03/27 Links Pt2: The real reason the left hates Israel; Meet Iran’s 21-Year-Old American Propagandist; For America at 250, Some Jewish Wisdom on How to Last 3,000 Years

From Ian:

Rod Liddle: The real reason the left hates Israel

I had previously been of the generous – and naive – opinion that the white left hates Jews because it hates Israel. That through the inevitable contact with the people who call themselves Palestinian and their Muslim supporters, there was a gradual erosion of the boundaries between loathing Israel and, as so many Muslims do, loathing the people who live there. You end up nodding along when they say the Jews control the media and armaments and capital, and eventually you end up painting virulently anti-Semitic daubs in an art gallery in Margate and thinking how clever and right on you are and down with the Pallys.

But this was wrong, I think. It is the other way about. They hate Israel because they hate Jews. We all need somebody to hate and for the left, Jewish people have come to represent a plethora of things they already hated: capitalism, the West, military competence, industrial competence, education and a hostility to the religion which they come close to worshipping themselves, Islam. In a sense Israel is simply an embodiment of those already-present loathings.

It is true the Overton window had already moved quite sharply over the past ten years or so in tandem with the rapid growth of our Muslim population and its growing political weight. That is in there somewhere – but perhaps only to the extent that this growing section of our community gives licence to the real feelings the white left already had. A white left which can show you racism in a handful of dust – except where the Jews are concerned. Then, it simply doesn’t exist.

So when four ambulances are set on fire, it is easy to spot the anti-Semitic white lefties. They are the ones asking why the Jews have their own ambulances, or the ones suggesting it was a false flag attack by Mossad, or that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Gaza. These idiots are not only enemies of the Jews – they are enemies of the rest of us too.

The Free Speech of Fools

What remains of the original “heterodox” cause that died on Oct. 7 is the metastatic cancer that consumed it and which now wears the exact face and form of Tucker Carlson. Today it is led by luminaries like Owens, whom Carlson repeatedly welcomes on his show, Megyn Kelly, another great Owens defender, sundry leftists like Glenn Greenwald who make common cause with Carlson and Owens, yellow journalists desperate for page views, like the hosts of the show Breaking Points, podcasters of the “Hitler was a misunderstood empath” genre, comedians whose comedy consists of hectoring political monologues, and assorted social media influencers including the former pimp Andrew Tate, and the mestizo anti-Jewish campaigner Nicholas Fuentes.

What has replaced the loose association of individuals organized around adherence to a common idea is a grossly self-serving social network. Led by Carlson, the network systematically undermined the organizing principle of the anticensorship movement, which was aggressive, open inquiry skeptical of ideological dogma and institutional authority. In its place, members of the Carlson clique obey two imperatives: to shield other members from legitimate criticism and to uphold anti-Jewish ideology as the ultimate principle of free speech.

Sharing and competing for the same audience, members of the network frequently appear for puff interviews on each other’s shows, circulate the same guests, and launder the same propagandistic talking points. While posturing as tough independent journalists taking on the establishment, they operate like a social club. Driven by the worst incentives of social media and insulated from criticism, this self-credentialing blob turned independent journalism into a synonym for in-group cattiness, schlock conspiracy, propaganda, and audience pandering.

Michael Tracey, who was an early debunker of Russiagate and COVID fallacies, has called the Epstein affair “the worst covered story of my lifetime, by far—and with the most destructive consequences.” Tracey is one of the few journalists who has been willing to question the extraordinarily popular Epstein mythology, despite himself being a strident critic of Israel. “Flinging around charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ has of course been cheapened beyond recognition, especially since 10/7/2023, but if you’re unaware that a HUGE portion of online uproar around Epstein is rooted in open, unabashed anti-Semitic ideology, you’re simply deluding yourself,” Tracey recently wrote.

In his coverage, one distinctly senses Tracey arriving at this conclusion—namely, that the Epstein melodrama is fueled by antipathy toward Jews—somewhat reluctantly, and only out fealty to an unavoidable truth. The structural reshaping of the news ecosystem into “independent” voices and outlets, which once held so much promise to cut through entrenched interests and provide audiences with an unvarnished view of the world around them,, instead ended up as a propaganda industry promoting the work of fantasists and open antisemites.

Maybe this was inevitable. Like the transgender activists before them, they seem to imagine themselves as members of a heroic resistance movement. What they fail to see is that being drunk on self-righteous hatred of the Zionist entity has not made them brave martyrs. It has made them aggressively incurious and blind to the reality around them, which has in turn made their audiences less informed and easier to manipulate. Epstein mania is the logical endpoint. It is a story that underscores the spectator’s lack of agency in a world utterly outside their control, while also promising them access to its deepest secrets.

Transforming the American concept of free speech into a euphemism for “asking the Jewish question,” required a large cooperative effort. Many people participated, some directly, others through silent assent. Yet if past historical episodes offer any lessons for the present, some of these people will seek to minimize their contributions and rewrite the past. Indeed some of them are already trying. For the sake of keeping an honest record about a pivotal moment in history, they should all be given credit for their work.

Nathan Livingstone (aka MilkbarTV): Circling Back On Oswald Mosley, The Fascist Tucker Carlson Calls A ‘Patriot’

Last week, Tucker Carlson released a video framed as a shocking piece of history: “Winston Churchill presided over the imprisonment of his opposition party during the entire length of the war.” According to Carlson, their only crime “was being the opposition party and being disloyal and unpatriotic. They weren’t.”

He goes on to build this political prisoner up as a heroic figure: “The opposition was led by a First World War hero who fought not just as a pilot in the sky, but in the trenches — one of the great war heroes, a former Member of Parliament.”

So who exactly is Tucker talking about?

Although he is never named, images of Oswald Mosley flash throughout the video, fists clenched, rallying so-called patriotic Britons. But search his name and you’ll also see images of Mosley and his fellow British Union of Fascists (BUF) members performing Roman salutes in Mussolini-style uniforms, complete with imitation armbands bearing the BUF lightning bolt, drawing heavily from Nazi aesthetics. Mosley wasn’t the leader of a legitimate opposition party. By the time of his arrest, he wasn’t even an MP, and his party, the British Union of Fascists, operated outside Britain’s democratic system. These are hardly minor details, yet are conspicuously absent from Carlson’s video.

What else did Tucker leave out?

Mosley came from an aristocratic family. He served briefly in France during World War I as a cavalry officer, but after being injured in training with the Royal Flying Corps, he spent the rest of the war away from the front. His war record was later exaggerated for propaganda purposes — and apparently still is today.

He then entered Parliament, drifting from the Conservative to the Labour Party. After the Cabinet rejected his plan to tackle unemployment through public works and the nationalization of major industries as too radical, he resigned, turning toward the rising authoritarian movements in Europe.

Mosley visited Mussolini’s Italy in 1932 and, impressed by what he saw, founded the British Union of Fascists.

The BUF would also become closely aligned with Germany’s rising Nazi movement. Mosley was so close to the regime that he married his second wife, Diana Freeman-Mitford, herself a committed fascist, at Joseph Goebbels’ home. Only a handful of guests were present. The guest of honor? Adolf Hitler, naturally.

The early days of the BUF saw rallies drawing tens of thousands: members dressed in Mussolini-inspired blackshirt uniforms, standing in columns and raising Roman salutes as Mosley strode through to deliver impassioned speeches. Membership at one point reached 50,000. Popular British papers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror heralded the movement with headlines “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” and “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand.”

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03/27 Links Pt1: Israel is crafting a powerful new anti-Iran axis; Iranian missile strike US airbase in Saudi Arabia, 12 soldiers wounded

From Ian:

‘Experts’ hate Trump’s war on Iran. They’re making seven fatal errors

What is wrong with the West’s expert class? Do they really believe, as they keep telling us, that the war against Iran is a disaster, the end of days, the final humiliation for Donald Trump? Such defeatism, such catastrophism are not warranted. It is far too soon to conclude how this war will end, regardless of what Iranian propagandists and other appeasers would have us believe.

I can count seven principal errors clouding “expert” judgments in the West.

Error 1
The first is the European establishment’s inability to accept the scale of Iran’s defeats since the Oct 7, 2023 pogroms against Israel, one of the greatest military miscalculations in modern history.

The regime’s decades-long plan for regional domination lies in tatters. It has wasted tens of billions of dollars, its proxies have been defanged, its economy plunged into depression, its mainland ravaged with close to 20,000 targets bombed, its navy sunk, its air defences crippled, its missile stock and launchers decimated, its military-industrial complex blown up, its nuclear capacity curtailed – but apart from that, all is well in Tehran. It is a strange kind of victory which has seen Iran fail to shoot down a single US or Israeli manned plane or sink a single ship.

The reality is that Iran has been downgraded from regional superpower to a pirate terror state, able only to shoot a few missiles and drones at civilian targets, to threaten crimes against humanity, and to blackmail the shipping industry.

Yes, this residual power matters greatly: controlling the Strait of Hormuz and threatening Gulf oil and gas facilities is a potent form of asymmetric warfare that is inflicting devastating damage. But it hardly amounts to US defeat, or certainly not yet.

I don’t know how this war will end. Trump’s negotiations may fail. He may botch an invasion, or he may launch a successful airborne raid. What is certain is that he must reopen the Strait and will be judged on the outcome.

Error 2
The second myth is that Trump is somehow struggling because he supposedly failed to plan for the obvious. In fact, many US assumptions were either right or too pessimistic. It proved remarkably easy to kill Ali Khamenei. Iran failed to overwhelm US and Israeli defence systems.

Critics warned that stockpiles of allied interceptors would run out almost immediately; that was false. The Gulf states turned out to be more resilient than anticipated; instead of turning to China or hoisting the white flag, they shot down missiles, and the Saudis and UAE are moving closer to Washington. US combat losses have been smaller than expected.

Not everything has gone better than planned. Trump may have hoped that Iran’s ability to deploy missiles and drones would have diminished further. The low-probability possibility of an immediate implosion of the regime hasn’t materialised. It may well be that the US underpriced the chances of attacks on Qatari energy assets.

But the idea that Iran would move to block the Straits of Hormuz was the best-rehearsed risk in geopolitics. Trump probably accepted it as a necessary trade-off, an inevitable hit. It may well be that Trump didn’t expect Iran to move so fast. It might have been a blunder not to dispatch more demining resources to the Gulf ahead of time. We shall soon find out; the stakes are enormous.

History’s Pro Tips on Iran

Nothing in human experience compares to the wars of the last 120 years. Their scope has grown as the world has shrunk. The international laws governing conduct in war have too often failed. Technology advances, and along with it war’s lethality and devastation. So war is bad. No one wants another war. Or rather, almost no one. More on that shortly. In the meantime, the question before us is whether the current U.S. and Israeli operations against Iran qualify as just. It’s a debatable matter. I believe they are. I understand the opposite view. But I also find it unpersuasive. Here’s why.

The United States and Israel didn’t start the current conflict. It’s merely the latest phase in a war that began in earnest forty-seven years ago; a methodical war of aggression pursued by Iran to erase Israel as a nation and defeat the United States as the world’s “Great Satan.” The Tehran regime now supports a global network of terrorist violence. In the process, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the same regime has murdered or sponsored the murder of scores of thousands of people, including many of its own citizens, the vast majority innocent of any wrongdoing.

It would be easy but inadequate to excuse today’s Iranian policies as vengeance for the 1953 Mossadegh Affair. In that year, at the height of the Cold War, Britain’s MI6 and the American CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. In his place, they secured the pro-Western Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. For Britain, the goal was maintaining its control over Iranian oil. For the United States, the coup sought to prevent any Iranian drift toward the Soviet Union and any internal threat from Iran’s Tudeh (communist) Party. In the end, Mossadegh was imprisoned for three years and then held under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Several hundred pro- and anti-Mossadegh rioters died in the ensuing street violence.

So much for the past. The hatred animating today’s Islamic regime is far more intense, systematic, and expansive than mere revenge for an event more than seventy years ago. Mossadegh died in 1967. The 1979 revolution sidelined and repressed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist allies, and his memory is treated with deep ambivalence. In practice, Tehran reviles anything non-Muslim. Its “tolerance” for internal, legally recognized minorities, including Catholics and other Christians, is little more than theater. It amounts to a kind of slow strangulation with distrust and oppressive constraints. The regime especially loathes what it sees as a godless West with its arrogance, licentious comforts, and obscene wealth. It has the same brutal zealotry, the same puritanical extremism, the same easy use of deceit, as the homicidal ideologies that preceded it in the last century.

Tehran has repeatedly lied in negotiations about its nuclear program. It continues to pursue nuclear weapons. This, despite years of pleading and pressure from the international community. It ignores both sanctions and financial enticements. It’s built an immense missile and drone capability, putting Europe and eventually the United States within range. It uses cluster weapons—banned by international law—against civilian populations. And if current military efforts against Iran prove anything, it’s the impressive scope and depth of the regime’s war preparations, the dispersal and hardening of key infrastructure, and the survival of many leadership cadres despite massive damage. A reasonable peace assuring mutual security has never been, and is not even now, on Tehran’s agenda. One doesn’t “make a deal,” a deal that’s sincere and lasting, with psychotics. Religious and political fanatics don’t stop. They won’t, because they can’t. Thus, the best one can hope for when dealing with mentally diseased zealots is preventing them from hurting others.

Hamas Confirms: Gaza Airstrikes That Hit Homes & Tents Actually Killed Terrorists — 10 Examples

A common narrative of the Gaza war is that Israel conducted indiscriminate bombing, striking civilian homes, shelters, and tents in humanitarian zones without military justification. Some observers have alleged that AI and automated systems were used to target single junior operatives or persons with no real affiliation to Hamas or other militant groups. Yet no clear, affirmative evidence has been produced showing the IDF deliberately targeted a civilian site absent a military objective.

This narrative nevertheless became central to accusations of war crimes and genocide. It gained traction in part because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) systematically operate in civilian dress and embed within homes, mosques, hospitals, and humanitarian zones as part of their human shield strategy. Under these conditions, strikes on legitimate military targets can appear indistinguishable from attacks on civilians, especially in initial reporting. Early accounts, often provided by Hamas operatives posing as journalists , were frequently accepted and amplified before additional information emerged.

Even when the IDF identified targets and provided operational details, these explanations were often dismissed. However, that posture is becoming difficult to maintain. Recent disclosures by Hamas and PIJ, through official statements, affiliated Telegram channels, and martyr notices, have identified dozens of their own operatives killed in incidents widely reported as attacks on civilians. PIJ alone has acknowledged more than 140 members of its command structure killed during the war.

When these admissions are cross-referenced with specific strike reports and contemporaneous local reporting that initially presented the individuals as civilians but now confirms them as combatants, a consistent pattern emerges. Many incidents described as unlawful attacks on homes, shelters, or tents in humanitarian zones were in fact strikes targeting embedded fighters. As more of these cases come to light, the narrative of indiscriminate or blind AI directed airstrikes on civilian targets is exposed as false by the accumulating evidence.

The following ten cases, drawn from recent Hamas and PIJ martyr notices, demonstrate the pattern using the groups’ own admissions.

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03/26 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips Issues WAKE UP Call To Jews In The West; Green Party Moves to Declare Jewish Self-Determination “Racist”; Tariq Ramadan sentenced to 18-year jail term for rape

From Ian:

Maureen Lipman: Does the world have any idea of how tired the people of Israel are?

As Blanche du Bois bravely states as she is dragged off to a mental home in the last scene of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The Jewish communities of the world are back on that same streetcar, reliant on the whims of tyrants and the gullibility of their moronic followers. The appalling ambulance arson attack is the result of genuinely sick minds.

David unearthed a 1994 copy of this very paper and honestly, save for the design differences, it could have been today’s edition.

A suicide car bomb had exploded during the Middle East Peace talks, killing eight people and injuring 50 civilians. Even before the bombing, a poll revealed that one-third of Israelis thought that the demands of peace could cause civil war. Thirty-two years of existential battles later, does the world have any idea of how tired the people of Israel are?

The BBC and reporters worldwide do not go into the shelters where children are trained to lie on the floor when the sirens go off. A dear friend told me that his grandchildren have needed to enter their safe room more than 200 times since the current battle began.

Neither do they report on the closure of schools. Most Israeli kids have missed some school every day since Covid. Are the media even aware of the fear of the elderly in Israel? “I am alone,” said one, “I spend the nights scared of the bombings. If anything happens to me will anyone notice?”

In the same 1994 edition, there is a review of a biography of Roald Dahl, citing him as a coming from the Goebbels school of propaganda. In an interview in the Independent, he said of the bombing of Beirut during the first invasion of Lebanon: “It was hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned.” This drivel coming from an avowed antisemite and blatant self-publicist, with unhampered access to the media. When the JC phoned him for a quote on his Independent diatribe, he said:

“I’m an old hand at dealing with you buggers. No comment.”

We had form Dahl and I. He once was so insulting to me, as in “You people…” on a chat show, that I was struck dumb. Years later in a Sydney hotel he was in the lift as I got in with my small children. I had always vowed that if I ever met him I would confront him. Except once again my courage failed and I think I mumbled, “Good morning.” I met his wife once on a cruise. She was a beautiful woman and a great actress. Dahl, in fairness, nursed her back to health after a severe stroke. Then he left her for a younger woman to live on higher moral ground.

Page seven of the newspaper is of particular interest with an NUS conference calling for measures to be brought in against militant Muslim students distributing leaflets calling for the death of Jews. Plus ça change… except the NUS may not be quite so philosemitic these days.

David Collier: Green Party Moves to Declare Jewish Self-Determination “Racist”

This weekend, at their spring conference, UK Green Party members are preparing to debate a motion titled simply: “Zionism is Racism.”

Motion A105 does not merely criticise Israeli government policy. It attempts to rewrite Jewish identity and Jewish history in order to deny the Jewish people the same right afforded to every other nation: the right to self determination. At the same time, it undermines the very anti-racist safeguards developed to protect Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

The incoherent, self-contradictory, and ahistorical mess that forms the text of this “anti-Zionist” motion is the resurrection of a discredited ideological campaign whose origins lie in Soviet propaganda – an effort designed to isolate and demonise the Jewish national movement.

Rather than become lost rebutting every distortion and fabrication line by line, it is more useful to focus on the core pillars upon which the motion rests. Examining them exposes the true nature of what the Green Party is proposing.

Denying the Jewish right to self-determination
The motion begins by redefining Zionism itself:
“Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation… of an ethnonationalist Jewish State… to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.”

This is a false accusation, not a definition of Zionism. Zionism emerged as a national liberation movement of a stateless people. It was the conclusion reached after centuries of failed integration, persecution and expulsion. Israel is a nation built by refugees. Families of people who learned the hard way that their safety could never be entrusted to others. To label that project racist is as absurd as calling a refuge for abused women sexist. Both evolved as a means of protection, not domination.

Zionist is a Jewish label
Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people, rooted in their history, their vulnerability, and their need for collective security.

One of the frequently repeated defences is to present Zionism as a political ideology, detached from Jewish identity.

Technically, there are non-Jews who identify as Zionists, and there are Jews who do not. But this framing conceals something important.

A non-Jewish person living safely in the West who declares themselves a Zionist is not personally exercising Jewish self-determination. They are expressing support for the right of Jews to exercise theirs.

There is a distinction, and it matters. A Londoner who supports Scottish nationalism is not considered a Scottish nationalist in any meaningful national sense. He remains a Londoner expressing an opinion about another people’s national aspirations.

Zionism is not about its supporters abroad. It is about the national existence of the people who live it, and the aspirations of others who want to join them.

When the Green Party declare Zionism to be racism, they are not condemning a theoretical idea held by distant sympathisers. They are condemning the national legitimacy of millions of Jews whose identity, security, and future are bound up in that state.

Tony Blair (paywalled): Why the West Fails to Stop Antisemitism

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03/26 Links Pt1: Herzog warns Europe ‘you’re next,’ blasts UK's Kier Starmer over Iran terror response; Trump delays Iran energy sector strikes another 10 days

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Bombs are the only form of diplomacy Iran understands

The truth is as tragic as it is disturbing: This is a zombie regime that can only be stopped by bombs. It doesn’t care for the welfare of its people and it doesn’t care for death. It cares only about its theology. To hear Keir Starmer and his ministers bleating on about how a “negotiated solution” was in the pipeline before Donald Trump went to war was to witness the final, preposterous gurgling of luxury pacifism. Very soon, Britain is going to be woken up good and hard. Alternatively, it will die in its sleep.

If Iran ever signs a meaningful deal that leads to regional and global stability, it will only be after its most fanatical and effective demagogues are dead; its armed forces, missile stockpiles and nuclear programme are destroyed; its ability to choke the Strait of Hormuz is eliminated; and its regime suffers the final humiliation. So much should be obvious: the West has been negotiating fruitlessly with this devious theocracy for decades. How long before we accept the conclusion?

It is high time we recognised that not all people are the same, not all cultures are like our own, and that the values of an open society are not universal. We hold precious things like democracy, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law because they are ours, which is to say, they were developed and defended by those who came before us and entrusted to the present generation. The Iranian regime is of a different, nihilistic tradition. They can no more abandon their mentality than we can abandon ours.

War is the worst thing mankind has invented. But we wage it out of necessity, not choice. For all Trump’s demonstrable failings and shortcomings, Britain’s fateful flaw has been exposed for the world to see: Our contemptible appetite for appeasement. How little we have learned since 1938!

Jared Kushner says Iran wasn’t serious about negotiations prior to war

Jared Kushner, an informal Middle East envoy to the White House, said Thursday that Iran had not been serious about reaching a nuclear deal with the United States before President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, chose to attack the country in a joint military operation with Israel.

“We basically saw that there was no seriousness, and that they were trying to play different games to just get beyond President Trump in order to preserve their capabilities and pathway to get to a nuclear weapon in a way that would have been very, very hard to be stopped in the future,” Kushner said at Saudi Arabia’s exclusive FII Priority summit, held in Miami this week.

Kushner, whom Trump tapped alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to help lead talks with Iran amid the ongoing conflict, told the crowd of political and financial leaders gathered in South Florida that the Iranians’ public statements on the war should not be trusted.

“The one thing with the Iranians, and we’re seeing this even now, is you have to just ignore a lot of what they say publicly, because I think that their statements are usually more for their domestic audiences,” explained Kushner, who had met for indirect negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva two days before the war began in late February.

Likening Iran’s military tactics to a player losing at backgammon, Kushner said the Islamic Republic is now seeking “to create as much chaos as possible” across the region, as it has fired “indiscriminately” at nearby Gulf states and beyond. “That basically describes what they’ve been trying to do there.”

“President Trump’s focus is to try and get to a good outcome with them,” Kushner added. “He wants to just be in a position where they act like a normal country.”

Uganda is willing to fight alongside Israel, military chief says

Uganda’s military chief tweeted on Wednesday that his country is willing to go to war on Israel’s side.

“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it. But any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring us into the war. On the side of Israel!” wrote Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the chief of the Uganda People’s Defence Force and the son of the country’s President Yoweri Museveni.

The tweet went viral, generating more than 1.3 million engagements on the social media platform as of Thursday morning.

Elaborating on his stance the following day, Kainerugaba tweeted: “We stand with Israel because we are Christians. Saved by the Holy Son of God ... Jesus Christ the only One who can forgive sins. The Bible says ‘Blessed are you Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper and your glorious sword.’ (Deuteronomy 33:29).”

In a separate tweet, he said, “Israel stood with us when we were nobodys in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn’t we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa.”

Last month, Kainerugaba revealed that his country was planning to erect a statue of IDF Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was killed in action in Uganda during a counter-terrorism operation that rescued more than 100 hostages on July 4, 1976.

The statue is expected to be erected at Entebbe Airport, where Yonatan Netanyahu fell in battle, according to Kainerugaba.

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03/25 Links Pt2: Israel Derangement Syndrome Needs to End; Coleman Hughes vs Glenn Greenwald; Two men arrested in connection with the Hatzola ambulance arson

From Ian:

Time for non-Jews to call out this hatred

I find myself emailing Jewish colleagues, “So sorry for abuse you’re suffering”, when I read comments on social media. But it happens so regularly I can’t keep up. I fear becoming desensitised. Gentiles aren’t included in WhatsApp groups where Jews discuss escape plans to New Zealand. The young aren’t going to call out this racism. Their cause is Palestine. Greta Thunberg, like most of her generation, appears to equate Jews collectively with the Israeli government. It doesn’t matter how many times Jewish friends and colleagues apologise for atrocities occurring in the Middle East, how often they distance themselves from Binyamin Netanyahu’s wars — it’s not enough for some unless they disown the state of Israel and disavow Zionism.

Hate crimes against Muslims are now twice as likely to result in prosecution as offences against Jews, yet Jews are nearly ten times as likely to be the targets of these attacks, according to Home Office figures. The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day is down 60 per cent since the October 7 massacre in 2023. Jews aren’t considered victims any more.

Sir Keir Starmer says little, he’s too compromised. This half-term he slipped away to visit Auschwitz with his wife, Victoria, who is Jewish, and their children. “Antisemitism has no place in our society,” he said stiffly this week, but it is clear he is anxious about offending both the Muslim and youth vote as the government fast-tracks a new definition of Islamophobia. The Green leader Zack Polanski has mentioned his Jewish heritage yet is more fixated on his party’s vote this week on the motion “Zionism is racism”. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, needs to speak up for Britain’s Jews. It was Jewish News that reached out last week to show a British sense of tolerance in supporting Muslims celebrating Iftar in Trafalgar Square.

I am nominally Church of England but my creed is acceptance and respect for all faiths that adhere to our country’s values. I never thought we could be like the communities in Kyiv, Lviv, Salonika and Amsterdam in the last century who allowed their Jewish brethren to be shunned and then attacked before being annihilated. Standing by and saying nothing now corrodes us all.

The everyday heroism of our Jewish children

It’s primary school. 12:30. Sun is shining. Some of the kids are having lunch, others are out in the playground. The climbing frame is full, the football pitch is buzzing, kids are running around playing ultimate tag. There’s a lunchtime netball club in the hall. This is the primary school of every kid in the UK. But this is where the familiarity for the general population ends.

The alarm goes off. It takes a second, but the kids know exactly what to do. They’ve practised for this very moment. This alarm isn’t the fire alarm. It’s the other one. The one where you have to stay safe, stay down, and stay silent. Thirty seconds later the entire school has locked down. Out of sight. Four to eleven year-olds sitting without making a sound. A minute goes by. Then the next, then the next. Seconds feel like hours. The teachers don’t know any more than the kids, but they have to keep them calm. They have to keep them quiet. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

Finally, the all clear sounds. It was a false alarm. Everyone breathes out.

And the kids? They just go back to the rest of the day like nothing happened.

I just finished watching Crossfire on BBC iplayer. It’s harrowing. Gunmen attack a hotel. Families, kids, running everywhere. But all I could think (and it was wildly depressing) was, “my kids would know what to do. If I told them it was an intruder alarm, they’d know what to do”. And that awkward lump in my throat, the slight tear in my eye, grew just slightly bigger.

Every kid at a Jewish school walks past the security, and often the police outside their school, and instead of turning to their parent and asking why these people are here, they just say good morning. Because it’s normal. But it’s not, is it? It’s not normal to be surprised when the front gate is open rather than locked shut. It’s not normal to have your bag searched going into a Jewish community centre. It’s not normal for my son’s teacher to have to skip a section of CBBC Newsround because it might hit a bit too close to home.

It’s not normal for every single synagogue in the country, every Jewish school, every Jewish building, every Jewish event to have security stood outside large gates and fences. And it’s not normal for my kids to think it’s normal.

And this isn’t just some sort of over-reaction. The threat is real. This month alone there has been an attack against a Jewish “cheder” school in Amsterdam, an attack on a synagogue in Michigan which housed a nursery, arrests of Iranians accused of spying on Jewish locations (including a school) in London, and of course the firebombing attack on the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.

Police chief who responded to Detroit synagogue attack targeted by online vitriol

During a press conference last Thursday, organized to address rising antisemitism in the wake of the ramming attack on Temple Israel in Detroit earlier this month, the Oakland County sheriff who helped organize the police response to the incident announced the arrest of what seemed like the latest perpetrator: an individual who had posted an antisemitic meme ridiculing the sheriff.

Sheriff Mike Bouchard displayed the image, featuring his face altered to include a Star of David over his forehead and payot, the sidelocks worn by some Jewish men, dangling near his ears.

“Some pond scum felt empowered and emboldened enough to put this picture of me up to try to threaten and intimidate me,” Bouchard, who is not Jewish, said during the press conference. “And by the way, the person that did this said a bunch of terrible things, not just against me, but against a lot of groups and individuals, who, by the way, was arrested today in Wisconsin.”

But while the arrest was only briefly mentioned during the press conference, which featured Bouchard and a group of religious leaders, including Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel, by Tuesday, it had been seized on by thousands of users on X as evidence of censorship and Jewish supremacy.

“Arrested in America for pointing out that a sheriff is jewish,” Jake Shields, a far-right influencer and former MMA champion, wrote in a post on X.

“Jews are murdering free speech in America,” wrote another influencer.

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03/25 Links Pt1: The War Is Going Better than You Think; Israeli Ambassador Sounds Red Alert Siren at UN; Iran Does Not Accept A Ceasefire; Hezbollah chief rejects Israel talks as ‘surrender’

From Ian:

WSJ Editorial: More Evidence that U.S. Was Right to Act before Iranian Missile Threat Grew

The rulers in Iran are hoping to move the war to a theater more favorable to their side: the negotiating table. But one of Iran's nonstarter demands is an unconstrained missile program - days after the regime fired at the American and British military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The launch is "the furthest ever attempted Iranian missile strike," the Institute for the Study of War notes. "The attack demonstrated that Iranian missiles can reach beyond the 2,000-km. limit that the regime has long claimed to have self-imposed." Diego Garcia is about double that distance from Iran.

For all the derision about "a war of choice," Mr. Trump was correct to act before Iranian missiles grow in number, range and accuracy. The reach underscores that the missile program isn't merely Israel's problem. The Iranians clearly aspire to put European cities in play, and eventually the U.S. homeland too. The shots fired at Diego Garcia are a moment of clarity about America's enemies.

Bret Stephens: The War Is Going Better than You Think

In March 2012, the price of Brent crude closed at $123 a barrel - $175 a barrel in today's dollars.

As of Tuesday, despite Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors' energy facilities, the price is hovering around $100.

That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the price of oil.

During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a campaign widely considered a brilliant military success, the U.S.-led coalition lost 75 aircraft, 42 of them in combat.

In the conflict with Iran, four manned aircraft have been destroyed, three to friendly fire and one in an accident. Not a single manned plane has yet been lost over Iran.

In 1991, Iraq fired 39 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there. In this war, Israel is registering an interception rate of 92% against more than 400 missiles.

One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by the U.S. to remake societies in both countries.

In this war, we hope the Iranian people use the opportunity of their leadership's weakness to seize their own destiny. But we won't do it for them.

If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity's comparative good fortune.

Why the Iran War Should Not Cause Higher Gas Prices in the U.S.

America does not depend on oil sent through the Strait of Hormuz and its closure does not provide any good reason for U.S. consumers to face big increases in gas prices.

The U.S. produces more oil than it needs and is a net exporter of oil. Problems in the Strait need not change the amount of oil produced in the U.S., nor the cost of pumping oil in the U.S., nor the amount of gasoline produced and used in the U.S.

When prices recently increased for oil internationally, U.S. oil companies also raised prices stateside, but this makes no sense.

The net result is that U.S. consumers pay more for gasoline, while American oil companies' production costs are the same, providing a huge profit windfall.

There are differences in types of oil in the U.S., but that does not alter the logic. Most of the oil produced in the U.S. is "light." But some U.S. refineries use "heavy" oil.

That means that the U.S. trades about 30% percent of its light oil for heavy oil, predominantly from Canada and Mexico.

Under a long-term understanding between America and its oil companies, the companies are given many privileges, including on public lands, and they are supposed to provide reliable production for America's needs, at fair and reasonably stable prices.

There is no legitimate basis for U.S. oil and gasoline companies to set prices in America any higher than they were last month.

Once gas prices decline in the U.S., perhaps the IRGC will realize that keeping the Strait closed would harm China, India and Japan, not America - and they might reopen the Strait.

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03/24 Links Pt2: Britain is a dying society, poisoned by a hatred nobody will confront; Canada’s Polite Pogrom; What Happened, Megyn Kelly?; Death of a Holocaust denier

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The Islamophobia narrative is about erasing Jews and antisemitism

Americans have good reason to fear the spread of hatred that has become normative in nations where Islamists dominate. That is why immigration and even refugee absorption from such countries is so problematic, because it leads to an influx of people who are largely indoctrinated in beliefs that are antithetical to the values of Western civilization and invariably antisemitic.

Nor, contrary to the Times, is fear of such groups imposing Muslim religious law (Sharia) on other societies unfounded. That is not merely the historical pattern of Islamic communities, but the reality in Western Europe, where the infusion of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa has resulted in authorities fearing to enforce the law at all in some places. This creates an environment in which Islamist hate crimes can be excused or ignored, and those who protest such policies are treated as troublemakers rather than truth-tellers.

More than anything else, the talk of Islamophobia is a stick with which to beat critics of Islamic hate. It is an attempt to silence those who have the temerity to notice the connection between the antisemitic incitement that is commonplace in Islamist discourse in the West and attempts to intimidate Jews and target them for violence. It is no surprise that every time an act of Islamist violence happens, it is now followed by talk of the need to prevent Islamophobia.

The Times commended, in retrospect, President George W. Bush’s almost obsessive fear of offending Muslims during his administration’s “war on terror.” Bush’s insistence that Islam was “a religion of peace” became something of a joke during his presidency. Two decades later, that knee-jerk effort to deny the obvious about Islamist hate and antisemitism is no longer merely risible. It is a deliberate effort to prevent effective action against the Jew-hatred that has surged throughout American society, largely with the assistance of the same media outlets so determined to decry Islamophobia.

The point of contemporary bigotry and bias against Jews is, as author Dara Horn has written, to erase them and work toward a final solution of eliminating Jewish civilization. The focus on Islamophobia is just that. Those who are serious about actually preventing discrimination and hate shouldn’t fall for this big lie.

Death of a Holocaust denier

Ali Larijani, the 67-year-old former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, died a terrorist’s death last week. For much of his career, however, he lived as a diplomat, and was feted as one by regional and Western nations alike.

Back in 2007, Larijani addressed the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany. Arriving in the city off the back of a Holocaust-denial conference hosted by the regime in Tehran, Larijani no doubt got a tremendous kick out of telling an audience in Germany, of all places, that it was an “open question” as to whether the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews had occurred. He did much the same two years later at Munich in 2009, telling one questioner that Iran’s leaders did not share European “sensitivities” or “perspectives” when it came to querying the veracity of the extermination program.

He would have likely done so again in 2011 had his earlier denialist statements not resulted in a ban on his attendance—a classic example of a European state realizing far too late that to stop the horse from bolting, the stable door would need to be shut first.

In the various high-level roles he held on behalf of the Islamic Republic, chief nuclear negotiator among them, Larijani never lost sight of the regime’s core goal of eliminating the State of Israel. Now that he has himself been eliminated—the latest in a long line of terrorists and terror enablers from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran to have been felled by an Israeli strike since the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom—the question remains as to whether Iran can continue to be the world’s primary state sponsor of anti-Zionist ideology, assuming that the regime survives the current U.S.-Israeli onslaught in truncated form.

Iran took on that position following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied communist states from 1989 onwards. During the Cold War, Soviet anti-Zionism, a central plank of Moscow’s foreign policy, morphed into what I call “antizionism”—a toxic ideology that has never been as strong or as visible as today, nearly four decades after the demise of the USSR. What was being opposed was not Zionism as the vast majority of Jews understood the term, but a defamatory caricature that drew heavily on older antisemitic tropes.

This expressed itself in two principal ways: violence and propaganda.

The Soviets backed the Arab side in the regional wars of 1967 and 1973. They supported various left-wing terrorist groups in Western countries, led by such figures as the Venezuelan militant Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez (also known as “Carlos”), a KGB and East German Stasi asset who operated on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And they sponsored a slew of propaganda initiatives, in the form of pamphlets with titles like “Beware: Zionism,” as well as U.N. General Assembly resolutions, among them the infamous equation of Zionism with racism approved by the world body in 1975.

Genocidal Glee

The screenshots below show two things happening at once:
First, a private email sent by Glenn Greenwald, where he tells a Jewish recipient to “crawl out of your Sabbath hole” and watch Israeli cities being hit by Iranian missiles, followed by a link and the word “Enjoy.”

Second, his public follow up, where he frames himself as the victim of smears, denies wrongdoing, and then states plainly, “I think it’s good for the world that Israel is feeling retaliatory strikes for the wars they started.”

All the talk about innocent civilians, all the moral posturing, all the hours spent pretending this is about universal principles and human suffering, all of it collapses the second Israelis are the ones under fire. Then the mask slips, and what comes out is the truth. They never cared about innocent civilians in any consistent or serious way. They cared about using civilian suffering as a political weapon against Israel. That is a very different thing, and people should stop pretending otherwise.

Defenders of Israel spend an enormous amount of time explaining basic realities that should not need to be explained to honest people. We explain why casualty figures coming out of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health cannot simply be treated as clean, neutral civilian death tolls, especially when Hamas has every incentive to inflate, manipulate, and obscure the distinction between civilians and combatants. We explain that Hamas embeds itself in civilian areas, stores weapons in homes, schools, and mosques, launches attacks from within populated neighborhoods, and then relies on the resulting images for propaganda. We explain that Hamas built an entire terror infrastructure under Gaza while leaving its own civilians exposed above ground, because civilian vulnerability is useful to them. We explain all of this for one reason. Because if Israel were deliberately targeting innocent civilians, that would be evil, and the truth would matter.

That is what makes comments like Glenn’s so revealing. He’s not arguing that civilian suffering is tragic wherever it occurs. He’s arguing that Israeli civilians being targeted by ballistic missiles is somehow morally satisfying because he has accepted the lie that they are collectively guilty. He wants the category of civilian to apply when it can be used against Israel, and he wants it to disappear when Israelis are the ones bleeding.

And once you see that, a lot of other things come into focus. It explains why so many of these people become extremely skeptical and forensic when Israeli actions are under discussion, but suddenly become emotionless and vindictive when Israelis are murdered. It explains why every dead Gazan child is treated as a moral indictment of the Jewish people, while dead Israeli children are treated as background noise, an unfortunate detail, or in many cases a justified consequence. It explains why they spend months lecturing the world about “dehumanization” and then casually speak about Israeli families as though they are legitimate instruments of collective punishment.

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