05/06 Links Pt2: Antizionism is a totalitarian conspiracy theory rotting the West from within; Michael Oren: The End of the Diaspora?; Zack Polanski is a joke that isn’t funny anymore

From Ian:

Allister Heath: Antizionism is a totalitarian conspiracy theory rotting the West from within

Antizionism is a psychosis dressed up as a theory of justice, the ultimate pathological, nihilistic, anti-Western brew, a disgusting concoction of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Third Worldism and critical theory, fused together with aspects of Nazism, Christian anti-Semitism, Islamism and Cold War Soviet nostrums.

The genocide libel justifies doing to Israel what the allies did to the Nazis. It trivialises the Holocaust, absolving Europeans of residual guilt. It banalises the actual genocidal behaviour of Islamist countries. It redefines normal military practices as illegitimate, making self-defence impossible. It rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. It rationalises intifada terrorism as freedom-fighting.

Antizionists support a neo-Inquisition that identifies and cancels Zionists. They want to force British Jews to denounce Israel, to renounce friends and family, to pass a purity test. Modelled on the Cultural Revolution’s struggle sessions and the “taking of the knee” ritual, antizionists celebrate “good Jews”, in politics or the arts, who have turned against Israel, who have proved their loyalty, who “converted”, who humiliated themselves.

The antizionists have blood on their hands. Their lies have worked. They have radicalised white Lefties, and emboldened recently arrived extremists. The hatred is atavistic, and follows the pattern of a social contagion. Each time Israel is attacked, UK anti-Semitic violence instantly surges. Anti-Jewish pogroms trigger more Jew-hatred, especially when Israelis are raped and butchered.

Psychologists call this arousal transfer: one violent act heightens other people’s aggression level. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, violence against Jews triggers a quasi-ecstatic reaction in sick minds, and a collective bloodlust ensues. Maniacs detect weaknesses, and go in for the kill. Many suffer deindividuation: they lose their sense of self, and join in the mob.

Is that who we have become? Is the Leftist-Islamist alliance here to stay? Is anti-Semitism the New Normal? I refuse to accept it. This is not Britain. This is not us.

Exclusive: Labour’s Middle East policy let antisemites use antizionism as a cover, claims Badenoch

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has told the JC she believes Sir Keir Starmer’s Middle East policy has been picked up as a “signal” by “people who use antizionism as a cover for antisemitism”.

The leader of the opposition accused the prime minister of being “too preoccupied with his own problems” to consider the consequences of actions taken to “appease his backbenchers”, including recognising the state of Palestine.

In a wide-ranging interview, in Barnet, north London, on the final day of campaigning before tomorrow’s local elections, Badenoch also called for the Nakba Day protest scheduled for May 16 in the capital to be banned.

In critical comments the day after Starmer held a crisis summit on antisemitism at No10, Badenoch suggested his own government’s foreign policy had been at least in part responsible for the situation.

Looking back to the increasingly anti-Israel line Labour took after coming to power in 2024, she claimed that Starmer “had trouble with his backbenchers, his MPs weren’t supporting [him], and so he did things like recognising Palestine while there were still hostages held by Hamas.

“That sort of action, which he did to appease his backbenchers, sent a signal to a lot of people who have been using antizionism as a cover for antisemitism.

“I don’t think he realised the repercussions of those sorts of actions.”

The JC joined Badenoch on a campaign visit to Barnet the day before local elections, as she toured seven London boroughs in a Conservative-branded black cab.

She criticised some Labour MPs, as well as Green and pro-Gaza independent politicians, for extreme anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitism.

‘Woefully inadequate’ plea deal, with just a year in jail, for man who killed elderly Jew in LA, Jewish groups say

The plea deal, under which Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, who admitted to charges related to the 2023 death of a 69-year-old Jewish man near Los Angeles, gets probation and a year in jail, is “woefully inadequate,” according to Joshua Burt, a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

It also “emboldens others to act in anger against the Jewish community,” Burt told JNS.

Alnaji, 52, pleaded guilty to all charges, including felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury, on Tuesday after initially pleading not guilty. Paul Kessler died from injuries sustained in an altercation with Alnaji on Nov. 5, 2023.

The attack occurred in Thousand Oaks, near Los Angeles, amid competing pro- and anti-Israel rallies. Alnaji struck Kessler with a megaphone, and the sexagenarian fell and hit his head on the pavement.

The Ventura County Superior Court has suggested it will place Alnaji on probation, with up to a year in jail, according to the county district attorney’s office. Erik Nasarenko, the district attorney, stated that “Alnaji should be sentenced to prison for his violent behavior, and our office strongly objects to any lesser sentence.”

Under state law, Alnaji could spend four years in jail.

Tom Dunlevy, supervising senior deputy district attorney for Ventura County, told JNS that “the judge offered probation if Alnaji pled guilty, but with a custodial sanction of up to 365 days in jail as a term of probation.”

“If the court places the defendant on probation, they then set the terms of probation,” he said. “One of those terms could be an amount of jail time up to a year in jail.”

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05/06 Links Pt1: The ‘Palestinian Land’ Myth; Asymmetric warfare and the ayatollahs; Why Is the UAE ‘All-In’ on Its Relationship With Israel?

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The ‘Palestinian Land’ Myth

The idea behind this is as follows: Jews were massacred and their property stolen by Arabs, therefore Arab Palestinians have a right to it in perpetuity. They believe this is true of Jewish property in Jerusalem and Hebron as well, for example. This is a cornerstone of anti-Zionism, that Jews have no right to life or property.

Yet there’s another point to be made here besides the fact that the mayor of New York and a legion of progressive-aligned anti-Semites revealed their unique combination of ignorance and bad faith. There are a couple of problems with the whole concept of “Palestinian land.”

The first is that “Palestinian” here is used to mean “Arab.” The protest mob reportedly even chanted “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” When they use the phrase “Palestinian land” they are declaring it Judenrein.

Second: If a Palestinian Arab personally owns a piece of land, that land is a Palestinian’s land, which is not the same thing as Palestinian national territory. From the perspective of national claims and sovereignty, it is, at most, disputed land. There have been two sovereign claimants to land on what is known as the West Bank: Israel and Jordan. Jordan relinquished its claims on the land decades ago. Israel has not annexed it. There is no Palestinian national claim to sovereignty, even if one believes that eventually turning it into Palestinian sovereign national territory is the only just resolution to the conflict.

Thus the Palestinian claim to disputed territory that was once occupied by the state of Jordan can best be described as “land the Palestinians want.” That’s fine! They are more than entitled to make demands in a negotiation process. And they should aspire to precisely the kind of statehood that Israelis—both Jews and Arabs—have built with its capital in Jerusalem. The state of Israel is a worthy model, and though successive Palestinian governments have rejected offers of statehood, perhaps they are reconsidering.

Israel did not invade a place called “Palestine” and take its land. It fought a defensive war against Jordan and won. “Palestinian land” is a concept of the future—if the Palestinians want it.

Trump and the Imaginary Iran Box By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Critics of the war in Iran like to say that Donald Trump has “put himself in a box.” I doubt that’s true. But whether or not it is, Trump is acting as if his critics are correct.

The president’s frustrating unreadability served a tactical purpose at the start of the war. He didn’t want to telegraph any moves to the Iranians or indicate where his thinking was in terms of a timeline or endgame. But after more than two months, the endless vacillations and goalpost shifts, the stop-and-start rhythm of the U.S. operation, and its ever-changing characterization are starting to broadcast a sense of distress over the war.

It could very well be that Trump is still focused and resolute about Iran’s surrendering its fissile material. His decision yesterday to pause U.S. escorts through the Strait of Hormuz and work on a new peace proposal might be yet another expression of his noble but doomed hope that Iran will finally accede to American demands. He’s always been inclined to give peace a chance.

It could also be a head fake, allowing the U.S. to catch the regime off guard with some new kinetic initiative. That’s another Trump favorite.

Relatedly, this could all be an attempt to calm energy markets in advance of more fighting or an extension of the blockade.

But to Americans and Iranians alike, Trump is signaling U.S. weakness.

Not military weakness, there are no grounds for concern on that front. Perhaps, rather, a faltering of will. That’s been the undoing of American victory for decades.

Ruthie Blum: Asymmetric warfare and the ayatollahs

In an interview on May 3, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohabi pointed out something that the West has trouble grasping about asymmetric warfare. “In the unequal battle we are facing, Iran’s armed forces will be the final victors,” he told the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network. “They fight with the culture of Ashura and consider surrender a disgrace for themselves.”

For Shi’ite Muslims, Ashura is a memorial marking the anniversary of the death of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Though he was killed during the Battle of Karbala in 680 C.E., Husayn is still held up as a hero who didn’t surrender to the massive army of the caliph, Yazid.

“Our model in today’s wars is [that] of Ashura—steadfastness in an unequal battle,” Mohabi said, describing Tehran’s current predicament.

Referring to the United State and Israel, he went on, “Our enemies are specifically one country and one regime with enormous equipment. America brought its latest defensive and offensive equipment to the battlefield. Our equipment and the number of our forces are very unequal compared to theirs.”

However, he said, “our spiritual power enabled us to stand against them.”

To clarify, he added, “In this arena, our fighter either wins or is martyred. Martyrdom is happiness for him. In such a situation, our forces do not falter.”

This wasn’t rhetorical bravado. It’s the essence of radical Islamism and the reason that the phenomenon has been nearly impossible to combat, let alone eradicate.

Mohabi admitted that Iran’s forces are outmatched in conventional terms, with fewer resources and an inferior arsenal. He didn’t mention his regime’s goal of obtaining nuclear weapons, of course. Not only has the Islamic Republic insisted that its nuclear program was always for “peaceful purposes,” but the enriched uranium in its possession was and is President Donald Trump’s casus belli.

So Mohabi steered away from that particular topic. He focused instead on the main weapon that compensates for the deficiencies he acknowledged: the willingness, even desire, to die as martyrs for the cause of regional and worldwide hegemony.

Herein lies the weakness of liberal democracies in the face of barbarism. Such societies sanctify life and human rights, and their militaries operate under legal, ethical and psychological restraints.

In the United States and Israel, for example, soldiers are trained to minimize civilian casualties and the governments that send them into battle and are held accountable by courts and public opinion. Jihadist states and organizations scoff at these practices, viewing them as the enemies’ Achilles’ heel.

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05/05 Links Pt2: Jews Now Live in a World Where Right and Wrong Have Been Reversed; Jordanian pleads guilty to lesser charge in murder of pro-Israel protester Paul Kessler

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Jews Now Live in a World Where Right and Wrong Have Been Reversed

The Palestinian cause and the fictitious Palestinian identity that underpins it are devoted to the destruction of Israel and the theft of the Jews' own ancestral history in the land. Far from being moral, it's an evil cause. The stock in trade of the Palestinian Arabs is to project their own crimes onto the Jews and to accuse the Jews in turn of committing atrocities of which they have, in fact, been the victims. Everyone who has perpetrated these lies is an accessory to murderous violence against Jews.

Horrifyingly, anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become so deeply ingrained in the West as an unchallenged narrative presenting Israel as the fount of all evil that they've developed into a belief system that defines an individual's moral identity.

The shocking outcome, therefore, is that the West has framed antisemitism and anti-Zionism as conscience itself. Small wonder that Jews and all decent people feel as if they're now inhabiting a looking-glass world where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor have all been reversed.

Seth Mandel: Progressive Radicals Face No Resistance

Yesterday, Axios reported that longtime anti-Israel campaigner Maher Bitar, a former Biden administration intelligence official, will essentially be running the Democratic Party foreign-policy group founded by Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes. While Rhodes is held in low regard in the foreign-policy world, Sullivan is not. But the former national security adviser appears to be handing the torch to a veteran of the anti-Semitic BDS campaign against the Jewish state.

The key takeaway here is that there is almost no resistance within the party structure to the ascendant anti-Zionist contingent. There won’t be a fight for the party; there will simply be a process in which the old hand the reins to the new.

The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported that Chris Rabb, a state lawmaker running for Congress, shared a social media post that blamed the Bondi Beach massacre on “Zionists,” pushing a conspiracy theory that the whole attack was a Jewish false flag.

Rabb blamed a staffer and said he condemned the sentiment. But while Rabb’s post was grotesque, it wasn’t necessarily shocking. Last week, he campaigned with prominent progressive anti-Semitic influencer Hasan Piker, who backs Hamas over Israel and has used various slurs to refer to Jews.

As Jewish Insider notes, Rabb is in a competitive primary contest, but he has received the backing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the leader of the anti-Israel congressional bloc and possible 2028 presidential candidate. He was also endorsed by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

And today the Washington Free Beacon reports a rather unsettling detail about one of the Democrats running for the party’s nomination for a New Jersey congressional seat. Adam Hamawy “was an associate of terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman—the ‘Blind Sheikh’—and served as a defense witness at the trial that ultimately saw the cleric put away for life, court records show.” The Beacon piece contains a number of interesting details about the friendship between Hamawy and the man connected to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Jonathan Tobin: Anti-Zionists who condemn antisemitic crimes are gaslighting us

Last week’s stabbing attack against two Jews in London’s Golders Green neighborhood was just the latest instance of what even local police agreed was an “epidemic” of antisemitic crimes. It was just one of many such incidents in the United Kingdom, the United States, continental Europe and Australia over the course of the last 31 months in which Jews were subjected to violence merely for being conspicuously Jewish.

Since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, such incidents have become commonplace. The connection between the two is not a coincidence. That’s because the Oct. 7 attacks were the spark for a global surge of Jew-hatred. It’s rooted in the idea that the war to destroy Israel—for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 were just a trailer for what would happen to the rest of the Jewish state should Hamas and its allies triumph—was a righteous cause that enlightened progressives should support.

And in the name of this supposedly righteous cause of ending the one state on the planet that is Jewish, where half of the world’s Jews just happen to live, a lot of harm is being done to Jews elsewhere.

They don’t want to be called ‘antisemites’
The curious thing about the people who support these awful ideas is that they don’t wish to be considered antisemitic.

Listen to those like leftist podcaster Hasan Piker and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who openly support Hamas, and they’ll tell you that while they support the destruction of Israel, they want to assure Jews in the Diaspora that they have nothing to fear from them. Or, at least, not as long as they don’t support Israel.

They are adamant in asserting that anti-Zionism—a movement that denies rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to any other group or people—is not the same thing as antisemitism. Indeed, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, they are proud of their public advocacy against the Jewish state and their nonstop floating of lies about it committing horrible fictional crimes while denying or rationalizing the actual crimes committed against it and its people.

At the same time, they deny that this has anything to do with the unprecedented worldwide increase in acts of Jew-hatred. Piker was at pains to make this argument in, of all places, JTA, which was once the respected primary source of news about the Jewish world. He claims that he’s trying to fight antisemitism while leading the charge in favor of demonizing the Jews of Israel and their supporters abroad.

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05/05 Links Pt1: Alan Dershowitz: Why Are Some in Our Media Cheering for Iran?; Trump pauses Strait of Hormuz operation; What We Learned From Today’s ‘Palestine Action’ Verdict

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: Why Are Some in Our Media Cheering for Iran?

It is shocking how many people with major media platforms would rather see Iran win its battle to preserve its nuclear program.

Both the U.S. and Israel are taking proper military action against a tyrannical and unlawful regime that might well use a nuclear arsenal against its enemies, were it be allowed to develop one.

Preventive wars against threatened nuclear attacks are justified both morally, legally, and under any theory of just war.

No decent person should be on Iran's side or remain ambivalent about the need to defeat Iran's genocidal ambitions.

No decent person should support Iran's repression and murder of tens of thousands of its own citizens just this year.

There can be little dispute about these democracies being on the right side in their conflict with a tyrannical regime sworn to their destruction.

The First Amendment gives Americans the right to cheer for Iran if they want, just as it gave them the right to cheer for Nazi Germany. But that doesn't mean that others don't also have the right to point out that they are wrong on the merits.

Palestinian activist says UK ‘betrays democracy’ by continuing to back Mahmoud Abbas

A Palestinian political activist has accused Britain and other Western governments of “betraying Palestinian democracy” by continuing to treat Mahmoud Abbas as the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people.

Samir Sinijlawi, an East Jerusalem-born activist and former Fatah youth figure, made the comments at an event at JW3 in north-west London, where he warned that the lack of democratic renewal in Palestinian politics was “dangerous for Palestinians and for Israelis”.

Speaking at Emerging Partners: Perspectives of a Palestinian Insider, Sinijlawi said: “Each leader of yours, when he hosts Abbas and receives him as a legitimate leader of the Palestinian, he is betraying the Palestinian democracy. He’s betraying everything that I am fighting for.”

He added: “We deserve democracy. You cannot tell us that democracy is good for you… and it’s not good for us.”

The event, for which Jewish News was a media partner, brought together organisations including We Democracy, UJS, Progressive Judaism, Yachad and the New Israel Fund, and was chaired by Sunday Times journalist Josh Glancy.

Aizenberg: Hamas Confirms: October 2023 IDF Strikes on Homes Targeted its Commanders

In October 2023, Israel’s opening air campaign in Gaza was often characterized as indiscriminate, with family homes struck and incidents catalogued as “civilian-only.” That conclusion rested on a faulty assumption: absent proof of combatant status, the dead were treated as civilians. In Gaza’s operating environment, where Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) dress in civilian clothing for combat, use private homes for weapon storage, as their leaders admit, as well as for command centers and tunnel shafts, that assumption was always going to misclassify outcomes.

Airwars is an NGO that catalogues fatalities in conflict and connects them to specific airstrikes. Its methodology in Gaza also defaulted to treating all those killed as civilians. Since Hamas hides its losses as a matter of policy, and Gazan residents also avoid disclosing combatant deaths, it follows that Airwars would classify the large majority of attacks as civilian-only. This produced the absurd claim that 96% of 606 assessed IDF airstrikes in October 2023 killed only civilians, which in turn fed the broader allegation that the IDF was deliberately targeting civilians and reinforced genocide claims.

That record is now changing. As Hamas and PIJ release martyr notices, often identifying commanders, many October strikes can now be reexamined in light of new disclosures. Incidents once cited as evidence of indiscriminate bombing are now being shown to have killed commanders located in residential structures. Civilian casualties remain and must be accounted for, along with the fact that Hamas and PIJ, by strategy, do not operate from traditional military bases. But the emerging evidence directly challenges the claim that these strikes lacked legitimate military targets and calls into question a methodology that defaulted to “civilian-only” in a context where combatant status was systematically concealed.

The following examples focus on strikes on family homes that were originally labeled “civilian-only” but are now shown to have killed commanders. They represent just a small sample of what has since been disclosed.

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05/04 Links Pt2: Mourner in Zion Dara Horn reviews Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s memoir; The Chilling Truth Behind the New School’s War on Hillel; Vogue’s Glossy Whitewash of Francesca Albanese

From Ian:

Mourner in Zion Dara Horn reviews Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s new memoir.

I have never met Rachel Goldberg-Polin—though saying this feels somehow false, since at this point, every English-speaking Jew on earth is in a parasocial relationship with her. We have seen her at rallies fighting for her then still-living son; we have heard her voice on podcasts weeping for her executed child; we have seen her on television, her fight and her pain always on public display. And since Jews are a global family, I have, inevitably, also had some indirect contact with her. A mutual acquaintance told me that, remarking on the title of my book People Love Dead Jews, she suggested that the next one should be called People Hate Live Jews (ultimately I chose something even worse). This second-hand comment has stayed with me because it felt like more than a dark joke. It hinted at something that the public Goldberg-Polin, despite her enormous emotional exposure, rarely if ever expresses: rage.

Part of the galvanizing appeal of the cause of the hostages for worldwide audiences was that the hostages fit into the category of the kind of Jews that non-Jewish (and Jewish diaspora) audiences are more comfortable with: Jews who are powerless. This is one of the reasons for the broad acceptance of Holocaust memorialization, a history in which Jews are generally presented as powerless and pitiable victims. Goldberg-Polin is a woman of unfathomable energy and courage, but this unexamined and unconscious attitude toward Jews was part of what made it possible to share her public grief on mainstream American media outlets like 60 Minutes. It would be inconceivable, for instance, for the mother of a fallen IDF soldier to do so.

In Israel, in contrast, young Jews who have been killed fighting in Gaza are mourned alongside the civilians murdered or kidnapped on October 7. Everyone understands they are in the same fight for their lives, against an enemy that makes no distinction between soldiers and civilians. In her book, Goldberg-Polin dramatizes this equivalence with a moving personal story. She describes her fellow synagogue congregant Oshrat’s son Yuval, who constantly yelled Hersh’s name as he fought in Gaza, hoping to find his friend. At the end of Goldberg-Polin’s shiva, Oshrat was the one who recited the ritual statement “Get up from your mourning” and “took my broken paw in her cool, confident hand, and pulled me up into my New World.” A few months later, when Yuval was killed in Gaza, “it would be my hand to put into Oshrat’s broken paw, pulling her up into The New World where we both now live.”

When We See You Again is a deliberately apolitical book, almost stridently so, and, almost certainly, necessarily so. Beyond some important (and tragically not obvious) statements about mourning civilians on both sides, Goldberg-Polin makes no comments at all about the military or other choices of the Israeli government, which hostage families in Israel often vocally opposed. There was an inescapable—and for Hamas, intentional—tension in the official dual war aims of returning the hostages and defeating Hamas. The cause of freeing the hostages rightly became a near-universal obsession in Israel and the wider Jewish world, both because of the long Jewish tradition of ransoming captives and because of the sheer human horror of elderly people and children, even babies, being kidnapped, and innocents of all ages being shackled, beaten, starved, tortured, and in many cases sexually assaulted. But this meant negotiating with people who are “not like us,” people who regard murder, kidnapping, rape, and torture as legitimate, and it meant accepting their ever-more-outrageous demands, most consequentially the release of hundreds of convicted terrorists, many of them murderers. In 2011, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was, of course, returned to Gaza, along with a thousand other convicted terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit. The recent hostage horror show threatened to turn Jewish existence into a sickening real-life Trolley problem, in which “Bring Them Home Now” might be a track toward generating even more bereaved mothers in the future.

In discussing Hersh’s death, Goldberg-Polin invokes an ancient folktale retold by Victor Frankl as “Death in Tehran,” though it is more popularly known under Somerset Maugham’s title “Appointment in Samarra.” The point of the story is that no one can escape their predestined appointment with death. But, as she knows better than anyone, her son’s murder was not a natural disaster or force majeure; it was the result of human perpetrators making monstrous choices in “lands where we should not go,” including not only Gaza but also Qatar and Iran. Perhaps this is what drew her to a story called “Death in Tehran.”

Goldberg-Polin’s memoir is about her terrifying immersion in personal grief, not a confrontation with the political evil that produced it. But as she guides her readers through that gutting grief with all her luminous goodness and courage on display, it is easy to imagine her finding her why, in her (and our) horrific new world, where we all desperately need more goodness and courage like hers.

The prophet Jeremiah also gave us the divine response to the original mother Rachel’s wail from Ramah: “Restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears. For there is a reward for your labor… and there is hope for your future.” There is.

Seth Mandel: The Chilling Truth Behind the New School’s War on Hillel

Buried in a 2007 decision by Israel’s high court is the key to understanding an important part of the Arab-Israeli conflict that has migrated to America and the rest of the West.

The case illuminates recent events at the New School and elsewhere.

A Palestinian connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization, was petitioning the Israeli courts to nullify a decision that would stop him from being able to travel abroad. Officials argued that he’d be a security threat. His attorneys argued that he was also running a “humanitarian” NGO, al-Haq, and thus had a right to continue that work abroad.

The infamously left-wing court agreed, through gritted teeth, that the security officials had presented a convincing case that the man was a threat: “Nevertheless, the current petitioner is apparently acting as a manner of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, acting some of the time as the CEO of a human rights organization, and at other times as an activist in a terror organization which has not shied away from murder and attempted murder, which have nothing to do with rights; rather, they violate the most basic right of them all, the most fundamental right that without which there are no other rights—the right to life.”

That description of al-Haq and its director—terror operatives masquerading as NGO directors and using their “human rights” group as a free pass to kill Jews—is a Rosetta Stone for our age. And why would an NGO director be the perfect job for a terror operative? The Israeli high court revealed this, too:

“A director of a human rights group has a special status similar to that of journalists or humanitarian workers; the security concerns must be concrete to justify hindering his freedom of movement.”

Today we are plagued by these “special status” holders.

Last week in New York, the student senate of the New School, a private university, voted to stop all funding of the local chapter of Hillel, the campus Jewish center. Though framed as some sort of stand against Israeli aggression, this move was obviously and undeniably anti-Semitic. Terror groups and their American public-relations pets tried to claim that Hillel was guilty of funding war crimes because it supports the IDF.

One of the sources of information for this claim? The Hind Rajab Foundation, a Hezbollah-linked Mr. Hyde dressed up as humanitarian Dr. Jekyll.

How Europe's classrooms are being turned into factories of antisemitism

What are Irish, Spanish, and Norwegian children learning about Israel and the Jewish people? What happens when a teacher shows a classroom of children photographs of Palestinian children from the Nakba alongside photographs of Holocaust survivors liberated from a death camp? When do textbooks describe Auschwitz as a "camp for prisoners of war"? When does an education system teach that Jews promote violence? When do new curricula present the war in Gaza as "genocide"?

Across Europe, a slow but dangerous shift is underway. A one-sided narrative is seeping into classrooms – sometimes officially, more often as the personal views of teachers shaped by the society around them. The result is a generation that may grow up with a distorted image of Israel, Judaism, and history.

Three countries illustrate the problem with particular sharpness: Ireland, Spain, and Norway. In Ireland, a near-total public consensus against Israel has taken hold, expressed across the entire political spectrum and throughout the media. In Spain, where 82% of the public believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, even news outlets that are supposed to be objective use the term in their reporting.

The anti-Israel line taken by the media and by a government that leans on the radical left – reinforced by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's own claim that Israel is committing genocide – has created a public atmosphere in which Israel is seen as a malevolent and murderous actor.

Norway presents a similar picture. 88% of members of the country's largest trade union – which includes Norway's largest teachers' association – voted in favor of a boycott of Israel.

Here, too, power lies with a left-wing government that depends on the radical left. The discourse around "the genocide Israel is committing" has been ongoing since early 2024, and most of the media takes a pronounced anti-Israel line.

Ireland: when an error becomes policy
Orly Degani, a board member of the Jewish Community Council of Ireland, has been closely monitoring what is being taught in Irish schools. The picture that emerges from the textbooks, she said, is alarming. "Auschwitz is described in them as a 'prisoner of war camp' rather than an extermination camp. Judaism is presented as a religion that believes the only way to achieve justice is through violence.

"Another book, intended for children aged 4–5, puts forward the narrative that Jews did not like Jesus – classic antisemitism passed down from generation to generation." According to Degani, the problem is not necessarily malicious intent on the part of teachers, but a lack of knowledge and oversight. The Irish education system allows a wide range of bodies to publish textbooks, as long as they cover the subjects set by the government – but there is no meaningful oversight of the content.

"The government decides on the subject areas, and then any educational body that wants to can go and print a textbook. When we explained to the Ministry of Education that this produces problematic content, they said it was not within their control and that it was the publisher's responsibility."

The examples Degani cites are not theoretical. An official examination by the State Examinations Commission listed Palestine as a place where there are "many Jews." "The exam went through checks," Degani said. "It was approved by educational authorities, and it went out to every school. What does a child think when they receive that page?"

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05/04 Links Pt1: Australia was ‘golden’ but not anymore, Jews tell royal commission; Iran fires missiles and drones at UAE; South Korean ship attacked near Strait of Hormuz

From Ian:

The Violence They Wanted By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. Israel, overall, is thriving. Its terrorist enemies are on life support and their main patron is paralyzed and destitute. At the same time, it’s never enjoyed closer ties with a multitude of Arab neighbors, some of whom it’s providing with defense assets. The Israeli stock market and birth-replacement rate both keep breaking records.

You’d think that if a movement had failed as conclusively as the supposed free-Palestine crowd, it would either rethink its approach or begin to fall apart. But it’s done the opposite. With this record of failure on its stated aims, the movement is now becoming bolder and, sadly, more accepted by important figures outside its ranks.

What, then, keeps it going? Why are unapologetic Hamas supporters now driving through the gates of the Democratic and liberal establishment to stake their claim at its heart?

Because, while Gazans are miserable and Israel is flourishing, the “anti-Israel” thugs have succeeded in one powerful way. Around the world, they’ve unleashed an unprecedented storm of hateful violence. In synagogues and schools, at religious celebrations, and on campuses and the streets of Jewish neighborhoods, they’re getting Jews killed for being Jews.

It’s what sustains them because it’s what they wanted from the start. And history shows that cowards bow before those who embrace uncompromising violence. The beasts are attacking, and the cowards are bowing.

The Jews, in the face of threat and despite the reality of death, stand upright—in Israel and the Diaspora. We must because no one else will, because the threat isn’t going away on its own, and because it is only courage that defeats depravity.

Jay Solomon: The Iranian Terror Group Targeting Europe’s Jews

Counterterrorist experts tracking HAYI believe most of its recruitment is happening online, rather than by the IRGC activating local cells or dispatching terrorists into Europe. These experts said HAYI is using Telegram, in particular, due to its high engagement rate and relative anonymity.

In one recent Telegram chat, an anonymous recruiter asked a potential operative in the UK: “What expertise and abilities do you have?” The potential operative replied: “Open to hearing what you need, depending on what I would get in return.”

“Print out a photo of Trump and Netanyahu, set it on fire in one of London’s famous streets, and send a video of it,” the recruiter then wrote. “This is the first step to building trust, and I will pay for it,” the recruiter continues. The payments would be made in cryptocurrency, according to the Telegram messages, which were viewed by The Free Press.

U.S., European, and Israeli officials are particularly alarmed by HAYI’s use of teenagers and criminal gangs, many of whom appear to display no loyalty to Iran or the IRGC. And those arrested often aren’t Muslim.

The foiled March 28 attack on Bank of America’s headquarters in Paris offers a case in point. French police arrested four men, aged 16 to 21, while they attempted to ignite a large pyrotechnic device at the bank’s entranceway in the city’s eighth arrondissement. Police investigators learned that the eldest man recruited the teenagers by offering them between 500 and 1,000 euros to carry out the operation.

HAYI’s apparent use of amateurs in Paris likely diminished the effectiveness of its operations. But that doesn’t mean they lacked ambition, according to Parisian police authorities. France’s Le Monde, citing forensic experts at the Paris Police Prefecture, said the device planted by the HAYI team was “very high power” and could have generated a “fireball several meters in diameter.”

HAYI’s terrorism and social-media operations are intertwined to maximize their propaganda value, counterterrorism experts said. The recent attacks on Jewish targets in the Netherlands, including a synagogue and religious school, were followed minutes later by online posts of videos and comments. “The close proximity of these channels to Iranian-aligned networks, combined with the near-immediate reporting and access to attack footage, suggests that they were informed of the incidents almost in real time, either directly by the perpetrators or via intermediaries,” Julian Lanchès of the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague wrote last month.

U.S. officials said there has been no evidence that HAYI has sought to conduct operations inside the U.S. But there is mounting concern about that possibility now that the U.S.-Iran war has entered its third month.

Tehran has shown a growing willingness to operate inside the U.S. in recent years, often using proxies and criminal gangs. Last year, two members of an Eastern European criminal syndicate were convicted of trying to assassinate Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American journalist who lives in New York, on the orders of the Iranian government. And in 2022, a Lebanese American man named Hadi Matar stabbed and nearly killed novelist Salman Rushdie at a cultural festival in upstate New York. Matar is facing charges of providing material support for Hezbollah. In March, another Lebanese-American man allegedly rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue in a terror attack that the FBI says was “Hezbollah-inspired.”

The surge in anti-Israel activism on U.S. college campuses also could provide an organization like HAYI with a rich environment to draw recruits to its cause, counterterrorism officials told me. “Could it translate across to the U.S.?” asked Roger Macmillan, a London-based counterterrorism expert who has closely tracked HAYI’s emergence over the past two months. “Of course it could.”

Palestinian Authority's 'Reforms': Incitement in Classrooms, Empty Promises to the West

[T]he European Parliament has condemned Palestinian Authority textbooks for the seventh year in a row, citing the ongoing defamation of Jews, incitement to violence, and the promotion of jihad (holy war) as well as "martyrdom." Members of European Parliament also called for future PA funding to be strictly conditional, based on genuine reform. Demanding conditions and accountability is overdue but extremely welcome.

"[T]he PA [Palestinian Authority] has repeatedly and explicitly rejected calls to reform its curriculum. In public statements... senior PA officials—including the Prime Minister, Minister of Education, and curriculum directors—have all affirmed their unwillingness to make even minor changes to school textbooks." — Impact-se, November 2025.

"A central component of the PA curriculum's antisemitic narrative is that it categorically rejects Jewish presence in the region. Not only has content teaching Jewish history and the origin of the Jews been ejected entirely from PA textbooks since 2016, but the current curriculum explicitly refutes the very existence of a Jewish people.... The PA curriculum encourages students to believe that they share the same goal: of expelling the colonizing 'invaders,' the Jews, from the Palestinians' indigenous homeland, presumably to Europe, as they are presented as entirely foreign to the region." — Impact-se, November 2025.

In fact, the reverse is true. In 1977, senior Palestine Liberation Organization official Zuheir Mohsen openly admitted in an interview in the Dutch daily Trouw: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism."

The Jews have lived in the area, such as Judea, continuously for nearly 4,000 years; they are the indigenous people as much as the Arabs are.

The PA's own Ministry of Education recently admitted that textbooks currently used in schools "have not been revised at all."

No one is asking the Palestinians to embrace Zionism. However, any society that aspires to statehood and peaceful coexistence -- also not at all certain -- must prepare its next generation for nonviolence, mutual recognition, and respect. So far, there is scant evidence that these results are even in the bottom quadrant of the Palestinian leaders' goals.

This systematic indoctrination has poisoned the minds of generations, making reconciliation far off, if possible at all.

The funding of terrorism must stop. Aid should not subsidize incitement. It should demand the total cessation of terrorism and the total cessation of terrorist funding.

Until such a time, the PA's promise of reform will continue to ring extremely hollow, and peace will be out of reach.

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05/03 Links: Let's Put an End to Ingrained Jew Hate in Britain; Here’s how to crush Tehran in three moves; The Deafening Lies about Israel; Clash Report, Unmasked

From Ian:

Lord David Frost: Let's Put an End to Ingrained Jew Hate in Britain

I thought Jewish people were surely as safe in Britain as anyone else. Apparently the British Jewish community must now live in fear. It sees its schools and synagogues under airport-style security and watches its children drilled in responses to attacks - while the rest of the population need do none of these things.

Sadly, security at Jewish institutions has been necessary since the mid-1990s in response to largely foreign-inspired Palestinian and Islamist terrorism. But what we have been seeing recently is different. Our Jewish fellow citizens fear to wear Jewish symbols in the street, to overtly identify as Jewish, and, it seems nowadays, even to go about their normal business in Jewish areas. In short, they are facing a growing campaign of intimidation and systematic incitement to violence.

This has happened because we have let it happen. The political and social response to the Gaza war - caused, let us not forget, by a horrific pogrom of murder, rape, and mutilation - has created a hostile environment. The Government's recognition of "Palestine" - an action which has made precisely zero difference on the ground - has only served to legitimize all those who want to think that "Zionists" are bad people and deserve everything they get.

We don't have to put up with the terrorizing of Jewish people in Britain. We are going to have to over-correct until something like normality has returned. For now, pro-Palestine marches should be prohibited. Open expressions of antisemitism in the mass media, in mosques, or on the streets need to be banned and prosecuted. We should deport foreign nationals who are guilty of this and revoke British citizenship for those who have acquired it. We need exemplary prosecutions and sentences for any kind of violence or intimidation of the Jewish community.

In short, we need to get tough if we are to reset the norms of civilized behavior in a democratic liberal state. I don't particularly welcome any of this. But for now, either we ignore the problem and see it get ever worse and ever harder to tackle, or we face up to it while we still can. Do we want to be the generation that let the Jewish community be intimidated into silence or out of the country? Shame on us if we do. But I think, even nowadays, we are better than that.

Kemi Badenoch: Extremists spreading Jew hate have no place in Britain

This is what the Green Party is pandering to – that alliance between the so-called progressive Left with the Islamist extremists – to the extent that they don’t even talk about the environment anymore. It is this ideology which has infiltrated many parts of our society and normalised hostility towards Jews.

The first place to start is a moratorium on marches relating to Israel and Palestine because they are being used as a cover to promote violence and intimidation against Jews. When these marches first started, I was Equalities Minister. My view then was that those who glorify the massacre of Jews have no place on our streets.

Next, we should crack down on hate preaching, extremist organisations, and ideologies that glorify violence and undermine Britain.

Back in 2021, a convoy of cars draped in Palestinian flags drove through Jewish neighbourhoods while a man’s voice, amplified by a megaphone, shouted: “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.” These men were arrested, but the CPS dropped the charges. If people get away with this sort of hatred, and this sort of behaviour has no consequences, then these crimes will escalate.

The Prevent programme must be more vigilant when it comes to cases that pose a credible threat to Jews. There is a disturbing mismatch between the proportion of Prevent’s caseload on Islamist extremism, which is just 10 per cent, and the head of MI5 saying that three quarters of their counter-terrorism caseload is Islamist extremists.

The Golders Green stabbing suspect, Essa Suleiman, was known to Prevent, but his case was closed. Now is the time for a comprehensive audit of counter-terrorism investigations involving anti-Semitic motivation to ensure nothing is missed. The Prime Minister needs to be bold if he’s going to deal with this threat. Warm words and more money for security are not enough.

The Iranian regime and its proxies are fuelling anti-Semitism on British soil. Just this week we learnt that the Iranian Embassy in London urged Iranians in Britain to recruit their children as martyrs and “sacrifice their lives for the homeland”. Britain should not be a recruiting ground for extremism.

I have offered to work with Sir Keir Starmer to fast-track legislation to ban the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). But he should implement Jonathan Hall KC’s recommendations and designate the IRGC as a hostile force and criminalise recruitment or displays of support for them.

Britain has been a sanctuary for Jews for hundreds of years and must continue to be so. Israel cannot be the only safe country in the world for Jews, who have been driven out of so much of the Middle East. We must all play our part in making anti-Semitism shameful. It cannot remain acceptable in supposedly polite dinner party conversations.

The Conservative Party is clear: if you want to spread hatred and violence towards Jews, you are not welcome in Britain.

Australia to hold first antisemitism commission hearing after Bondi Beach interim report

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is set to begin its first block of hearings on Monday, following the presentation of an interim report regarding the Bondi Beach massacre.

The commission, formed in the wake of the December terrorist attack to investigate government and societal failings, will hold the hearings through May 15.

The first hearings will focus on defining antisemitism and examining its historical and contemporary manifestations, and listening to the experiences of Jewish Australians, as well as on metrics for assessing levels of antisemitism in institutions and society.

Several major Jewish Australian institutions said in a joint statement that the hearings would be an opportunity for community members to have their voices heard, and that they hoped the commission would use their testimonies to develop practical recommendations.

“Giving evidence about these experiences takes courage,” said the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Australian Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Zionist Federation of Australia, National Council of Jewish Women Australia, Dor Foundation, New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, and Jewish Community Council of Victoria.

“Many of those appearing are speaking publicly for the first time. They are doing so because they believe this country can be better and because they want the commissioner to hear their truths and recommend changes that will make all Australians safer.”

The Jewish groups said that students would speak about rising campus hostility, while congregants would share what it was like to visit Jewish sites under armed guard and how workplaces had become uncomfortable.

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05/02 Links: With gallows humor, UK author Howard Jacobson takes on post-Oct. 7 ‘bloodlust’ for Jews; Whisper it, but Trump’s blockade is working; Why Anti-Zionism Is Really Just Envy

From Ian:

With gallows humor, UK author Howard Jacobson takes on post-Oct. 7 ‘bloodlust’ for Jews

Jacobson can’t disguise his disdain towards far-left politicians such as the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the new leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski, a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist Jew. He labels Polanski “a despicable clone of Jeremy Corbyn,” while saying Corbyn at least has the excuse of ignorance. “He really is an ignorant man and doesn’t know what Zionism was and really does think it was a colonial enterprise from the start,” Jacobson says. “Zach Polanski doesn’t have that excuse.”

Jacobson recognizes that “the Zionist heart has hardened,” but believes this was inevitable both because “no grand ideal … can ever stay loyal to its first principles” and because “there’s been so much pressure put on it [by] the enmity it faced once the world decided to turn against Zionism.”

But he maintains his staunch belief in the nobility of the founding Zionist dream, which he terms “the liberation of the Jewish mind, as well as the liberation of the Jewish body.”

If Charmian desperately tries to help her husband cling on to sanity — “it can’t all be catastrophe, Ferdie,” she tells him — his mother has a view of the world shaped by history’s darkest hour. “She never did think humanity had learnt its lesson or ever would,” Ferdie recounts, quoting Agata’s dismal words: “I will not waste my time saying Never Again.”

Do the last two years validate that assessment? In the days after October 7, Jacobson recalls sensing an “exuberance … in some academic circles, on campuses throughout the Western world, [and] on the streets of our great cities.”

After eight decades of supposed restraint in the wake of the Holocaust, he says, “permission” had finally been given to “do to the Jews, and then say about the Jews, all the things we’d been brought up not to.”

Jacobson believes the results are horrifying. “The moral walls erected around Belsen and Auschwitz [are] finally coming down, and that’s terrifying,” he says.

The “raucousness” of the demonstrations in Britain, the manner in which people would “shout and scream” if they were denied their weekly “right” to protest exactly as they wished, didn’t just offend Jacobson’s Jewish sensibilities. “It bothered me as an Englishman too,” he says, adding it felt alien to the “free and easy way that life in London … and England has always been.”

But, Jacobson was recently reminded, the sympathies of England’s silent majority may not be with the strident minority.

As he traveled by cab to do a promotional interview, a London taxi driver asked Jacobson what he was going to be talking about on the radio. The author told him about “Howl.”

The driver asked to pull over for a minute, turned to face Jacobson, and said: “I just want you to know that out there in this country, we’re with you, you know.”

A perplexed Jacobson asked him what he meant.

“We’re not buying it,” the driver replied. “We’re not all buying that horrible [antisemitic] Jewish stuff, we’re not. We’re with you.”

It is no wonder Jews want to leave Britain

I am the one with the big personality around the Friday night dinner table. I have spent my whole life being told to ‘stop it with the dramatics’ as I sip my chicken soup. A day does not go by where my family – proud Jewish Brits – long for me to lower my voice or roll their eyes at my overexaggerating tendencies. So you can only imagine my horror when my friend – one of the most rational people in our social circle – said exactly what I was thinking: that Britain is no longer safe for British Jews. If Green party leader Zack Polanski made it to Number 10, my friend said that he would leave immediately. He told me in candid detail that he would stay in Israel until a visa was accepted for him to go to America. I was startled. Is the situation for the Jewish community really that bad? The latest attack in Golders Green shows that my friend – and many other British Jews – are right to be afraid.

When Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, members of the Jewish community started to explore the idea of leaving the UK. Who could blame them when faced with the realities of living as a Jew in 21st Century Britain? A lot of my non-Jewish friends were somewhat surprised when I told them that it was standard protocol that synagogues are heavily guarded. Being educated in two Church of England schools, I had the luxury of assimilated protection from outside threats in that regard, although I still felt the danger when going to my place of worship. But when I think back to my old school days, memories flash before me of being told to ‘get in the oven’ by ignorant classmates. When meeting another Jew at university who was also educated at a private school, we bonded over similar shared experiences. It’s a reminder that the scourge of antisemitism is always present, but now war in the Middle East has enabled it to float to the surface and into the mainstream.

Childhood memories include skipping the children’s service at my synagogue to chat with my dad as he was on guard duty, only for him to tell me to go back inside for my own safety. Should any place of worship in the UK even be in such need of security? This is a proud country which has freedom of religion. And why do Jewish schools in the UK need prison-like walls? So why do synagogues need to be so heavily guarded? Jewish children in Britain have been forced to hide their blazers in public for fear of putting a target on their backs. These issues aren’t confined to schools, of course; a friend working in the media told me she was scared of even outing herself as Jewish to her colleagues.

The rate of people leaving the UK to emigrate to Israel hit a 40-year high in 2025, with an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year. That was already on top of an increase of over 70 per cent in 2023. This is not necessarily just members of more orthodox denominations, but young adults who are feeling the impact directly on the streets and in the workplace. I spoke to one of my friends in Israel – a 29-year-old living in Tel Aviv, who told me in explicit terms that they feel safer in a warzone than on the streets of the UK. “We moved to Israel with the security of knowing we would feel secure in a war zone rather than in a country who has abandoned its most loyal yet petrified minority group, the Jewish community,” she said.

Jake Wallis Simons: Whisper it, but Trump’s blockade is working

Foreigners who commit evil belong in the depths of the water, apparently. That’s according to Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, who is badly wounded, living like a rat underground and reduced to handwriting his words of wisdom, or having them handwritten for him.

Did nobody point out that when his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, posted on X that an American warship was less dangerous than “the weapon that can send that warship to the bottom of the sea”, it heralded his death 11 days later?

No sense of irony, these people. Speaking of irony, rumours abound that the new dictator might be dead and the regime is hushing it up. A mural recently unveiled near Qom “mistakenly” included his mugshot in a gallery of martyrs, and the state-run Tasnim News Agency “mistakenly” referred to him as the “martyred leader of the revolution”. Oops!

Yes, the regime isn’t doing particularly well. Factions are squabbling, the leadership – or what is left of it – is in disarray, it can’t decide if its figurehead is alive or dead, while its armed forces, air defences and munitions production capabilities are devastated.

Whisper it, but Economic Fury may be working. For almost 50 years, the regime has weathered Western sanctions by covertly selling oil to China via shadow ships. So far, the US navy has intercepted 44 such vessels, with an estimated value of up to $6billion (£4.8bn).

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05/01 Links Pt2: Israel’s first lady: British Jews have always supported Israel. Now, they need us; How Wokeness Came for the Jews; Mahmoud Khalil wants your sympathy

From Ian:

Israel’s first lady: British Jews have always supported Israel. Now, they need us

Israel has fought many battles to survive over the decades, with Jewish communities across the world raising billions of pounds for critical services and providing tens of thousands of volunteers in times of crisis.

Thousands of people, from London to Sydney and New York, went over to help after the Oct 7 massacre by Hamas, many of them caring for traumatised survivors, while funds raised by Jews abroad helped rebuild the Israeli communities most affected by the attacks.

But, as an extraordinary wave of anti-Semitism has hit the Jewish diaspora, there has been a subtle change in who is looking after whom. Which is why Israel’s first lady Michal Herzog, wife of its president Isaac Herzog, happened to be paying a visit to Britain this week, when two Jewish men were stabbed in a terror attack in Golders Green.

Herzog describes Wednesday’s attack as “very disturbing”. But, tragically, it wasn’t a surprise. In fact, it was a desire to support Britain’s Jewish population in the face of shocking levels of anti-Semitism that compelled her to arrange her visit in the first place, with the intended focal point being Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue, where an anti-Semitic attack resulted in the death of two men seven months ago.

“The diaspora communities were always so wonderful to us,” she says. “They came to volunteer and help, not to mention the philanthropy. But it is a two-way street and that has become more apparent since October 7. We help each other in every possible way.”

In February, the Herzogs travelled to Australia to meet the families of the victims of last December’s Bondi Beach massacre. They were warmly welcomed by the Australian Jewish community and the Australian government, but the couple also faced ugly protests by Palestinian supporters, who hounded them, even when they were talking to survivors of the attack.

For the first lady, an instinctive feminist, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Western anti-Israel hatred has been the denial of horrific sexual assaults carried out by Hamas terrorists on Oct 7.

“One UN rapporteur, Pramila Patten, did come and do a report about the sexual violence and she was attacked for it,” says Herzog. “For months afterwards, whatever war she was talking about, people in the crowd would scream at her about Israel. The fact that women won’t defend just one group of women – Israelis – can only be anti-Semitism.”

Witnessing such behaviour convinced her and her husband to do more to engage with Jewish communities around the world. “Seeing the demonstrations, some of them fierce, some violent, just made us realise how important that mission is,” she says. “I think people realise that whatever begins with the Jews never ends with them.”

Herzog, 63, a former top lawyer and the daughter of a celebrated military hero, was born on a kibbutz in Israel, but spent part of her childhood in Brazil and Argentina, where her father was a military attaché. It means she has an idea of life as a diaspora Jew and the anti-Semitism that can accompany it – something many of her fellow Israelis are only just beginning to grasp.

Jake Wallis Simons: Jews have Israel. It’s the future of Britain that I fear for

Jews are also deeply patriotic. My Jewish grandfather, who was hugely proud of serving for the RAF in the War, was typical. It has been some years since I attended a Sabbath service, which invariably takes place against the hum of gossip (and the occasional SSSSH!), but once you have passed through security and sat through the Torah reading, there is always a prayer for the Royal family, the only part that is recited in English.

These are the people who have been betrayed by Britain. The awful truth is that successive governments have preferred to placate the country’s most bigoted minorities rather than protect its most patriotic ones. Can nobody draw a line between the jihadis of Hamas and those who blew up the Manchester Arena and the Tube, or who stabbed people on London Bridge? Does nobody draw the obvious conclusion when the statue of Winston Churchill is defaced by Gaza thugs, or when they attack RAF Brize Norton? Did the Prime Minister, who expended far more energy criticising Israel during the war than condemning Hamas, not understand that he was emboldening the enemy?

Truly, Britain has been fanning the flames with one hand and funding more fire extinguishers with the other. In addition to Israeli-style security measures, we need a counter-propaganda campaign to overcome incitement in universities and schools, the NHS, the media and the arts, the Civil Service and even Parliament. We need to suppress the hate marches, starting with a moratorium, as Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terror legislation, has argued.

We need systemic reform – a dedicated anti-Semitism unit for the CPS, for instance, as former attorney general Michael Ellis has proposed – and we need no-questions-asked deportations of foreign nationals who offend. We need an end to uncontrolled immigration, both legal and illegal, a robust programme of assimilation, and careful measures to suppress extremist entryism. We need to crack down on dodgy charities. We need to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, the Revolutionary Guards and other terror groups, and a revolution in education that restores our sense of national pride.

But now I’m doing Starmer’s job for him. Don’t get me wrong: it isn’t the Jews who need all this. They may be first in the firing line, but there is a reason they have survived for thousands of years. We’ve got Israel. It is the future of Britain and the West that is the worry.

How Wokeness Came for the Jews By Abe Greenwald

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If you’re looking to stir up mob hatred of a designated enemy, you can’t do better than the Jews. Three years of whiny anti-whiteness made woke into a punchline, but anti-Semitism is serious business. The committed Jew-hater enters an ancient tradition with a long instructional literature and counter-history. There are mentors and potential sympathizers around the globe. Just follow the playbook: Accuse the Jews of blood libel, hidden influence, and ill-begotten gains. Establish them as the motive force behind everything that’s wrong, and don’t let up. You’ll even find fellow travelers on the right.

When the woke replaced whites with the Jews, they were back in business. “White privilege” became “Jewish supremacy”; “white fragility” was dropped for the supposed Jewish hypervigilance over anti-Semitism and intolerance for criticism of Israel.

Jews, unlike whites, are associated with an ideology and political movement of their own: Zionism. That makes things a lot easier for the woke. They can attack Zionism—already mischaracterized and demonized for ages—as one of history’s great evils. And they can, when they even bother, hide behind anti-Zionism to disguise their Jew-hatred.

This all began way before Israel launched its ground invasion into Gaza. But once that happened, the anti-Jewish campaign exploded. Now there were images (fake or out of context) and reports (false or slanted) to bolster the grisly accusations. On campuses, at rallies, and on social media, the woke jihad produced leaders and spokespeople. The Biden administration and the Democrats began to pay them heed.

Eventually, the woke jihad threw up political contenders. New York’s sitting mayor was the first to reach office. Now there’s Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed running for the Senate and Graham Platner (complete with a giant Nazi tattoo) doing the same in Maine.

And just as the liberal Democrats once took up the woke cause of anti-whiteness, they’ve now fully accommodated the left’s naked anti-Semitism. The Democratic establishment, along with the liberal commentariat, has come around to endorsing every leftist anti-Semitic candidate or influencer that comes their way.

The war in Gaza has been stalled for months, and the left barely mentions it anymore. But they don’t have to because this was never about Palestinians or liberation. It was about siccing the mob on the Jews, once again, and turning Jew-hatred into political power. You don’t need Gaza when you can talk about the dark hand of AIPAC, the immorality of U.S. aid to Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu dragging us into war. The new woke and their establishment enablers have an array of anti-Jewish lies to choose from. Believing the wind at their backs, they’re going with all of them at once.

ABC panel discusses Bondi massacre without any mention of Jewish community or radical Islam

Michael Gawenda Outs Australia’s left-liberal media quartet
There was a time when The Age in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald were fine newspapers of record. This was especially the case after the arrival of The Australian as a national newspaper in 1964 – since it put pressure on the (then) broadsheets in Melbourne and Sydney to improve. Both became strong performers in the 1970s and 1980s. But not anymore. Now in tabloid size [Nine Newspapers calls it “compact”, I believe. – MWD Editor] they are essentially expressions of the left (or “liberal” in the North American sense of the term) political point of view.

This was demonstrated in the article on 29 April in The Australian by James Dowling and Stephen Rice titled “Age legend to air left-wing media’s failure on anti-Semitism at Royal Commission”. The reference was to Michael Gawenda.

Michael Gawenda was a man of the moderate left – until anti-Semitism became an increasing reality in Australia. A former contributor to leftist The Digger magazine, he became, in time, editor of the left-of-centre Melbourne Age.

As The Australian revealed last Wednesday, Michael Gawenda has provided a submission to the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion. In it he has identified Australia’s influential left-liberal media quartet. Namely, in alphabetical order, the ABC, The Age, The Guardian Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Reflecting on the fact that the anti-Semitism spike in Australia occurred after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Gawenda had this to say:
I think the left liberal media – the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC, the Guardian – have basically not done the sort of job that I would expect mainstream media organisations to do. They have minimised in their commentary the effect on Jews of what is clearly an increase in antisemitism. They have favoured minority Jewish organisations and used them as if they represent some sort of mainstream Jewish opinion. That media was shocking in its treatment of the antisemitism envoy’s [Jillian Segal] report. So I think they’ve done a ­terrible job. I think it’s got to do with the fact that journalists see themselves now, not as reporters, but as social activists wanting to change the world rather than report the world.

And so, it has come to pass that Michael Gawenda, a one-time successful Age editor, cannot get published in the newspaper he once edited on account of his support for Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and outspoken opposition to anti-Semitism in Australia. Can You Bear It?

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05/01 Links Pt1: Trump ‘not satisfied’ with latest Iranian proposal to end war; The Gaza Numbers Debate: Who Was Right?; The World's Shameful Silence on Hamas

From Ian:

Trump ‘not satisfied’ with latest Iranian proposal to end war

U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday that he is “not satisfied” with Iran’s latest proposal to end the ongoing conflict.

“They want to make a deal, but I don’t. I’m not satisfied with it, so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “Iran wants to make a deal, because they have no military left.”

“They’re asking for things that I can’t agree to,” he added.

Iran sent the proposal through mediators on Thursday, though details remain unclear. “They want to make a deal so badly, but they’re not there yet,” Trump told reporters. “In my opinion, they’re not there.”

“Do you want to go blast the hell out of ’em and finish them forever, or do we want to try and make a deal?” he said.

The president added that he’d prefer not to continue military strikes. “On a human basis, I’d prefer not, but that’s the option,” he told reporters.

Asked if he was considering new strikes on Iran, Trump said, “Why would I tell you that?

“Right now, we have negotiations going on,” the president said. “They’re not getting there. They are very disjointed. They’re extremely disjointed. They’re not able to get along with each other as leaders. They don’t know who the leader is.”

Trump noted that this puts the United States “in a bad position,” because separate groups in Iranian leadership want different deals.

The president dismissed the need for congressional authorization for further U.S. military action against Iran, arguing that other presidents have considered the War Powers Resolution “unconstitutional” and “exceeded” the law’s 60-day limit. Trump added that the current ceasefire reset the timeline.

US pulling 5,000 troops from Germany amid spat with Trump over Iran war

The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from NATO ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, as a rift over the Iran war widens between US President Donald Trump and Europe.

Trump had threatened a drawdown in forces earlier this week after sparring with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said on Monday the Iranians were humiliating the US in talks to end the two-month-old war and that he did not see what exit strategy Washington was pursuing.

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said recent German rhetoric had been “inappropriate and unhelpful.”

“The president is rightly reacting to these counterproductive remarks,” the official said.

The Pentagon said the withdrawal was expected to be completed over the next six to 12 months. Germany is home to some 35,000 active-duty US military personnel, more than anywhere else in Europe.

The official said the drawdown would bring US troop levels in Europe back to roughly pre-2022 levels, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a buildup by then-president Joe Biden.

The official also cast the decision in terms of the Trump administration’s push for Europe to become the main security provider on the continent. But it is nonetheless another potent reminder of Trump’s willingness to respond to perceived disloyalty by allies.

IDF official says Iran war will be ‘one big failure’ if enriched uranium not removed

A senior Israeli military official said on Friday that if Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium is not removed from the country in the wake of the recent war, the campaign could be considered “one big failure.”

Israeli officials have said that this stockpile is sufficient for 11 nuclear bombs if enriched further. Iran has long maintained that its program is peaceful, despite enriching uranium at near-weapons-grade levels.

Israel launched its campaign against Iran on February 28, alongside the United States, to degrade the Iranian regime’s military capabilities, distance threats posed by Iran — including its nuclear and ballistic missile programs — and “create the conditions” for the Iranian people to topple the regime, the military and other Israeli leaders have said.

The senior officer said that if, under the ongoing negotiations between the US and Iran, no agreement is reached to remove the uranium stockpile and halt enrichment in the country, the achievements of the 40 days of fighting will have been for nothing.

“If the nuclear objective is not achieved, then everything we did in Iran will be one big failure. The evil Iranian regime can pounce on the nuclear program,” the official said during a briefing for reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The officer added that “if the uranium is removed from Iran through diplomatic means, we have done our part.” However, if that does not happen, Israel would need to launch another operation in Iran to achieve the objective.

Periodic reminder the JCPOA was designed to protect Iran from pressure for a decade and flood it with cash so it could build up its economy and military, and then at the end it legalized an unlimited Iranian enrichment program so the regime could build a nuclear arsenal at will. https://t.co/MQQwjviD4v

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) May 1, 2026

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04/30 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionism is a menace to every Jew on Earth; Being Jewish in Britain means living in a security ghetto; NYTs platforms professor who imagined joining terrorists on Oct. 7

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill:Anti-Zionism is a menace to every Jew on Earth

It is staggering the extent to which anti-Zionists refuse to be bound by the linguistic rules they enforce on everyone else. These are people who think JK Rowling is responsible for anti-trans violence because she says men aren’t women, and who will accuse you of playing with ‘Islamophobic’ fire if you comment on the rape gangs. And yet apparently their cruel, ceaseless, voluble and entirely disproportionate loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation – and for everyone who supports it, which includes most British Jews – has no impact whatsoever. It magically exists above the grubby fray of cause and effect that the lowly speech of us riff-raff is compelled to inhabit.

Apparently, our measured opinions cause violence, whereas their meticulously constructed and ruthlessly enforced culture of burning animus for the Jewish nation causes nothing. And woe betide the Jew who says it does. He shall be found guilty of ‘weaponising anti-Semitism’ to silence ‘critics of Israel’. See how cynical the Jews are? They will even marshall and monetise their own historic suffering – the Holocaust, 7 October, recent atrocities in Britain – to the end of protecting their precious genocidal homeland from the decent-hearted critique of pacifist Brits. They lie, and they do so for slippery reasons of dual loyalty – that’s what anti-Zionists are saying when they tar Jews as ‘weaponisers’ simply for saying something they themselves say every day: that words have consequences.

Can we cut the crap? Our moral emergency is too pressing. This is the truth: the industry of hatred for the Jewish nation is endangering Jewish people everywhere. It is not merely opinion – it is a vast system of moral instruction enforced through the institutions of education and culture which singles out Zionism as the most repulsive ideology of our time, and Zionists as enablers of apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide. Golders Green is full of Zionists. I know some of them. They are good people. Yet according to the ideological superstructure of anti-Zionism, they are agents of chaos, facilitators of crime and simps for a regime whose crimes are so uniquely barbarous that even just reflecting on them can feel like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. It is utterly untenable to say anti-Zionism is not the cause of anti-Jewish violence.

‘It is morally consistent to oppose both anti-Semitism and Israel’s genocide’, said armies of leftists after Golders Green. Actually, it isn’t. For it is the latter – the ceaseless defamation of ‘the Zionist entity’ as a genocidal machine that lusts after the blood of innocents – that inflames the former. There is a determined effort to draw a moral distinction between ‘real anti-Semitism’, like that in Golders Green, and anti-Zionism. No, no, no. Anti-Zionism is the foul soil in which violent Jew hate has taken root. It is the most menacing hate movement of our time. It has power and clout. It is the ideology of the new ruling class. It is ruthlessly communicated through the digital highways and popular culture. And it is hanging a target sign around the necks of Jews everywhere on Earth. It must be defeated, urgently.

Being Jewish in Britain means living in a security ghetto

Don’t you just hate it when your kids need a security briefing to go to primary school? Isn’t it annoying to have airport-style security at your place of worship so that congregants aren’t murdered?

If you’re Jewish in Britain, this is the reality. We don’t live our lives like normal British citizens any more. We live in a security ghetto – one where tolerant Britain is fading away.

This week – before two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, north London, in an attack police declared a terrorist incident – my better half and I were due to attend a documentary screening by a Jewish-Israeli journalist. We worked out that, given the risk, only one of us should go, so our child would still have a parent if something happened. These are the kind of calculations British Jews now make.

The security services have advised friends’ children to hide their school uniforms when travelling to and from their fortified Jewish schools. Children are asked to conceal what they are in case it upsets racists.

I don’t hide my Star of David on public transport – I don’t mind the glares. The exception is medical appointments. Almost every Jew I know does the same. It is hard not to, when doctors feel free to post Nazi-grade racism under their own names on social media (I’ve been shown a private Facebook group of nearly 17,000 GPs, where anti-Jewish hatred was expressed openly and seldom challenged). And we’re to trust these people to treat us when we are at our most vulnerable?

Soon, it will be my turn again. My turn to put on a stab-proof vest, stand alongside a paid security guard, and guard the gates of my own synagogue. Everyone in the community who can will take a turn. Every synagogue in Britain that I know of runs the same rota. Metal gates. CCTV. Volunteers in body armour. This is what worship looks like now.

Incidents happen when you least expect them. The day before my son’s bar mitzvah, I went to the synagogue to drop off wine. As I left and the gate shut behind me, I turned and saw a man I didn’t know inside the grounds. Scruffy, well-built, tattooed, wearing a vest. He had scaled the perimeter fence as I was leaving and was heading for the door.

I went back in and confronted him. I barely had time to register the backpack.

He was looking around, taking in the layout. I took his picture and shepherded him out. On the pavement, he dropped into the Islamic prayer position. The rest of my day was spent with the police and the Community Security Trust, the Jewish security charity.

DOJ’s Harmeet Dhillon compares contemporary antisemitism of ‘educated elites’ to 1930s Germany

In a speech at a federal government commemoration of the Holocaust on Thursday, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon argued that the post-Oct. 7 wave of antisemitism in the U.S. resembles 1930s Germany and warned that modern bigotry is often perpetrated by “educated elites” under the cover of intellectual language.

Dhillon, drawing on a speech that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave at a Holocaust remembrance event nearly three decades ago, said that Germany’s reputation as an intellectual and scientific hub in the 1920s and 1930s is closely connected to the development of the Holocaust.

“The road to Auschwitz was incremental and methodical. It began with excluding Jews through the legal, political, economic and social life of everyday society,” Dhillon said. “Many perpetrators of the Holocaust were often the most educated intelligentsia in Germany.”

She was speaking at the 33rd annual Federal Interagency Holocaust Remembrance Program, an event organized by and for federal government employees. It took place in the Justice Department’s Great Hall, and as attendees arrived, they walked up a staircase lined with portraits of historic legal experts, like the Babylonian king Hammurabi. One showed Moses, pictured with the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments.

The fact that the perpetrators of the Holocaust often had advanced degrees and impressive credentials is relevant for our understanding of contemporary antisemitism, Dhillon said.

“Today we are experiencing a rise in antisemitism in the world, including right here at home. As in the past, it often begins with social exclusion. On some university campuses, Jews have been blocked by mobs from entering certain spaces,” said Dhillon. “As in 1930s Germany, these actions are often perpetrated by the educated elites of our nation, framed in intellectual language, giving them a veneer of legitimacy.”

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04/30 Links Pt1: US finds evidence tying four more UN staffers to Oct. 7; The Party With the Nazi Tattoo; MSF Abandoned Neutrality, Employed Staff with Hamas Ties

From Ian:

What Thomas Jefferson Would Do about Iran's Barbary Pirates

The Western approach to diplomacy is to attempt to reconcile legitimate but conflicting interests. Iran's rulers, by contrast, regard compromise as capitulation. And they have no interests that we should recognize as legitimate. For 47 years, they have vowed "Death to Israel!" and "Death to America" - unambiguous declarations of war.

American presidents in the past have responded: Maybe the theocrats don't really mean it! Maybe they'll liberalize over time! Maybe we can identify moderates among them! One president sympathized with their "grievances," accommodated their ambitions, and sent them palettes of cash. They were not appeased.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still has hundreds of small, fast-attack boats in the Strait of Hormuz. Those who use boats to harass or attempt to seize commercial vessels should be designated as pirates. And Americans long ago learned how to deal with pirates.

In 1786, while serving as U.S. Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson questioned an envoy from Tripoli - one of the North African Barbary states - about his government's habit of seizing American and European ships and cargo, and enslaving sailors. The envoy said he was doing his religious duty, enforcing Islamic law as he understood it. From then on, Jefferson opposed paying ransom or tribute to the Barbary Pirates and deemed negotiations futile. As president in 1801, he took a kinetic approach: the First Barbary War (1801-1805).

Iran's rulers, whatever their internal disagreements, all call themselves "Islamic revolutionaries." Their revolution, we should understand, is against America. If Iran's rulers are praying for martyrdom, that may be a matter on which we can find agreement.

Explaining the Iran-U.S. Value Asymmetry

The Western approach to diplomacy is to attempt to reconcile legitimate but conflicting interests. Iran's rulers, by contrast, regard compromise as capitulation. And they have no interests that we should recognize as legitimate. For 47 years, they have vowed "Death to Israel!" and "Death to America" - unambiguous declarations of war.

American presidents in the past have responded: Maybe the theocrats don't really mean it! Maybe they'll liberalize over time! Maybe we can identify moderates among them! One president sympathized with their "grievances," accommodated their ambitions, and sent them palettes of cash. They were not appeased.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still has hundreds of small, fast-attack boats in the Strait of Hormuz. Those who use boats to harass or attempt to seize commercial vessels should be designated as pirates. And Americans long ago learned how to deal with pirates.

In 1786, while serving as U.S. Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson questioned an envoy from Tripoli - one of the North African Barbary states - about his government's habit of seizing American and European ships and cargo, and enslaving sailors. The envoy said he was doing his religious duty, enforcing Islamic law as he understood it. From then on, Jefferson opposed paying ransom or tribute to the Barbary Pirates and deemed negotiations futile. As president in 1801, he took a kinetic approach: the First Barbary War (1801-1805).

Iran's rulers, whatever their internal disagreements, all call themselves "Islamic revolutionaries." Their revolution, we should understand, is against America. If Iran's rulers are praying for martyrdom, that may be a matter on which we can find agreement.

Monitored phone calls and fear of arrest: What life looks like for Iran’s Jews now

Amid the war in Iran, one Iranian Jewish woman who lives in the United States, but whose family remains in Iran, has been wracked with fear. Before the ceasefire, she spoke with her parents once a week for exactly one minute — both because of the exorbitant cost, about $50 per minute, and because of the fear of surveillance.

During one call a few days into the war, she said, something felt off.

“I could see that something is so wrong. It’s as if someone was there,” the woman, who moved to the U.S. in 2008, said in an interview with the Forward. “It seemed like my mom was actually reading from a note.”

She later learned that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had come to her parents’ home, questioning why they frequently called an American number. They instructed her parents to download Bale, an Iranian messaging app widely believed to be monitored by authorities, before making any further calls.

“It’s a spy app, and everyone knows that,” the woman said with a wry laugh. Her parents refused. Instead, they were told to call their daughter and read from a script while IRGC members watched.

“Basically, they said to prove that you are with us and not with Israel, read this when you call her,” the woman said. “After that day, they didn’t call for a long time.”

Eventually, she learned that her parents had fled to a safer part of the country to escape bombardment.

Her family are among the estimated 10,000 Jews who still live in Iran, in the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel. Once numbering around 120,000, the community has dwindled significantly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when life for religious minorities fundamentally changed. Today, Jews who remain in Iran must carefully navigate life under the regime, publicly expressing loyalty to avoid being falsely accused of Zionist espionage.

Amid Iran’s war with the U.S. and Israel, that pressure has intensified.

With an ongoing internet blackout, communication is limited and closely monitored. To understand what life is like for Iranian Jews today, I spoke with several people in the U.S. who remain in sporadic contact with family members inside Iran. Everyone interviewed requested that they not be identified, fearing repercussions for either themselves or their families.

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