow freely, it would relieve a massive headache for Washington. Saudi Arabia's attempt to stop the Houthis from menacing its territory and the Red Sea shipping lanes shows how difficult this will be to accomplish without first defeating Iran.

The Doha remarks did not announce an immediate withdrawal, and the United States is still very active in the region: The military continues to protect ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, a third aircraft-carrier strike group and another Marine expeditionary unit are on their way there as rumors swirl of intense American and Israeli preparations for a post-midterm strike on the Islamic Republic.

American military might is upsetting Iran's strategy of impoverishing the world by bottling up the Gulf's resources. Thanks to the courage and skill of our service members, and the technical wizards who have found ways to bypass the Strait, more oil is leaving the Gulf now than before the war with Iran began. Gas prices remain high, but the extra output should help drive that down.

America's regional allies are still growing increasingly concerned about our steadfastness. It is not easy to draw a straight line between the foreign policies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. And as the danger from Iran has grown, princes and presidents have tried to reduce the risk of abandonment. Trump is far more willing to confront Iran than any of his predecessors, but his successors will likely be more cautious, particularly if the political cost to this administration is high.

For most of the last decade, numerous allies have tried to tie themselves more closely to the American-led regional order. Most have sought firmer security guarantees. Last year, President Trump designated Saudi Arabia as a major non-NATO ally and stated in an executive order that the United States would defend Qatar if it is attacked. Many of the Abraham Accords nations began coordinating more openly with Israel on defense issues.

The Netherlands confronts Israel while hiding from its own Jewish history

On September 22 the Netherlands began enforcing a decree that makes it a crime, punishable by up to six years in prison, to buy or sell Israeli goods produced beyond the 1967 armistice line. Customs officers at Schiphol Airport are reportedly searching luggage from Tel Aviv for wine and dates. The government says it is meeting its obligations under international law.

No Dutch decree threatens prison for a bottle of Turkish wine from occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan phosphate from Western Sahara, or a cotton shirt from Xinjiang. China, Turkey, Morocco, and many other governments with disputed territory can sell freely in Amsterdam. Of all the countries in the world, the Netherlands wrote a criminal statute for exactly one, and it is the Jewish state.

From most European countries that would be ordinary bias or hypocrisy. From the Netherlands, it is something else. To explain why, we are compelled to share our own families' experience in the country we grew up in, and about what Anne Frank's diary left out.

Many know the Dutch from cheese, herring and Anne Frank. Two of those are accurate. The diary gave the world an image of ordinary Dutch people risking everything to hide a Jewish family. That story is true, but as a portrait of the nation it is almost exactly backwards. The helpers were real, but they were rare. The diary turned these singular saviors into the whole country, and the Dutch were happy to let that be the narrative.

Here is the rest. The Dutch Nazi party had over 75,000 active members during World War 2, several times the few tens of thousands who ever joined the resistance. After the war, 425,000 Dutch individuals were accused of active collaboration with the Nazis, which is nearly 5% of the wartime population.

The machinery of persecution in the Netherlands was Dutch
The Germans did not even bother with a military administration. Unlike France or Belgium, the Netherlands got a civilian one, and the machinery of persecution was Dutch. The municipal registry handed over every Jewish address. Local police carried out the raids. The Amsterdam tram company drove Jews to the collection points and billed the occupier for the fare. In 1943, Dutch civilians formed a unit to collect a German bounty for every Jew in hiding they turned in. The Frank family was discovered, likely on a Dutch tip, and sent through that machinery to Westerbork and then east.

Of about 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, roughly 102,000 were murdered, three in four, the highest rate in Western Europe. Dutch authorities often implemented the anti-Jewish orders with zeal. Fortunately for our families, that was not the whole population: thousands of Dutch citizens disobeyed their authorities and risked their lives for their Jewish neighbors. But they were the exception. Survivors, our grandparents among them, came home to find neighbors occupying their houses, and in 1946 the city sent them back tax bills covering the years they had spent in concentration camps. Amsterdam's tram company was still chasing the German government in 1947 for payment on its final deportation run. The Dutch government did not apologize for the treatment of its Jews until 2020.

None of this obliges the Dutch to admire Israel's government or policies towards the Palestinians, and we don't doubt that the images from the war in Gaza produced real revulsion. But something else happened underneath it. The Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once put it in a sentence: the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. If the Jewish state can be cast as the perpetrator of the age, then the descendants of the people it was built for are owed nothing, and the tax bills and the tram fares and the bounties are finally paid off. The Dutch found a way to liberate themselves from feeling guilty.

When NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, began describing Israel's conduct as "genocidal violence," following a report about Gazan casualties that turned out to be incorrect, leaked emails published online showed the editor-in-chief applauding the decision and justifying it by the lack of complaint emails it received. True, there aren't many Dutch Jews left to write them.

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10/23 Links Pt2: Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history; Douglas Murray: France is a warning – our civilisation is not immortal

From Ian:

Barack Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history

Never mind 3,000 years of Jewish history, two Temples in Jerusalem, or centuries of Jewish longing for Zion. In Obama’s telling, the Jews somehow became interlopers in their own land.
MORE DISTURBING still was Obama’s treatment of Palestinian violence.

Speaking about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Obama declared that “you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”

Think about that.

When terrorists murder approximately 1,200 people and kidnap 251, the principal issue is not whether their actions will produce meaningful political change. It is that they committed an act of unimaginable barbarity.

By discussing the massacre in terms of its political effectiveness, Obama risks reducing a moral atrocity to a tactical mistake. Would the slaughter have been any less reprehensible had Hamas managed to advance its political objectives?

Indeed, no political claim, no matter how loudly asserted, confers a license to murder families in their homes or drag hostages into Gaza.

And terrorism did not begin with Israel’s founding, let alone the 1967 war. In 1929, Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in Hebron, destroying an ancient Jewish community nearly two decades before independence.

WHAT OBAMA did in Belfast was more than distort Israel’s history. He turned the descendants of ancient Israel into trespassers in their own homeland, while treating the massacre of Jews as a failed political strategy.

Obama is, of course, entitled to his own opinions. But he is not entitled to his own version of history.

The Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel long before Barack Obama entered the world stage. And they will still be there long after his shameful revisionism has been forgotten.

The Fraud Squad By Abe Greenwald

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There’s a whole lot more to the curious case of Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a.k.a. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, but it’s best to let the feds sort all that out. The point is, she’s a phony, and she’s made a career of pointing at Israel, AIPAC, the Jews, and the United States to draw attention away from her own fishy shenanigans.

On to Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed describes himself as a doctor and physician, yet he’s never held a license to practice medicine. Lately, he’s been playing up his all-American roots, but he’s also claimed to be an Egyptian citizen. El-Sayed portrays himself as a humble Michigander in a Senate race against fat cat Mike Rogers, who owns a yacht in Florida. But El-Sayed is also rich. He and his wife own properties around the world, including a place in Dubai. When asked about his family’s documented links to the Muslim Brotherhood, he simply lies. So, once again, a con artist.

And, once again, an Israel-hater and terrorist sympathizer. Like Omar, he attacks Israel and AIPAC to cast himself as a saint who wants to ensure that American resources go to Americans in need.

All the flimflam artists are on the same page these days, and it doesn’t matter if they’re associated with the “left” or “right.” Rich-kid socialists think that screaming “intifada” loud enough can drown out those calling them hypocrites. Democrats and liberal journalists regularly stage run-ins with Jews in Judea and Samaria to boost their resistance credibility. Hasan Piker—the Maoist with the $200,000 Porsche—says Israel is worse than Hamas. Tucker Carlson—who claims to have physically wrestled with demons in his bed—peddles Putin propaganda, nicotine pouches, and Jew-hatred. When Nick Fuentes inadvertently streamed himself watching gay porn, he blamed it on Zionist saboteurs.

At least these charlatans and imposters are getting something out of the anti-Semitism racket. Their earnest supporters and fans are just dupes.

Jonathan Tobin: Amanpour leaves ‘CNN,’ but a legacy of anti-Israel media bias remains

Amanpour may like to claim that she was “fiercely independent” and devoted to the facts, though that has never been true of her work. And there is no better illustration than the way she has used her influential perch to skew coverage against the State of Israel, and to depict it and its people as uniquely evil and almost always in the wrong.

Her bosses at CNN and elsewhere have not only tolerated her bias but encouraged it. Indeed, if she’s a role model for the rising generation of the press, it’s because she has practiced a form of journalism and reporting the news from her own biased perspective. From the time she first became a star during the First Gulf War to the present, Amanpour turned the skewing of stories into an art form. She always managed to make whatever she reported conform to her pre-existing ideas about the good guys to be extolled and the bad guys to be vilified.

Coverage of Israel and its ongoing battle for survival against Arab and Muslim opponents who want to destroy it demonstrated this regularly.

The list of outrageous examples of her anti-Israel bias is too long to relate here. Those who want to take a deep dive into the extensive catalogue of her journalistic malpractice can visit the CAMERA media monitoring organization’s website page devoted to her for a taste of the consistent way in which she misrepresented the truth when it came to anything about the Jewish state.

Some of the highlights include incidents such as when she said on air on Oct. 25, 2025 that the Israeli hostages held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, who were tortured, raped and starved by the terrorists, “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” Never mind that some of the hostages were actually being abused while held captive by “average Gazans.” While she was later forced to retract that lie, it was in line with the way she and others in corporate media became stenographers for Hamas, accepting every false claim the terrorist organization made, while treating anything coming from Israel with the deepest skepticism.

In 2024, she compared Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, currently serving a life sentence for five murders, to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years until he was freed and eventually became that country’s first black president.

Her toying with the truth didn’t begin on Oct. 7.

Six months earlier, during Passover, she described a terror attack in Judea and Samaria of a Jewish family in which the wife and two daughters of Rabbi Leo Dee—Lucy Dee, and daughters Maia and Rina—who were ambushed and shot and killed while driving in their car as being a “shootout.” She apologized for this, but the instances in which she “misspoke” (most of which never generated retractions) almost always demonstrated outrageous bias against Jews.

Years before that, she provoked justified anger from the pro-Israel community for her 2007 CNN documentary series “God’s Jewish Warriors.” It depicted all Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria, as well as their supporters, as mad fanatics. The series never acknowledges the Islamist extremism that defines mainstream Palestinian Arab opinion and that has impelled them to reject every attempt at compromise for a century.

Amanpour never hesitated to demonize Israelis. She also played fast and loose with Jewish history. In 2020, she compared President Donald Trump to German Nazis who perpetrated the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, a year before the start of World War II. Under pressure, she again apologized, though later retracted the apology.

In this, Amanpour was a forerunner for what would eventually become standard practice at liberal outlets like CNN or The New York Times. It’s an era in which a new generation of journalists considers it to be their obligation to promote their conception of woke truth, regardless of the facts, and dismiss efforts at objectivity and reporting both sides of a story as the “neutrality” she disdains.

And that’s why she fears any effort to return CNN or any other outlet to upholding honest journalism by Weiss and Ellison.

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