From Ian:
Time for non-Jews to call out this hatred
I find myself emailing Jewish colleagues, “So sorry for abuse you’re suffering”, when I read comments on social media. But it happens so regularly I can’t keep up. I fear becoming desensitised. Gentiles aren’t included in WhatsApp groups where Jews discuss escape plans to New Zealand. The young aren’t going to call out this racism. Their cause is Palestine. Greta Thunberg, like most of her generation, appears to equate Jews collectively with the Israeli government. It doesn’t matter how many times Jewish friends and colleagues apologise for atrocities occurring in the Middle East, how often they distance themselves from Binyamin Netanyahu’s wars — it’s not enough for some unless they disown the state of Israel and disavow Zionism.
Hate crimes against Muslims are now twice as likely to result in prosecution as offences against Jews, yet Jews are nearly ten times as likely to be the targets of these attacks, according to Home Office figures. The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day is down 60 per cent since the October 7 massacre in 2023. Jews aren’t considered victims any more.
Sir Keir Starmer says little, he’s too compromised. This half-term he slipped away to visit Auschwitz with his wife, Victoria, who is Jewish, and their children. “Antisemitism has no place in our society,” he said stiffly this week, but it is clear he is anxious about offending both the Muslim and youth vote as the government fast-tracks a new definition of Islamophobia. The Green leader Zack Polanski has mentioned his Jewish heritage yet is more fixated on his party’s vote this week on the motion “Zionism is racism”. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, needs to speak up for Britain’s Jews. It was Jewish News that reached out last week to show a British sense of tolerance in supporting Muslims celebrating Iftar in Trafalgar Square.
I am nominally Church of England but my creed is acceptance and respect for all faiths that adhere to our country’s values. I never thought we could be like the communities in Kyiv, Lviv, Salonika and Amsterdam in the last century who allowed their Jewish brethren to be shunned and then attacked before being annihilated. Standing by and saying nothing now corrodes us all.
The everyday heroism of our Jewish children
It’s primary school. 12:30. Sun is shining. Some of the kids are having lunch, others are out in the playground. The climbing frame is full, the football pitch is buzzing, kids are running around playing ultimate tag. There’s a lunchtime netball club in the hall. This is the primary school of every kid in the UK. But this is where the familiarity for the general population ends.
The alarm goes off. It takes a second, but the kids know exactly what to do. They’ve practised for this very moment. This alarm isn’t the fire alarm. It’s the other one. The one where you have to stay safe, stay down, and stay silent. Thirty seconds later the entire school has locked down. Out of sight. Four to eleven year-olds sitting without making a sound. A minute goes by. Then the next, then the next. Seconds feel like hours. The teachers don’t know any more than the kids, but they have to keep them calm. They have to keep them quiet. Because the alternative is unthinkable.
Finally, the all clear sounds. It was a false alarm. Everyone breathes out.
And the kids? They just go back to the rest of the day like nothing happened.
I just finished watching Crossfire on BBC iplayer. It’s harrowing. Gunmen attack a hotel. Families, kids, running everywhere. But all I could think (and it was wildly depressing) was, “my kids would know what to do. If I told them it was an intruder alarm, they’d know what to do”. And that awkward lump in my throat, the slight tear in my eye, grew just slightly bigger.
Every kid at a Jewish school walks past the security, and often the police outside their school, and instead of turning to their parent and asking why these people are here, they just say good morning. Because it’s normal. But it’s not, is it? It’s not normal to be surprised when the front gate is open rather than locked shut. It’s not normal to have your bag searched going into a Jewish community centre. It’s not normal for my son’s teacher to have to skip a section of CBBC Newsround because it might hit a bit too close to home.
It’s not normal for every single synagogue in the country, every Jewish school, every Jewish building, every Jewish event to have security stood outside large gates and fences. And it’s not normal for my kids to think it’s normal.
And this isn’t just some sort of over-reaction. The threat is real. This month alone there has been an attack against a Jewish “cheder” school in Amsterdam, an attack on a synagogue in Michigan which housed a nursery, arrests of Iranians accused of spying on Jewish locations (including a school) in London, and of course the firebombing attack on the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.
Police chief who responded to Detroit synagogue attack targeted by online vitriol
During a press conference last Thursday, organized to address rising antisemitism in the wake of the ramming attack on Temple Israel in Detroit earlier this month, the Oakland County sheriff who helped organize the police response to the incident announced the arrest of what seemed like the latest perpetrator: an individual who had posted an antisemitic meme ridiculing the sheriff.
Sheriff Mike Bouchard displayed the image, featuring his face altered to include a Star of David over his forehead and payot, the sidelocks worn by some Jewish men, dangling near his ears.
“Some pond scum felt empowered and emboldened enough to put this picture of me up to try to threaten and intimidate me,” Bouchard, who is not Jewish, said during the press conference. “And by the way, the person that did this said a bunch of terrible things, not just against me, but against a lot of groups and individuals, who, by the way, was arrested today in Wisconsin.”
But while the arrest was only briefly mentioned during the press conference, which featured Bouchard and a group of religious leaders, including Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel, by Tuesday, it had been seized on by thousands of users on X as evidence of censorship and Jewish supremacy.
“Arrested in America for pointing out that a sheriff is jewish,” Jake Shields, a far-right influencer and former MMA champion, wrote in a post on X.
“Jews are murdering free speech in America,” wrote another influencer.
From Ian:
WSJ Editorial:
More Evidence that U.S. Was Right to Act before Iranian Missile Threat Grew
The rulers in Iran are hoping to move the war to a theater more favorable to their side: the negotiating table. But one of Iran's nonstarter demands is an unconstrained missile program - days after the regime fired at the American and British military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
The launch is "the furthest ever attempted Iranian missile strike," the Institute for the Study of War notes. "The attack demonstrated that Iranian missiles can reach beyond the 2,000-km. limit that the regime has long claimed to have self-imposed." Diego Garcia is about double that distance from Iran.
For all the derision about "a war of choice," Mr. Trump was correct to act before Iranian missiles grow in number, range and accuracy. The reach underscores that the missile program isn't merely Israel's problem. The Iranians clearly aspire to put European cities in play, and eventually the U.S. homeland too. The shots fired at Diego Garcia are a moment of clarity about America's enemies.
Bret Stephens:
The War Is Going Better than You Think
In March 2012, the price of Brent crude closed at $123 a barrel - $175 a barrel in today's dollars.
As of Tuesday, despite Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors' energy facilities, the price is hovering around $100.
That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the price of oil.
During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a campaign widely considered a brilliant military success, the U.S.-led coalition lost 75 aircraft, 42 of them in combat.
In the conflict with Iran, four manned aircraft have been destroyed, three to friendly fire and one in an accident. Not a single manned plane has yet been lost over Iran.
In 1991, Iraq fired 39 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there. In this war, Israel is registering an interception rate of 92% against more than 400 missiles.
One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by the U.S. to remake societies in both countries.
In this war, we hope the Iranian people use the opportunity of their leadership's weakness to seize their own destiny. But we won't do it for them.
If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity's comparative good fortune.
Why the Iran War Should Not Cause Higher Gas Prices in the U.S.
America does not depend on oil sent through the Strait of Hormuz and its closure does not provide any good reason for U.S. consumers to face big increases in gas prices.
The U.S. produces more oil than it needs and is a net exporter of oil. Problems in the Strait need not change the amount of oil produced in the U.S., nor the cost of pumping oil in the U.S., nor the amount of gasoline produced and used in the U.S.
When prices recently increased for oil internationally, U.S. oil companies also raised prices stateside, but this makes no sense.
The net result is that U.S. consumers pay more for gasoline, while American oil companies' production costs are the same, providing a huge profit windfall.
There are differences in types of oil in the U.S., but that does not alter the logic. Most of the oil produced in the U.S. is "light." But some U.S. refineries use "heavy" oil.
That means that the U.S. trades about 30% percent of its light oil for heavy oil, predominantly from Canada and Mexico.
Under a long-term understanding between America and its oil companies, the companies are given many privileges, including on public lands, and they are supposed to provide reliable production for America's needs, at fair and reasonably stable prices.
There is no legitimate basis for U.S. oil and gasoline companies to set prices in America any higher than they were last month.
Once gas prices decline in the U.S., perhaps the IRGC will realize that keeping the Strait closed would harm China, India and Japan, not America - and they might reopen the Strait.
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin:
The Islamophobia narrative is about erasing Jews and antisemitism
Americans have good reason to fear the spread of hatred that has become normative in nations where Islamists dominate. That is why immigration and even refugee absorption from such countries is so problematic, because it leads to an influx of people who are largely indoctrinated in beliefs that are antithetical to the values of Western civilization and invariably antisemitic.
Nor, contrary to the Times, is fear of such groups imposing Muslim religious law (Sharia) on other societies unfounded. That is not merely the historical pattern of Islamic communities, but the reality in Western Europe, where the infusion of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa has resulted in authorities fearing to enforce the law at all in some places. This creates an environment in which Islamist hate crimes can be excused or ignored, and those who protest such policies are treated as troublemakers rather than truth-tellers.
More than anything else, the talk of Islamophobia is a stick with which to beat critics of Islamic hate. It is an attempt to silence those who have the temerity to notice the connection between the antisemitic incitement that is commonplace in Islamist discourse in the West and attempts to intimidate Jews and target them for violence. It is no surprise that every time an act of Islamist violence happens, it is now followed by talk of the need to prevent Islamophobia.
The Times commended, in retrospect, President George W. Bush’s almost obsessive fear of offending Muslims during his administration’s “war on terror.” Bush’s insistence that Islam was “a religion of peace” became something of a joke during his presidency. Two decades later, that knee-jerk effort to deny the obvious about Islamist hate and antisemitism is no longer merely risible. It is a deliberate effort to prevent effective action against the Jew-hatred that has surged throughout American society, largely with the assistance of the same media outlets so determined to decry Islamophobia.
The point of contemporary bigotry and bias against Jews is, as author Dara Horn has written, to erase them and work toward a final solution of eliminating Jewish civilization. The focus on Islamophobia is just that. Those who are serious about actually preventing discrimination and hate shouldn’t fall for this big lie.
Death of a Holocaust denier
Ali Larijani, the 67-year-old former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, died a terrorist’s death last week. For much of his career, however, he lived as a diplomat, and was feted as one by regional and Western nations alike.
Back in 2007, Larijani addressed the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany. Arriving in the city off the back of a Holocaust-denial conference hosted by the regime in Tehran, Larijani no doubt got a tremendous kick out of telling an audience in Germany, of all places, that it was an “open question” as to whether the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews had occurred. He did much the same two years later at Munich in 2009, telling one questioner that Iran’s leaders did not share European “sensitivities” or “perspectives” when it came to querying the veracity of the extermination program.
He would have likely done so again in 2011 had his earlier denialist statements not resulted in a ban on his attendance—a classic example of a European state realizing far too late that to stop the horse from bolting, the stable door would need to be shut first.
In the various high-level roles he held on behalf of the Islamic Republic, chief nuclear negotiator among them, Larijani never lost sight of the regime’s core goal of eliminating the State of Israel. Now that he has himself been eliminated—the latest in a long line of terrorists and terror enablers from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran to have been felled by an Israeli strike since the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom—the question remains as to whether Iran can continue to be the world’s primary state sponsor of anti-Zionist ideology, assuming that the regime survives the current U.S.-Israeli onslaught in truncated form.
Iran took on that position following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied communist states from 1989 onwards. During the Cold War, Soviet anti-Zionism, a central plank of Moscow’s foreign policy, morphed into what I call “antizionism”—a toxic ideology that has never been as strong or as visible as today, nearly four decades after the demise of the USSR. What was being opposed was not Zionism as the vast majority of Jews understood the term, but a defamatory caricature that drew heavily on older antisemitic tropes.
This expressed itself in two principal ways: violence and propaganda.
The Soviets backed the Arab side in the regional wars of 1967 and 1973. They supported various left-wing terrorist groups in Western countries, led by such figures as the Venezuelan militant Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez (also known as “Carlos”), a KGB and East German Stasi asset who operated on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And they sponsored a slew of propaganda initiatives, in the form of pamphlets with titles like “Beware: Zionism,” as well as U.N. General Assembly resolutions, among them the infamous equation of Zionism with racism approved by the world body in 1975.
Genocidal Glee
The screenshots below show two things happening at once:
First, a private email sent by Glenn Greenwald, where he tells a Jewish recipient to “crawl out of your Sabbath hole” and watch Israeli cities being hit by Iranian missiles, followed by a link and the word “Enjoy.”
Second, his public follow up, where he frames himself as the victim of smears, denies wrongdoing, and then states plainly, “I think it’s good for the world that Israel is feeling retaliatory strikes for the wars they started.”
All the talk about innocent civilians, all the moral posturing, all the hours spent pretending this is about universal principles and human suffering, all of it collapses the second Israelis are the ones under fire. Then the mask slips, and what comes out is the truth. They never cared about innocent civilians in any consistent or serious way. They cared about using civilian suffering as a political weapon against Israel. That is a very different thing, and people should stop pretending otherwise.
Defenders of Israel spend an enormous amount of time explaining basic realities that should not need to be explained to honest people. We explain why casualty figures coming out of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health cannot simply be treated as clean, neutral civilian death tolls, especially when Hamas has every incentive to inflate, manipulate, and obscure the distinction between civilians and combatants. We explain that Hamas embeds itself in civilian areas, stores weapons in homes, schools, and mosques, launches attacks from within populated neighborhoods, and then relies on the resulting images for propaganda. We explain that Hamas built an entire terror infrastructure under Gaza while leaving its own civilians exposed above ground, because civilian vulnerability is useful to them. We explain all of this for one reason. Because if Israel were deliberately targeting innocent civilians, that would be evil, and the truth would matter.
That is what makes comments like Glenn’s so revealing. He’s not arguing that civilian suffering is tragic wherever it occurs. He’s arguing that Israeli civilians being targeted by ballistic missiles is somehow morally satisfying because he has accepted the lie that they are collectively guilty. He wants the category of civilian to apply when it can be used against Israel, and he wants it to disappear when Israelis are the ones bleeding.
And once you see that, a lot of other things come into focus. It explains why so many of these people become extremely skeptical and forensic when Israeli actions are under discussion, but suddenly become emotionless and vindictive when Israelis are murdered. It explains why every dead Gazan child is treated as a moral indictment of the Jewish people, while dead Israeli children are treated as background noise, an unfortunate detail, or in many cases a justified consequence. It explains why they spend months lecturing the world about “dehumanization” and then casually speak about Israeli families as though they are legitimate instruments of collective punishment.
From Ian:
The Iran War Is Saving the West
The war that the U.S. and Israel finally initiated against Iran is saving the West.
The entire world is a beneficiary of the Allied campaign, since there was no remaining alternative to war.
The decision to attack Iran should have been taken two decades ago, in February 2006, when Iran brazenly resumed uranium enrichment and was referred by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the Security Council.
The world was faced with the prospect of Iran attaining nuclear weapons and had absolutely no plan to prevent it.
The U.S. was, in practice, pursuing only one policy option: waiting for Iran to obtain the means to mass murder either Americans or America's allies.
Some experts are complaining that there is no clear endgame to the current war. But without the war, there was a very clear endgame - a nuclear Iran and very probably nuclear war.
What is absolutely clear is that the war brings the possibility of a positive outcome. Without war, a catastrophic outcome was certain.
Amb. Alan Baker:
Will the International Community Confront Iran's Illegal Use of Cluster Munitions?
Iran's use of cluster munitions has become a dominant feature in its conduct of warfare against Israel and many of the Gulf states. International law acknowledges that such munitions may be used against purely military targets. However, Iran's widespread and indiscriminate use of cluster bombs that could endanger civilians and civilian locations is strictly forbidden and constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law.
One of the principle international humanitarian law norms of armed conflict is that of distinction, requiring an attacker to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. When fired at targets where non-combatants are in close proximity, their use violates the international law principle of distinction.
During the present, ongoing hostilities, Iran has been indiscriminately and deliberately firing cluster munitions on a large scale against Israeli residential areas. In light of Iranian violations, there exists every legal necessity and justification to make appropriate representations to the international community, its institutions and to the international media and to provide evidence of such misuse by Iran.
The malicious, deliberate, and indiscriminate targeting by Iran and its proxy Hizbullah of Israel's civilian areas clearly violates all humanitarian norms and is absolutely prohibited.
Iran Is Trying to Defeat America in the Living Room
Islamic Republic officials have actively sought to fracture Trump’s base by evoking anti-Zionist conspiracies. “Trump has turned ‘America First’ into ‘Israel First,’” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted, adding, “which always means ‘America last.’” Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is close with Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, referred to Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “Epstein Axis” and posted that “American families deserve to know why Trump is sacrificing their sons and daughters to advance Netanyahu’s expansionist delusions.”
Iranian state TV has also amplified the commentary of Tucker Carlson—an outspoken conservative critic of the war—including a recent interview with Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned after blaming “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for the conflict. Tehran doesn’t want to turn Americans against just the war. It wants to turn Americans against one another.
Although opinion polls, oil prices, and the number of projectiles remaining are measurable, the fate of the war will be determined in part by the resolve of both parties, something far more difficult to measure. A democratic president’s will to fight is constrained by elections, polls, gas prices, and the news cycle. An authoritarian regime fighting for its survival answers to none of those pressures. Reagan had resolve until Congress didn’t. Bush had resolve until six in 10 Americans called his war a mistake. This asymmetry of resolve is Iran’s greatest structural advantage. Tehran wins by not losing; Trump loses by not winning.
The Islamic Republic’s decision to build its political identity around “death to America” has been a 47-year war of choice. Trump’s decision to try to end Tehran’s malign capabilities, rather than merely contain or counter them like past administrations did, has also been a war of choice.
If Iran’s strategy depends on Peoria, Trump’s presidency depends on the Strait of Hormuz. Trump cannot withdraw so long as Iran controls it, but securing it risks the kind of mass American casualties that ended Reagan’s and Bush’s resolve. If Trump reopens it, his appetite for regime change may grow. If he doesn’t, the economic pressure on his base will mount. This is ultimately a war between a democracy’s impatience and a theocracy’s ruthless endurance. The question is whether, for the first time since 1979, Tehran has finally met a U.S. president more committed to destroying the regime than the regime is to destroying him.
From Ian:
The Golders Green ambulance attack reveals the depths of the new Jew hatred
We’ve been told since Brexit that a new 1930s is upon us. Apparently, British voters politely asking for more democratic clout and better border control constituted a terrifying descent into Nazism. All the while, those menacing Britain’s tiny Jewish community – smaller in number than British Sikhs – were rendered invisible.
Smashed shops, firebombings, murder – purely because they are Jews. I don’t know how many echoes of history need to ring out, how much broken glass needs to rattle on the ground, before the anti-fascists rouse from their slumber. Or realise they’ve slipped on to the other side.
Muslim anti-Semitism, in particular, has been lent cover by all the usual idiots and cowards. Despite anti-Semitic attitudes being stubbornly higher among British Muslims, despite Islamic extremism being the biggest terror threat we face by a country mile, every political discussion must at some point pivot to the spectre of the ‘far right’.
Given you could now fit the actual far right in the back of an Uber XL, this requires smear tactics and spectacular mental gymnastics – like when Gary Neville responded to the Heaton Park killings by bemoaning the blokes putting Union flags on lampposts, or when Green MP Hannah Spencer blamed the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing on the ‘division’ generated by Reform UK.
The arguments are almost too stupid to rebut. Apparently, Jihad al-Shamie only decided to lunge at Jews with a knife because he was made to feel ‘unwelcome’ by the sight of our national flag, and Salman Abedi only blew up girls at a pop concert because he stumbled across one of Nigel Farage’s old speeches to the European Parliament.
These are just the more low-wattage attempts to defend the indefensible. Jew hatred is back. But our rulers cannot compute it, let alone fight it. For that would require ditching their comforting ideologies, their identitarian blinkers, their deranged Israelophobia. It would mean accepting that they are part of the problem.
Jake Wallis Simons:
We love life, they love death and Britain still can't pick a side
The firebombing of the ambulances is a case in point. We saw it in the Manchester synagogue stabbings and in all likelihood, we have seen it again: unbridled antisemitic incitement has consequences. Ever since October 7, our country has been debased by weekly carnivals of Jew-hatred on our streets, powered in large part by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. Yet when Suella Braverman labelled them “hate marches”, it was she who was silenced rather than the racist agitators.
Once again, even as the ambulances smoulder, the same propaganda is all over social media. If the Jews hadn’t tried to defend themselves against the jihadi hordes of Hamas and the Islamic regime in Tehran, if they had simply rolled over and joined Kier Starmer in bleating that vanquishing your enemy is “against international law”, they claim, then ambulances would not be firebombed in London.
Such are the foul consequences of lies. Such is their weaponisation. Such are the results of fanning the flames of hatred for years, or taking no action when it happens under our noses.
There was no “genocide” in Gaza – which genocide features evacuation warnings and humanitarian aid? Which genocide involves soldiers fighting hand-to-hand in tunnels to avoid harming civilians when the Strip could easily have been levelled from the air? – just as there are no “war crimes” in Iran.
Saturate people’s brains with footage of the appalling sufferings of war, however, and deceitfully frame it as evidence of atrocities, and lies have borne the fruit of hatred. Even our political leaders are not immune. With one eye on the Muslim vote, which is increasingly functioning as an anti-democratic sectarian bloc in a contribution to our social decline, the Prime Minister recognised a state of Palestine with the Israeli hostages still in the catacombs, earning the open congratulations of Hamas.
About ten days later, two Jews were killed in Manchester, again to the great satisfaction of the jihadis in Gaza. When David Lammy turned up to offer his condolences, he was heckled by the grieving Jews of Manchester, and with good reason.
What does all of this amount to? Simple: Britain faces a choice. Either we find the courage to look the Islamists in the eye and tell them that enough is enough, or we see the disappearance of our Jewish community and the gradual fall of our democracy. If that sounds alarmist, look back at history. Read the 2015 government report on the Muslim Brotherhood, which labelled the group a national security threat and yet resulted in no action.
As Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said, “they say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.” Does Britain wish to stand on the side of the ambulances that seek to save us, or the arsonists who fetishise blood? Disturbingly, the country is finding it hard to make up its mind.
Daniel Sugarman:
Golders Green, antisemitism and Passover
In a little more than a week, we will sit at the Passover table to conduct the seder. We will tell our children the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The people of Israel were honoured in Egypt – Joseph served as the Imperial viceroy – until it all came crashing down. What happened? The book of Exodus, quoted in the Haggadah, the telling over of the Passover story, tells us. “A new king arose, who did not know Joseph”. Did he literally not know who Joseph was? Unlikely. But Joseph – and his service to Egypt, helping protect the populace from the ravages of famine – meant nothing to him. The Bible goes into detail about what was the first instance of antisemitism in history – the charge, repeated so many times down the millennia, of dual loyalty.
“Let us deal wisely with them”, says Pharaoh to his people. “In case they increase in number and a war befall us and they join our enemies and wage war against us.”
A little later on in the Haggadah, we will read the paragraph of Vehi Sheamdah, which says “in every generation, our enemies rise up to destroy us”. It would be taken as paranoia were it not demonstrably true. The last few years have seen a sickening sanitisation of Jew hate in public life. In an era where every antisemitic attack is followed by a tidal wave of accusations of false flags and dual loyalty, where Jews are blamed for the very attacks they are targeted by, this takes on a new meaning.
That paragraph of the Haggadah ends by saying “and the Holy One, blessed be he, rescues us from their hands.” Returning momentarily to my charedi upbringing, the word for “rescues us” – matzilenu – has the same Hebrew root as the name of the organisation whose ambulances were firebombed – hatzola – literally, “rescue”. At the time I write this, more than £1 million has been been raised for Hatzola NW, raised by thousands of people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike – and the government has pledged to replace all the ambulances that were destroyed.
Those who seek to intimidate us and bring us down will find it far harder to do so than they think.
From Ian:
Suicide by Timidity
There is a particular kind of comfort in the phrase no imminent threat, a talking point that has gained prominence with the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran. For opponents of the operation, on the left and the right, the phrase serves as evidence that the rationale for attacking Iran is fraudulent. It functions both as a linguistic sedative—whispered by bureaucrats and pundits to assure a nervous public that the wolf is not yet at the door—and as an assertion that any military action at this time constitutes reckless and unnecessary warmongering. It is the language of “principled restraint,” a rhetorical shield used across the ideological spectrum, from the skepticism of Sens. Mark Warner and Elizabeth Warren to the isolationist critiques of Tucker Carlson and Rand Paul. But beneath the surface of this bipartisan consensus lies a profound psychological pathology.
By reducing the complexity of strategic judgment to a single, binary metric—Is an attack occurring right this second?—we have traded genuine security for a dangerous, and ultimately temporary, emotional relief.
In the realm of behavioral economics, this tendency is known as “present bias” or “hyperbolic discounting.” Humans are hardwired to undervalue future risks in favor of present comforts. For a modern populace, the “immediate reward” of social stability today—no sirens, no mobilization, no disruption of the daily routine—is so intoxicating that we are willing to accept the “delayed punishment” of an adversary completing a nuclear facility that renders future defense impossible. Avoiding military action delivers an instant hit of political relief, while the catastrophic risks of inaction remain deferred and abstract. We are, in effect, choosing a quiet today at the cost of a radioactive tomorrow.
This cognitive trap is reinforced by a legal doctrine that has failed to keep pace with the physics of modern slaughter. The traditional formulation for anticipatory self-defense emerged from the Caroline incident of 1837, when Canadian militia, under British authority, crossed into the United States and destroyed the Caroline, an American steamer that had been used by sympathetic Americans to supply Canadian rebels, nearly setting off a crisis between the United States and Great Britain. The legal theory, articulated in the diplomatic correspondence between U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British envoy to the U.S. Lord Ashburton, required a threat to be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” In the mid-19th century, when armies moved at the speed of a horse, and mobilization was a visible, weeks-long process involving steamships and infantry, this standard was a workable safeguard against adventurism.
But we no longer live in the world of the Caroline. Modern warfare has compressed the timeline of destruction into a digital pulse. Ballistic missiles, cyberwarfare, and nuclear enrichment programs have eliminated the visible “mobilization phase” of old. Today, an adversary can achieve a “breakthrough” that permanently alters the strategic balance before a single soldier crosses a border.
Legal scholars like Daniel Bethlehem have proposed a necessary evolution: Imminence must be assessed contextually. It must weigh the probability of an attack, the pattern of hostile conduct and, most critically, the “last window of opportunity” to act. As Mark L. Rockefeller has argued, equating imminent with immediate risks transforms the sacred right of self-defense into a “strategic suicide pact.” If we wait until the missile is airborne to satisfy a 19th-century definition of timing, we have already lost.
Israel Is America's Best Ally - We Must Reject the Evil of Antisemitism
The stunning and ominous rise in antisemitism in the U.S. cannot be disputed, but can be resisted. It is particularly the obligation of genuine Christians to participate in the repression through education of the ancient evil. It is the particular obligation of Christian institutions to do their part in making this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help cure those who suffer from it and, where it cannot be cured, to force it back by shaming and shunning into the deepest shadows where it belongs.
In a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower - the U.S. - needs allies. Israel is, objectively, the most important ally of the U.S. It is the equal of any military on the globe in its ability to strike far and hard and to dominate its region. It's an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-increasing breakthroughs. If any country had to pick one strong ally not named the U.S., it would pick Israel.
Israel is also a reliable and fully-integrated-into-our-military ally. Israel takes what the U.S. makes and improves on it, as had been the case with the F-35 fighter. It sometimes takes the rudiments of a technology and develops them to scale and deploys them, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. Those advancements will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America's founding values of individual liberty and democratic governance. Freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are respected there as they are here. It is a "Western nation" in every respect.
Criticizing Israel in Wartime
According to a survey by the Institute for National Security Studies, 91% of Israeli Jews support the war against Iran, which most view as a battle for Israel's very right to exist. Israel's American critics say Iran does not present an imminent threat.
In practice, Iran's ballistic missile program was growing at a rapid rate and becoming an extreme threat to Israel, of which we are now getting an initial "taste." Iran was also building new nuclear facilities at Natanz and Isfahan and would eventually have unearthed the 400 kg. of highly enriched uranium, sufficient for the first 10 bombs.
Part of adulthood is the ability to put one's overall political preferences aside and assess specific issues on their merits. Trump and Netanyahu are doing an effective job of severely degrading a major threat to American security and an existential one to Israel's. On this they deserve our support and appreciation.
The critics have never had to cower in their shelters and safe rooms, grab their kids off the swings in a playground during an alert, or jump into a ditch on the highway. They rarely served in the IDF or sent their children to serve. They have never spent three or more years of sleepless nights, worrying whether their sons - and increasingly daughters - who serve in combat units are all right. Most American Jews have never lived in a country in which one is rarely out of sight of the nearest hostile border.
They have never had to live for decades in the face of existential threats and the knowledge that Israel's enemies would annihilate its civilian population if ever given the opportunity, as proven so tragically on Oct. 7. They have never had to live with continuous terrorism and repeatedly had to call the cell phones of loved ones to make sure they were okay after another barbarous attack.
If you care deeply about Israel and want to have a positive impact, support AIPAC. It may not be perfect, but it is the only pro-Israel lobby.
From Ian:
John Spencer:
The rise of the ‘leadership first’ strike — and why it’s so important in warfare
The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described war as a contest of wills between political communities. His framework assumed friction, uncertainty, and resilient command structures under pressure.
What he did not imagine was a world in which the senior political and military leadership directing a war might be physically targeted in the opening minutes of conflict through integrated intelligence and precision strike.
The objective of these strikes is not simply destruction. It is a disruption.
For decades, opening strikes focused on suppressing air defenses, destroying aircraft on the ground, and degrading infrastructure. The goal was to weaken an enemy’s military capacity.
Today, some states are experimenting with something different: targeting the leadership directing the war itself.
That possibility introduces a new dimension to deterrence.
If adversaries believe their political and military leadership could be struck in the opening phase of a conflict, the personal risks of initiating war change. Deterrence has traditionally relied on threatening damage to territory, forces, or infrastructure. Leadership vulnerability adds another layer to that calculation.
This capability is not omnipotent. Intelligence can fail. Targets can escape. Succession structures can absorb the loss of leaders.
But the increasing ability to locate and strike senior leadership rapidly at the outset of conflict represents an important shift in how wars may begin.
For centuries, eliminating a supreme leader was usually the end of a war.
In the emerging character of modern conflict, it may sometimes become the opening move.
To Fulfill Iran War's Objectives, More Time Is Required
The regime in Iran continues to function and fight, largely because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has effectively taken control of the state and is directing the war effort.
Both Israel and the U.S. seek to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, ideally permanently, and to deny it the ability to develop and produce ballistic missiles and drones in quantities and sophistication that no defense system could counter. These are the two existential threats the war is meant to eliminate, at least for years, even if the current regime survives.
Israel is acting across multiple channels to create conditions in which the Iranian people will want and be able to take control of their fate. Efforts to weaken the regime include targeted strikes against security officials and political leaders, and attacks on Basij and Revolutionary Guard facilities.
Israeli officials report results including defections, particularly among Basij members. At the same time, efforts are underway to organize opposition groups and encourage public protests. According to informed sources, these efforts are beginning to bear fruit.
Iran has learned lessons from previous confrontations and prepared well for the current war. It dispersed its military assets geographically and granted local commanders authority to act based on pre-set directives. It moved critical assets underground, including nuclear laboratories, ballistic missiles and launchers, drones, and even fast attack boats. Iran also divided the country into 31 ballistic missile commands, each with independent launch authority. Iran has also moved much of its nuclear weapons program infrastructure underground.
Israel is targeting Iran's missile, launcher, and drone production infrastructure spread across the country. The air force will likely need at least two more weeks to achieve a satisfactory level of damage. Meanwhile, interception rates by Israel's air defense systems have risen from over 85% to more than 90%.
In both Iran and Lebanon, significant achievements have already been made. But for the war's objectives to be largely fulfilled and for those gains to endure for years, more time is required.
Iran Believes It's Winning and Wants a Steep Price to End the War
Three weeks into the war, the Iranian regime is signaling that it believes it is winning and has the power to impose a settlement on Washington that entrenches Tehran's dominance of Middle East energy resources for decades to come.
Despite optimistic U.S. and Israeli pronouncements, Iran has retained the ability to fire dozens of ballistic missiles, and many more drones, every day across the Middle East. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf's chokepoint, remains only possible with Iranian permission. Surging oil and gas prices are exacting growing pain on economies worldwide.
Tehran has pledged that it will agree to a ceasefire only if Washington and the Gulf states pay a steep price. The spokesman of the Iranian Parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, Ebrahim Rezaei, said any talks with the U.S. are off the agenda as Tehran "focuses on punishing the aggressors."
"This hubris is dangerous because they are not smart enough to understand that President Trump will never let them win. They don't understand how far he's willing to go," said Jason Greenblatt, who served as the White House special envoy for the Middle East. "The cost of not taking care of the problem will be many times more expensive over many, many years."
Demands voiced by Iranian leaders in recent days as conditions for ending the war include massive reparations from the U.S. and its allies and the expulsion of American military forces from the region. They have also called for transforming the Strait of Hormuz - an international waterway where free navigation is guaranteed under international law - into an Iranian toll booth controlling 1/3 of the world's shipborne crude oil. It is hard to imagine the U.S. - or the Gulf states - accepting such an arrangement.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
