06/01 Links Pt2: The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed; Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul; How Palestinianism wages war on Zionism and Jewish history

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed

It’s not that I don’t understand what is happening. Having watched a similar process take place within the GOP, the entire political world knows exactly what it’s seeing: The base sees every character flaw in a candidate as a feature not a bug; defeating the other party becomes a matter of life and death and therefore justifies any behavior; the party’s institutions get in line.

All of it is inexcusable but uncomplicated to decode.

And so progressives have made Platner the hero of the hour, a living idol and a human litmus test. Je suis Platner, they seem desperate to cry out. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ floor leader in the upper chamber, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jointly announced they’ll ensure Platner has all necessary resources to bring his Totenkopf to the halls of the Senate. And professional ex-Republicans fall all over themselves to prove their loyalty to their new party by saturating the punditry with anti-anti-Platnerism whose irony is apparently lost on them.

But the truly wild part of all of this is that rejecting Platner was supposed to be the absolute least that was expected of them. Platner wasn’t supposed to be the “country over party” test because it was too easy to mean anything. You weren’t supposed to deserve credit for rejecting Nazi iconography.

This weekend’s latest additions to Platner’s long list of scandals is that he was sexting up to a dozen women while married and had an active account on a singles’ site with a reported reputation for lax age-limit gatekeeping.

To add this to what we already know—the Nazi tattoo, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the racist postings, the cheering of the killing of U.S. soldiers, the fascination with violence, and all of the dishonesty about it—is to realize just how insane the conversation has become. Ideally, a person who criticizes Platner would prove nothing except that they are still human. Yet somehow we got to a point at which Platner’s denunciators truly do deserve praise because Democrats seek the political destruction of these dissenters. When Rep. Jake Auchincloss had the temerity to say the Nazi stuff was disqualifying, it was Auchincloss who was put on the defensive and made to explain himself.

Democrats have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Republican abuse of power, but it turns out they are far more afraid of what the progressive left is capable of once in power. That, at least, is the clear message they are broadcasting.

And so we are left begging for crumbs of decency. Yes, we say, it is brave to denounce Platner. And it is—because his party has made it so.

Nothing Is Disqualifying By Abe Greenwald

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If a Democrat has a shot at winning, he can do no wrong. Adam Hamawy volunteered with an al-Qaeda front group in Bosnia and was an associate of “the Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Today, Hamawy is in the lead for a New Jersey congressional seat and has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the newest neo-Squadnik, Ro Khanna.

Abdul El-Sayed is a strong contender in a Michigan Democratic primary battle despite his voicing sympathy for the mourners of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragging about smashing a bottle in a liquor store, struggling with Israel’s right to exist, and various disconcerting escapades.

Of course, the exemplar here is Zohran Mamdani. In his successful run for mayor of New York City, he showed that support for terrorist causes, involvement in anti-American activism, and staunch socialist zeal were more than acceptable in Democratic politics.

Platner represents something different from all these. His deficiencies aren’t foremost ideological or political. They’re deeply intrinsic to his character. He’s a messy amalgam of glowing red flags that, in everyday life, would signal, well, human garbage.

Like Nick Fuentes, Platner is at once a Nazi admirer and Communist sympathizer. He’s on record mocking a wounded U.S. soldier as a “Dumb motherf-----” who “didn't deserve to live.” Platner has said that women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f***ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” And he was most recently exposed for sexting with women on a hook-up app while married to his current wife.

With a guy like this, it’s a safe bet that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

It wasn’t long ago that a large majority of Democrats would simply recognize Platner as unfit to serve in the janitorial staff of the U.S. Senate, let alone as a senator.

Brendan O'Neill: Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul

That flag is so omnipresent that it feels like Ireland has been colonised again – not by the Brits this time but by that Euro-fervour of anti-Zionism. All of the most Guardian-approved, Shoreditch-thrilling Irish artists – Sally Rooney, Kneecap, the Mary Wallopers – bow obsequiously at the altar of Israelophobia.

It stinks up the political class, too. Indeed, just last week, Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, returned from one of those thwarted flotilla jollies to Gaza that the hyper-smug love to engage in. She said Israel behaves like a ‘Nazi state’. She described her brief detention in Israel as being akin to a ‘concentration camp’. She said she and her fellow seafaring narcissists ‘got a feeling of what the Jews felt like during the Second World War’. Comparing the two-day detainment of posh, well-fed mugs with the incarceration and burning to death of millions of Jews? There’s repugnant, then there’s that. Stay classy, Israel-haters.

Defamations against Israel fall from the mouth of every influencer here. Even a sports presenter, following the game with Qatar, could casually say on air that Israel is waging a ‘genocidal campaign’ in Gaza. Nothing to say about Qatar? The team we just played? Which funded the army of anti-Semites that killed more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis? Of course not. Israel is the all-consuming devil that stalks the fever dreams of Ireland’s pious. It is a substitute Satan in a post-Catholic land. You can’t even watch the footie here without being subjected to self-righteous homilies about the uniquely wicked nature of this far-off nation. It is relentless. It is exhausting.

And get this – the Irish men’s cricket team is due to play Afghanistan in Belfast in August. Do the sanctimonious of Dublin 4 long to stop that game too, in protest against the Afghan government’s violent gutting of women’s rights, its theft from women not only of the right to play sport but also of the right to show their faces in public, speak in public and attend schools and universities? Nope. There have been a few expressions of ‘moral discomfort’ about hosting the Afghanis but nothing like the orgy of moral inebriation that greeted the news that the Irish football team would play Israel. As I say, moral circuit boards fried, all over this isle.

Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul. The Irish establishment’s frothing animus for the Jewish state is an embarrassment to us Irish who refuse to convert to the cult of Israel-hate. It is disproportionate, hysterical, and so obviously driven by bigotry, meaning these people will go mental over a sports fixture against the Jewish nation but say nada about a sports fixture against an Islamist nation ruled by violent men who treat women like cattle. Let Ireland be a lesson – when you drink too heartily from the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, you lose your reason and decency. You become so consumed by hatred for a tiny foreign state that you let your own state go to moral rack and ruin.

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06/01 Links Pt1: Gazology: How Gaza Became The West's Moral Obsession; IDF doctor killed, 7 hurt by Hezbollah drone attack; Israel commemorates victims of 1941 Baghdad Farhud pogrom

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Iran Is Really Asking of Trump

So Trump’s strategy is to keep talking and use the embargo as leverage to get a better deal. Iran’s strategy isn’t a secret either. It’s to allow Trump to think he’s close to a deal in order to for him to force Israel to stop beating up Iranian forces in Lebanon.

Each side thinks it’s playing the other, while the soldiers still dying are mostly Israelis.

Of course, the antiwar crowd has an answer at the ready: Israel can stop its pursuit of Hezbollah in Lebanon! Except, the reason Israel is in Lebanon is because Israel not being in Lebanon doesn’t prevent Israelis from being killed by Hezbollah.

On a simpler level, here’s what just happened: Iran announced that a specific part of the war—namely, Hezbollah in Lebanon—was of utmost importance to it. In response, Trump conceded that part of the war as a down payment on renewed negotiations, without getting anything in return.

Why would Iran think it’s doing anything other than winning at the moment?

There is another aspect to this refreshing bit of honesty from the Iranians. They have admitted that Hezbollah is Iran and Iran is Hezbollah. Of course, we knew this. But it’s better to have Iran openly admit it in a way that makes it impossible for its numerous American supporters to pretend otherwise.

Thus, we have three powers in Lebanon: Israel, Lebanon, and Iran. Only two of those are arguing for a permanent right to control the country: Lebanon and Iran. So which of those two has a stronger case to control Lebanon?

It’s not a trick question. Iran is confirming, yet again, that the Western narrative of this conflict is the correct one. Iran is an occupying power in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the deaths in Lebanon are indeed Iran’s responsibility.

It is also confirming something else. Any belief that Iran can be merely contained while leaving its threats intact is shortsighted in the extreme. The entire region was blown open by October 7, which was the work of one of Iran’s militias, Hamas. The fact that Iran is asking to preserve the ability to have its proxies repeat the conflagration is proof that the choice before Trump is war now, in which the U.S. has a distinct advantage, or war later, when the enemy has rearmed. The president should choose wisely.

JPost Editorial: Forcing the IDF to leave Lebanon is a betrayal of Israel's citizens

Trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet
Accepting another extension under these conditions would mean trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet, which is not truly quiet at all.

The collapse of the ceasefire extension was inevitable. Israel cannot maintain a truce with an organization whose purpose remains its destruction. The IDF’s recent maneuvers, including the capture of strategic high ground such as Beaufort Castle, reflect a clear military need to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in a lasting way.

Those hard-won gains must not be bargained away for another fragile agreement that Hezbollah will violate as soon as it suits its interests.

The airstrikes in Dahiyeh must be relentless and unrestricted. That is where decisions are made, where precision weapons are stored, and where Hezbollah’s Iranian-backed leadership feels most secure.

Israel does not need an extension of a failed policy. It needs the restoration of real deterrence. That deterrence will not come through gradual de-escalation, American-brokered road maps, or futile negotiations with Iran. It can only come through the systematic destruction of Hezbollah’s will and capacity to fight.

The time for begging for permission to defend Israel is over. The government must resist international pressure to preserve the ghost of a ceasefire and give the IDF the mandate to finish the job. Anything less would be a betrayal of the citizens still huddled in shelters, waiting for a government that values their lives more than its standing in Washington.

The ceasefire is dead. Israel should stop pretending otherwise before more Israelis pay the price for this diplomatic fiction.

France bans Israel from defense exhibition, limits Israeli companies to showing defensive weapons

The French government barred Israel's official participation in the June EUROSATORY defense exhibition, according to a Monday statement by the Israeli Defense Ministry, with its French counterpart saying that Israel was limited to defensive platforms.

The Israeli government and the ministry will be unable to participate in the exhibition or establish a national pavilion. Israeli defense firms would be prevented from displaying offensive weapon systems.

The French Defense Ministry said that exhibits would be limited to air defense and anti-missile defense equipment, and that Israeli exhibitors would be able to display their wares if they complied with that framework.

"The French decision encompasses: a ban on government representatives attending the exhibition; a ban on opening an Israeli national pavilion; and a restriction limiting Israeli defense industries to displaying air defense products only, with offensive systems explicitly excluded," said a statement by the Israel Ministry of Defense.

"This policy is applied selectively and discriminatorily relative to other participating nations - in direct violation of the established norms governing international defense exhibition," it added.

Participating companies confirm their attendance months in advance and despite the ban on the Israeli government and offensive weapons, many Israeli companies are expected to have their own smaller private desks to present their systems. Defense & Tech by The Jerusalem Post understands that among the Israeli companies still planning to attend with their original lineups including Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Dozens of Israeli companies acquired by the American defense conglomerate Ondas will also participate at the expo.

According to the French ministry, EuroSatory organizers have been informed of the decision and are expected to enforce the restrictions.

The Israeli Defense Ministry decried the restrictions at one of the world’s largest defense industry exhibitions as a selectively applied and discriminatory policy, “in direct violation of the established norms governing international defense exhibition,' said the ministry.”

"This is a disgraceful decision, one that reeks of political and commercial calculation, and regrettably, it comes as no surprise. It fits a deeply troubling pattern in French conduct in recent years - a pattern that has consistently placed France on the wrong side of history,” said the ministry. “France, which prides itself on the values of liberty and democracy, is acting in direct contradiction to the principles it claims to uphold. It is hiding behind a pretense of political justification to exclude Israeli offensive defense systems from an international forum - systems that have proven far superior to their French counterparts, and that have demonstrated exceptional precision and effectiveness against terrorist organizations and regimes threatening not only Israel, but regional and global stability at large.”

Paris' desire to undermine Jerusalem as a competitor
Eurosatory, one of the world’s largest defense exhibitions, takes place on the outskirts of Paris every two years.

During the last Eurosatory in 2024, France prevented the attendance of dozens of Israeli defense companies. At the time, the French Defense Ministry said that “the conditions are no longer right to host Israeli companies at the Paris show, given that the French president is calling for the cessation of IDF operations in Rafah.” The move was overturned by the Paris Commercial Court, which found that the order would lead to discrimination, but many Israeli companies decided not to attend the show.

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05/31 Links: Rachel's Life in Pieces; Einat Wilf: What the Arab World Knew All Along & How Israel Lost the Information War; Netanyahu hails capture of Lebanon’s Beaufort Castle

From Ian:

Rachel's Life in Pieces

REVIEW: 'When We See You Again' by Rachel Goldberg-Polin
"Once upon a time, I was meandering down the road of life with my husband, Jon. It was a regular and beige life, and it worked. It was a warm beige. We felt, and were, blessed and lucky. Normal.

"Suddenly, one day, while walking along our way, a metaphorical 18-wheeler semitruck hit us from behind and broke every bone in our bodies. All 412 of our combined bones were fractured, our spirits were mangled, and our hearts were stolen. Our life was stolen.

"That day was October 7th, 2023."

So begins the soul-searing memoir by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the Chicago-born American-Israeli whose globe-trotting efforts to free her son Hersh from Hamas captivity ended when he was murdered in a tunnel in Gaza 330 days after his kidnapping.

When We See You Again is a book no parent should ever have to write but every American should read. That every Israeli will read it I take as given, considering the prominence of Hersh in the country's national consciousness and the fact that posters pleading for his release still cling stubbornly to street signs across the world's only Jewish state.

The book is an attempt by a bereaved mother, beloved by the millions of people across the globe who read and watched her and her husband's efforts on behalf of their only son, to capture Hersh's personality beyond the headlines and psychologically work through her unimaginable grief. "Since my heart is shattered into tiny pieces," she writes, "it is easier to share than when it was one mighty, solid, and strong heart. So please take a shard. Be careful, they are sharp." Its brilliance lies in the author's weaving of unending loss and boundless frustration alongside attempts to find measures of comfort through Jewish teachings (by profession, she is an educator). Additionally wise is her avoidance of distracting the reader with partisan politics. No political figure in America or Israel is mentioned by name and she does not take a side on the debate that roiled the global Jewish community as to whether imprisoned terrorists should be freed in exchange for civilian hostages.

The reader is reminded of Hamas's brutality, often absent from daily headlines about Middle East negotiations and by those who would seek a Palestinian state. Describing how Israeli authorities found the bodies of Hersh and his fellow murdered captives, she unsparingly and clinically notes, "They were all skeletal, filthy (the coroner estimated they had not bathed in months), bearing scars of torture, and riddled with close-range bullet wounds. Hersh had six. And his hair was covered in gunpowder." She details how Chaim Peri, an 80-year-old peace activist, was kidnapped and murdered after 100 days of captivity. While Goldberg-Polin doesn't dwell on every horrific detail, it's worth reminding readers that on the 7th, Hamas also killed Holocaust survivors, burned Jews alive in their homes, sexually abused both living and dead victims, and livestreamed the murder of grandmothers on Facebook. Forty-six Americans had their lives snuffed out that day.

Jake Wallis Simons: The anti-Zionism mob is showing its true insidious colours

On the surface, the anti-Zionist cover story is quite convincing. They simply long for the evil state of Israel to be replaced by a single, democratic country with equal rights for all. The Zionist project was a historic mistake and should be humanely dismantled. Pretty reasonable, no?

Not so fast. For one thing, if you’re going to start dismantling every country with a history of injustice, best of luck to America, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Pakistan and India, all the Latin American states founded through Spanish and Portuguese conquest, all the European states built through centuries of feudal warfare and empire, and much of Africa and the Middle East.

Secondly, any practical thoughts on that single state for Jews and Palestinian Arabs? Here’s a clue: think October 7 and multiply it. So what’s the solution? Send the Jews back to the countries from which they most recently fled, like Poland, Russia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Libya? What about the racists in those countries who persist in their demands that the Jews go “back to Israel”?

They must know all this, just as they must know that “Death to the IDF” would mean a second Holocaust. Regardless, celebrities like Gary Lineker and Juliet Stevenson craft the anti-Israel narrative, while progressive Jews like Miriam Margolyes and Zack Polanski provide the alibi. “Respect” is awarded. Then the shock troops go in.

Here’s another flavour of the idiocy of the scene. Molly Crabapple, an anti-Zionist writer, recently published a book about Bundism. This was an Eastern European Jewish socialist movement of the 20th century which opposed the Zionist dream of returning to the land of Israel. Instead, Bundism promoted “doikayt”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”, insisting that Jews should fight for dignity where they already lived. According to The Economist, this could inspire modern Jews who “want to celebrate their heritage without tying themselves to Israel”.

Thanks for that. Here’s the problem: the Bundists were slaughtered in the Holocaust. This, then, is a vignette with a warning. To prevent the rhyming of history, we need immunity to spin. Insidious ideas must be given their true names, regardless of the nomenclature shrilly demanded by their proponents.

British Museum evacuated after ‘suspicious device’ found days after Jewish event postponed

The British Museum was evacuated on Saturday after staff discovered a suspicious device in a visitor toilet and received what it described as “malicious communications”, just days after the institution faced criticism for postponing a Jewish Culture Month lecture on ancient Israel over security concerns.

Police were called to the museum at around 2.50pm and between 12,000 and 16,000 visitors were evacuated as a precaution.

The Metropolitan Police later confirmed that the package was found to be non-suspicious and that there was no ongoing threat. The museum reopened shortly before 4pm.

In a statement, the museum said: “Earlier today, the British Museum was evacuated as a precaution after a suspicious device was discovered in a visitor toilet. At the same time, the museum received malicious communications, which were treated seriously and reported to the relevant authorities.

“As this remains a police matter, we will not be providing further comment on the nature of the communications received.”

The incident comes less than a week after the museum postponed a lecture on the kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah, which had been scheduled as part of Jewish Culture Month.

The lecture, due to be delivered by Paul Collins, Keeper of the Department of the Middle East, was postponed after concerns that activists planned to disrupt the event. Museum officials said intelligence suggested a significant proportion of those registered to attend intended to prevent the lecture from proceeding.

The decision sparked widespread criticism, with politicians, historians and public figures accusing the museum of capitulating to threats of disruption.

David Collier: Antisemitism and Ignorance on Display at Cambridge Market Square

Last week someone showed me a photograph of a pro-Palestine stall in Cambridge Market Square. What I saw was not angry students or hardened activists, but four elderly women – probably in their seventies – who had chosen to spend their day urging strangers to boycott Israel.

The image stayed with me – and I decided that I wanted a closer look at what was actually taking place. So yesterday I went up to Cambridge to listen to what they were saying. Selling a Fictional Palestine

When I arrived, the stall was slightly larger than the one I had seen in the photograph, with perhaps six people gathered around it. The women from the original image were there, now accompanied by a couple of younger men. For a while I simply stood nearby, looked through the maps and leaflets laid out on the table, and listened to the conversations taking place with members of the public who had stopped to engage.

At one point, one of the Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists was speaking to three young people, probably in their early twenties. The discussion turned to the word “Palestine” – and it quickly became clear that none of those involved had any real grounding in the history they were attempting to discuss.

For much of the last two millennia, “Palestine” was primarily a geographic term used by successive imperial and colonial powers in reference to the Holy Land. It was not part of the traditional identity of the local Arab population. Yet the subject has become so politically charged that many pro-Palestinian campaigners now tie themselves in ahistorical knots trying to pretend otherwise.

Which was exactly what I encountered.

After the group moved on, and noticing my interest in the stall, one of the women approached me. I deliberately chose not to challenge her or present myself as informed. I wanted to test the depth of her knowledge, so rather than appearing as an adversary, I presented myself as someone open to being educated.

We spoke for around twenty minutes, and almost everything she told me was either misleading, historically confused, or simply false.

Here are a few examples:
Invading armies
I was told that while the Arab armies did invade in 1948, they only entered the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state and did not enter the Jewish enclave. This is simply false. Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese armies all entered areas allocated to the Jewish state. Jordanian forces also captured the Jewish areas within the international zone around Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed them of their Jewish population. At one stage, the Egyptian army was just twenty miles from Tel Aviv.

The woman was not merely mistaken. She was dramatically rewriting the nature, ambition and scope of the invasion.

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05/30 Links: Mamdani just offered NY's Jews a 234-year-old bargain; Ireland Can't Stop Thinking About Israel; Hezbollah targets Israeli home front with series of rocket, drone attacks

From Ian:

Hen Mazzig: Giant

I went into Giant braced for a hit job, and I was wrong about that. Mark Rosenblatt does not put Roald Dahl in the dock and read out the charges against him. He gives him wit, a beautiful house in the country, a fiancée who adores him, and a new children’s book about to ship... And then he lets Dahl talk. John Lithgow plays him as charming, the kind of man you would want at your table. By the end you understand that the charm and prestige were doing the work the whole time. It was how the cruelty traveled.

Liccy, his fiancée, catches the contradiction before anyone else in the room. You keep telling me the Jews in Israel are violent monsters, she says, and yet you tell me the Jews here are weak. She cannot make the two fit together. She is not meant to. The Jew who is too powerful and the Jew who is too cowardly are the same invented Jew, convicted in both directions at once. The charges against him have never needed to agree with one another.

Then there is Tom, Dahl’s British publisher, who is Jewish and wants no part of any of it. “I’m British!” he proclaims. This has nothing to do with me. Yes, I was rolling my eyes too. Later he exclaimed that when his people do something good he feels a flicker of pride, or maybe not pride, maybe just relief at not having to be ashamed for once. When they do something bad, he is ashamed. It is the diaspora bargain, the hope that enough distance from Israel will buy you a pass. It does not. Dahl turns on him anyway and calls him a house Jew. A house Jew? The man who worked hardest to be left out of it gets the ugliest name in the room.

Dahl saves a stranger argument for Jessie Stone, the executive his American publisher sent to manage him. His real quarrel, he tells her, is with Ashkenazi Jews like her. Europeans, with no claim to the Middle East, unlike the “Arab Jews and the Ethiopian Jews.” The flattery is a weapon. It makes some Jews native so the rest can be called foreign. I hear the identical argument now, usually from people who have never read a line of Dahl. The Israeli becomes the white colonizer and the Mizrahi the real thing, and none of it is meant to honor anyone. It is a way to decide which Jews are allowed to belong where they already live. Dahl got there in 1983. The sorting is a pose, and it does not survive the afternoon. By the end he stops pretending any of them are the real ones. He hates all of us.

The play is funniest right before it is at its worst. Stone presses Dahl on Israel fighting a defensive war and asks what Britain would do if its own cities were bombed. We would never be as barbaric as you are to the Palestinians, he says. She gives him two words back. Dresden. Nagasaki.

Later, cornered, he turns to his cook and asks whether she would ever visit Israel, whether she would boycott an Israeli avocado. Does the avocado know that it’s Israeli, she asks, and the house laughed. The laugh matters. The whole logic of the boycott comes apart the moment a real piece of fruit is in your hand.

What lifts Giant above a period piece is that Dahl wrote the ending himself, in life, and Rosenblatt understood that.

No, ambassador: Israel's anger with France is not 'staged,' it is earned

The ambassador defends France’s stance on Lebanon, but he ignores the rhetoric that accompanied it. To hear Macron accuse Israel of “spreading barbarism in the region” as it fought to stop Hezbollah’s relentless rocket fire was a breaking point. It felt less like a strategic critique and more like a defense of France’s historical raison d’être in Lebanon at the expense of Israeli lives. To use the word “barbarism” against the victims of October 7 while they fight an Iranian proxy is an inversion of reality that no “friend” should utter.

Then came the diplomatic sucker punch: the announcement of an upcoming, unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state. By moving toward recognition then, without a negotiated settlement or the release of our brothers and sisters still rotting in Hamas tunnels, France effectively rewarded the October 7 massacre. This move did not advance peace; it actively derailed the delicate negotiations to free our hostages by signaling to Hamas that it need only wait for the West to hand it a victory.

To add insult to injury, France then moved to boycott Israeli defense companies at major exhibitions. How can a nation claim to support our “right to self-defense” while simultaneously banning the very tools we need to exercise that right? A diplomatic double standard

Ambassador Journès, you claim there is a “double standard” being applied to France. On the contrary, we are simply applying the same standard to you that you apply to us. We see the consistency with which France treats Israeli security as a secondary concern to its own Mediterranean grandstanding.

I am not a fan of the current Israeli government. I protest its policies and worry for our democracy. But being a critic of my government does not make me suicidal for my country. Loving France does not mean I must accept its gaslighting.

We don’t need “smooth conversations,” Mr. Ambassador. We need an ally that doesn’t treat our survival as a bargaining chip for its own regional relevance.

Our anger isn’t “staged.” It is the natural response of a people that expected more from the patrie of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Author Theo Baker says he feels more Jewish as a result of antisemitism at Stanford

Theo Baker describes himself as “an accidental journalist.” But at just 21, his writing has already sent shockwaves through the academic world.

As a freshman at Stanford University in 2022, he exposed then-President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s decades-long pattern of manipulated data and research in scientific papers he co-authored or supervised, ultimately leading to his resignation. Baker, the son of New York Times reporter Peter Baker and New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser, became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award for his reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

During his sophomore year, Baker published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic called “The War at Stanford,” exploring campus culture following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel. He called college “a factory of unreason” and argued that anti-Israel demonstrations and rhetoric had created a pervasive climate of fear, accusing Stanford of failing to adequately condemn the attacks or protect Jewish students, all while training the next generation of tech and industry leaders.

Baker reflects on his turbulent college years in his new memoir and exposé, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, published earlier this month. The book lays bare an elite university corrupted by Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power, all while Stanford saw a historic rise of antisemitism.

Whether it was navigating the release of ChatGPT or grappling with the impact of the Oct. 7 attacks, Baker said every year of his experience at the elite Palo Alto, Calif., university presented a unique challenge. Weeks away from graduation, Baker spoke with Jewish Insider about his past four years on campus, the role that technology plays in rising antisemitism — and what the future might hold for universities.

Jewish Insider: You’ve described yourself as coming from a home with “just a tiny bit of cultural Judaism.” How has covering antisemitism changed your Jewish identity? What about your relationship with Israel?

Theo Baker: In fall 2022, I went home for Thanksgiving and said, “There’s so much antisemitism at Stanford.” I was shocked by that. It’s not something I really countered growing up. As soon as I arrived at Stanford — even in the first week — someone asked me, “why are all Jews so rich?”

By the end of that year — and this is before Oct. 7 —- someone in my dorm, a kid who was Jewish, talked about being Jewish for the first time and someone put a bunch of swastikas and an image of Hitler on his door later that day.

So Jewishness is an identity and not one I would have placed much investment in prior to coming to college. It was something that I knew about myself but was not particularly salient. Certainly, I, like many college students in the last few years, have been made to feel more Jewish just by the circumstances around us. It was certainly interesting to be here on campus as a reporter when the biggest story happening was something that also intersected with my own background.

I have not taken trips to Israel [in college] but I lived in Israel briefly when my dad was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times. I’ve tried to center my reporting on the things I have expertise on. Stanford is 7,000 miles away from Israel. It’s so fascinating that it became such an important issue for people, and then disappeared seemingly so quickly from the public conversation.

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05/29 Links Pt2: The Joy of Hating Jews; The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing; Mamdani endorses former Columbia encampment organizer for Congress

From Ian:

The Joy of Hating Jews

Nazi Germany understood this with terrifying sophistication. Some of the most disturbing footage from the period is disturbing precisely because people appear cheerful. Crowds smiled during boycotts of Jewish stores and later acts of public humiliation and degradation. Book burnings resembled university festivals. Torchlit parades became raucous public celebrations. Looting, gathering, and watching flames together transformed hatred into public theater in which ordinary people could participate.

Today’s digital culture has monetized these pleasures. Online platforms are engineered to maximize engagement by maximizing emotional reward. Antisemitism is extraordinarily well suited to such systems. Platforms amplify the thrill of forbidden knowledge, insider language, memes, and collective outrage while making them instantly accessible and endlessly repeatable. The digital dogpile—coordinated mass attack on a single Jewish target—is the mob made digital. Like the analogue mobs that preceded them, these too are often gleeful and public. But unlike earlier forms, participation no longer requires gathering in the street or much physical effort at all. The mob no longer needs to gather, it simply needs to log on.

Flooding Jewish journalists’ social media feeds with Holocaust jokes and “oven” memes; defacing synagogues, menorahs, or Jewish community centers with swastikas—often timed to holidays; filming antisemitic taunts of visibly Jewish people and posting them online for laughs; turning classic antisemitic tropes into viral “ironic” content or remix videos—none of these are coherent responses to a supposedly sophisticated international cabal controlling the world’s economy, politics, media, migration, and satellites. They are rituals of humiliation. The point is not resistance. The point is pleasure.

Revelation, belonging, and moral framing explain much of antisemitism’s appeal and durability. They are pleasures that can disguise themselves as insight, solidarity, and justice. Each has a cover story. Together, they remove the ordinary societal restraints on cruelty. Once hatred feels righteous and collective, Jewish suffering itself becomes the pleasure. The sadism—pleasure in Jewish pain, fear, and humiliation for its own sake—has no disguise. The suffering itself is the reward.

One of the most difficult realities confronting Jews about antisemitism is that their outrage is part of the reward structure. It is part of the fun.

Antisemitism is rarely content merely to express itself. It seeks reaction. The shock, anger, fear, and public anguish it provokes are psychologically and socially rewarding to the antisemite. It heightens the drama. This helps explain why even wildly implausible accusations persist despite their absurdity. The accusations are not simply designed to persuade—they are meant to scandalize, provoke, and energize. Their very absurdity is part of the thrill. Jews have been accused of using Christian children’s blood to make matzo, of controlling the weather, of harvesting organs from Palestinian children, of training and deploying dogs as instruments of sexual assault, of operating secret space lasers. The accusations need not be coherent. They need only be energetic. The more absurd the allegation, the more satisfying the reaction it provokes.

This creates a peculiar bind. Antisemitism cannot be ignored. History punishes indifference again and again. But public Jewish distress feeds the very reward system sustaining it. Condemnation does not deter, it deliver the pleasure the antisemite wants.

If Jews protest loudly, it will be cast as Jews having something to hide. If Jewish organizations demand collective condemnation, it will be cast as Jews having the power to suppress criticism. If Jews stay silent, it will be cast as indifference, arrogance, or worse—tacit agreement. Confront the accusation publicly and Jews feed the spectacle. Ignore it and normalization spreads. Explain it carefully and with nuance and lose ground faster. Complexity will always be outrun by emotional simplicity and the vocabulary of moral crusade. In short, Jews become unwilling performers in someone else’s theater. The antisemite wins either way.

This is part of the exhaustion Jewish communities experience in the wake of antisemitic waves that followed Oct. 7 and have not abated. It is not only fear. It is the demoralizing recognition that every available response is both necessary and compromised.

Antisemitism is not a burden its adherents bear—it is a pleasure they seek. Antisemitic narratives are not the cause of antisemitism—they are its cover stories. Spectacle is not a byproduct of antisemitism—it is often the product. Sadism is not a side effect—it is what revelation, belonging, and moral righteousness make possible. Jewish outrage is not a deterrent—it is a reward. And all of this is because, while the antisemite often claims to be outraged by Jews, history shows he is—far more often than not—thrilled by them.

Seth Mandel: The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing

The story of Taryn Thomas’s recovery from the intellectual isolation of pro-Palestinian activism provides a handy guide for anyone interested. Her quotes in her Telegraph profile are perfect as a CliffsNotes-style outline of the anti-Zionist movement in the West:

“People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.” This is Thomas reflecting on her social circle at Stanford after the massacres of October 7 but before Israel’s ground incursion in response. She didn’t know much about the conflict, but those around her had talking points ready to go to defend Hamas and indict Israel as soon as the attack happened. This is key to anti-Zionist activism: It isn’t grassroots or organic; it is pre-packaged and distributed to an army of propagandists.

“I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free.” Thomas, who is black, was introduced to the pro-Palestinian cause at Black Lives Matter events. This is classic anti-Zionist media strategy: Co-opt someone else’s oppression and tell them that they are the victim of the Jews. Immediately making it about someone other than the Palestinians also frees one from the burden of the Palestinian share of blame for the state of the conflict.

“It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide. The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.” Once inside the activist wing of the mission, one quickly finds that the lazy river flows only in one direction. If you float along, you drift into increasingly more extreme territory; it is staying in one place or exploring moderate positions that require effort.

Seth Mandel: Heed This Rabbi’s Words

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, gave a speech yesterday at a Reform Judaism conference that I predict will be studied, remembered, and referenced for the foreseeable future by his fellow rabbis.

The address should be watched, because Hirsch knows how to deliver a speech. And because often when there’s something you really need to hear, you need to literally hear it. The speech was a rousing call for Reform Judaism to wear its Zionism on its sleeve, to proudly embrace Jewish particularism, and to hold firmer than ever to its belief in Jewish peoplehood.

Because it is no surprise that I support Hirsch’s unapologetic love of Zion, I will comment on one specific aspect of the speech that I believe made it so profound. In organized American Jewry, just as in politics, an idea has taken hold: Because young people are wishy-washy on Zionism and Israel, institutions must either adapt to welcome their ideas or watch their membership crumble.

I won’t mince words: This is weaselly behavior. Which is why I’m not shocked to see it in politics, even as I find the self-debasement cringeworthy. But I have no patience at all for it in Judaism for one reason: Our clergy are our teachers.

Teaching, leadership, education—these are what saved Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing exile. We argue endlessly about what our rabbis say and do and mean, but it is largely thanks to this system that we have something to argue about at all.

So if young people are straying from Jewish peoplehood, is it our responsibility to join them? Or to teach them?

One of the repeated explanations one hears from liberal Jews is that so many young people have never known a not-right-wing Israeli government. In political circles, this can make Israel advocacy difficult for Democratic officials.

Hirsch also shares this sentiment. He has many disagreements with the current Israeli government, and he does not shy from saying so. But he does not use this as an excuse:

“Given the growing hostility to Israel, especially in our circles, liberal and progressive spaces, it is not enough for us to proclaim our Zionist bona fides every now and again, often expressed defensively, and with so many qualifications, stipulations, and modifications that our enthusiasm for Zionism is buried under an avalanche of provisos. It is not enough to issue occasional press releases, or tweets, that we are a Zionist movement. We are the leaders. We must lead.”

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05/29 Links Pt1: How Benjamin Netanyahu transformed Israeli politics in 30 years; Every US ally is under attack from the UN; The ICC’s illegitimate pursuit of Israeli leaders is political warfare

From Ian:

How Benjamin Netanyahu transformed Israeli politics in 30 years

Shimon Peres, the world-renowned statesman who had served in multiple governments for an aggregate 24 years, was dethroned by a political novice nearly three decades his junior, the woefully inexperienced Benjamin Netanyahu, who had not been a minister for one day.

The electoral upset was explained by circumstances – a wave of terror attacks that followed, and mocked Peres’s peace promises. No one understood that a new era in the history of the Jewish state had just begun: the Bibi era, an epoch that has his name written all over it, and our future teetering under its weight.

What was this era about, what were its benefits, what were its costs, and what should follow its steadily approaching end?

Netanyahu’s finest hour came not during his aggregate 18 years as prime minister, but in between them, as Ariel Sharon’s finance minister.

With his first premiership having ended in a ringing defeat, Netanyahu set out to prove he could not only talk, but also do. What he thus did – massive cuts in social spending, sharp tax cuts, a set of privatizations, and a package of financial reforms – helped lead the Israeli economy to international stardom. It also showed that Netanyahu, unlike most politicians, had convictions.

Then again, that achievement was not the Bibi era’s main feature. His economic reforms accelerated, but did not launch, Israel’s journey from socialism to capitalism. That transition had been triggered by the 1985 Stabilization Plan. In fact, reforms mostly starred in Netanyahu’s rhetoric, but not in his deeds.

As prime minister, he delivered some infrastructure development – most notably the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv fast train – but when it came to complex structural problems, he avoided ambitious action. Yes, his open-skies policy cut flight prices, but more urgent issues, like the quality of the school system, the shortage of hospitals and doctors, the political system’s deformities, and the crime crisis in the Arab sector, were accepted fatalistically as fixtures of Israeli life.

As this column claimed already 15 years ago, by the time he returned to the premiership, Netanyahu had “lost his own reformist drive” (“Bibi the third’s failed premiership,” July 1, 2011).

Johnathan Tobin: Who should speak for Israel? The case for Caroline Glick

As far as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leftist critics are concerned, the last thing Israel needs is someone representing the country abroad who enthusiastically supports his policies, and is ready to do intellectual and verbal combat with the government’s opponents. If that doesn’t make sense, then welcome to Israeli politics.

That basic conundrum explains the firestorm that has greeted the floating of the idea that Netanyahu might name veteran journalist and current adviser Caroline Glick to the post of consul general in New York City. Glick was a senior contributing editor at JNS and hosted “The Caroline Glick” show on JNS TV before being named as Netanyahu’s international affairs adviser in February 2025.

In many ways, she is an ideal candidate for such a post. She was born, raised and educated (at Columbia and Harvard universities) in the United States. As a result, she speaks unaccented idiomatic American English, unlike most of Israel’s diplomats.

After making aliyah, she served in the Israel Defense Forces, where she worked as coordinator of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority during the period of the Oslo Accords. After becoming a journalist, she was embedded with the U.S. Army during the invasion of Iraq and worked as a frontline war correspondent. Since then—and outside of a brief stint running for the Knesset in 2019—she’s been covering and commenting on the issues that are at the forefront of Israeli public policy and diplomacy.

Moreover, as someone who worked with Netanyahu for a while in the 1990s and then again in the last year, she understands the prime minister’s views as well as anyone.

October 7 exposed the West’s dangerous illusion about Iran - opinion

October 7 was not merely a security breach; it was a fundamental turning point that shattered a global delusion. To understand why Israel was so catastrophically blindsided, we must examine the fact that for decades, the West and Israel operated under the comfortable delusion that money, prosperity, and the responsibilities of governance could “tame” an ideological movement.

This catastrophic error in Gaza, the belief that Hamas could be “bought,” was not just an Israeli failure. It is the exact same flaw currently poisoning the international approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran, particularly regarding its nuclear program.

The illusion of prosperity
Prior to October 7, Israel and the United States – operating under the assumption that economic prosperity could tame radicalism – approved the flow of vast amounts of capital into the Gaza Strip.

High-paying work permits were issued for Gazans to work in Israel, and the Strip saw the rise of modern shopping centres and palm-fringed boulevards.

The assumption was simple: If we give them a middle-class life, they won’t want to lose it. We believed that Hamas, burdened by the duties of statecraft and the management of a growing economy, would choose the survival of its “mini-state” over the bloody pursuit of its charter. We assumed they knew that a major attack would mean their total destruction, and that they feared that destruction.

The reality of the death cult
We were wrong. October 7 proved that jihadist forces do not view the world through the lens of material profit and loss. For them, this world is an “abode of passage,” a temporary and hollow stage. Prosperity is not a goal; it is a tactical lull used for “Taqiyya” (strategic deception) while they prepare for the only world that matters: the afterlife – as they see it.

In this ideology, life is not something to be protected; it is a currency to be spent.

When a movement views its own children as future martyrs, uses its civilians as human shields to gain divine and political merit, and values a glorious death over a comfortable life, traditional economic leverage is useless. You cannot deter those who perceive their own annihilation as a shortcut to paradise.

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05/28 Links Pt2: VDH: Haters’ selective outrage exposes the hypocrisy of their Israel lies; Yad Vashem to open first Holocaust education center outside Israel in Munich

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Haters’ selective outrage exposes the hypocrisy of their Israel lies

Since Oct. 7, 2023, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel.

The campuses, the left-wing media and Democratic Socialist officials, following the cue of student activists and leftist professors, have painted Israel and its Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world.

This is nonsensical.

The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on Oct. 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced.

Instead, it spawned a storm of antisemitism.

The libels of genocide and ethnic cleansing being cast at the Jewish state apply far more accurately to a host of other nations.

Over the decades, we have sold arms and given billions of dollars in military aid to Turkey — yet between 1915 and 1920, the Turkish government conducted a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing against their Armenian population, for which it has never apologized and which it continues to deny.

None of the current critics of Israel seems worried that Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and ethnically cleansed Northern Cyprus of its Greek inhabitants.

There are no demonstrations anywhere in America on behalf of the far more recent “Nakba” of the Cypriot Greeks.

Did Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil ever rally his armies of idealists to damn the Islamic-driven ethnic cleansing of the ancient population of Christian Armenians, or to call for the United States to sever its joint arms deals with Turkey?

Before the 1967 war, nearly 1 million Jews were living in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, descendants of those who had been there for centuries.

But during the serial Arab-Israeli wars of the 20th century, they were almost entirely pushed out of those countries.

None appear today before television cameras, shaking the keys of their confiscated homes in Algiers, Amman, Baghdad or Cairo.

Of course, no one dares to say Arabs “ethnically cleansed” almost all their Jewish citizens.

Between 1987 and 1989, the Somali Marxist dictator Mohamed Siad Barre began slaughtering entire rival Somali clans. The eventual death toll may have reached nearly 200,000.

When Barre’s murderous regime finally imploded, thousands of Somali refugees who had either supported Barre or belonged to his clan fled to the once-despised West, especially the United States and Europe.

Among those pro-Barre refugees were apparently members of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s family, including her father, a colonel and regimental commander in Barre’s army.

It’s a bitter irony that Omar is now such a sharp critic of Israel and the United States, given that America granted refuge to her family.

Yet we are not aware that any Somalis today are now being accosted by strangers — as Jews are — and lectured about what their former leader’s regime did to those thousands of innocent civilians.

Ruth S. King: As Antisemitism Rages, Jewish Organizations Have Sidelined Themselves They did so by embracing partisan politics, rather than focusing on their core mission—protecting Jews around the world, including America and Israel.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish politician, writer, historian, and academic, once said, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” The phrase is often invoked to explain sudden, violent resurgences of antisemitic sentiment in modern times. It has now awakened with gale-force winds, and Jewish political clout and influence have disappeared.

Many Jewish organizations, some of which are political powerhouses ostensibly created to protect Jews and provide bipartisan support for Israel, have allied themselves with the “progressive” left. This is odd, as I searched all the Psalms and the “shalt not” commandments, and there is absolutely nothing about abortion rights, global warming, or transgender ideology. Furthermore, “woke” is a verb, not a Jewish mandate.

This is not the first time a single-issue political organization has picked a side in America and lost all its clout. An excellent example from the past is the old “China Lobby,” which went to the extreme right—and embraced antisemitism.

When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, he had to contend with a hegemonic institution: the powerful “China Lobby,” an influential bipartisan coalition of voters who adamantly advocated for U.S. recognition and protection of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Taiwan, and fiercely opposed diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China.

The lobby successfully influenced foreign policy, securing the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan through legislation like the Formosa Resolution of 1955.

To say the lobby was a political powerhouse is an understatement. The group forced the cancellation of Ross Y. Koen’s The China Lobby in American Politics. Macmillan had already started printing copies, but the book was withdrawn from publication in response to the political pressure. Only a few copies survived.

What happened to the China Lobby, which originated as a focused bipartisan group?

The group moved sharply to the right, collaborating with far-right isolationist and anti-communist coalitions, including early ties to militant grassroots organizations such as the John Birch Society. Among its protagonists were Senators William Knowland and Joseph McCarthy, alongside publisher Henry Luce and academic organizations like the Committee of One Million, a political pressure group that operated from 1953 to 1971.

The lobby actively allied with militant right-wing politicians to push an aggressive, pro-Nationalist foreign policy, attacking moderate U.S. diplomats and attempting to purge government officials who were deemed “soft on communism.”

Influential conservatives like J.B. Stoner advocated for radical antisemitism and segregation.

This was not the premise of the original lobby, which was concerned only with protecting Taiwan’s international status. Because it became embroiled in other political issues, it effectively came to be seen as a conservative fringe group and lost members, influence, and political clout.

For the past many years, Jewish organizations have made the same mistake. They were once political powerhouses ostensibly created to protect Jews and provide bipartisan support for Israel. Now, though, they’ve allied themselves with the “progressive” left. (Not all have done this, thankfully. Two outstanding organizations that continue to support Jews and Israel are the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) and AFSI (Americans for a Safe Israel).)

Zionism, After the Fact By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. A number of Israel-supporters have noted that the terms “Zionism” and “Zionist” are, from a present-day perspective, confusing or even insulting. As Zionism refers to a belief and a movement that sought to establish a modern Jewish homeland, does it make sense still to speak of Zionists when that homeland has existed for more than 75 years?

Coleman Hughes remarked in a recent episode of his podcast that it makes as much sense to declare oneself a Zionist today as it would to self-describe as an abolitionist. The State of Israel is a long-established fact, and American slavery has long been abolished. In this reading, perhaps the term Zionism is an anachronism that’s intended to cast a shadow of impermanence or erasure over the Jewish state.

I think Hughes makes a powerful point in comparing the relevance of Zionism and abolitionism. But it’s equally illuminating to contrast the two.

There is, after all, a reason that self-proclaimed abolitionists no longer exist while Zionists do: While there is no active anti-abolition movement, there’s a massive, coordinated, and armed anti-Zionist campaign looking to undo history and destroy Israel.

Now, let’s keep the contrast going with a little thought experiment. What if a modern anti-abolitionist movement suddenly arose? How would elite opinion respond to those actively fighting to repeal the 13th Amendment and reinstate slavery?

With fury, of course. Western liberals would be disgusted and outraged by the political organization of retrograde racists.

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