06/19 Links Pt2: Mamdani calls AIPAC ‘monsters’; The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews; Sally Rooney blames Israel and US for rise of fascism in Europe

From Ian:

The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews

It ran under the headline: “From Goop to ‘Gwynocide’: why is Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a luxury Israeli real estate ad?” Beneath it appeared the following summary: “Paltrow went viral this week for her commercial for 51 Park – a building just miles from where Palestinians are being killed and displaced.”

Mahdawi's accusation of Paltrow's putative complicity in a (non-existent) genocide is based entirely on the fact that the commercial is for a building located "just miles" from where Palestinians are being killed:

“While the situation in the West Bank is terrible, it’s even worse in Gaza – which is only 50 or so miles away from the luxury pilates room at 51 Park,” she writes.

So, the logic would suggest, not only are all Israelis, even those living within pre-67 boundaries, guilty or complicit in genocide, but diaspora Jews – and, presumably, non-Jews – who visit, invest, or in any way associate with the state, within any borders, are genocidaire-adjacent.

Then, the Guardian columnist places an even large target on Israelis and Jews by evoking the Nazi analogy:

"Newborn babies are being gnawed on by rats in filthy camps in Gaza, while Paltrow shows off the wine rooms of a luxury tower development down the road,” Mahdawi writes. “It is some real The Zone of Interest stuff.”

The Zone of Interest is a film focusing on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who lived with their children in a home in the "Zone of Interest" next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

So, for at least the fifth time since October 7, 2023, Guardian editors have promoted one of the most morally grotesque and cruel forms of antisemitism – the attempted “Nazification” of Jews.

"There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide", wrote Howard Jacobson, "as though those making it feel they have their man at last". The sadism, he added, "resides, specifically, in attacking Jews where their memories of pain are keenest...by making them now the torturer and not the tortured, their assailants wrest their anguish from them, not only stealing their past but trampling on it."

Of course, the only party in the war that is guilty of genocide is Hamas, whose desire to rid the world of the Jewish state is codified in its founding charter, and who live-streamed to the world on October 7 what barbarism inspired by Nazi-like hatred of Jews looks like.

Turning again to Jacobson, who wrote that "morality changed on 7 October. Black became white, evil good, ugliness, beauty, the victim the culprit" and that "it was Hamas’s genius to have seen something to its advantage in the declining status of the Jews in the conscience of the west.” It realised, he added, "how the drip, drip, drip of unremitting revilement in the western media and on western campuses had worn away their humanity".

It is undoubtedly true that, both before and after October 7, no mainstream British outlet has done more to inspire the "revilement" of Jews than the Guardian.

The useful idiocy of Zack Polanski

To push back, he’s doubled and tripled down on his AsAJew status. He can barely utter a sentence without spitting out ‘the genocide’. He has constantly demanded that the UK should end arms sales to Israel and investigate the country for war crimes. He has backed sporting and cultural boycotts of Israeli football teams and supported the monitoring of UK-Israeli dual nationals who served in the IDF, saying they could be responsible for war crimes.

He didn’t even speak out against the Green party’s ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, even though it would mean labelling his own family – most of whom are Zionists and a few of whom made Aliyah – racists.

But still it isn’t enough for those who are really in control. Et tu, Mothin Ali? Because, yes, it is Zack’s trusty deputy who is on manoeuvres. Who could have guessed?

According to an article in the Spectator, Mothin is backing a new, powerful Greens affiliate called the Global Majority Greens (GMG), which has accused Polanski and other senior Greens in a new report of creating a “hierarchy of racism” with allegations of antisemitism taken more seriously than other complaints.

The report, which will be presented at the Green Party AGM later this month, accuses Zack of only “performing anti-racism” and condemns a “serious governance problem inseparable from institutional racism”. The problem is that too many Muslim members have been suspended for antisemitism. Apparently, that is racist because it “demonises migrants and Muslims”.

And even though Zack has really done everything he possibly could to disassociate himself from his own previous Zionism, it is not enough. It never would be. Because Zionism isn’t the problem.

It was inevitable that the Red/Green/Islamist alliance that now makes up the Greens would eventually break up. Their agendas are too separate, even if they can agree on hating Israel and the need for revolution. This glue won’t hold forever, as Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party found when the far left fell out with conservative Islamists on the issue of trans rights.

Perhaps the Greens lasted just a little bit longer because they are an older, more established party; but the cracks are emerging.

So the battle for the Greens is on. Now we will see whether the party’s newfound popularity is genuinely the Zack effect (and I don’t doubt that some of it is) and how much it is sheer entryism from the hard left and Islamists.

I imagine that Zack will fight this, but he is already bloodied by the growing body of scandals surrounding him. How much longer can he last?

You do have to wonder how he really thought that a Jewish man with a history of Zionism could survive as leader of a party obsessed with Israel. Idiot.

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06/19 Links Pt1: 4 IDF soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah attack; Melanie Phillips: Trump’s surrender; ‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist; Vance Drops the Pretense; How Doha captured the ICC

From Ian:

Melanie Phillip: Trump’s surrender

Trump signed the agreement because he found himself in a trap from which all escape options were bad. But that was because he had refused to accept Israel’s assessment that the Tehran regime needed to be brought down and that it would take a year of attrition to do so.

Having embarked on a different, shorter war, he then proceeded to undermine Israel’s carefully thought-out plan for victory, calling off its most decisive attacks at the last moment.

Looking for an off-ramp from the war to avoid political or economic collapse is rational, if regrettable. Dressing up a tactical retreat as victory to obscure the disaster caused by Trump’s own incompetence is also rational, if deplorable.

But the enormity of his capitulation to Iran, the ludicrous absurdity of his remarks and the venom against his great ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggest that something else is at work here.

It was always assumed that Trump would be careful never to go down in history as a second Barack Obama, replicating the former president’s disastrous 2015 Iran deal; nor would he ever tolerate being thought of as a sucker.

But what if Trump’s chronic narcissism makes him unable to see that’s what he’s actually become? We know from long experience that he often frames events to correspond with what he wants them to be, rather than what they actually are. What if, accordingly, he really has turned surrender into victory against Iran in his mind? What if he really believes that America has won this war?

There are possibly even darker explanations for this debacle. There are the financial connections between Iran’s ally Qatar and people in the Trump administration—not to mention the $1 trillion that Qatar has now pledged to invest in the United States, in addition to the vast sums with which it has already bought up America.

And in Tablet last April, Lee Smith suggested that the Iranian regime’s “echo chamber” influence operation in Washington, D.C., to sell Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal was actively working once again during the current war to safeguard Iran’s nuclear program. This time, however, it had a man on the inside of the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance.

Israel now faces a hideous choice between abandoning its military defense against Hezbollah’s unceasing attacks—another Israeli soldier was killed in Lebanon this week, and several others were injured—or risking the vindictive wrath of Trump.

The longtime opponents of this war may be gloating, but America’s national interest demanded—and still demands—that the Iranian regime be neutralized.

Iran’s war against the West hasn’t ended. Trump’s surrender has produced a crisis not just for Israel but America as well.

Rowan Dean: Peace offering

Last week the world looked on in horror at the footage of a beautiful young 21-year-old girl, Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, being callously tossed to her death at a Brazilian bungee jump, as the safety rope lay uselessly unattached to one side. To add to the tragedy, it has also been reported that Maria was still alive when a nurse got to her, but she died shortly afterwards.

It’s hard not to draw a comparison with the other horror show this week, as President Donald Trump and his sidekick J.D. Vance announced a so-called ‘peace deal’ with Iran, or rather a ‘memorandum of understanding’, that appears to throw Israeli Prime Minister and the security of Israel off a cliff, with no safety rope.

This betrayal of Israel comes as a profound shock to all those who supported Mr Trump’s war against Iran not only in the hope that it would defang the world’s most evil regime, but would also provide the impetus for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their murderous and oppressive government.

This magazine believes it was a mistake for the Americans to halt the bombing campaign at the very point where the Iranian regime was at its most vulnerable. It is impossible to know what may have been, but any student of military history knows that when you are winning against a bloodthirsty foe, the wisest course of action is to finish off your enemy when they are down. Giving them the opportunity to re-build, re-organise and ultimately fight another day is a very grave error.

‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist

It has become axiomatic, on both the Left and the Right, to claim that America has always given Israel “unconditional support.” Tucker Carlson has said as much. So has Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), among many, many others.

But there’s a problem with this narrative: It’s not true. And one only needs to read a history book to find out why.

As historians such as Walter Russell Mead have documented, America has long had a special relationship with Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. America has become, over time, Israel’s greatest ally.

But it is historically inaccurate to portray that support as either unwavering or one-sided.

The United States was the first nation to recognize the State of Israel. President Harry Truman, defying many of his advisers, supported U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, which called to create two states out of British-ruled Mandate Palestine.

Zionist leaders in pre-state Israel supported Resolution 181, although it fell far short of the territories promised to them after World War I. By contrast, Arab states rejected the proposal and chose war instead.

In Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, five Arab armies and multiple militias, some led by former Nazi officers and collaborators, massed to destroy the fledgling Jewish state.

Israel won by the skin of its teeth, losing as much as 1% of its population. Israelis fought and bled for their freedom. And they did so on their own.

Many of those who fought and died were Holocaust survivors, some fresh off the boats from Displaced Persons camps in Europe.

They did not use American arms. The Israelis relied on a hodgepodge of weapons, many from the Czech Republic.

In fact, the U.S. government instituted an arms embargo and prosecuted those who violated it. By its very nature, the arms embargo favored the Arab states, who had an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Transjordan, known today as Jordan, even fielded British-led and trained troops, meaning that, mere years after World War II, some British officers were quite literally on the same side as the Nazi officers who were advising Syria and other Arab nations.

Opposition to the world’s sole Jewish state can make for strange bedfellows.

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06/18 Links Pt2: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter; The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism; Hillary Clinton: No alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan

From Ian:

‘The single best diaspora experience’: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, American Jewish leaders have signed an open letter expressing gratitude to a nation “unlike so many others through Jewish history [that] did not merely tolerate Jewish life, but made possible its flourishing,” while also highlighting Jewish contributions to the country’s founding.

“From the earliest days of the American experiment, Jews were drawn to the promise of a nation founded not on bloodline, monarchy, or established religion, but on liberty, covenant, and the dignity of the individual,” the letter reads. “Having known the weight of persecution and exclusion, Jews recognized in America’s founding ideals something rare in human history: the possibility of belonging without surrendering our identity.”

The letter continues, “Here, Jewish immigrants arrived with little and built lives of dignity. Here, Jewish communities established synagogues, schools, charities, businesses, and institutions of civic life. Here, Jews rose not because success was guaranteed, but because freedom made striving possible.”

The letter was spearheaded by David Bernstein, CEO of the North American Values Institute, and Phil Darivoff, chairman emeritus of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, to increase American Jewish involvement in America 250 celebrations.

“America 250 is an opportunity to express gratitude to America, the country that’s been the single best diaspora experience that Jews have ever had,” Bernstein told Jewish Insider. “American Jews have been an integral part of this country and its story from the very beginning and we want to remind our fellow Americans of that.”

“It’s also an opportunity to ensure that America lives up to its founding ideal,” continued Bernstein. He asserted that America’s core civic values, such as freedom of conscience and the rule of law, “are the best defense against antisemitism,” which reached historic levels in America following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

“It’s incumbent on the American Jewish community to double down on those values, both because they protect us and because they allow America to live up to its highest potential,” said Bernstein.

The letter also acknowledges America’s shortcomings, noting, “America has not always lived up to its own ideals. Its history is marked by acts and periods of injustice, exclusion and failures that wounded many communities, including at times our own.”

It concludes with a call to action for American Jews.

Adam Louis-Klein: The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs, mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.

The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.

Jewish Statehood and American Tribal Law

The United States pursued a one-state solution to the American-Indian conflict between 1887 and 1934. Treaty promises were ignored. Tribal governments were dismissed. Territorial boundaries were erased. Native peoples were no longer classified as members of foreign nations and instead given allotments of land to build private farms and ranches. Many of their children were placed in federal boarding schools where they were taught to assimilate into the culture of the newly unified nation. Known by historians as the Allotment Era in U.S.-Native American relations, these assimilationist policies were championed in part by idealistic reformers who believed that Indian poverty would be alleviated when native peoples abandoned tribal ways for the universalist principles of American citizenship. Their intention was good; their one-state experiment, a tragedy.

The project of “civilizing” native children in boarding schools became notoriously abusive. Many allotted lands proved unfit for small-scale agriculture while others required costly equipment most families could not afford. Thousands of impoverished Indians were left with no choice but to sell their property or lose it through foreclosure. Tribal landholdings plummeted from nearly 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by the time the allotment policy was repealed in 1934. It was a loss whose “devastation and trauma to tribal communities…cannot be overstated,” to quote the textbook Mastering Native American Law.

It was into this climate of anti-tribal reform, now largely forgotten, that Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State first entered the public debate in the United States. Various reform rabbis and Jewish intellectuals, who had absorbed the anti-tribal zeitgeist, opposed Herzl’s “tribal” assumptions. Prominent among them was the distinguished philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen who in 1919 published an influential essay in The New Republic entitled “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?”

Cohen argued that Zionism and Americanism are irreconcilable. “A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a peculiar religion, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil,” he wrote, “whereas liberal America has traditionally stood for separation of Church and State, the free mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and language and still advance the process of civilization.” When Cohen reissued the essay in his 1945 book The Faith of a Liberal, he likened Zionism to Nazi Aryanism, declaring that “tribalism is a creed that leads to grief and massacre.”

Against Herzl, Cohen insisted that “the Jewish problem is one that must be settled in each country separately” through assimilation and individual freedom. He maintained that as the world’s nations became ever more liberal, antisemitism would wither away. Though global Jewry’s faith in such promises mostly evaporated after the traumas of the Holocaust and the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, Cohen’s portrayal of Zionism as inherently illiberal and backward nevertheless reverberated down the decades, giving birth in our time to a school of anti-Israel thinkers whom this paper calls anti-tribalists.

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06/18 Links Pt1: The Ceasefire Neither Ends nor Eases the Iranian Threat; Florida man planned mass shooting at AIPAC office; Germany foiled Hamas Oct. 7 anniversary plot

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Hamas weaponized our desire for quiet; now Israel must learn it can't afford innocence

The newly exposed Hamas files have forced Israel to confront one of the most painful truths of the October 7 massacre: Hamas caught Israel off guard by studying it, feeding it the signals it wanted to see, and turning its wish for quiet into part of the battlefield.

Yonah Jeremy Bob’s exclusive report in The Jerusalem Post, based on documents provided by the Military Intelligence Directorate to the Meir Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute, shows a calculated deception effort that began long before the massacre.

A Hamas document from September 2022 addressed the need to build a “strategic deception” plan for a surprise attack. Another, from September 25, 2023, shortly before the invasion, described calibrated border pressure, mediated demands, and the use of Jewish festivals as tactical opportunities.

That is the horror of these documents. They show planning, patience, and confidence.

Hamas understood that Israel had come to see Gaza through a management doctrine: More work permits. More Qatari money. More indirect messages through mediators. More rounds in which Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired, and Hamas sat on the sidelines.

Quiet became evidence. Restraint became analysis. Economic distress became deterrence.

The documents suggest Hamas understood all of this and weaponized it. This deepens Israel’s self-indictment. A serious country expects enemies to lie. Terrorist organizations deceive. Intelligence exists because hostile actors conceal intentions, simulate routine, and exploit assumptions.

The question is why so many warnings, patterns, drills, border incidents, and signals were forced into a theory that said Hamas wanted calm more than war.

The answer begins with the old “conceptzia,” the preconceived notion that the enemy is deterred because our logic says he should be.

Israel has known this failure before. In 1973, it believed Egypt and Syria would refrain from launching war under conditions Israel considered irrational.

In 2023, it believed Hamas would prioritize its rule, its money, and its economic arrangements over a catastrophic confrontation. Hamas read that arrogance and built a trap around it.

The Saudi-normalization context makes the lesson wider. Hamas saw a regional order forming that could push the Palestinian issue aside and strengthen Israel’s place in the Middle East. It chose mass violence to blow up diplomacy.

Mark Levin: The US-Iran MoU is a dangerous gamble

The nuclear issue
Item 8 states that Iran “reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons” and that the fate of enriched uranium and other nuclear-related issues will be resolved later.

Shouldn’t that have been the first issue addressed?

The agreement offers relief and concessions immediately, while postponing the most critical details about permanently dismantling Iran’s nuclear program and eliminating its enriched uranium stockpiles.

Now there is talk of merely degrading the uranium. At best, this provision amounts to little more than a slogan.

Item 9 prevents us from strengthening our regional military posture or imposing new sanctions while negotiations continue, surrendering even more leverage.

Item 10 immediately grants waivers for Iranian crude oil exports, petroleum products, banking, insurance and transportation services.

In other words, the Iranian regime is back in business before any final agreement is reached. Billions of dollars will begin flowing into Tehran immediately.

Item 11 releases frozen Iranian assets and restricted funds.

Again, billions more flow directly to the regime before it has demonstrated any meaningful change in behavior.

What’s missing
Notably absent from the agreement are several critical issues.

First, there is not a word about Iran’s ballistic missile program, the regime’s most destructive conventional weapon and one capable of killing tens of thousands of people. This omission is a grave concession.

Second, there is nothing addressing Iran’s support for terrorism and terrorist organizations. I have no illusion that Tehran’s sponsorship of terrorism will end under this arrangement.

Third, there is no mention of the Iranian people, whom we once promised to support. They appear to have been abandoned.

Fourth, there is no discussion of reparations owed by the regime to the United States, Israel or Arab states for the devastation caused by its missile attacks.

During the next 60 days, this MoU requires serious changes—if not outright abandonment.

Bret Stephens: The Ceasefire Neither Ends nor Eases the Iranian Threat

Iran's military leaders have greeted the ceasefire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that "through the imposition of their divine and iron will" they had "humiliated American and Zionist enemies."

Today, Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is worthless. The leadership rules an unhappy population that would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow.

Americans who supported the war believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests. This ceasefire neither ends nor eases that threat. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran - the naval blockade of its ports - before there's any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office.

Trump's Iran Deal Isn't Perfect. It Doesn't Need to Be.

Notions that the U.S. should have held out for more upfront nuclear concessions from Iran gets things backward. The U.S. and the world need shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. They do not need a nuclear agreement with Iran, and Mr. Trump should not make negotiating one a priority in his postwar Iran policy.

For all the operational capability demonstrated by the U.S. military over the course of this conflict, there is no painting the preliminary outcome as a resounding American victory. Food and energy costs have spiked; U.S. military resources have been depleted; America's alliances in the Middle East and Europe have suffered. Nor was the war a win for the Iranian regime, whose conventional military capability is diminished, economy crippled and leadership demolished.

These results obscure an important detail: the U.S. has significantly reduced the nuclear threat posed by Iran. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, Iran's nuclear program was advanced enough that it was capable of producing sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon within a matter of days, and a small arsenal's worth within just weeks.

Today, Iran's nuclear program is arguably the weakest it's been since the early 2000s. To produce a nuclear weapon, Iran would need to reconstitute its infrastructure, which is believed to have been largely destroyed, while facing the prospect of additional strikes as it tried to rebuild.

Much of the global economic pressure that has been building as a result of this war will dissipate once the Strait of Hormuz reopens, but Iran's economy will remain in tatters. Whatever agreement Washington and Tehran reach, an Iranian regime determined to dominate its region and control its people through force will be unfriendly to American interests and its regional partners.

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06/17 Links Pt2: The Squeezing of Jewish Life in Britain; Israeli flag removed at World Cup match as Palestinian flags remain; Tel Aviv remains world’s fourth-largest startup ecosystem despite wartime pressures

From Ian:

It’s Not Biased if It’s Against Jews

To paraphrase Law & Order, in the American legal system, bias-motivated offenses are considered especially reprehensible. Punching someone is bad. Punching them for racist reasons is worse. So various laws, both criminal and civil, prescribe enhanced penalties in those situations. Sometimes the racism is unmistakable. At other times, it’s hidden behind code words or dog whistles—thugs, urban, globalists, etc.—or seemingly neutral markers like hair and dress. No matter; courts, prosecutors, and legislators have become quite adept at sniffing out crafty bigotry.

Yet the invocation of Zionism has, inexplicably, thrown them all for a loop. In the United States and across the globe, participants in purportedly anti-Zionist movements are committing crimes and civil offenses. Sometimes they harm Jews. Sometimes they harm non-Jews. But, in all cases, the people who commit these crimes—as well as their legions of defenders—argue that there is no bias. Any animus, they insist, is not antisemitic or anti-Jewish. It is anti-Zionist. Some of their best friends, these assailants are quick to add, are Jews.

As much as these claims have been dissected, debated and, regularly, debunked in a variety of settings, the courts are just beginning to weigh in. Will they treat the targeting of alleged “Zionists” as purely political—and thus not evidence of racial or religious bias? Or will they see it as integral to the racial and/or religious identity of American Jews?

Earlier this month, a federal district court judge in New York gave us a sneak peek at how the U.S. legal system might resolve what many see as yet another ham-fisted effort to work around long-standing civil rights laws. The results weren’t pretty. The court adopted a number of conclusions that, if accepted by other courts, would substantially weaken the civil rights of those harmed by anti-Zionist campaigns of harassment and violence. That’s bad news for Jews, their allies, and anyone else who happened to get in the anti-Zionists’ way.

If allowed to stand, the ruling could embolden more anti-Jewish agitators, effectively furnishing them with a virtual blueprint to harass without violating the KKK Act.

Mariano Torres and Lester Wilson, the men at the center of the New York case, got in the way. Neither Torres nor Wilson is Jewish. They are janitors employed by Columbia University. And like so many trying to go about their studies or jobs in Morningside Heights or around the country since Oct. 7, 2023, Torres and Wilson found their efforts impeded—and their lives imperiled—by those obsessed with Jews and Israel, the Jewish state.

On April 30, 2024, this obsession turned riotous. Masked militants, armed with hammers, knives, bolt cutters, chains, and zip ties, stormed Hamilton Hall and confronted the two working men. Torres and Wilson each refused to yield, which drew the ire of the rioters who then assaulted the janitors, detained them, sought to bribe them, and slurred them as “Jew lovers,” “Jew workers,” and “Zionists.” Eventually, according to their lawsuit, Torres fled, and Wilson was forced out of the building. The rioters, meanwhile, kept going. They seized the building, broke windows to chain the doors shut, barricaded themselves inside, and unfurled banners declaring an “intifada.”

Torres and Wilson later filed a civil rights lawsuit. With the help of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Torridon Law firm, the pair relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, to argue that they were victimized by an anti-Jewish riot. A provision of that law prohibits people from conspiring to deprive “any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws.” To satisfy that equal protection component, plaintiffs must generally show that the conspiracy was motivated by “some racial or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus.”

According to Torres and Wilson’s complaint, that’s precisely what occurred: The rioters, motivated by anti-Jewish animus, had conspired to deprive equal protection of the laws to people who are or are perceived to be Jews or supporters of Jews.

The clear focus of the lawsuit was illegal conduct, not speech. Torres and Wilson sought damages for alleged assault and battery during an illegal building occupation. They weren’t concerned with the rioters’ opinions on world affairs. They were concerned with the crowbars, rope, chains, and zip ties. They were concerned with their seizure of university property. They were concerned with being detained and threatened.

Torres and Wilson also happened to understand the nature of the riot because, allegedly, the rioters made it clear. Jews and those presumed to side with (or, gasp, love) Jews were the problem.

This is precisely the type of situation Congress anticipated when enacting the KKK Act—that is, the supercharging of ordinary crimes into far more socially corrosive hate crimes based on evidence of discriminatory animus. Yet the court twisted itself, the facts, and the law in knots, rendering an error-filled decision that had the effect of widening what we see as an emerging anti-Zionism exception to civil rights law. So long as you scream about Zionists and not Jews (or, as in this case, even if you interchangeably slur Zionists and Jews as you brandish knives and hammers), the courts will give you a hall pass.

Nearly a third of Canadians believe antisemitism has become more acceptable, survey finds

Nearly one-third of Canadians believe that antisemitism or anti-Jewish attitudes are becoming more acceptable in the country, according to a new poll.

The Leger survey, conducted on behalf of the Association for Canadian Studies, found that 31 per cent held that view, while the highest level of agreement was concentrated among university students (37 per cent), men (38 per cent) and Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 (35 per cent). English speakers were more than twice (35 per cent) as likely to agree with the statement as opposed to just 16 per cent of Francophones.

Slightly over a fifth (22 per cent) of Canadians agreed that “Israel’s military actions in Gaza justify negative attitudes toward Jewish people in Canada,” as opposed to nearly half (49 per cent) of respondents who disagreed. Canadians aged 18 to 34 (26 per cent) and men (29 per cent) were most likely to agree with the statement.

“The findings suggest that condemnation alone has not been enough. While many leaders have denounced antisemitism since October 7, the survey shows that a significant minority of Canadians still believe that events in the Middle East justify negative attitudes toward Jewish Canadians,” Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, told National Post in a written statement.

Roughly one-sixth (17 per cent) of Canadians surveyed agreed that they have become more negative toward Jews since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, while a majority (62 per cent) disagreed with the statement. Women (68 per cent), college students (66 per cent) and Canadians over 55 (69 per cent) were the most likely to disagree with the statement. Those born outside of Canada were more likely to agree (24 per cent) than respondents born in the country (16 per cent).

A similar split was seen on the question of whether “Jews in Canada are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.” Nine per cent of all respondents and eight per cent of people born in Canada agreed, while nearly twice the number of respondents born outside of the country (15 per cent) agreed. Strong majorities of respondents born in Canada (73 per cent) and outside the country (62 per cent) disagreed with the statement.

“It suggests that public education should not only focus on people who hold openly antisemitic views, but also on the much larger group that may not recognize when criticism about Israel becomes rhetoric that targets Jews and that presents a threat to Jewish Canadians’ sense of safety and belonging,” Jedwab said.

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06/17 Links Pt1: Israel won the war, but the peace is being signed without it; Iran's deal must weaken, not strengthen, Hezbollah in Lebanon; IDF soldier killed, seven others wounded, by IED explosion in southern Lebanon

From Ian:

Did Iran Just Get the Better of Us?

Much of the language in this document is vague, so it is difficult to pin down what each country has actually agreed to, but the plainest meaning of the text indicates a lopsided deal. The United States has committed to immediately easing its economic pressure on Iran, and Iran has only promised to set in motion a process that should eventually open the Strait. The Islamic Republic—which is still attacking shipping in the Strait—can drag its feet, but the United States must leap to comply. Tehran can continue its campaign of international terrorism, rebuild its war machine, and perhaps even extort protection money from Gulf shipping while Washington stands pat.

The rest of the document is unlikely to come to fruition unless Trump also caves on Iran's enriched uranium. The MOU's "minimum methodology" would permit the mullahs to keep a slightly lower-grade blend, which might actually ease their path to a bomb if it enables them to excavate their material that was buried by American B-2s last summer. Iran would receive over $300 billion if it came to an arrangement about its nuclear program that satisfies Trump, but with the pressure off, there is little reason to believe that it will make any further concessions. And CIA director John Ratcliffe reportedly told Trump that his agency collected intelligence indicating Iran's leaders intend to play a double game with these negotiations.

Some commentators have noted, correctly, that there are few yardsticks by which to measure compliance, to say nothing of mechanisms to enforce deviations from the agreement. That is beside the point. Trump signed this document because he escalated the conflict as far as he was willing to go, did not get the results he wanted, and is now trying to put the conflict in the rearview mirror. There will be little enthusiasm in the White House to hold Iran to its obligations and risk provoking it further.

If Trump does not find a way to recover quickly, this MOU could mark the effective end of his presidency. The air campaign inflicted significant damage on Iran's military capabilities and nuclear program, which will buy some time. But the Gulf Arabs, who have been in the crosshairs for months, are unlikely to wait until Tehran has fully rearmed to cut a deal. And since Trump has agreed to restrain Israel, which reportedly was not even allowed to see the text, he cannot use his most capable ally to curb Iran. The ripple effects could extend far beyond the Middle East. The midterms are looking grim, the Iran campaign has split the president's party, congressional Republicans are openly expressing their impatience, and Trump is now in danger of presiding over a regional collapse.

Second-term presidents often run into similar challenges, and many turn to foreign policy, where they have the fewest domestic constraints on action. Trump has a flair for improvisation and is eager to build a lasting legacy, so he is likely to make the same pivot. But to turn the tide against America's fanatical enemies, he also needs to exhibit steadfastness and resolve.

JPost Editorial: Diplomacy is not enough: Iran's deal must weaken, not strengthen, Hezbollah in Lebanon

The new US-Iran framework risks doing the opposite. By placing Lebanon inside the Iran track, it effectively ties Hezbollah’s fate to Tehran’s leverage. Iranian officials and Hezbollah’s political allies are already treating Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon as part of the next stage of US-Iran negotiations.

That is precisely the danger: Israel’s northern border becomes another bargaining chip in a deal whose central parties are not the people who live under Hezbollah’s rockets.

This does not mean Israel should reject every diplomatic initiative. Israel needs the United States, needs working ties with neighboring countries, and should support any serious effort to turn Lebanon into a sovereign state capable of enforcing its own territory. If the Lebanese Armed Forces can genuinely replace Hezbollah south of the Litani, that is an Israeli interest.

But hope is not a security mechanism. A ceasefire that leaves Hezbollah armed, politically emboldened, and protected by Iranian patronage is not a solution; it is quietly purchased on credit, and the bill will come due in the North.

Northern residents have paid too much for temporary quiet. Since October 7, they have endured evacuations, rocket and drone fire, destroyed homes, collapsing local economies, and the humiliation of not knowing when their own state can safely tell them to return. This is not just a military problem – it is a civic failure.

For years, the state underinvested in the North, neglected emergency preparedness, and allowed border communities to live with insecurity that would be intolerable in the center of the country. The result is a slow hollowing-out of the Galilee.

People leave because they cannot build a future on a warning siren, businesses close because uncertainty is not a business model, and communities meant to embody national resilience become evidence of national neglect.

Israel cannot accept less than dismantling Hezbollah
This is not new, but today it receives a different kind of validation. When an international framework appears to prioritize regional calm over dismantling Hezbollah’s threat, residents hear the same old message: wait longer, trust more, accept less.

Israel cannot accept that.

A responsible Israeli position should be firm, not reckless. Any arrangement must include enforceable benchmarks for Hezbollah’s withdrawal and disarmament, a credible Lebanese or international mechanism on the ground, and explicit recognition that Israel retains the right to act against imminent threats. It must not allow Iran to trade Lebanon’s stability for nuclear concessions, or ask Israeli citizens to return home based on diplomatic language that Hezbollah has not implemented.

Israel should welcome diplomacy that makes the North safer – and resist diplomacy that merely makes that danger quieter.

The people of the North do not need another declaration; they need protection, reconstruction, accountability, and a border secure enough to come home to.

Phase Two Never Comes By Abe Greenwald

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What’s wrong with the MOU is pretty much everything. It seeks to protect Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon from Israel. The U.S. will withdraw military forces, lift its naval blockade, end sanctions on the regime, and unfreeze the regime’s frozen assets. The U.S. also pledges that Iran will get $300 billion “for reconstruction” “as part of a final deal within 60 days.” Iran is supposed to let vessels pass freely through the Strait of Hormuz once again and vows not to pursue a nuclear weapon. But any further discussion of Iranian nukes has been pushed off for another 60 days, and that’s the phase-two dead end.

If the regime refused to conduct detailed and credible negotiations about ending its nuclear program today, it’s certainly not going to feel more pressured to do so 60 days into its second life as the country that beat America.

Donald Trump didn’t need a war or an MOU to get the Iranians to pledge that they wouldn’t go nuclear. The regime has been saying for decades that it has no interest in pursuing nuclear weapons, with mullahs citing fatwas that supposedly proscribe nukes on Islamic grounds. The whole time, however, they’ve been enriching uranium to levels that are useful in achieving only one thing: making a nuclear explosive.

The regime will never abandon its nuclear quest and never stop lying about it. So once again, the Trump administration is expecting people to do things that they will never do. Hamas was happy to put off talk of disarming to a later date, and Iran is even happier to kick the nuclear can down the road. Both parties know they will never comply.

But the Iranian regime now enjoys an extra sense of security. Its leaders know that the U.S. is making a mad dash for the exits and plans never to look back. Trump says that he’ll bomb Iran again if it doesn’t comply with the agreement as outlined. The problem is that he’s taught Tehran to read such threats as signs of surrender. And Iran’s leaders are additionally aware that the U.S. has stood idly by and done nothing while the regime dug missiles out of cratered tunnels during the “cease-fire.” All parties’ intentions are now as clear as can be. The U.S. is heading out, and Iran is moving forward.

Trump also claims that if the deal goes bad, he’ll blame Vice President JD Vance, who’s taken the lead on it. But that’s not true. When the deal goes bad, Trump just won’t acknowledge it. It will be another, scarier open-ended phase one.

Jonathan Tobin: Who will stand with Israel against a new Iran deal?

There will be those who will blame this predicament on Netanyahu. His domestic opponents will claim that he depended too heavily on Trump’s friendship for Israel and that of the Republicans. And they will say he alienated Democrats.

This is both untrue and deeply unfair. Whatever one might say about Netanyahu when it comes to navigating the political landscape of his country’s sole superpower ally, the current alignment has little or nothing to do with his unpopularity in the United States or his judgment.

The drift by Democrats away from Israel is the result of the growing influence of toxic left-wing ideologies that falsely label it as a “white” oppressor state. Their willingness to accept and spread blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza is not the product of Israeli behavior, but of the hijacking of the Democratic Party by antisemitic progressives. The prime minister had no chance of preserving a pro-Israel Democratic Party; the same would have been true of any Israeli leader.

That means that Israel and its friends are in a position where they have no choice but to rely on pro-Israel Republicans to preserve the alliance. That worked wonderfully so long as Trump was behaving—as he has done during the first five-and-a-half years of his two terms—as the most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern Jewish state. But with Trump adopting a more equivocal stand in which he may be waving the white flag on Iran and bristling with resentment at Netanyahu’s refusal to stop defending his people, that leaves supporters of Israel isolated in the United States on this issue.

We must hope that it doesn’t come to that—and that Trump isn’t willing to go on deceiving himself and the American people about the dubious prospects for a policy that will preserve the despotic regime in Tehran and ensure that there will be more Middle East wars and bloodshed in the coming years.

But if he is determined to stand by his own Iran deal, it won’t just signal that the aggressive presidency of the past 17 months is about to become a lame-duck administration, even before the outcome of the midterm elections is known. It will also mean that Israel and its friends will largely stand alone when it comes to the debate about this latest appeasement of the Islamist regime of Iran that Trump has given a new lease on life.

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06/16 Links Pt2: How ‘Settler Violence’ Became a Tool for Sanctioning Jews; Foiled plot targeting AIPAC-affiliated politicians at WH UFC fight; Batya Ungar-Sargon: ‘It’s over for Jews in Europe’

From Ian:

Mark Goldfeder and Eugene Kontorovich: How ‘Settler Violence’ Became a Tool for Sanctioning Jews

The Biden administration’s play was designed to open the floodgates of European and other Western sanctions. In turn, the European sanctions, which are even worse, are themselves a dress rehearsal for what we can expect under a future Democratic administration in the United States.

One of the sanctioned organizations, Regavim—also a plaintiff in the Texas case—has been exposing the European Union’s role in promoting violations of the Oslo Accords by sponsoring the ongoing Palestinian land grab in Area C, the area left under full Israeli control by those agreements. Regavim’s research and whistleblowing activity, it turns out, is also considered settler violence.

Regavim’s work forensically documents how the “settler violence” sausage is made, thereby clarifying the function not only of leftist NGOs in Israel, but also of groups like Dawn MENA in the United States. The production cycle goes like this: A deceptive NGO report becomes a settled account, trumpeted by human-rights organizations that are themselves funded by the European Union. Reporters and international bodies cite the NGOs without independent corroboration. Policymakers cite the resulting consensus. The European states that funded the NGOs making the claims then impose sanctions accordingly. What passes for evidence is often nothing more than a chain of ideological citations. And when a handful of these stories were finally forced to address facts, the narrative fell apart.

Take the case of Amana, a company that has built tens of thousands of homes throughout Judea and Samaria for decades. The Biden administration made sure to sanction Amana on its way out, two weeks after it lost the election in November 2024. As justification, it cited Amana providing a loan to Manne, whom it had sanctioned in August of that year. Another justification was that “the settlers and farms that Amana supports play a key role in developing settlements in the West Bank, from which in turn settlers commit violence.”

Following the Biden administration’s lead, last month the European Union sanctioned Amana for “initiating, financing, and facilitating at least 30 violent outposts and settlements.” The word violent in that sentence is doing Herculean work. What makes an outpost “violent”? Amana pours concrete and lays roads. But under the definitions used by the United Nations, anything from exercising self-defense to an individual committing petty theft is classified as violence. This then allows the European Union to state with a straight face that Amana “facilitated violent outposts” without identifying a single act of violence that Amana directed, funded, or encouraged. This is not a legal standard. It is a word game.

Based on spurious accusations and bogus legal reasoning, the Biden administration, and now the European Union, turned the very idea of Jews living in the West Bank into a sanctionable offense and an inherent violation of Palestinian human rights.

Criminal and political violence—typically vandalism and property crime—directed at Palestinians by Israeli Jews (not necessarily settlers) in the West Bank does exist. It is both wrong and rare. Israel’s leaders and rabbis condemn it categorically, in contrast with the Palestinian Authority, which pays pensions to its terrorists. The clearance rate on such incidents is low, but that is also true of property crime in U.S. and European cities.

Our lawsuit alleged that while the sanctions were facially neutral—aimed at any perpetrators of violence in the West Bank—they were applied discriminatorily, exclusively targeting Jews. The settlement agreement states that the government will not “target private organizations and Israeli citizens living in the West Bank,” a hint that this is exactly what Democrats have done and want to do again.

Framing settler violence as a crisis worthy of global concern reinforces a narrative of predatory fundamentalist Jews dispossessing Palestinians. The low level of criminal activity by Jews in Judea and Samaria is a domestic Israeli law enforcement matter and should be treated as such. Thankfully, the Trump administration recognizes this. In the Justice Department’s settlement agreement, the government declares that it “categorically rejects any policy that would infringe upon Israel’s sovereignty.” Using such language to discuss measures relating to the West Bank is, in fact, a quiet but potentially significant policy change that should be celebrated.

A Mostly Violent Protest Movement

The indictments brought in the Eastern District of Michigan last week against eight 20-somethings deeply involved in anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus pull back the curtain on what that movement is really about.

Announcing the indictments, FBI director Kash Patel described a "campaign of violent, criminal acts" in which the Michigan eight engaged in a coordinated campaign of intimidation against university leaders—the president, the provost, the chief investment officer, members of the board of regents, and university police officers, plus "anyone they believed supported" the State of Israel—after the school shut down their illegal "solidarity encampment."

They threw noxious chemicals through the windows of victims’ homes, taped demand letters to their doors, defaced the Jewish Federation of Detroit on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, and spray-painted private homes with messages like "Intifada" and "Free Palestine."

Then they tried to intimidate a witness, identified in the indictment only as a University of Michigan student the defendants believed was cooperating with federal authorities. Defendants Paige Feyock, a Wellesley graduate and University of Michigan medical researcher, and Zainab Hakim, a 2024 University of Michigan graduate who was then hired by the university for a full-time job in the Center for South Asian Studies, hatched a plan to confront the witness. In mid-July 2024 Feyock aired her concerns about a "snitch" who was "going to send us to federal prison." In early August, she told her pals she and Hakim planned to get coffee with the witness: "ima strip search [him] ... to see if he is wearing a wire. not taking no chances with him." After the fact, she reported, the victim "knows not to talk."

The alleged criminality on display in Ann Arbor is hardly an isolated incident. At UCLA, so-called protesters set up a "Jew Exclusion Zone" barring Zionists from a portion of the campus. At Columbia, pampered rich kids stormed and occupied a university building and held two janitors hostage. At Harvard, a pair of graduate students accosted a fellow student walking across campus.

We’re picking up what they’re putting down. The nucleus of the "pro-Palestine" protest movement more closely resembles the violent left-wing movements of the past, from the Weather Underground to the Symbionese Liberation Army and Black Lives Matter, that have used terror, violence, and intimidation in an attempt to achieve their political aims.

The Weather Underground didn’t end U.S. imperialism. The SLA didn’t spark an uprising against capitalism. We are still living through the backlash to BLM and the George Floyd protests.

How will the "pro-Palestine" movement fare? The leading candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, had one of the alleged thugs on his payroll and not a whole lot to say about the indictment except that he blames the Trump DOJ for selective prosecution. One of the Democratic Party’s nominees for University of Michigan regent is a Dearborn attorney, Amir Makled, who has represented anti-Israel protesters on campus and is more or less a proxy for the alleged criminals. The party chose Makled in favor of Jordan Acker, the pro-Israel regent whose law firm, home, and car were vandalized by the Michigan eight.

The predictable idiocy of Palestine Action

To put it as simply as possible for the benefit of some remarkably simple minds on the far left of politics, the British government cannot, under any circumstances, afford to be seen as weak on national security. And when a group proudly infiltrates a British military facility and broadcasts it to millions, then the government effectively has little option but to ban it, or else demonstrate its weakness for the entire world to see.

In some ways I believe the RAF incident was inevitable. If a direct action group continues to carry out similar sorts of attacks, but with no significant results, their alternatives are either to up the ante or to see members siphoned off to join groups which are prepared to go even further. To stay relevant in the hysterical arena of pro-Palestinian activism in the UK, Palestine Action had to become more extreme or see itself slide into irrelevance.

But in other ways the latest descriptions of Palestine Action mask the real story, the ever-shifting attempts to market it in a way best designed to grab public sympathy. I don’t believe that a single one of the high profile individuals damning the proscription decision, for example, has referred to the RAF base infiltration in their screeds condemning the ruling. One possible reason is because that designating this as a simple civil liberties fight is far more likely to gain wider public sympathy.

Such efforts have been constant; a moving of the goalposts dependent not on what is actually true, but what works best to score pity points. People may have forgotten, for example, that there were an awful lot of attempted defences of Palestine Action last year prior to its proscription that described it as a “non-violent organisation”.

It is hard to understand how such descriptions had arisen – the group itself never explicitly described itself as non-violent – and the only feasible conclusion is that the people claiming this really wanted it to be true and therefore simply decided to act as if it was true – something of a leitmotif in 21st century activism. Since then, of course, many of Palestine Action’s most doughty defenders have moved on to arguing that that the member who fractured a policewoman’s spine didn’t intend to do it, and that it wasn’t a bad fracture, really.

This fight is unlikely to be over. No doubt Ms Ammori will now try and take this to the Supreme Court, and if that fails, to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, other groups mimicking Palestine Action techniques have begun to spring up – for example, one calling itself “People Against Genocide”, which features the red triangle of Hamas – a group specifically dedicated to genocide – on its banner.

It remains to be seen whether they will be as stupid – and arrogant – as Palestine Action proved itself to be.

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