09/21 Links: Richard Landes: How the Western Press Got Jihad Wrong; Police officer wounded in shooting outside Ontario synagogue; Reform Rabbi: Unhinged, obsessive loathing of Israel is corrupting US values

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: How Hamas Controls the Story Coming Out of Gaza

Azaiza revealed details about how journalists operated under Hamas rule. He described an environment in which journalists were pressured to suppress criticism of Hamas and, in some cases, to stop filming when Palestinians expressed anger toward the terrorist group.

These are not allegations coming from an Israeli government official or a pro-Israel advocacy organization. They are admissions by a Palestinian journalist who became internationally famous for documenting the war.

When Palestinians blamed Israel, the cameras kept rolling. When Palestinians blamed Hamas, the cameras were turned off.

He acknowledged that stepping outside this framework exposes journalists to intense backlash, including organized online campaigns, accusations of treason, and physical intimidation inside Gaza.

He openly acknowledged that initially he struggled with whether to publish material showing Palestinians criticizing Hamas. He said he had never seen a Gaza journalist publish such material. He also disclosed that he grew up supporting Hamas and that Hamas's ideology and the culture of "resistance" were part of his childhood environment.

This is a remarkable admission. It helps explain why the outside world has heard relatively little from Gaza about Hamas's responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians under its rule. It also raises an obvious question: How much of the story coming out of Gaza has been shaped not only by what journalists saw but also by what they believed they were permitted to show?

Azaiza's account should therefore prompt media organizations that used his work – and the work of other Gaza-based journalists as well as journalists covering other terrorist entities and their sponsors – to examine their own reporting practices. Who supplied the information? Who was present when it was gathered? What material was not published? Were journalists pressured? Were interviews conducted freely? Were Palestinians allowed to criticize Hamas on camera? Most importantly, did international media organizations independently verify claims coming from a territory controlled by a terrorist organization?

Azaiza's interview is ultimately a warning about the dangers of accepting any side's narrative without scrutiny.... It should be a wake-up call.

The question is no longer simply what the cameras show. It is also what they do not show.

Gaza journalist who met with Mamdani admits he buried Oct. 7 footage of Israeli hostages being beaten to protect perpetrators

A Gaza journalist who has met with Mayor Mamdani and been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and a spot on the Time100 list admitted that he buried footage of Israeli hostages being beaten by a Palestinian mob on Oct. 7, 2023 in order to protect the perpetrators.

Photographer Motaz Azaiza also revealed that all media in Gaza is controlled by Hamas through a single WhatsApp group — and the terror group will target any journalist who publishes criticism.

Azaiza — who has become one of the most famous journalists in Gaza — was in the territory on Oct. 7, when Hamas marched the hostages taken from Israel through the streets of Gaza, where all hell broke loose.

“People got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed,” Azaiza told the Taqarrab podcast.

“But I did not publish those videos.”

“Why? Because I did not want to ruin the lives of the people who were filmed,” the photographer said.

“I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them.”

“I did not want to be responsible, even indirectly, for the deaths of those people in exchange for a few likes and views online,” he added.

Aziza also revealed that “every journalist in Gaza” is in a Hamas-run WhatsApp group called “Smart” that coordinates coverage in Gaza. One of the Hamas media directors based at the Rafa Crossing ran it, he said.

Aziza went on to say that he was targeted by pro-Hamas media — run through that channel — when he showed a video of a Gaza resident cursing Hamas.

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09/20 Links: Take a look inside Israel’s war room on the day Hamas invaded; Terrorist kills Netanel Shakron, father of six, in Samaria on Yom Kippur eve; The Letter I Wish Robert Kraft Wrote

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Israel’s Rivals in a Fight for Survival

REVIEW: ‘In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis’ by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman
In the War Room is a detailed reconstruction of how Israel's top officials navigated the three-year series of wars that began with Hamas's invasion of Israel on October 7. The book lets us zoom out, providing structure and narrative coherence to a conflict that is in some ways still ongoing, and that most people know only from daily news stories, many of them deeply inaccurate.

The authors—Elliot Kaufman, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, and Yonah Jeremy Bob, the military correspondent of the Jerusalem Post—had extraordinary access to the central figures directing Israel's war effort. As it happens, those figures were all political rivals. At the top sat Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, whose reputation as a security hawk was profoundly shaken by the catastrophic surprise attack. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant, a former general turned politician, was a senior member of Netanyahu's Likud party, but one who had very publicly broken ranks with him just before the war over the government's efforts to reform the powers of the judiciary.

Another key member of the war cabinet, the affable Benny Gantz, a former general and IDF chief of staff, had for a time led the main rival political party; he joined Netanyahu's government in a show of national unity after the attacks. He brought with him his political colleague Gadi Eisenkot, another former general—and now Netanyahu's biggest rival in the October election. Finally, Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff—a vastly powerful post in Israel—had not even been appointed by Netanyahu, but by the previous, short-lived government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Likewise, the head of the internal security service, the Shabak, which had jurisdiction over Gaza, was a holdover from the previous government, and Netanyahu's efforts to replace him would lead to a lengthy Supreme Court battle.

This was not just the proverbial "team of rivals." It was a team of political enemies with little personal connection or camaraderie and deep suspicion of one another—cats in a bag. That they managed to lead such a successful multifront war is remarkable. As the authors tell it, the atmosphere in the war room was deeply unpleasant—though certainly better than the one between General Omar Bradley and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who tried not to be in the same room together.

The authors trace the crucial decision points of the wars and the debates that preceded them. At every stage, there were marked disagreements about how to handle an exceedingly complex situation. Drawing on firsthand testimony, the authors paint a picture of the shock and disorientation of the war's first days, as Israel's leaders struggled to grasp a situation for which they bore command responsibility. Throughout, some members of the war cabinet favored offensive pushes while others urged caution—though who played which role changed from battle to battle, and even within a single battle.

For example, Gallant favored an immediate attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon to neutralize what was then its massive missile arsenal, which posed the greater strategic threat—even though Hezbollah had joined Hamas's assault only in a limited way. Netanyahu favored dealing first with Hamas and the hostages, the immediate casus belli. Later, Netanyahu would be cautious about launching the ground operation in Gaza, as well as about taking Rafah in the south of the Strip, while his generals favored both operations. Over time, however, Gantz grew more skittish about the Rafah campaign, and Netanyahu more determined to carry it out.

Even after the fact, the participants' recollections differ—several remember the other participants as shaken in the first weeks of the war, but not themselves. Strategic disagreements are almost certainly inevitable in making such high-stakes decisions, and it is difficult to weigh these internal battles in hindsight. While most of the war room figures were politicians to some extent, there does not appear to be any clear correlation between their political leanings and how aggressively they wanted to prosecute the war. Whatever their failings in anticipating and understanding the enemy, these were patriots determined to defeat a genocidal foe.

The clearest mistake in retrospect was Gantz and Eisenkot's readiness to end the war in early 2024, with the Palestinian Authority brought in to serve as a fig leaf for Hamas control of Gaza. At the time, they faced an increasingly hostile international environment and saw no other prospect for the hostages' release. It is now clear that Netanyahu's insistence on fighting on was wise. It led to the decimation of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad, the establishment of security zones in enemy territory, and the repeated degradation of Iran's nuclear and missile programs.

Ira Stoll: Take a look inside Israel’s war room on the day Hamas invaded

Alongside the highlight reel of Israeli and American accomplishments, this book provides a kind of supercut of retrospectively ridiculous things that Israeli and American politicians have said along the way. The compilation, in one volume, of all these gems is another public service provided by Bob, who is The Jerusalem Post’s senior military analyst, and by Kaufman, who is an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal.

Israeli politician Benny Gantz bragged to an interviewer in 2018 that as Israel Defense Force chief of staff he had “prioritized cyber and intelligence over infantry and armor,” because “unlike the threat of ground invasion, the threat of cyber is realistic.”

John Kerry, as President Obama’s secretary of state, cited the Afghan army to the Israelis as a model for Palestinian security forces and “an example of how local forces could be trained successfully.”

Kamala Harris, before Israel’s invasion of the southern Gazan city of Rafah: “I have studied the maps,” she said, incorrectly claiming there was nowhere for civilians to evacuate to.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who has since landed at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, had written a Foreign Affairs essay “that went to print just before the October 7 attack and arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes later in the month,” boasting that Biden’s policies made the Middle East “quieter than it has been for decades.” He claimed credit for having “de-escalated crises in Gaza” and having “enhanced deterrence” to discourage Iranian aggression.

The book details differences among Netanyahu, his war cabinet members Gantz and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Israel Defense Force chief of staff Herzi Halevi. Those internal discussions — and the parallel dialogues with the Biden and Trump administrations — shaped the outcomes in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The personalities also reflected the span of public opinion in Israel’s diverse democracy.

The authors are less sure-footed when analyzing US and global sentiment. “Widespread destruction became a key driver of Israel’s diminished global standing,” the authors contend. “Videos of Gazan neighborhoods turned to rubble, with nothing left intact for as far as the eye could see, told a story of their own.” And, “a young generation’s first impression of the Jewish state has been formed by the destruction of Gaza.”

Somehow the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of Dresden, didn’t diminish America’s global standing for the young generation during or after World War II. Any erosion can be blamed not on the destruction of Gaza but on a sophisticated social-media and on-the-ground campaign by foreign actors to demonize Israel, coupled with social trends in America such as declining church attendance, a flood of Muslim immigration and biblical illiteracy.

The weakest part of the book is an author’s note from Yonah Jeremy Bob. Here, Bob claims Netanyahu “harmed Israel’s name with US Democrats and other parts of the fair-minded West (Germany is another notable example) by continuing the war for too long.”

He goes on: “Whether the war should have ended in late summer 2024, early 2025 or summer 2025 is hotly debated within the Israeli defense establishment. But close to zero of the Israeli defense establishment supported continuing the war beyond that point, and beyond that point is where Israel’s standing took the largest global walloping.”

This timeline does not cohere. It was only in October of 2025 that Hamas agreed to disarm and to return all the Israeli hostages, dead and alive. Count me as skeptical that Israel’s global standing would have been improved had the Jewish state ended the war prematurely, without getting the hostages back and without a plan to disarm and dislodge Hamas. And the sniping by the “Israeli defense establishment” against Netanyahu, an unfortunate feature of Israel’s domestic political landscape, is the rare Israeli export that America might indeed be better off boycotting.

So skip that section and appreciate the rest of the fast-paced narrative. Rerun the dramatic details of how Israel killed all those terrorists, and laugh along the way at Kerry, Sullivan and Harris. The victory may not be entirely total, but for Israel and America it’s already been quite an impressive win, especially considering how grimly this round began. And the war is not fully over quite yet.

Book Complaining About Israeli Influence Ironically Benefits From Offshore Arab Funding

The book claims, "It is Israeli violence against Palestinians that increases antisemitism." That ignores that antisemitism peaked during the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust, before there was a modern state of Israel or "Palestinians" with a national identity. It also blames the victims of a hateful bias for a bias that is fundamentally irrational. Israel has tried plenty of nonviolent ways of dealing with the Palestinians—a border fence, unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Iron Dome, the Oslo Accords. Yet when faced with dedicated Islamist fanatical terrorists determined to wipe Israel off the map and rape, kill, or kidnap the Jewish inhabitants, the demand that Israel restrict its responses to nonviolent ones seems more a symptom of antisemitism than an indication of concern about fueling it.

The book accuses Israel of "the obsessive use of 'terrorist' as an adjective." Actually Israel frequently uses "terrorist" as a noun, because, unfortunately, it is fighting a lot of enemies who are terrorists, a fact this book is determined to minimize.

The authors and their editors seem ignorant on foreign policy and national security issues even beyond the Middle East. They claim, "[b]etween Truman and George H.W. Bush, every American adopted containment as their grand geopolitical strategy." That ignores President Reagan's shift beyond containment to rollback, the strategy that eventually yielded victory.

One could go on. Throughout there's a single-minded obsession with donors and interest groups that favor a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, and neglect of the countervailing donors and interest groups. It amounts to a skewed story. The Anti-Defamation League's antisemitism statistics are dismissed as a "hoax," downplaying or ignoring FBI or New York Police crime statistics that show similar surges in anti-Jewish hate.

The interesting question is how and why a book this gross and full of falsehoods found a mainstream publisher—One Signal, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by KKR. The chairman of Qatar Investment Authority, Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani, met with Co-Chief Executive Officer of KKR & Co. Scott Nuttall in July during a visit to New York, according to a photo released by the government of Qatar. The acknowledgments say, "This book benefited from the generous support provided by Lina and Ali."

Who are Lina and Ali? What sort of "support" did they provide? And why not be fully transparent about it? Eli Clifton's author photo on the book jacket is provided "Courtesy of the Quincy Institute," an institution that lists Clifton as "cofounder and senior adviser." Quincy also lists Ali Munir & Lina Lazaar as donors in the $100,000 to $250,000 category (the same level as the Soros Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund but a lower level than Koch's Stand Together Trust).

With the last names available, so is more information. The Charity Commission of England and Wales lists Ali Munir as one of three trustees of Ibraaz, a London-based cultural center whose website describes it as "an initiative of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation." The president of the Kamel Lazaar foundation is Lina Lazaar; the website describes it as "a Geneva- and Tunis-based institution." Lina's father is Kamel Lazaar, a Tunisian-Swiss investment banker. Her ex-husband, Hassan Jameel, is a Saudi Arabian billionaire. Corporate registration documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from the Jersey Islands, the offshore jurisdiction where Munir's Panarae Limited company is based, indicate he is a British national and his full name is Mohammad Ali Munir Ahmed.

There are plenty of foreign powers whose grip is on display here, but Israel is not among them. As I said, it's nauseating. Lina and Ali should ask for a refund. This book is so shoddy it will damage their reputation to be associated with it. No wonder they didn't want their full names in the acknowledgments.

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09/19 Links: Andrew Fox: The Anti-Israel Film That Undermines Its Own Genocide Claim; Saudi Arabia discovers the value of a strong Israel

From Ian:

Saudi Arabia discovers the value of a strong Israel

The lesson for Mohammed bin Salman should be clear: Alliances matter most when allies are prepared to confront a common enemy.

Only last month, Saudi Arabia signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Turkey and Pakistan. The pact provides that an armed attack against one of the three countries will be considered an attack against them all.

It sounded impressive. Reality has proved more complicated.

Turkey has no desire to be drawn into a confrontation with Iran, while Pakistan has sent mixed signals about what the agreement actually requires. Islamabad initially indicated that continued Houthi aggression could activate the pact, but later said that no military response had been discussed. And Pakistan is far away.

The stakes extend far beyond Saudi Arabia. Through its proxies, Iran has now extended its reach to another of the world’s strategic maritime choke points. Bab el-Mandeb is the gateway to the Red Sea and, ultimately, the Suez Canal—a vital artery of trade between Europe and Asia. Houthi control of the strait therefore threatens not only Riyadh but Egypt, Europe and global commerce.

That also helps explain Mohammed bin Salman’s turn to Egypt. Cairo has an enormous economic interest in keeping the Red Sea route open and traffic flowing through the Suez Canal. The Saudi crown prince traveled there this week seeking support from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the Houthi attacks intensified.

Saudi Arabia has also sought assistance from other allies as its missile-defense resources come under pressure. The United States continues to provide intelligence cooperation while stopping short of direct military intervention.

And then there is Israel.

Israel does not disappear when circumstances become difficult. It is not going anywhere. And Saudi Arabia and Israel face the same enemies: Iran and the Houthis.

Reports now suggest that Riyadh has sought Israeli intelligence assistance through U.S. Central Command as it confronts the growing Houthi threat.

That is significant.

Mohammed bin Salman has spent years dangling the possibility of relations with Israel, always conditionally and often ambiguously. But reality is stronger than diplomatic games.

On one side are Iran and its proxies. On the other are countries with a common interest in stopping them.

The Houthis have advanced along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and threatened the Bab el-Mandeb, one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. Saudi Arabia said this week that it intercepted a Houthi drone near Mecca, although the Houthis denied targeting the holy city.

They have demonstrated that there are few limits to their ambitions.

Mecca and Medina are threatened. The Red Sea is threatened. International shipping is threatened. And Jerusalem has long been in the sights of Iran and its proxies.

Mohammed bin Salman is discovering something that should have been obvious all along: Geography, common interests and common enemies are ultimately more powerful than diplomatic maneuvering.

When Iran and the Houthis threaten the region and its stability, Saudi Arabia must decide whom it can actually count on.

Riyadh is drawing closer to Israel again because, in a dangerous region, strength commands respect—and Israel has shown that it’s willing to use it against its enemies.

Brendan O'Neill: Ireland’s insane witch-hunting of Ed Sheeran

The infantile decree that to be Irish is to be a keffiyeh-wearing ponce who moans morning, noon and night about Israel’s ‘settler colonialism’ is gospel in Ireland’s cultural establishment. Aaron Rowe, the Irish crooner who withdrew from Sheeran’s tour, titillated both the Irish and British bourgeois left with his statement about how the Irish are all too familiar with ‘genocide, forced famine and violent occupation’. Oh change the record. No one in the Republic of Ireland has been famished or occupied for more than a hundred years.

It’s the Irish elite’s depthless capacity for self-pity that gets me. The Famine jabber in particular is appropriation of the most nauseating kind. They plunder the horrors of history and pull on the rags of the starved to try to coat themselves in the holy shroud of victimhood. If these moral bloviators knew the first thing about history, they’d know the Irish have far more in common with Israel than with Hamas-ruled Gaza. Two tiny, plucky countries with huge diasporas who won their freedom through force of arms against the British. And yet the Trinity grads of the keffiyeh mob identify more with a death cult that rapes Jews for sport.

What arrogance to say that Sheeran is no longer welcome in Ireland. And coming from the same people who say the Eritrean fella who arrived five minutes ago and who now aggressively panhandles outside the GPO is welcome and you’re racist if you say otherwise. We are witnessing the Kneecapification of Irish culture. Ireland is overrun by ridiculous fake rebels who hate the Brits but bow down to the EU, who bemoan Ireland’s sexist history yet insist women throw open their spaces to cocks in frocks, and who pose as anti-fascists while being curiously, hysterically and tirelessly obsessed with the Jewish homeland. ‘Jewish billionaires who control America’ – that’s who Kneecap’s manager blamed the Macklemore scandal on. I guarantee you he will face no consequences whatsoever for this.

So there you have it: you can wang on about the Jews who control America but you can’t say there’s suffering on both sides in the Holy Land. You can fret over ‘ZioNazis’ but you can’t choose to be apolitical about the Middle East. The Sheeran scandal really has exposed what a one-eyed, hateful and authoritarian cult Palestinianism has become. And Ireland has been conquered by it.

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09/18 Links Pt2: Why did the archbishop honour a cleric who called bin Laden ‘mujahid’? She worships at the shrine of Palestine; Widow of Bondi Hanukkah photographer reveals she is converting to Judaism

From Ian:

LA Review of Books spikes interview with pro-Israel professor Shai Davidai: ‘Double standard’

The Los Angeles Review of Books spiked an interview it commissioned with Shai Davidai — the Israel-born professor who called out antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus — with an editor calling the outspoken academic “a toxic figure,” The Post has learned.

Senior editor Rob Latham pulled the rug out from under freelancer Melissa Uchiyama after hiring her to interview Davidai ahead of his new book, “American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities,” emails showed.

He had a stunning change of heart after reading the 2,000-word piece, telling Uchiyama in an email that Davidai is “a toxic figure who pretends to want respectful exchange.”

The prof is a “controversial figure” whose views “need to be probed more rigorously” than a standard interview allows, Latham wrote Uchiyama in emails seen by The Post.

Latham “should never have green lit the piece at all,” he added.

When Uchiyama offered to rework the article to salvage publication, the LA Review — which recently ran a fawning piece on controversial anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil – told her, no dice.

Latham wrote the dismayed scribe that her “best bet is to try and find a sympathetic venue” and offered her a $100 kill fee, which she declined.

“There was simply no way to have a quiet chat with him, and if you had challenged him forcefully, I expect it would’ve gotten ugly very fast,” Latham wrote.

Davidai said the spiking of the article looked like bitter proof of the kind of censorship he’s been fighting.

“Ironically, part of the book concerns these exact distortions and erasures in the media,” he told The Post.

“What’s most shocking is that they’re saying the quiet parts out loud,” he added, blasting “the double standard” at work.

French TV channel apologises after documentary shows French nuclear missile hitting Tel Aviv

The clip ran in Rafale, drones et canons : la révolution des armes françaises, a documentary on modern French weaponry first broadcast on September 1.

It was meant to illustrate the ASN4G, the fourth-generation air-to-surface nuclear missile planned for the Rafale F5 fighter jet.

The animation showed a mushroom cloud over a recognisable Israeli coastal skyline.

Héloïse Fayet, a researcher on nuclear weapons and the Middle East at the Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI), asked the channel on September 17 why France was firing a nuclear missile at Tel Aviv and noted that the blast yield on screen was far smaller than the ASN4G is supposed to carry.

By then the sequence had been circulating on social media as an illustration of French strike power. The clip was soon removed.

On September 18 the channel posted a communiqué on X, not on its website. It offered “sincere apologies” for using an image of Tel Aviv.

The shot, it said, came from a professional stock library that had “incorrectly identified and catalogued” it.

As soon as RMC Découverte was told, it pulled the film from its platforms and stopped further broadcasts. A cut without that sequence would follow.

The channel said it reserved the right to take legal action against whoever had mislabelled the city.

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09/18 Links Pt1: NAZA doc accusing Israel of war crimes actually proves the opposite; Britain’s Israel sanctions clash with US anti-boycott laws

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: The left lobs yet another ‘Big Lie’ on Israel — and the fallout keeps getting worse

The left’s Big Lies about Israel keep growing bigger — as do the ugly consequences.

The latest: Rep. Gregory Meeks’ bid to place a “hold” on a $2.8 billion sale of US bombs to the Jewish state.

“The Trump administration’s proposed sale of 40,000 2,000-pound bombs . . . raises grave, unresolved concerns about how these munitions could be used in densely populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon,” huffed Meeks; it’s empty virtue-signaling, since he can’t actually stop the sale.

How bad have the lies about Israel gotten?
These are weapons needed to destroy underground tunnels and bunkers; withholding them helps sustain Hamas and Hezbollah, though Meeks claims he backs Israel’s right to defend itself from the terrorists.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) likewise opposed the sale, claiming preposterously that “US weapons are being used to perpetrate a genocide.”

It’s all nonsense: Israel has never — never — used bombs indiscriminately or where it believed major civilian casualties were likely, let alone to “perpetrate a genocide.”

And there’s no legitimate fear it ever would.

These charges fit with a slew of whoppers in a new film, “NAZA” (an acronym for the Hebrew words for “collateral damage”), that the Israel Defense Forces used AI to identify targets in Gaza and carried out strikes knowing they’d mostly kill civilians.

Contrary to the vicious smears, the IDF never leaves targeting decisions to AI, nor would it proceed with a strike if it expected a high civilian-casualty rate.

What makes these lies especially heinous is that the precise opposite is true: Israel goes to lengths to avoid civilian casualties.

Even as Hamas tries to maximize them by using them as human shields.

Urban warfare expert John Spencer, who’s studied the war in Gaza, reports that Jerusalem has “implemented more civilian harm mitigation measures than any military in history.”

Eugene Kontorovich: Britain’s Israel sanctions clash with US anti-boycott laws

All these boycott measures are, at least in part, incompatible with U.S. federal anti-boycott laws. Measures were originally adopted in the 1970s in response to the Arab League Boycott to bar Americans from “comply[ing] with, further[ing], or support[ing] any boycott fostered or imposed by any foreign country, against a country which is friendly to the United States.” Laws prohibiting investments, financing, construction, or property ownership in Israel fall squarely within that prohibition.

Moreover, because companies want to do business, and because boycotts create a victimless crime, boycotting countries have always had to engage in extensive enforcement efforts. The U.S. anti-boycott law prohibits participating in the enforcement process, even for companies that are not engaged in a boycott. For example, to enforce its boycott, the U.K. will have to ask anyone importing goods from Israel whether they’re from what it considers a prohibited location.

Simply “furnishing information” needed to enforce boycott measures is forbidden by U.S. anti-boycott law, even if the company is not itself engaged in a boycott. Indeed, most recent enforcement actions by the Department of Commerce are for furnishing information, rather than actual boycott activity.

America’s anti-boycott laws are not designed to protect Israel. They are designed to protect American companies from economic coercion by foreign countries in the service of restrictive and discriminatory trade policies that America does not share. These countries are not trying to convince companies to boycott Israel. They are forcing them to boycott Israel. U.S. anti-boycott laws seek to disable such coercion by making those laws unenforceable.

And it works. The measures are widely credited with helping end the Arab League boycott and ultimately setting the stage for the Abraham Accords.

It doesn’t matter that the boycotts are said to apply to “settlements,” as this literally includes Jerusalem, where the U.S. recognizes Israeli sovereignty, and the American Embassy resides.

The Trump administration must make clear that the new boycott measures will raise significant compliance problems for U.S. business, as even the Biden administration did when Turkey announced a boycott during the Gaza war. Moreover, federal law requires the Treasury Department to maintain a “list of countries which require or may require participation in or cooperation with an international boycott.” The U.K. (along with Spain and Ireland, which also recently adopted narrower boycott measures) should be put on that list, which currently only contains the bitter enders of the Arab League.

Israel has responded by saying it will close the U.K.’s unaccredited consulate in Jerusalem, a reasonable move that might have even more impact if done in response to the U.K.’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Israel could go further by denying visas to hostile British nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty and Oxfam. Part of the U.K.’s boycott includes a partial ban on arms sales. Israel would be within its rights to scale back export licenses for its crucial defense technologies, which are in high demand around the world.

Future right-leaning governments will hopefully abandon the boycott, as Slovenia’s has. And if a sufficient example is made of the U.K., its fellow travelers may choose to change course. But this won’t happen unless both Jerusalem and Washington go beyond mere expressions of displeasure.

Gil Troy: To bland Mr. Miliband living in la-la land: Your antics aren’t bold. They’re bovine

Miliband pulled a Mary Poppins, adding spoonfuls of sugar so his poison could go down and fool liberals. He blue-and-whitewashed his lies, broadcasting his Jewish identity, then playing the Holocaust card. Blowing more smoke, he condemned Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the crude antisemitism threatening British Jews.

Apparently, even British Labourites can still reject these horrors.

But Miliband quickly started working his con, which has bamboozled millions. His 2,600-word speech omitted Hamas’s continued abuse of Gazans and ongoing attacks against Israel, treating October 7 as a one-time explosion. You’d think Hamas then stopped fighting.

Similarly, Miliband’s litany of Israel and “settler” sins never acknowledged Palestinian violence, provocations, or imperfections – beyond vaguely requesting “effective Palestinian governance.”

We learn: Hamas was “bad,” but “the Palestinians,” Jesus-like, suffer from the oppressive Jews. Israel is the only obstacle to peace and to Miliband’s Holy Grail, the “two-state solution.”

He ignored thousands of Palestinian terrorists who threatened Israelis before and after October 7, in Gaza and the territories – with 6,828 Palestinian terror incidents outside Gaza in 2024 alone.

He overlooked what Col. (ret.) Miri Eisin, senior fellow at the International Institute for Counterterrorism, calls “tens of thousands of weapons,” hidden in “almost every single house” in Judea and Samaria in order to kill Israelis – or seize land where Israelis farm.

He discounted the smuggling of “heavy-duty weapons” from Iran via Jordan, increasingly, by hard-to-track drones. He obscured the “pay-to-slay” policies of the saintly Palestinian Authority, forgetting that this supposedly moderate PA sabotaged the Oslo peace process years before Hamas blew any chance of peace by making Gaza “Hamasistan” – destroying many Israelis’ faith in the two-state solution.

Miliband’s cockeyed narrative echoed and legitimized anti-Zionists’ ongoing character assassination of Israel as fundamentally flawed, blaming Israel first, last, and always.

Escalating, Miliband accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Judea and Samaria. Ethnic cleansing echoes a Serbo-Croatian phrase Serbian militias used as they brutally expelled one million Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the early 1990s, killing over 100,000, 80% of them Muslim.

In 1993, UN experts defined the term as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” Ethnic cleansing in Rwanda involved Hutus murdering over 800,000 Tutsi in 100 days.

In Darfur, it described Arab Janjaweed forces expelling over 2.7 million non-Arab, African ethnic groups, leaving over 300,000 dead. UK foreign secretary accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing

By contrast, Miliband reported: “since 2023... over 4,000 Palestinians” were “evicted from their homes due to settler violence and state actions” – while 3.4 million Palestinians still live in the West Bank.

As with the “genocide” libel, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” pushes what academics delicately call “concept creep” to grotesque extremes. It’s concept free-fall, exposing the accusers as ridiculous – or malevolent. To indict Israel, the worst crimes in international law keep being drained of their meaning, with once-clear thresholds obliterated.

At what point can we fairly call out this disproportionate stampede toward injustice as unfair, hysterical, and depressingly familiar to those who recognize antisemitism, even when perfumed with human rights talk?

Diplomatic wilding against Israel risks becoming a new Olympic sport. These assaults thrill anti-Zionist haters. They bypass all the Miliband weasel words. They simply welcome Britain, Canada, Norway, and these other countries now threatening to imprison their own citizens for selling flowers or wine imported from the “bad Jews” as allies in their jihadist crusade to destroy the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

It’s curious. No Palestinians are boycotted, not even convicted terrorists cashing their latest PA check for murdering innocents.

This latest affront – coming 49 days before the Israeli elections – is counterproductive. It emboldens the marginal Israeli minority cheering violent settlers.

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09/17 Links Pt2: Dara Horn: What Nobody Understands About Antisemitism; The Mackle-morons are not supporting justice, but hatred; 2,000-year-old Jewish ritual bath uncovered intact in southern Israel

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Ed Sheeran, Macklemore and the tyranny of the Israel-haters

So that's it: you're not even allowed two hours off from Israel-hate. You can't even go to an Ed Sheeran concert without being lectured about what a barbarous state Israel is. It's not enough that our streets have fallen to zombie armies of Gazaholics and that our social-media feeds froth with anti-Israel invective. Now even Ed Sheeran must come with a side order of Jew State bashing.

People are alarmed that American rapper Macklemore has been ditched as the opening act on Sheeran's U.S. tour, after he barked "Free Palestine" and wanged on about Israel's "genocide" to 90,000 Sheeran fans at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Is nowhere safe from the marauding moralism of our insufferable cultural elites?

Then Sheeran's other support acts walked out in solidarity with Macklemore. His backing band walked, too. It will just be Sheeran and his guitar at this rate, which, to be fair, he's done before. If the whole tour falls apart, it would be a fitting if grim tribute to the joy-sucking dogmatism of Israelophobia. Music burnt at the altar of ideology. How very Hamas.

Isn't there something creepy, even a little authoritarian, about turning a middle-of-the-road pop gig into a neo-Nuremberg rally against the Jewish State? Israelophobes have a Tourette's-like urge to blab their puffed-up virtue to every poor soul they meet. I'd be fuming if I got dressed up for a night of harmless pop, only to find myself being harangued by a nerd about the murderous lunacy of the Jewish nation.

Palestinianism has become a neo-religion, seeking to conquer every nook and cranny of public life. If you don't go along, you'll be branded a genocide denier, even as "complicit" in the crime of the century. Like all cults, the Gaza cult splits us into the enlightened and the damned. Sheeran is being damned all over X as a genocide apologist. And all because he failed to meekly, compliantly bow down to the truthless commandments of the Gaza cult.

Good Riddance to Macklemore

The rapper Macklemore has now been booted as Ed Sheeran's opening act. At New Jersey's MetLife Stadium, Macklemore devoted most of his set to prattling about Gaza, ululating about Palestine, and praising the terrorist sympathizers on American college campuses. It's tempting to laugh off the whole kerfuffle as yet another case of a very minor artist suffering from very major delusions of self-importance. But l'affaire Macklemore teaches us important lessons.

Macklemore has spent the last several years repeatedly and shrilly calling on artists to boycott Israel. He even wrote a song dedicated to championing the BDS movement, which promotes sanctions against the Jewish state. Now that he's received a taste of his own medicine, he's crying foul and claiming to be a victim. He's anything but. If the culture you help create calls for canceling those whose opinions you don't like, don't be surprised if you too are canceled one day.

Once upon a time, the performers we hailed were the ones who could actually do something: sing, dance, act and move us with their art. Like other preening pro-Palestine provocateurs, Macklemore's true art is stirring up cheap controversy by trying to cower others into submission.

It's a very good strategy for mediocre entertainers, who can get famous quick by pretending to be great moral crusaders and plugging into hot-button political issues they barely understand. But it's terrible for everyone else because it hijacks truth and beauty and turns every aspect of life into an ugly, muddy political battlefield.

Nicole Lampert: The Mackle-morons are not supporting justice, but hatred

Their historical illiteracy and ignorance were summed up by Irish singer Aaron Rowe, who said: “As Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation. I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children.”

It is worth mentioning that not a single cry of Free Palestine has ever helped the Palestinians. In fact, by perpetuating what Palestinian intellectual Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib calls the “resistance narrative” – the idea that if the Palestinians keep trying to kill Israelis, they will somehow get their state – it has only made life more difficult for them.

And their demand for freedom of speech is highly selective. None of these musicians, as far as I know, spoke up when British band Oi Va Voi was cancelled from UK venues because their singer is Israeli, when Radiohead star Jonny Greenwood had to cancel gigs because of security threats to his Israeli partner, when Boy George was forced out of a musical for singing “I stand with the Jews”, or when Róisín Murphy dared to speak up against the medicalisation of trans kids.

They pose as free speech martyrs, but like Irish band Kneecap and English rappers Bob Vylan, who found fame thanks to their anti-Zionism, Macklemore may find the pro-Palestine grift is lucrative. He has already gained more than one million followers on Instagram since the fuss started.

Kneecap’s manager Daniel Lambert, meanwhile, exposed the obsessive hatred that gives the Free Palestine movement rocket fuel, in a statement oozing with the kind of tropes that a neo-Nazi would be proud of: “As Jewish billionaires who control America and fund the IDF decide who can and who can’t perform despite breaking no laws…The IDF is still murdering kids.”

This is also the thing about being Jewish when someone begins a “Free Palestine” chant. Either you suck it up, or perhaps silently leave, knowing they will do the same to others tomorrow. Or you try and stop it and get accused of having too much control, of too much power. Heads you lose, tails they win.

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09/17 Links Pt1: The malignancy of the left; Ed Miliband ignored MI6’s warnings over Israel sanctions; Pierre Rehov: The Shadows of War

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The malignancy of the left

Sometimes, a curtain draped across a mirror is torn aside, and a horrified public suddenly glimpses what it has become.

Two things happened this week which briefly interrupted the smooth acceleration of pathological Jew-hate in the West.

A film called “NAZA” won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It was directed by journalist-filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, radical anti-Israel activists with a long history of delegitimizing Israel through defamatory falsehoods, in conjunction with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, a byword for malevolent misreporting of the Jewish state.

“NAZA” is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage or unintended civilian casualties. In war, such casualties are sadly inevitable. In the Gaza war, Israel reportedly achieved the lowest ratio of civilians to combatant deaths anywhere in the world because of the unprecedented measures it took to save civilian life wherever possible.

Yet the film claims that the Israel Defense Forces willfully caused widespread civilian deaths. Under the laws of war, armies must assess likely civilian casualties before striking military targets. The film misrepresents the IDF’s fulfilment of that duty as evidence that it intentionally subjected civilians to indiscriminate bombing.

Its shock value lay in its reliance upon voices it said belonged to members of the IDF’s crack intelligence division, Unit 8200. But these were anonymous voices, with no corroboration of who they were or even evidence of what they were claiming.

The second event was a horrifying report compiled by Britain’s Campaign Against Antisemitism revealing the systemic intimidation, threat and menace now confronting Jews who seek treatment from the National Health Service.

A Jewish cancer patient said that while removing a growth from his forehead, his surgeon told him that Jews shoot children “in the head or the legs” for “their own amusement.” A nurse said that a colleague made a Nazi salute shortly after finding out she was Jewish. A senior Jewish medical professor had received antisemitic death threats. A Jewish emergency worker was physically attacked by a colleague.

The CAA said that Jewish patients were terrified of their surgeons, and Jewish nurses and doctors were being pushed out of the hospitals to which they had devoted their lives.

These two things crossed a line.

In Israel, there’s been a seismic reaction against the film, with Abraham and Szor coming under pressure even from their comrades on the left.

That’s unprecedented. Israel has been profoundly changed by the enduring trauma of the Hamas-led atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023 and the war that followed. Israelis are painfully aware of the heroism of the IDF troops, so many of whom have lost their lives, limbs or mental stability in the desperate fight against a fanatical genocidal enemy—and who have now been trashed in this film, allegedly by their own brothers in arms.

Even in anti-Israel Britain, there’s been widespread shock over the discovery that British Jews are too frightened to go to the doctor or hospital because they fear they may be attacked or even killed under the surgeon’s knife or general anesthetic.

Both developments show that the West is in the grip of a pathology created by the alliance between left-wingers and Islamists. And some Israelis are themselves contaminated by this deadly sickness.

Monsters Welcome By Abe Greenwald

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Here’s something to think about: While European countries are slapping sanctions on Israel, they’re ramping up engagement (including on trade) with the Taliban. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, of course, the Taliban reimposed all sorts of horrors, including the legalization of violence against females and the vicious punishment of religious heretics.

But Europe is too upset with the democratic State of Israel to care about any of that.

I wrote about this very issue a year ago. Since then, Europe’s outreach to the Taliban has increased considerably. In June, Taliban officials met with EU leaders in Brussels for talks about sending Afghan asylum-seekers back home. This was the first time a formal EU delegation met with Afghanistan’s leaders since 2021. The Taliban came out of it boasting that normal consular relations with the EU are coming next.

Officials from the UK and other individual Western countries now routinely fly to Qatar to meet with Taliban representatives. The Afghan Consulate General in Bonn, Germany, is under Taliban control. And an official appointed by the Taliban serves as the first secretary at the Afghan Embassy in Oslo.

The trend toward normalizing relations with the Taliban stretches well beyond Europe. India recently waived sanctions on the Taliban foreign minister so he could travel to New Delhi for talks, and the country is reassessing sanctions on Afghanistan altogether.

Less surprising, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others haven’t hesitated to engage with the brutal regime. It’s not at all uncharacteristic of Iran to have sent its foreign minister to Afghanistan last year. Nor is it shocking that Russia is the only country in the world to officially recognize the Taliban.

Revealed: New Bank of England director referred to slain Hamas terrorists as ‘unarmed demonstrators’

The new non-executive director of the Bank of England, Paul Nowak, accused Israel of killing “unarmed demonstrators” in Gaza, one week after Hamas announced the vast majority of those shot were its members, the JC has found.

Nowak, who has been the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress since 2022, was given the top role at the central bank earlier this month by Chancellor John Healey.

The incident Nowak was apparently referring to in his tweet occurred on May 14, 2018, during protests in the Strip which were dubbed the “Great March of Return”.

A total of 62 Palestinians are reported to have been killed, which initially prompted controversy as they were unarmed.

However, on May 16, Hamas had stated in interviews that 50 of those killed were its members. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) similarly claimed three of the deceased.

Hamas official Salah Bardawil said during an interview on Palestinian television: “In the last rounds of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, 50 of the martyrs were Hamas and 12 from the people.

“I am giving you an official figure. 50 of the martyrs in the recent battle were from Hamas...

The announcement was widely reported by Israeli media, while a Hamas spokesman told CNN on May 18 that, while the exact numbers could not be confirmed, “the protests are peaceful and include all political and military factions”.

Nonetheless, on May 23 Nowak authored a tweet criticising then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, in which he referenced the incident without mentioning the terrorist affiliations of those involved.

“Government in Brexit chaos. Unarmed demonstrators shot dead in Gaza. Iran nuclear deal undermined. Trade wars loom as a result of economic nationalism,” he wrote.

“Our Foreign Secretary’s priority? A personal jet. Oh and to be specific, one that isn’t painted grey.”

Nowak has also continued to post about the conflict in the years since.

On September 21 last year, the day the UK recognised a Palestinian state, Nowak tweeted: “Recognition of Palestine is a welcome and crucial step on the path to peace with a two-state solution at its heart.

“The UK government must now do all it can to ensure the Israeli government ends its assault on Gaza. Solidarity to our sister unions in Palestine."

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