01/13 Links Pt2: Why the West Is Split Over Political Islam; Scott Wiener’s Dangerous Cowardice; Australian writers’ festival canceled after booting Pro-Hamas author

From Ian:

Pierre Rehov: Why the West Is Split Over Political Islam

Trump's executive order represents the most serious American effort in decades to confront Islamist political networks that, in Washington, had long been considered merely political differences rather than lethal security threats.

Across the Atlantic... in the European Union and many of its major capitals, political Islam — often embodied by Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations — remains part of an approach for a larger "dialogue with Islamists". Can you imagine a "dialogue with Bolsheviks" or a "dialogue with the Third Reich"?

[T]he European Union has taken a far more cautious, at times permissive, approach, apparently preferring to regard Islamic extremists as potential voters.

The West ends up assimilating into Islam, rather than the other way around.

Rather than confronting liberal democratic values, these "entryist" actors advocate for "reinterpretations" that often blur the lines between religious freedom and political Islam.

Many Muslims in the West, of course, just want an opportunity for a better life, but they are not the ones in the engine room, driving the extremist Muslim train. The agenda, according to Islam itself, consists of sharing Allah's precious gift of Islam (Dar Al Islam, the "Abode of Islam") with the rest of the world (the Dar al Harb, the "Abode of War," those who have yet to submit to Islam) -- either by infiltration or force. Finally – when everyone in the world has submitted to Islam, whether they wanted to or not -- then there will be "peace." That, evidently, is when the world will enjoy "the Religion of Peace."

The result is a West that now follows two opposite paths. On one path, the United States under the Trump administration is moving toward clarity and confrontation, willing to codify ideological enemies and remove them from the political landscape. On the other path, Europe continues its policy of engagement, accommodation and submission, risk-balancing between wished-for civic inclusion and ideological risk. This split only serves to impede counterterrorism and jeopardize the West.

Who radicalized the Mississippi synagogue arsonist?

Hate found its way to Mississippi’s largest Jewish house of worship, Congregation Beth Israel, when an arsonist intentionally set fire to the synagogue at about 3 a.m. Saturday, damaging the only synagogue in Jackson.

The alleged suspect’s name, Stephen Spencer Pittman, was released late Monday. According to the FBI, he faces charges of maliciously damaging or destroying a building by fire or an explosive.

Russ Latino, a native Mississippian and founder of the Jackson-based Magnolia Tribune Institute, said an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi alleges Pittman admitted to law enforcement that he set the fire at Beth Israel because of its “Jewish ties.” Latino added that Pittman referred to the synagogue as the “Synagogue of Satan” and detailed the steps he took leading up to the arson.

Latino noted that “Synagogue of Satan” is an antisemitic phrase that both Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens have used in recent years. “Nothing in his personal profile points out anything political. There is no Trump or Biden or Harris. There are just a lot of bible verses,” he said, adding, “But ‘Synagogue of Satan’ well, that is a pretty specific alliteration and the same phraseology used by Fuentes and Owens,” he said.

His social media presence on X shows a young man posting about his Christian faith and baseball, where he was a standout player in both high school and college.

Latino said the entire Jackson community has rallied around the Beth Israel congregants. “Many different faith organizations had reached out and offered their houses of worship for the Beth Israel members so they can practice their faith,” he said.

Pro-Palestine protesters plotted to spy on Maccabi players

Pro-Palestine protesters plotted to spy on Maccabi Tel Aviv players after West Midlands Police “ignored” the threat to the Israeli football team.

The Telegraph has seen a message in a group chat that discusses trying to “obstruct” the visiting players from taking part in a fixture against Aston Villa on Nov 6.

Members of the West Midlands Palestine Solidarity Campaign were asked to scour hotel lobbies in Birmingham for Maccabi players, in an attempt to stop the match from going ahead.

Craig Guildford, Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, is facing mounting pressure to resign for banning Maccabi fans last year.

Critics argue his decision was politically motivated rather than based on genuine safety concerns, and that Mr Guildford has misled Parliament with his version of events. The force has also been accused of ignoring threats to the Israeli players and their fans.

The Telegraph can reveal attempts by pro-Gaza activists to track down Maccabi players the night before the match.

An unidentified campaigner said the group could “still cancel this match if we obstruct team Maccabi from attending” and called for volunteers for “MISSION CRITICAL search actions”.

Activists were tasked with searching “hotel lobbies and dining areas” on the night before the game, looking for faces in a lineup of Maccabi players on the team’s website in an attempt to cancel the match.

They were also asked to work as “spotters” at the stadium, to be “watching the Villa Park entrances for the team coach”.

“We can then mount a quick response, to protest them, or the spotters can follow them back to their hotels to find out where their [sic] staying, and mobilise a protest at the hotel.”

The message suggests there was an organised attempt to target the Israeli players ahead of the match, despite West Midlands Police’s insistence that it was Maccabi fans who were likely to cause violence or intimidation.

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01/13 Links Pt1: At least 12,000 killed in Iran crackdown as blackout deepens; Iranian Leaders' Claim to Legitimacy Shattered in the War with Israel; Syrian Druze leader: ‘Israel saved us from genocide’

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Iran’s Revolution

I tremble as I write these lines.

For Iran—brave and heroic Iran—trembles on the edge of a horrific bloodbath.

And I have no doubt that the fascist regime of the mullahs will take, if it can, a terrible revenge on the civilians who are defying it.

But the reality is clear.

What has been happening for the past eight days in the cities of ancient Persia is not a revolt. It is a revolution. The difference? Both tiny and immense. A revolt—Iranians have known at least five revolts in the past 15 years—demands reform, the mitigation of misery, negotiation. A revolution expects none of that and does not accommodate, at all, the hated order of things; it does not seek the adjustment of the regime, but its replacement.

Tocqueville: A revolution begins when people cease to imagine the future as an anamorphosis of the past.

Hannah Arendt: An insurrection challenges power; a revolution rejects its very principle and foundation.

This kind of event is rare in human history. But this is where the Iranians now stand. When they say, “Death to Khamenei,” they have crossed that threshold and entered this new era of both hope and tragedy.

Of course, the uprising may still be crushed. Of course, we are speaking of thousands of women and men executed in the secrecy of the electronic night that has fallen over the country. And, of course, we know of revolutions that ended drowned in blood.

But what has been has been. The Iranian women and men who have shouted at the top of their lungs that they want to live, but are ready to die for that, will not turn back. They will no longer accept the offers of negotiations made by cornered ayatollahs.

Those who fail to understand this are grotesque.

To those who still dare to reduce this conflagration to some so-called American Zionist plot—shame on them.

They are already and forever in the dustbins of History.

Trump Admin Designates Three Muslim Brotherhood Branches as Terrorist Organizations

The Trump administration on Tuesday designated three of the Muslim Brotherhood's largest branches in the Middle East as terrorist groups, unveiling long-awaited sanctions aimed at financially crippling the global Islamist organization responsible for fomenting violence against the United States and its allies.

The joint action from the State and Treasury Departments targets the Muslim Brotherhood's sects in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon in the first step "of an ongoing, sustained effort to thwart Muslim Brotherhood violence and destabilization wherever it occurs," according to the Treasury Department. The department noted in its release announcing the move that "additional terrorist designations" may occur as the Trump administration examines "all available tools to deprive these Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism."

"The Muslim Brotherhood has inspired, nurtured, and funded terrorist groups like Hamas that are direct threats to the safety and security of the American people and our allies," Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John K. Hurley said in a statement. "Despite their peaceful public façade, both the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim brotherhood branches have conspired to support Hamas’s terrorism and undermine the sovereignty of their own national governments."

Congressional Republicans have argued that the United States should designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization since at least 2015, but legislation doing so never reached the president's desk. After President Donald Trump took office for a second time and expressed an interest in targeting the Muslim Brotherhood through executive actions, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced a bill featuring a "new modernized strategy" to systematically sanction the groups' branches around the world rather than the brotherhood as a whole. The administration's announcement on Tuesday indicates that it is using Cruz's approach, going after individual Muslim Brotherhood sects across the Middle East.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control went after the Muslim Brotherhood's Jordanian and Egyptian branches, both of which provide material support for Hamas, while the State Department targeted the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood. The Lebanese branch, known as al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, received both the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist labels from Foggy Bottom, freezing its assets and preventing it from doing business with Western financial institutions.

‘Israel saved us from genocide’: Interview with Syrian Druze leader

‘We are paying a heavy price, but we struggle to remain steadfast and preserve our identity with dignity and pride,’ says Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze community.

According to him, the threat does not stem solely from the current rulers but from a continuous ideological current. ‘The previous regime also acted against us, but the current one is the most brutal. They do not want to eliminate only the Druze, but any minority that is not like them.’

Six months after one of the deadliest massacres the Druze community has suffered in generations, Sheikh al-Hijri speaks with rare openness about an open wound, a reality of siege and a clear aspiration to establish an independent Druze entity in Sweida province.

"The only crime for which we were murdered was being Druze", he says in a special interview with ynet. "This is an ISIS-style government, established as a direct continuation of al-Qaeda."

The massacre that took place last July, in which more than 2,000 Druze were killed, included executions, rape, abuse and the burning of people alive, women, children and infants, he says. "This was a decision by Syria’s dark regime and by all the terrorist groups operating from Damascus. It was genocide", he states.

‘The heavy price was not in vain’
Al-Hijri, 60, was born in Venezuela, where his father emigrated along with a large Druze community. Today, around 150,000 Druze live in Venezuela, making it the fourth-largest Druze population worldwide. He later returned to Syria and studied law at Damascus University.

In 2012, he replaced his brother as the spiritual leader of the Druze community following his brother’s death in a car accident that was never fully explained and was widely suspected to involve the Assad regime. Leadership of the community has remained with the al-Hijri family since the 19th century.

"The latest massacre proved that we cannot rely on anyone else to protect our community", he says. "The price was extremely heavy, but it will not be in vain. We are seeking a future in which the Druze are no longer victims."

"Since July 2025, we have been living in a state of full mobilization," he says. "Young and old alike are enlisted to defend our homes and our very existence. They wanted to annihilate us."

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01/12 Links Pt2: History is Not Whispering; Israel Won the Information War; Trump: No place for Jew-haters in GOP; Suspect admits to arson attack on synagogue in Mississippi due to its ‘Jewish ties’

From Ian:

History is Not Whispering

Anti-Semitism is never the end of the story. It is the warning flare.

It does not appear when societies are strongest, but when they are losing the ability to tolerate complexity, disagreement, and pluralism. Jews are the first test of that collapse—not because they are uniquely fragile, but because they have always stood at the center of pluralistic systems that extremism cannot tolerate.

This pattern is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. And it is not new.

When Jews are told their equality is conditional, that their safety depends on silence, that their collective existence is illegitimate, societies have already crossed a line. When violence against Jews is explained rather than condemned, escalation is no longer a question of if, but when. When elected officials refuse to name and shame anti-Semitism because doing so would alienate part of their base, the base has already been chosen.

The closing of the horseshoe is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis.

On the left, anti-Zionism reframes Jews as uniquely undeserving of national rights. On the right, post-liberal populism recycles the language of elites, global manipulators, and disloyal insiders. The vocabularies differ. But the structure is identical. Both reject liberal universalism. Both treat Jews as conditional citizens. Both abandon the same guardrails—and arrive at the same destination.

History does not forgive this convergence. It records it.

Those who imagine they can harness anti-Semitism without being consumed by it misunderstand how extremism works. The societies that tolerated it did not stabilize. They radicalized. Jews were never the last target—only the most reliable early prey.

We are not watching this unfold blindly. We have the documents. We have the precedents. We have the bodies.

This time, ignorance is not an excuse. Silence is not neutrality. Euphemism is not moderation.

We know exactly what is happening.

The only question left is whether we choose to stop it—or whether we allow history to resume its course, once again, at full speed.

Israel Won the Information War By Abe Greenwald

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Those who fret about the issue believe that Israel needed to continually explain the reasons for its military actions: It should have been more forceful in demonstrating that Hamas hides behind civilians and operates from civilian structures. It should have debunked Hamas casualty figures in real time, proved that there was no famine, explained the unparalleled effort the IDF makes to spare civilian lives, and so on.

But that’s not the story Israel needed to tell. There’s little point in the Jewish state trying to prove that it’s innocent of all the calumnious charges against it. Why? Because if Israel’s devoted critics could be persuaded that it’s a good and just country under continuous assault by barbaric fanatics, they would have been convinced by the decades of evidence—culminating in October 7—showing just that.

The vital information that Israel needed to disseminate, rather, was this: We will not perish. We are fiercer in battle than you could ever imagine, more accomplished in intelligence and operational execution than any nation in history, peerless in the art of war, and unapologetic in our commitment to survival. We don’t bend to public opinion; we stop at nothing to defend our existence.

And that message came across loud and clear.

Too many American Jews, on the other hand, spent two-plus years swallowing Hamas propaganda and publicly agonizing over Israel’s actions to varying degrees. Their story was: We’re just so sorry for all this ugliness.

And while they explained and apologized, they also bent over backwards to give the Jew-haters the benefit of the doubt. Some went so far as to kasher the mob.

We know exactly how that’s worked out. It’s long past time for Diaspora Jews to tell a different story of their own—one of bravery rooted in reverence for the Jewish tradition. But first they must believe it themselves. The Israelis do, and the world found that out.

No place for Jew-haters in GOP, Trump says

U.S. President Donald Trump said there is no room in the Republican Party for those with antisemitic views and that the GOP should condemn those espousing them.

“From my own personal standpoint, absolutely, because I condemn,” Trump told The New York Times in a two-hour interview last week that was published on Monday.

“I have a daughter who’s married to a Jewish person,” he told the newspaper. “My daughter happens to be Jewish, and the beautiful three grandchildren are Jewish. I’m very proud of them.”

The president also touted his support of Israel and his efforts to obtain a ceasefire in the war between Hamas and Israel.

“There has been no better president in the history of the world as we know it that has been stronger or better and less antisemitic, certainly, than Donald Trump,” he said in the interview. “I have been the best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel, and that’s, by the way, acknowledged by everybody, including the fact that we have peace in the Middle East, and that’s going to hold.”

Trump’s comments came as several prominent Republicans, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have faced criticism from several prominent party members for providing platforms to antisemites and Holocaust deniers, most notably Nick Fuentes. Carlson, a podcaster, was photographed in official images of a meeting that Trump held at the White House recently with oil executives.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual legislative conference in October, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and others went after Carlson for his friendly interview with Fuentes.

Speakers at the conference also aimed brickbats at the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and said the pro-Trump conservative research group was not in the business of “canceling our own people.”

The president earlier passed up opportunities to criticize Carlson, who had a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump told reporters in November.

But this time, he went after the antisemites in his own party.

“I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” he told the Times.

British Jewish veterans who fought for Churchill in WWII say the level of antisemitism in modern times feels like 'the whole world is against us'

They proudly fought for Britain to free the world from the clutches of Hitler's fascism.

But 80 years on, three Jewish veterans say they are increasingly alarmed by surging levels of antisemitism in the UK - and fear 'the whole world is against us now'.

Joe Slyper, 106, Don Breslaw, 102 and Solly Ohayon, 99, still remain largely positive about Britain, but believe anti-Jewish hatred today is at levels they themselves did not experience when they were younger.

Their views come in the wake of fellow veteran Alec Penstone, 100, who in November stunned the presenters of ITV's Good Morning Britain by declaring the sacrifice of the lost men of his generation 'wasn't worth' it.

He told Adil Ray and Kate Garraway: 'What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.'

While the trio are not so forceful in their opinion of today's Britain, they acknowledge the Second World War brought an end to Nazism - but not racially motivated hatred.

Don, who was just 19 when he was conscripted into the army, has come to sombrely conclude 'we've always been different - and when people are different, people tend to find cause to dislike us.'

The three spoke to Daily Mail as part of wide-ranging interviews on their wartime experience and how Britain compares today to before 1939.

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01/12 Links Pt1: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made; The courage of Iran’s women puts woke Westerners to shame; Trump: 25% tariff on all countries doing business with Iran

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: What the late great Bernard Lewis knew about Khomeini

The late Bernard Lewis—renowned multilingual Orientalist—didn’t agree that Carter or anybody else had an excuse for ignoring Khomeini’s true identity and agenda. In a 2010 interview that I conducted with Lewis while researching my book, To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the “Arab Spring,” the professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University described his rebuffed attempt to set the record straight.

“In 1978, there was this figure being discussed, Khomeini, whom I knew nothing about,” he recounted. “So, I did what one normally does in my profession: I went to the university library and looked him up. I discovered that he was the author of Islamic Government [a collection of speeches he delivered in Najaf, Iraq in 1970]. And I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. It could give me some idea of what the man is about.’”

Lewis took the volume home and read it in one sitting. What it revealed was a philosophy of Islamic statehood, using the harshest possible rhetoric to denounce non-Muslims and calling for the spread of Sharia law across the world.

Deciding that something had to be done to expose the ayatollah and his intentions, Lewis contacted then-New York Times op-ed editor Charlotte Curtis and offered to pen a piece on what subsequently came to be known as “The Little Green Book.”

“No thanks,” she answered. “I don’t think our readers would be interested in the work of some Persian writer.”

Whether her response was due to ignorance of the significance of Khomeini’s waiting in the wings to take over Iran from the Shah, or to a lack of desire on the part of the Times to acknowledge that however authoritarian a ruler the shah might be, he was the epitome of benevolence compared to his proposed successor, wasn’t clear.

Nor did Curtis’s attitude surprise Lewis, whose view of the press was already—justifiably—dim. But it did cause him to recall an exchange he’d had in Pahlavi’s office not long before the revolution.

“Why do they keep attacking me?” the shah burst out, as soon as Lewis entered the room.

“Whom do you mean, Your Majesty?” Lewis asked.

“The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London and Le Monde—the four weird sisters dancing around the doom of the West,” Pahlavi said. “Don’t they understand that I am the best friend you have in this part of the world?”

“Your Majesty,” Lewis replied, “you must understand that the editorial policies of these papers are based on Marxist principles.”

“What do you mean?” Pahlavi shot back incredulously, since Communism wasn’t on his list of the West’s faults.

“I’m not referring to Karl, but to Groucho,” Lewis quipped.

When the Shah looked puzzled, Lewis asked him whether he was familiar with Groucho Marx.

“Yes, of course,” he responded, almost insulted by the suggestion that he, a buff of American movies, might not be up on Hollywood.

Lewis explained, “Remember when Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to become a member of a club that would have him? Well, our media’s posture—like our foreign policy—is to shun any government that wants our friendship, and to placate and pursue our enemies.”

Brendan O'Neill: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made

Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.

The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.

The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.

The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.

After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself

Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.

Melanie Phillips: Iranian protesters are showing courage in the face of tyranny — but Israel-obsessed liberals don’t seem to care

The reason is that the uprising is not just against the regime but against the repressive tyranny of Islam itself. This is intolerable to Western liberals, because it gets in the way of their fixed narrative that, when Islamists commit mass murder against the innocent, it’s justified resistance against Western-backed imperialism.

Such liberals simply cannot acknowledge the reality of Islamic terrorism and repression.

Their belief that the Israelis and Western imperialism are always the villains, and Muslims are always their victims, is essential to their self-image as morally virtuous people.

It may sound incredible, but Islam has become synonymous with conscience itself among Western progressives.

This is because the Palestinian cause has become their signature motif.

The Palestinians are viewed as the ultimate oppressed people, dispossessed of their rightful inheritance and victims of Israeli “genocide,” “apartheid” and war crimes in Gaza.

Every part of that is a lie. But among liberals, it’s an article of faith.

So they’ve failed to grasp how this cause has been leveraged by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood bent upon the conquest of the West. This is particularly true of Qatar, which has patiently spread its influence throughout Western universities and even bought up various Western media personalities.

The Palestinian cause has embedded into the Western mind the inversion of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and tyranny, which is a hallmark of the Islamic world and has found such fertile ground in the post-truth, post-moral Western intelligentsia.

So the keffiyeh-clad classes have been cementing Islamic control over Western streets and public space.

In Britain this is far advanced, with the Labour government under Keir Starmer refusing to outlaw genetically damaging Muslim cousin marriage and dragging its heels over dealing with the mainly Muslim rape and grooming gangs.

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01/11 Links: The courage of the Iranian people and the silence of the world; Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

From Ian:

Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism published in Fox News, Asra Q. Nomani documented how a network of self-described Marxist and communist organizations mobilized pro-Nicolás Maduro protests across more than 100 American cities within 12 hours of his capture on Jan. 3 by U.S. forces. The minute-by-minute reconstruction reveals the operational capability that I described in my congressional testimony in December 2024: a sophisticated, foreign-funded rapid-response infrastructure operating on American soil.

Nomani’s reporting raises a critical question: What is this network actually built to do? The answer matters profoundly for understanding both the campus antisemitism many Jewish students experienced after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the broader threat to American foreign-policy coherence.

This infrastructure exists to mobilize immediate domestic opposition to U.S. actions that threaten authoritarian regimes aligned with Chinese and Russian interests. Not all anti-Israel protests fall into this category. But specific campaigns, particularly the “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) movement that blocked airports, bridges, tunnels and critical infrastructure, were organized by groups with documented ties to Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech billionaire who sold his company for $785 million.

What The New York Times investigation revealed in August 2023 was a global operation. Singham has been co-opting left-wing movements worldwide—from political parties in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, systematically steering them toward pro-China Communist Party narratives. The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to groups that “mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.”

In South Africa, Singham’s network funded the Nkrumah School, which hosts boot camps attended by activists and politicians from across Africa. According to U.S. tax records, one of Singham’s nonprofits donated at least $450,000 for training at the school. But activists who attended these sessions began noticing something troubling. What was marketed as liberation politics increasingly took a pro-China tilt. New Frame, a South African news outlet funded by Singham, shut down in July 2022 after staff questioned why there was no coverage of Uyghur oppression or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This pattern of co-optation was repeated globally. In India, Singham funded NewsClick, which “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” In Brazil, funding went to Brasil de Fato, which interspersed articles about land rights with praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The operational model was consistent: Find genuine progressive movements, provide substantial funding and gradually shift their focus toward CCP strategic priorities.

Who The Left Stands With By Abe Greenwald

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The Western left’s silence and inaction in response to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Iran confirms what some of us have long known. Progressive activists are not pro-human-rights, pro-minority-rights, pro–women’s rights, pro-freedom, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, pro-peace or anti-war, and they are definitely not pro-democracy.

What they are is anti-American and anti-Semitic. That’s it. Which means the only things they are for are America’s enemies and the world’s Jew-haters.

Some have asked: Where are the American demonstrations showing support for the courageous Iranians trying to bring down the theocratic regime that’s oppressed them for generations? The answer: They don’t exist, or at least not in numbers significant enough to have come to anyone’s attention.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t protests happening in the U.S. right now. For example, last night, while Iranians were standing up to the mullahs, a crowd of keffiyeh-clad thugs swarmed a synagogue and Jewish school in Queens waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” Set aside—if you can—that they were there to intimidate Jews. They were also declaring themselves on the side of the Iranian regime. Hamas, as we all know, is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization. That’s where their sympathies lie.

And that’s been the case for more than two years. Anti-Israel protesters in the U.S. and Europe have regularly waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which was, up until recently, almost an Iranian statelet in Lebanon. And sometimes they’ve brandished the Iranian flag itself. So long as you hate Jews and the U.S., you’ve got friends on the Western left.

Courage of Iranian women stands in stark contrast to Britain's face-masked cosplay revolutionaries

He styles himself a revolutionary, fighting for progress.

Week in, week out, he and his comrades gather in cities across the UK, chanting their support for Palestine and demanding the destruction of Israel.

On occasion, he’ll turn his attention elsewhere and stand outside a feminist conference, screaming abuse at attendees who refuse to buy into the fantasy that trans women are actually women.

Whether devoting himself to making Jews feel unsafe or spending miserable afternoons threatening women who reject the presence of men in changing rooms and rape crisis centres, the contemporary British radical goes equipped with two essentials.

The first is a terrifying certainty. The second is a face-mask.

I’ve never had much time for these cosplayers, these weekend insurgents with their incoherent views and their violent rhetoric but, over recent days, my contempt for them has only deepened.

Since December 28, people across Iran have been on their streets, demanding the end of the Islamic regime that has terrorised them for decades. With international media denied access to the country, citizens have, through shaky live streams on their smartphones, showed the world what real revolutionary courage looks like.

How small the masked undergraduate waving a Hamas flag on a British street looks when compared with those Iranian women who – under threat of the most horrific punishment – have thrown off the hijabs they are compelled to wear.

While British ideologues align themselves, from the safety of the West, with the Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah, people across Iran are saying “no more” to the theocrats who, for years, have supported those terror groups.

And they are doing it with humbling bravery.

Watching shaky footage of a group of young women – their heads uncovered, their voices loud and clear – marching in protest while the sound of gunfire echoed around them, I found myself profoundly moved by their courage. Would I, I wondered, step up as they were now doing?

The most honest answer I could give myself was that I hoped so.

It has been depressing, if unsurprising, that those on the British left who scream so loudly about Palestine have had little to say about what’s happening in Iran. There have been no rallies of Keffiyah-clad protestors demanding support for the oppressed people of Iran.

But, then, how could they credibly have done so when Iran, under the leadership of Ali Khamenei, has been funding Islamist terror groups that share their unwavering hatred for Jews?

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01/10 Links: Is Iran Finally on the Brink of Revolution?; Trump says he is ready to assist Iranian protesters; 40-year-old man arrested throwing rock that fractured skull of 8-year-old NJ Jewish girl

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: The Middle East is once again in flux

Something else, however, is forming in its place. A new ideological alignment is emerging around Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, grounded in political Islam and nationalist Islamist governance. It partially draws in Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Syria and finds resonance in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with indirect reach into Pakistan. This alignment privileges ideological affinity over transactional cooperation. Syria sits uneasily between worlds, open to Turkish influence yet also exploring pragmatic arrangements, including economic coordination and even talks with Israel, under American auspices.

Pragmatism, meanwhile, has contracted. Saudi Arabia no longer treats entry into the Abraham Accords as urgent. Public opinion, religious legitimacy and political identity impose costs on overt normalisation. As Iran weakens, Saudi dependence on Israel for security diminishes, reducing strategic pressure to formalise ties. Saudi policy blends interest with ideology and ambition. It does not mirror the Emirati model.

The result leaves the pragmatic alignment largely concentrated between Israel and the UAE, with others peripheral or inactive. Israel now faces two ideological fronts: the older Iranian-centred network, weakened but alive, and the newer Turkish-centred alignment gaining confidence and space. Washington positions itself between pragmatists and ideologues, cooperating selectively with Turkey and Saudi Arabia while hesitating to force the collapse of Iran’s system.

In this environment, Israel must operate with increasing autonomy. Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken openly of ending American military aid within a decade, arguing that Israel has ‘come of age’ and developed independent capacity. The statement reflects strategic reality. American leadership is less reliable. Withdrawal, not arbitration, defines its trajectory.

If Iran’s regime falls, the Turkish ideological bloc will expand. Pressure on Israel will intensify. Yet great opportunity will also appear. A post-regime Iran will require reconstruction, technology, water management, and institutional expertise. Israel could become a partner of consequence. Parallel to this, Israel is deepening ties with the UAE and even Somaliland, adding a non-Arab pragmatic partner and exploring new economic corridors.

The Middle East now contains both logics at once. No alliance yet dominates. Stability remains elusive. Power relationships shift without moral resolution. Conflict persists, mutating rather than vanishing. For Israel, adaptation replaces expectation. Threat and opportunity arrive together. There is no final settlement on the horizon, only a system in motion, shaped by interests where possible and ideology where restraint fails.

Secret dossier reveals police ‘covered up’ threat to Maccabi players

In response to these findings, Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP and Telegraph columnist, said: “The police fitted the intelligence to justify a predetermined decision to ban Israeli fans from Villa Park – all at the behest of Islamist thugs and agitators. And then they lied about it.

“While they pretended the threat was from Israelis to local Muslims, we know from released papers it was the other way round – with armed Islamists threatening visiting Israelis.

“These police logs are further damning evidence of the dishonesty of West Midlands Police.”

Lord Walney, the Government’s former adviser on political violence, said: “This fiasco started out looking like timidity from West Midlands Police in the face of vocal local Muslims, but this latest revelation suggests it has become a systematic cover-up.

“The more chief constable Guildford has tried to double down and deny the force’s initial cowardice, the worse the scandal has become. Like Nixon at Watergate and countless other wrongdoing, it is the cover-up that will tarnish his reputation until he does the decent thing and resigns.”

Lord Austin added: “This is a shocking revelation.” The former West Midlands MP said: “It shows beyond doubt that when West Midlands Police were telling the public and Parliament that Israeli fans had to be banned because they presented a threat to public safety, they knew that it was in fact local Islamist extremists who were threatening violence against the Israelis.

“But instead of arresting the people threatening racist violence, they capitulated to them and have staged an appalling cover-up and lied repeatedly ever since. Why is the Chief Constable still in his job? He must resign or be sacked.”

West Midlands Police declined to comment.

Mosque that advised on Israeli fan ban also sat on panel that chose police chief

A mosque consulted by police before Israeli football fans were banned from a match in Britain was also represented on the panel that appointed the force’s chief constable, newly released documents show.

The Sunday Times reports that Kamran Hussain, then chief executive of Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, sat on the interview panel that selected Craig Guildford as chief constable of West Midlands Police in December 2022.

The force later consulted the same mosque before barring supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a Europa League fixture against Aston Villa last autumn. The consultation was disclosed by Guildford in a letter to MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee.

The decision to exclude Israeli fans and transparently flawed intelligence used to justify it has left Guildford’s position in doubt. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has said he should be dismissed.

Guildford’s future may be decided within days, when a report by Sir Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, is expected to be submitted to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and laid before Parliament.

Freedom of information disclosures show that Guildford was appointed after appearing before a panel convened by Simon Foster, the Labour police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands, which included Hussain. The identities of other panel members have been withheld.

Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk and an Aston Villa supporter, told the Sunday Times: “West Midlands Police relied on false intelligence to justify banning Israeli fans from Villa Park and discussed the decision with Green Lane mosque. The question now is who is really in charge. It clearly was not the police.”

The force has been accused of retrospectively creating intelligence to support the ban, and of failing to disclose warnings that Islamist protesters planned to target Israeli supporters if they were allowed into Birmingham.

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01/09 Links Pt2: Archives Confirm the Nazi Origins of Palestinian Terror Finance; The Birmingham Maccabi scandal proves multiculturalism has failed

From Ian:

Explosive Archives Confirm the Nazi Origins of Palestinian Terror Finance

Archival material newly unsealed in Belgrade casts a harsh spotlight on collaboration between Nazi Germany and Islamist leadership during the Second World War. Hidden for decades in Yugoslavia’s national archives, a slim investigative file on Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, confirms both the scale of his operational role in Nazi Europe and the political suppression that later ensured the case would never be pursued.

The file is not thin because evidence was lacking. It is thin because the investigation was stopped.

The documents reinforce a historical continuum stretching from the Mufti’s wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany to the postwar survival of Nazi capital networks that later financed the emergence of Palestinian terror organizations. This is precisely the through-line Patricia Posner and I documented in our 2024 joint investigation published by the Jewish Chronicle, Revealed: Nazi Financial Fixer Who Funded Palestinian Terror. In that exposé we traced how François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi financier, preserved Hitler’s political and financial legacy and redirected looted Nazi assets into Middle Eastern militant causes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Belgrade materials focus heavily on al-Husseini’s activities in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina. Far from acting merely as a political intermediary or propagandist, the Mufti pushed aggressively for operational control. He helped facilitate the creation of multiple Waffen-SS divisions composed of local Muslims, units that went on to commit mass atrocities against Jews and Serbs, including village burnings, executions, rape, and systematic terror.

What emerges from the archive is not only violence, but design.

Just the Facts with Gerald Posner is a reader-supported publication. Subscriptions make this work possible.

Documents assembled by Yugoslav investigators before their work was halted reveal how deliberately the alliance between the Nazi leadership and the Mufti was constructed. A wartime memorandum authored by a senior German official responsible for Muslim minority affairs in occupied territories records extensive coordination between Nazi authorities and al-Husseini aimed at mobilizing Muslim populations for the Nazi war effort.

The Mufti was not simply endorsing Third Reich objectives. He was shaping policy. He advocated embedding religious authorities directly within German military units, arguing that imams should be used to indoctrinate and motivate Muslim soldiers serving in both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. He pushed for the creation of formal training institutions designed to fuse political Islam with National Socialist ideology, producing cadres capable of spreading both doctrines in tandem.

This was not theoretical. A similar religious training model had already been implemented under his direction in Bosnia. Graduates of that system were deployed across the Balkans, reinforcing Nazi control and participating directly in atrocities against civilian populations. The Belgrade files confirm that the fusion of Islamism and Nazism was neither accidental nor rhetorical. It was institutionalized.

The archives also expose another dimension of the alliance that resonates powerfully with what followed in the postwar period: money.

UK must stop giving millions to the corrupted fiefdom of Unrwa

The West is divided into nations that recognise the dangerous reality that has crept up on them, and nations that cling onto the hope that appeasement underpinned by the mirage of international law will prolong the illusion of peace.

While Israel has been forced to confront threats on seven fronts, the West has mostly had the luxury of appeasement.

A newly assertive United States has been awakened from the “All eyes on Rafah” delusion under President Biden, which obstructed Israel’s fight against antisemitic Hamas terrorists, to siding with Israel when President Trump neutered Iran’s threats of a second Holocaust by bombing their underground nuclear facilities.

Then there is the United Kingdom, which, along with others, continues to feebly call for “restraint” every time Israel strikes a blow against common enemies who hate Jews and the West, while keenly lapping up one piece of propaganda after another.

As Israeli hostages were starving in the dungeons of Gaza, Sir Keir Starmer demanded an end to the “man-made humanitarian crisis” there while recognising a State of Palestine without even conditioning it on the return of the hostages. He handed hardened terrorists the diplomatic jackpot free of charge. So much for moral clarity.

CAA’s polling now reveals that 91 per cent of British Jews opposed the move, with barely 5 per cent in favour. This was a climax of Britain’s immoral and self-defeating foreign policy, after decades under the spell of anti-Israel propaganda. Unsurprisingly, Israel pays little heed. British calls for “an immediate ceasefire” no longer land when Israeli children have been kidnapped in the wake of Palestinian terrorists committing the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.

Nothing demonstrates willing Western gullibility more than the United Nations. For decades, the UN has been a parody of itself. Its Human Rights Council bulges with the worst perpetrators of human wrongs. As Israel witnessed in southern Lebanon, UN peacekeepers are simply a shield behind which terrorists prepare for mass murder.

Perhaps the worst UN agency is Unrwa. Whereas all the world’s refugees fall under the remit of UNHCR, Unrwa focuses only on those designated as refugees under their own special definition in Gaza and other territories neighbouring Israel. Founded in 1949, Unrwa spends over $3 billion a year on six million people, while UNHCR spends $11 billion on 21 times that number.

Unrwa is a corrupted fiefdom within the already distorted world of the UN. Its practices have been exposed endlessly. Its educational curricula have referred to the Jewish state as the “enemy”, taught mathematics by counting “martyred” terrorists, used phrases such as “jihad is one of the doors to paradise” in grammar lessons, and more. Its facilities have been used to store munitions and as rocket launch pads in practically every conflict with Israel.

Perhaps the worst open secret has been that Unrwa teachers and officials repeatedly moonlit as terrorists. Israeli intelligence alleged that 12 of Unrwa’s staff participated in October 7, including taking hostages. UN Watch investigators claimed that 490 Unrwa staff had links to terrorist organisations. Yahya Sinwar was found carrying an allegedly fake Unrwa identification card but there was no such excuse when the leader of Hamas in Lebanon was found to have served as head of the Unrwa teachers’ union.

Hostages who made it out of Gaza alive described being held by Unrwa personnel or in Unrwa facilities, including British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari.

The importance of Unrwa to Palestinian terrorists perhaps became most blatant amid the storm that followed the establishment by the US of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which essentially briefly replaced Unrwa. Its Gazan workers were murdered by Hamas, and disinformation campaigns convinced many a credulous Western leader and journalist that Israel was massacring Gazans collecting food amid a supposed famine depicted using the emaciated figures of children suffering from congenital diseases.

In a pre-October 7, totalitarian, Hamas-run Gaza, one might argue that there was no way Unrwa could operate without becoming enmeshed with terrorist organisations using it for cover. I would agree.

It is therefore no wonder that our polling found that 89 per cent of British Jews do not want taxpayers to fund Unrwa. When the previous government suspended funding to Unrwa, it had good reason.

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01/09 Links Pt1: Israel tapering off US military aid within the decade; What normalizing antisemitism looks like; Widespread Iran protests reach 13th day; rights group says at least 51 killed

From Ian:

Is This Time Different in Iran?

So after two weeks of the largest nationwide demonstrations in Iran since the Islamic Revolution, what has changed and why? It had nothing to do with negotiating tables and a lot to do with battlespace.

First, let’s note that this month’s huge anti-regime demonstrations in more than 100 Iranian cities were not ignited by a single big domestic event like a blatantly stolen election or the murder of an innocent young woman. The Iranian rial has been crashing past a million to the dollar for weeks, and inflation reached the point where the Tehran bazaar was losing money on every transaction, so it closed. Something else drove the following events such as the South Pars energy strike and reported military defections.

The battlespace started shaping up six years ago this month under Trump, with the U.S. killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran, by U.S. drones at Baghdad Airport. He had just arrived from Damascus, where he was briefing former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a plan to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, as had been done in Tehran in 1979. Iran’s Iraqi cat’s-paw Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and 10 senior Iranian briefers and bodyguards were also killed in the strike. After 20 years of Bush, Obama, and Biden kid gloves, Tehran was legitimately frightened.

And then after the Tehran-directed atrocity against Israel in October 2023, Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, Muhammed Deif, Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Aqil, Hashem Safieddine, and Ismail Haniyeh in an IRGC safe house in Tehran, and almost a hundred more in Lebanon and Gaza. Deprived of its decapitated Hezbollah Praetorian Guard—the Syrian Ba’ath Party didn’t trust its own people any more than the Bolivarian Maduro trusted Venezuelans more than Cubans—the criminal Assad family fled to Moscow. Then, last summer, the Israeli and U.S. air forces wiped out much of the Iranian military’s general staff and key nuclear sites. The pro-Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing dominoes continued to fall with the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the massacre of his Cuban protection detail, the seizure of Russia’s ghost ships, and the spread of Starlink terminals in Iran.

Iranians have seen the regime and its backers exposed and humiliated by an American administration, and they were quick to exploit this roll of the dice. Unlike pro-Hamas nihilists from Berkeley to Dublin, they have hit their streets in millions without a single keffiyeh or “Allahu Akbar,” motivated by American successes against their regime and its feckless backers.

As of the time of writing, the regime has turned off the internet and all landlines, and Khamenei has emerged from a two-day silence to express defiance. This is no surprise to anyone who knows that Khamenei’s greatest fear is moderation that causes the regime to bend and then break. As expressed in Alex Vatanka’s The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran, Khamenei became obsessed with the prospect of an “Iranian Gorbachev” who would impose reforms and usher in a USSR-style collapse; the more so because this was addressed by Tom Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, in a 1996 column titled “Waiting for Ayatollah Gorbachev” after he visited Iran. That pressed all of the leader’s buttons. Expect his defiance to continue as long as he is alive or in power.

Which may not be long, because he faces two threats. The one in front of him is the unpredictable Donald Trump, who has already shed Iranian blood and has promised to “rescue” the Iranian people. The one behind him is the IRGC, which holds all the firepower in Iran and which knows—as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knew—that the mullahs are despised by nearly the entire population. They are unlikely to lay down their guns or give up the 40% of the Iranian economy they control. They are led by Ahmad Vahidi, an internationally sanctioned terrorist.

“Terrorists are assholes” was a wise saying of one of my counterterrorist colleagues at the CIA. She didn’t just mean that terror plots ruined our weekends and sleep schedules. She meant that terrorists are psychopathic, disloyal, and venal creatures who could and did mistreat each other and turn against each other. The top ranks of the IRGC are full of them.

What might lead the IRGC to sideline or overthrow Khamenei and his weak president, Masoud Pezeshkian? Two kinds of strikes: an anti-regime blow from the United States, or the labor variety that would shut down Iran’s energy sector. If both occur, my money is on a coup, and goodbye mullahs.

JPost Editorial: As ceasefires unravel, Israel faces critical decisions on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria fronts

Doubts about Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa remain strong in Israel’s political and military echelons.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have accepted US President Donald Trump’s request to give Sharaa a chance. Israel should take the opening seriously and test it with hard requirements.

For Israel, a successful security understanding with Syria would preserve its ability to secure itself through control on the ground while laying the foundations for wider communication and cooperation.

The rare joint statement released on Tuesday signals Israel’s willingness to try a different approach on the Syrian front while tying any diplomatic steps to the protection of Druze minorities in the area.

That condition offers a real indicator of whether Damascus can govern responsibly and keep hostile actors away from the border.

As ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza remain in limbo, Israel now has a rare opportunity to pacify the Syrian border and strengthen the security of its northern communities.

Jerusalem should define redlines, demand verification, and keep freedom of action intact. It must also remain wary of a weak agreement that collapses at the first test.

The potential benefits feel closer than they did a week ago, including an image that once sounded absurd: Israelis and Syrians sharing Mount Hermon in peace – even if that vision starts with a jointly operated ski resort.

Jonathan Tobin: What normalizing antisemitism looks like

In the last year, incidents of bloody antisemitic terrorism in Boulder, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Manchester, England; and last month, on Bondi Beach in Australia have demonstrated what happens when governments are indifferent to advocacy for these smears.

Jews internalizing hatred
But the willingness of some Jews to dismiss antisemitism, even after all the horror of the last two years, is also about something else. It’s clear that a minority—albeit a sizable one in places like New York, where so much of the Jewish community leans hard to the left—of the Jews have internalized the animus directed at them and now blame the victims, whether Israelis or Americans, of antisemitism for the behavior of the antisemites.

It is not atypical behavior for victims of discrimination to look inward to find the causes of violence rather than at the perpetrators and ideas that animate them. But it is more likely to happen when mainstream discourse becomes dominated by the Jew-haters. Under those circumstances, it is far easier for those who promote this noxious ideology to get away with pretending to be an advocate for human rights, as Mamdani does, and for the Jewish targets of victimization to be told to pipe down and stop complaining.

That was, after all, just how African-Americans who protested against those who promoted segregation and discrimination during the century of Jim Crow racism in the United States. In an era where such vile bigotry was made commonplace, they were also dismissed and told they were overreacting. Now, the very people on the left who falsely analogize that dark period of American history to the Palestinian war on Jewish existence, supported by Marxists and Islamists, are telling Jews to back down in much the same manner.

The only answer to Mamdani and those promoting the idea that those who notice the antisemitism of the left and American Muslims are just partisan hysterics must be the same one given by advocates of civil rights to the racists of America’s past. Those in the media and the political establishment must be told that members of the Jewish community aren’t going to be marginalized by being told to calm down and not believe evidence seen almost daily. Decent Americans of every faith and ethnic background must make it clear that Jews will not be silent or acquiesce to a mayor out for retribution. His actions must be resisted with the same loud and determined protests and political action that Americans have eventually meted out to other types of hate-mongers.

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01/08 Links Pt2: Australia must answer this question before it investigates Bondi; Hamas document casts shadow over former EU envoy’s role in Gaza; Georgetown Taps Hamas Apologist Mehdi Hasan as Visiting Fellow

From Ian:

Hamas document casts shadow over former EU envoy’s role in Gaza

In the document, dated 28 September 2021, officials from Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry describe Kühn von Burgsdorff as “a professional figure” who “strongly supports and sympathises with the Palestinians”.

“He is demanding [that the EU] open official channels to engage with Hamas, but the public policy of the EU dismisses this,” the document states.

At the same time, Hamas officials acknowledge that the envoy’s stance did not reflect the EU’s institutional position and could change with his departure.

“The positive approach and inclinations of the EU representative to the Palestinian territories and his sympathy with the Palestinian cause are a personal approach, and this might change when the current EU representative changes, since the European position is committed to the red lines of American policies,” the document reads.

Asked about Hamas’ assessment of his conduct, Kühn von Burgsdorff told Euractiv that he acted fully within his mandate.

“I have defended the internationally enshrined right to self-determination of the Palestinian people in full compliance with and implementation of applicable EU policy,” he said.

He added that he consistently represented Brussels’ official position. “At no point have I made public statements that contradicted the EU’s officially adopted policy towards Israel and Palestine,” he said.

Last year, Kühn von Burgsdorff contributed two op-eds to Euractiv on the Gaza conflict, including one under the headline “The EU’s moral collapse”.

‘Jerusalemite martyrs’

The Hamas report also claims that Kühn von Burgsdorff was “hated by both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority” due to his solidarity with “Jerusalemite martyrs” whose homes were demolished, and his expressions of sympathy following the death in custody of Nizar Banat, a Palestinian activist and critic of the Palestinian Authority.

The document recommends strengthening coordination and communication between the EU and “Palestinian political, governmental and [Hamas] movement parties”.

Olga Deutsch, vice-president of NGO Monitor, said the documents confirm that Kühn von Burgsdorff “actively worked to undermine official EU anti-terror vetting policies”.

“It is deeply troubling to see a senior EU diplomat engage in open, ideological political advocacy, particularly when it serves an EU-designated terror group,” Deutsch told Euractiv. “In Hamas’ own words, he even ‘demanded’ the opening of official EU channels to engage with a proscribed terror organisation – an appalling subversion of EU regulations and a blatant contradiction of the Union’s public policy.”

She added that the EU must significantly strengthen its internal controls and vetting mechanisms. “How can the EU guarantee that its grantees are not engaging in terror glorification if it cannot even vouch for its own diplomats?” she said.

Amnesty International Refuses to Admit That Hamas Wants to Kill All Jews and Annihilate Israel

In its nearly 200-page report on the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, “Targeting Civilians: Murder, Hostage-Taking and Other Violations by Palestinian Armed Groups in Israel and Gaza,” Amnesty International omitted years of statements by Hamas leaders and language from its charter demonstrating genocidal intent against Jews.

This omission renders Amnesty’s account of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack fundamentally flawed — because it disregards strong evidence of Hamas’ genocidal intent and distorts both the nature of the massacre and Israel’s response.

According to the former Deputy Director of Amnesty’s now defunct Israel branch, Yariv Mohar, this report on Hamas’ attack was delayed by eight months. It had already been nearly finalized by the same time the organization released its December 2024 report, titled, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”

The organization, according to Mohar, told Israeli staff that the two reports would be published within weeks of one another.

According to Mohar, Amnesty delayed the Hamas report to keep the focus on Gaza, fearing that highlighting Hamas’ atrocities would undermine efforts to end the war. Mohar added that this was driven by a belief that Western audiences prefer a simplified moral narrative, and also because of Amnesty’s fear of backlash from its ultra-radical activist base.

Notably, the non-profit’s substantially longer Gaza report in 2024 used several out-of-context and debunked quotes by Israeli leaders to portray them as having genocidal intent.

Conversely, Amnesty’s treatment of Hamas sharply downplays the terror group’s own explicit ideology and objectives.

Hamas’ charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel as a condition for the liberation of Palestine, achieved through holy war (jihad). The charter specifically states that Hamas’ “struggle” is “against the Jews.”

Press Emblem Campaign Is the Latest Press Rights Org to Count Terrorists as Journalists

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, the purportedly high number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces has been a consistent focus of mainstream media, social media pundits, and rights organizations.

At HonestReporting, we have been tracking this trend, noting that studies conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on journalists killed in Gaza include a significant number of Palestinians who are affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other Gaza-based terror groups. This affiliation takes the form of serving in a military capacity on behalf of these terror groups, working for media organizations owned and operated by the terror groups, and spreading propaganda on their behalf.

Now we can add another press freedom organization to the ranks of those that whitewash terror-affiliated journalists and diminish the integrity of journalism in the Gaza Strip.

The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), a Geneva-based organization that “aims at strengthening the legal protection and safety of journalists in zones of conflict and civil unrest or in dangerous missions,” has released its end-of-the-year statistics on journalists killed around the world in 2025.

According to the PEC, almost half the journalists killed in 2025 were killed in the Gaza Strip. However, a closer look at the 60 journalists reportedly killed in Gaza named by the PEC, 23 (roughly 38%) have some form of affiliation with Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Among these 23 terror-affiliated journalists are nine who are alleged to have been terror operatives active in the Gaza Strip, 13 who worked for terror-affiliated media organizations, and one who served as a terror propagandist.

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01/08 Links Pt1: How international law has been weaponized against Israel; Iran Is on the Edge of Revolution; US to proceed with Gaza phase two despite no Hamas disarmament and missing hostage

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How international law has been weaponized against Israel

The ICJ case is a glaring example of how international law repudiates justice and truth in concert with its “human rights” enablers.

At the center of this web of hate squats the United Nations. People believe its self-designation as the ultimate custodian of peace and justice in the world. This is because it represents most of the world’s countries, and so plays into the pleasing fantasy of the brotherhood of man.

But most countries are dictatorships, kleptocracies or other human-rights abusers. These dominate the U.N. General Assembly, while the presence of tyrannical Russia and China on the U.N. Security Council makes a mockery of holding the world’s malefactors to account.

Last year, what was the number of times the General Assembly condemned Cuba, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan, Turkey, Hamas, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon or Venezuela? Zero. The number of times it condemned Israel? 15.

In its increasingly brutal crackdown against the current insurrection in Iran, the Tehran regime has killed at least 36 protesters. The number of U.N. resolutions or emergency sessions about this? Zero.

International law isn’t the pathway to a fairer and more civilized world. In its ferocious weaponization against Israel, it has been turned into the negation of justice and the legal instrument of evil.

The rules-based order has expired in disgrace. The only “might” it constrained was the ability of the victims of aggression to defend themselves. The only rule that should govern tackling evil is instead to bring about its total defeat.

The UN’s Apartheid Accusation: Political Narrative Over Facts on the Ground

It is now a well-established tactic to accuse Israel of any wrongdoing under the sun with a fancy name. Definitions get twisted deliberately in order to be leveled against the only Jewish state. Facts are either purposefully ignored or intentionally warped to fit a pre-determined narrative that frames Israel as a state continuously convicted of the most horrendous crimes.

The UN, on January 7, did exactly this yet again by accusing Israel of “racial segregation and apartheid” in the West Bank. The report spans several years, but focuses specifically on the period from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2025.

Although the report has yet to make front page news in the vast majority of outlets – likely because the UN accusations leveled against Israel have unfortunately become commonplace and therefore unnewsworthy – the BBC wasted no time in publishing the story, displaying the outlet’s obsessive desire to push an anti-Israel agenda.

Counterterrorism Efforts in the West Bank
Incredibly, while the focus of the report is on the aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, the report merely skims over them. Had it recognized the severity of the attacks, the UN would then also have to acknowledge that Israel’s counterterrorism and security strategy shifted in real time to prevent terrorist attacks before they occurred and counter any perceived threats.

From October 7, the potential opening of a new front in the West Bank was not just some delusional possibility but a high likelihood, as Hamas and other terrorist organizations have established strongholds in several cities. Hamas even called on Palestinians living in the West Bank to carry out armed attacks against Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7.

Any state that had just experienced a horrific terrorist attack against its civilians would be expected and indeed obliged to take more preventative and preemptive measures to ensure that nothing like that could ever occur again. This requires the IDF to implement new counterterrorism operations in hotbeds of terrorism such as Jenin and Tulkarm. This is not apartheid but counterterrorism and ensuring the safety of Israeli civilians.

The UN attempts to prove its point that the IDF is indiscriminately targeting Palestinians living in the West Bank, with a spike in deaths reported after October 7, using data provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Not only is the context of October 7 once again missing, but the UN also conveniently omits that many of these Palestinians were members of terrorist organizations, or operating as lone actors attempting to or committing terrorist attacks against Israelis. When the ongoing terrorist threat is considered alongside the fact that Israeli operations have been concentrated in cities long known as hotbeds of terrorism, the claim of indiscriminate targeting collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

While the UN attempts to draw a connection based on the disparity between Israeli and Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, the data more accurately reflects the effectiveness of Israel’s counterterrorism operations, resulting in the reduction of Israeli fatalities.

The Palestinian Authority’s long game in Gaza

Western officials speak endlessly about “the day after” in Gaza, as if it were a technical planning exercise rather than a brutal political struggle. For the P.A., the real endgame is the day after the day after.

It seeks to return to Gaza not as one faction among many, but as an internationally installed authority—armed with donor funding, security guarantees and insulation from blame for the war that preceded its return.

This is why it has invested so heavily in cultivating diplomatic respectability while doing almost nothing to improve Palestinian lives anywhere outside the patronage networks of its dictator, Mahmoud Abbas, now 90 years old. It assumes that any multinational transitional authority will either fail or depart—and that the final choice will be between the P.A. and anarchy.

The P.A. is positioning itself accordingly, maneuvering to be included in any transitional governance framework, even if it is just a small role, so that it can gradually assume more control until inevitably it has the job. Long-term thinking is an Islamist strength the West struggles to match.

Gaza’s civilians bear the cost. Hamas sacrifices them on the altar of resistance; the P.A. on the altar of legitimacy. Palestinian suffering in Gaza is not incidental to the P.A.’s strategy; it is instrumental. Each war, each humanitarian collapse, each funeral deepens a claim that only its rule can restore order and international standing. The message is simple: “You may not like us, but look at the alternative.”

This logic has worked for decades. Israel alone has consistently challenged this cynical and destructive formula.

When the P.A. finally moves to reclaim Gaza, it will insist that Hamas and Israel are gone, and that responsibility for the devastation lies elsewhere—with Israel, the global community or history’s arch itself.

What it doesn’t want is continuity. It wants a reset without reckoning. The P.A. doesn’t want to govern Gaza as it is, but Gaza as a symbol: liberated, suffering and returned at last to “legitimate” Palestinian hands.

This type of strategy is not confusion or incompetence; it is patience, weaponized. It is the belief that international guilt will eventually converge to restore its power without demanding reform, compromise or courage.

Until this strategy is named honestly and confronted openly, Gaza’s future will remain bleak. It will continue to be ruled by those willing to destroy it—and claimed by those waiting to inherit the ruins.

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01/07 Links Pt2: Norman Podhoretz Leaves a Legacy of Political Principle; Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”; Oct. 7 Hostages Reveal the Music That Helped Them Hold On

From Ian:

Norman Podhoretz Leaves a Legacy of Political Principle

Podhoretz’s death comes as the notion of even having political principles has become tenuous. On the left and right, many politicians and pundits refuse to criticize their own side. The principled and courageous perspective that marked Podhoretz’s life and writing, with a willingness to leave former allies, is rare. The few politicians who do it—like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who broke with their party over January 6—often pay a price for being courageous, and lose their seats.

Today, publications like The Dispatch and The Free Press exist because their founders and many of their writers were unwilling to embrace progressive shibboleths or MAGA elements and thus had to leave institutions where they’d once belonged. Last month, Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, demonstrated moral courage at a TPUSA event and may pay a price for it.

As a Christian who believes that human beings are made in the image of God, I resonated with Podhoretz’s perspective. We should we care about democracy and human rights around the world because humans are made in God’s image. Why should we battle Marxist and Islamist dictatorships and hope to see human flourishing expand through free markets, entrepreneurism, and innovation? Because people are made in the image of God. For Podhoretz, religion was not central, but his point of view had deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Podhoretz also understood the importance of stewardship regarding the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and stories. He was grateful for the gifts our forebearers bequeathed to us, and we should remember how his ideas shaped the understanding of Ronald Reagan, Kirkpatrick, and others who led the global movement to defeat the Soviet Union.

Podhoretz’s body of work reminds us that we don’t need to “make America great again,” because its principles, legal structure, history, and symbols are already great. It’s a treasury to be stewarded, as the Constitution says, to made more perfect rather than deconstructed.

Podhoretz’s legacy of principled stands based on deep moral conviction deserves remembering. As our Jewish friends often say at a moment of loss, may his memory be a blessing to us—a nation in search of its soul—at this fraught moment.

Seth Mandel: It Was Ever Thus

Review of 'Antisemitism, an American Tradition' by Pamela S. Nadell
Indeed, American history is littered with instances of full-blown anti-Jewish violence. When Major-General Ulysses S. Grant expelled all Jews from the territory under his control during the Civil War after accusing them of disloyalty to the Union, he didn’t “merely” cause them economic loss and social disruption. He also opened them up to vigilante attacks from citizens who were riled up by their war leader and took matters into their own hands.

The discrimination discovered in hospitals surely cost some Jewish patients their lives—doctors and relatives of deceased patients later testified as much. In 1902 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hundreds of Jews participating in a funeral procession were attacked by factory workers and then the police; some victims compared it to pogroms back in Russia. And then there were the immigration restrictions: Calling it “social anti-Semitism” was of no consolation to the many Jews around the world who were condemned to systematic murder in their home countries because the gates of America were closed to them.

The lesson that jumps off the pages of Nadell’s book is not that some forms of anti-Semitism are harmless but that all forms of anti-Semitism are connected and will, with the reliability of a law of physics, proceed toward violence unless acted upon by an outside force. Responding to the Damascus Affair, Nadell writes, U.S. Jews “honed strategies that they would employ to counter discrimination and persecution in the future. They held public meetings, lobbied the government, appealed to the press, welcomed allies, and stood up individually and collectively against antisemitism wherever and whenever it arose.”

Which is why Nadell’s concluding chapter is so important. She weaves together the post-10/7 wave of discrimination against Jews in major institutions and across party lines. In Nadell’s telling, that very much includes not just the post–October 7 atmosphere on campus but the two decades’ worth of buildup to this moment in colleges throughout the country. “The battle lines over antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism—the disapproval or demonization of all things Israeli—on campus were drawn,” Nadell writes about such fights in the early years of the new century. “They would widen into deep trenches in the years to come. Jewish students and faculty experienced what they perceived as antisemitism no matter what others called it.”

Nadell should be commended for refusing to adjudicate the debate over terminology. What matters most is what is happening, not what name you give it. The goal of all these anti-Jewish and anti-Israel extremist movements is clear, ambitious, and evil: Exclude Jews from society, and put targets on their backs in the process. And they will ultimately fail so long as American Jews remain vigilant and willing to exercise their rights.

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”

In May 1925, President Calvin Coolidge offered a vivid tribute to the “Hebraic mortar … of American democracy.” It should have been a vanilla speech at a prosy Washington event—the dedication of a new Jewish community center. But Coolidge took stock of the moment; a century later, his address is worth revisiting.

Just a couple of years earlier, in 1923, Henry Ford—America’s great industrialist, in many ways the Elon Musk of his time—had dominated multiple presidential polls, trumping the incumbent, Warren G. Harding. Ford never announced his candidacy for the 1924 election, nor had he ever held elected office. But he had captured the American imagination as an avatar for business ingenuity, education reform, and general uplift for the American middle class. It is also undeniable that Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. He ultimately endorsed Coolidge for president in December 1923, after Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack. In Coolidge’s 1925 speech to a largely Jewish crowd, he decisively broke with the anti-Jewish element of Ford’s movement.

In November 1920, Ford published the first installment of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. A multivolume anthology drawn from Ford’s anti-Jewish weekly, The Dearborn Independent, it was soon translated into sixteen languages—including six editions printed in Germany between 1920 and 1922. By the mid-1920s, the Dearborn Independent had reached a circulation of between 700,000 and 900,000. These numbers were in part due to the paper’s distribution in Ford automotive dealerships, but are nonetheless significant, considering that the New York Times had a circulation of 345,149 in 1925; the Chicago Tribune reached 608,130.

Of course, other forms of bigotry flourished in the teens and twenties. The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation was banned in cities across the Midwest for its insulting depictions of black people. Despite these widespread restrictions, then–President Woodrow Wilson watched the film upon its release, in the first-ever movie screening held at the White House. Birth of a Nation soon inspired a new iteration of the anti-Catholic, racist, and anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan. Hugo Black, the Alabama politician and sometime Klan member who eventually became a Supreme Court justice, built his early career attacking Catholicism; he delivered dozens of anti-Catholic speeches at Klan meetings across Alabama during his 1926 Senate campaign.

It was in this troubled atmosphere that Coolidge took the stage at a dedication ceremony for a community center, in 1925, “a year of dedications and rededications.” Hearkening to the start of the American Revolution in 1775, Coolidge attributed the success of the American project to a “common spiritual inspiration” powerful enough to “mold and weld together into a national unity, the many and scattered colonial communities that had been planted along the Atlantic seaboard.” He reminded his audience that tension among the early colonies seemed more organic and far more likely than cooperation. There was no guarantee that the colonies would form a national entity for revolution, and no clear idea of which colonies might agree to join it:

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01/07 Links Pt1: Trump signs order withdrawing US from 66 global bodies, including 31 UN orgs; How Maduro’s Arrest Became Another Anti-Israel Campaign

From Ian:

Trump withdraws US from dozens of international and UN entities

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from dozens of international and U.N. entities, including a key climate treaty and a U.N. body that promotes gender equality and women's empowerment, because they "operate contrary to U.S. national interests."

Among the 35 non-U.N. groups and 31 U.N. entities Trump listed in a memo, opens new tab to senior administration officials is the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change - described by many as the "bedrock" climate treaty which is parent agreement to the 2015 Paris climate deal.

The United States skipped the annual U.N. international climate summit last year for the first time in three decades.

"The United States would be the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC," said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Every other nation is a member, in part because they recognize that even beyond the moral imperative of addressing climate change, having a seat at the table in those negotiations represents an ability to shape massive economic policy and opportunity," said Bapna.

The U.S. will also quit UN Women, which works for gender equality and the empowerment of women, and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the international body's agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries. The U.S. cut its funding for the UNFPA last year.

"For United Nations entities, withdrawal means ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law," reads the memo. Trump has already largely slashed voluntary funding to most U.N. agencies.

UN report accuses Israel of ‘systematic’ racial segregation, apartheid

A new report released on Wednesday by the office of Volker Türk, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, claims that “Israel is violating international law requiring states to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”

The report, titled “Israel’s discriminatory administration of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” argues that unequal treatment and abuses of Palestinians have intensified since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Jerusalem’s subsequent military response.

“There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank,” Türk stated, using the international term for the Judea and Samaria region. “Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends or harvesting olives—every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”

“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before,” Türk added.

The Israeli mission to the U.N. in Geneva condemned the publication of the report, stating that Türk’s office “abuses its position and dire resources to issue yet another unmandated report against Israel” while “other mandates remain nixed on account of budget cuts.”

The Israeli mission said the report itself contains “absurd and distorted accusations of racial discrimination” which ignore “fundamental facts that lie at the basis of the conflict.”

Hamas-Linked Groups in UK Launch Campaign Demanding "Freedom for Palestinian Hostages"

The Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) and the Global Sumud Flotilla have launched a joint campaign, “Demanding Freedom for Palestinian Hostages.” The initiative invites supporters to take part in a red ribbon online action by updating their profile pictures and sharing videos or messages that feature the ribbon for “Palestinian hostages.” The campaign begins at 8 p.m. Jerusalem time on January 15th and leads up to coordinated street demonstrations on January 31st.

The campaign has drawn attention for its deliberate use of a red ribbon, a clear appropriation of the yellow ribbon that has become an internationally recognized symbol of solidarity with the 253 Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas during the October 7th terror attack. By adopting similar imagery and language, the campaign seeks to reframe convicted or detained terrorist prisoners as “hostages,” attempting to draw a moral equivalence between civilians kidnapped by Hamas and individuals imprisoned for terrorism related offenses.

The collaboration, promoted on social media in early January 2026, comes as UK Treasury investigators examine whether to impose sanctions on PFB leader and Freedom Flotilla Coalition International Zaher Birawi under counter-terrorism regulations. Both PFB and the Global Sumud Flotilla have documented ties to individuals and entities designated as terrorist organizations and operatives.

Birawi Under Investigation
According to the Telegraph, HM Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation confirmed in December 2025 it is investigating Zaher Birawi for potential designation under Counter-Terrorism Sanctions Regulations 2019.

Birawi both chairs PFB and heads the International Committee for Breaking the Siege of Gaza. He has also called himself a “founding member” of the Freedom Flotilla International Coalition aid boat Madleen. He has denied all allegations, describing them as “baseless.” If sanctioned, he would face asset freezes and prohibitions on receiving funds or economic resources.

Labour MP Christian Wakeford named Birawi in Parliament in October 2023 as a “Hamas operative living in London” and asked, “Given the national security implications, can we have an urgent statement in Government time on what the Home Office is doing about Hamas operatives here in Britain?“ Israel designated Birawi as a main Hamas operative in Europe in 2013.

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