03/15 Links: Eli Lake: One American-Israeli Battle After Another; Carlson claims CIA is ‘framing’ him as an Iranian agent; Israel rejects South Africa’s ‘blood libel’ genocide case

From Ian:

Eli Lake: One American-Israeli Battle After Another

The greatest irony of recent Israeli history is that, for all of its brilliance in penetrating and sabotaging Iran, Israeli intelligence failed to pick up the signs before October 7 that the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust was in the offing. But that failure quickly led to profound changes in the scope of the mission against Iran. The senior Israeli war planner to whom I spoke put it like this: “We began rethinking the war plan in early 2023, but after October 7 we focused on a broader war against Iran, not just its nuclear program or missiles.” This represented at least a partial vindication of Dagan’s ideas a decade earlier.

And that is where things stand today. As Israel and America take out Iran’s missiles, nuclear facilities, defense industries, and its political and military leadership from the air, the hope is that after the dust settles, the remaining regime leadership will either surrender or agree to end the Islamic Republic’s war on the Great and Little Satan. As I write at the beginning of March, that may seem like a long shot, and one that invites intolerable risks. After all, without boots on the ground, neither the U.S. nor Israel will have the ability to shape the inevitable chaos that will result after the bombing stops. On the other hand, Israel has proven over the past eight months that it has eyes and ears everywhere in Iran. I wouldn’t be shocked if the Mossad has a plan for what comes next.

Here at home, what is going to come next for those who decided to blame this just American war on the little Jewish state they seem to hate so much? The populists seething about Trump’s war to Make Iran Great Again have shown that they misunderstand recent history and that their audiences are fools to listen to them. Over the past 30 years, Israel has built a capability that is on the precipice of removing a blood enemy of America. It has located and eliminated the clerics and generals responsible for 47 years of terror against our country and her allies.

Trump has not launched a war for Israel. Rather he has joined a war with Israel—a war Israel may have won even before the bombs started dropping.

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump challenged 50 years of Iran fears — and revealed the rotten, decaying truth

So here we are in 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade façade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.

The regime has no military ability to ensure its survival.

All it has is a rope-a-dope strategy that assumes a White House attuned to domestic criticism, the looming midterms, the price of gas, and pressure from allies to end the war before the global economy sinks into recession.

We are left somewhat confused.

Why did prior presidents not hold Iran accountable for its killing, thus nourishing the myth of Iranian invincibility?

Why did Israel not respond earlier to Iran itself, rather than just its terrorist clients?

And what now are the remaining theocrats thinking? What is their strategy of survival?

They intend to ride out the bombings and, at some point in extremis, expect an armistice via “negotiations.”

They plan to wait out the tenures of both Trump and Netanyahu and hope for a sympathetic president like Obama, or a non compos mentis Biden, or someone ideologically akin to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

With Trump and Netanyahu out of office, they dream of using their oil to re-arm and resume their role as Chinese and Russian proxies, eventually getting the bomb — and this time perhaps using it.

Theocratic Iran, in its fantasies, still believes that if it ever destroyed Israel, the world, especially given the recrudescence of Western antisemitism, would be appalled — for a day or two.

Then it would resume business as usual.

And with a dozen or so deterrent nuclear-tipped missiles at their backs, the Iranian ritual boilerplate of crazed pronouncements would follow.

Thus, we would go full circle back again to a “crazy” Iran, its murderous clients and its unhinged — but effective — threats.

John Podhoretz: They Should Have Listened to My Dad

Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu saw how an Iranian proxy in Gaza had set into motion a plan on October 7, 2023, with the purpose of bringing about an apocalyptic multifront assault on Israel’s existence—the very thing Ahmadinejad had said he had been seeking 18 years earlier. Iran hit Israel with ballistic missiles in 2024. Trump and Israel struck back with unprecedented force in 2025. And when they were done with the 12-day war, Trump said in no uncertain terms that he would go back to the skies if there were indications Iran was working to re-nuclearize. The Iranians had every chance during this time, and every rational reason, to stand down. They could have sued for peace after the 12-day war destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility and Iran’s air-defense system. They could have made a deal after Trump sent a gigantic armada to the waters near Iran and sent his negotiators to Geneva to talk to the Iranians. After all, they had seen Trump do what no other president would do, even though the four presidents who preceded him in office after the Soviet Union’s fall had all said Iran could not be allowed to go nuclear. The Iranians saw him go into Venezuela and extract its dictator, maybe their closest ally, like a dentist extracting a rotted tooth. But the Iranians did not stand down. Instead, they bragged to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that they possessed enough nuclear materiel for 11 bombs. Trump had watched the Iranian people rise up and had seen the Iranian leaders shoot them down. He tried to talk and in response they boasted of their capabilities to do evil. The Israelis had told him they knew the ayatollah and his team were going to be meeting on a Saturday morning all together in one place. Trump said go. Israel went. And then America struck.

In 2007, the Iranian nuclear program was nascent and notional. But we already knew where they had located it and what they were trying to get going. Had we bombed those sites then, as Israel had bombed Iraq’s reactor in 1981, a precedent would have been established. A simple precedent. Stop. Do it again, and we will hit you again. So don’t do it.

But we didn’t. And Barack Obama tried to buy them off. Donald Trump, in his first term, tried to put the Iranians in a cage with maximum pressure. And Joe Biden, well, who knows what Joe Biden did—but he certainly didn’t scare the Iranians. Donald Trump did hit them. And they didn’t stop.

Now they will. But we needn’t have gotten to this point. One strong strike in 2007 and the world would have looked very different. Bush should have listened to my dad.

Read More

03/14 Links: The despicable disgrace of the ‘call off the war’ crowd; Michigan: a case study in the new Jew hatred; Ashab Al Yamin? New Shi’ite terror group claims synagogue attacks across Europe

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: The despicable disgrace of the ‘call off the war’ crowd

We’d like to believe that the negative coverage of the Iran war so rampant in the media is simply more Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s plainly also about how the president’s firm actions expose how pathetically the same elites applauded President Barack Obama’s misbegotten Middle East policies, and not just his sad nuclear deal with Tehran.

To simplify things, consider The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the dean of elite liberal political analysis, who’s actively sneering at the joint US-Israeli effort to defang an entity that for five decades has called them “The Great Satan” and “The Little Satan.”

“Both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about ‘imminent’ threats that require ‘preemptive’ strikes,” he huffs, “but we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel.”

No, because the two nations took out Tehran’s nuclear program last year, as it was weeks from producing usable weapons, and they’ve acted before it could rebuild its defenses and offensive conventional forces to shield it as it recovered that capability.

The imminent threat was to become too tough to take out.

And Iran’s lunatic bombing of almost every country now within its range proves that it was and is a threat to the entire civilized world: Just imagine it with the long-range missiles and nukes that it never stopped developing.

But of course Jeff Goldberg was one of Obama’s chief media sycophants

He asked Obama how he could possibly understand the Iranian regime as both thoroughly antisemitic and “practical,” “responsive to incentive” and “rational” — and accepted without question Obama’s blithe reply that “the fact that the supreme leader is antisemitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”

What poppycock: Those “other considerations” centered on a determined drive at regional domination and a certainty that going nuclear was the only sure way to ensure the regime’s survival.

Obama & Co. simply fantasized that a mature Islamic Republic would happily become a normal power if bribed sufficiently — and fanboys like Goldberg swooned.

Jake Wallis Simons: How Israel could spark regime change from the air

In a video speech last week, Benjamin Netanyahu disclosed that the IDF had “many surprises” in store for the regime. According to insiders, these have been delayed by Israeli infighting over which agency will take the credit. But they are on their way.

These surprises, thought to number about four or five, are unlikely to feature anything on the scale of the pager operation that castrated Hezbollah in September 2024. Instead, we are likely to see a sequence of creative subversions of the foundations of the Islamic Republic.

“With one hand, we grip the regime’s throat with force,” a security official said, referring to the conventional air campaign. “With the other hand, we shake it unexpectedly, again and again and again, until its neck snaps.” The objectives are clear. If all goes well, Israeli surprises will both demoralise the regime’s troops, tempting them to desert, and embolden the Iranian people to overthrow them.

But what about boots on the ground? Never before, etc. Well, keep your eyes on the Artesh, Iran’s regular armed forces which, unlike the fanatical Revolutionary Guards, descend from the time of the Shah. These troops tend to be of a nationalistic temperament, not an Islamist one, and they have largely held back from the fighting.

If the humiliation of the regime reaches a tipping point, the Artesh may revolt. This would resemble a traditional coup, empowered by homo digitalis and the Mossad. Another first. As if by magic, the Iranian people would find themselves with a great many boots on the ground.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. None of this is guaranteed and, as Netanyahu pointed out this week, “you can lead someone to water, but you cannot make him drink”. Donald Trump echoed these sentiments, telling Fox News on Friday that an uprising was “a big hurdle to climb for people that don’t have weapons”. He added: “It’ll happen, but it probably will be maybe not immediately.” Post-2003 Iraq always lurks around the corner.

But what was the alternative? Diplomacy had failed. Sanctions had failed. Covert action had slowed Tehran’s progress towards a bomb, but was powerless to stop it. Even after the hammering it received in June, the regime immediately began building back its missile stockpiles and proxies, like zombies knowing only death, and went on to butcher more than 30,000 people in two days, not to mention the atrocities it plots on our shores.

Seen from our rainy isles of appeasement, Mossad and homo digitalis stand like greyhounds in the slips. With or without our support, the game’s afoot. They will follow their spirit, and upon the charge, cry: “God for America, Israel and Iran!”

Brendan O'Neill: Michigan: a case study in the new Jew hatred

Dearborn is like a microcosm of the supine culture that has reigned in the post-7 October West. In the US, the UK and Europe, we’ve witnessed an explosion of the twin forces of Islamism and Islamo-censorship. We’ve seen mobs cheer anti-Semitic terrorism and wallow in the violent dream of Israel’s fiery demise. And yet you’re called ‘Islamophobic’ if you fret about it. Islamism is treated as a reasonable reaction to the behaviour of ‘the Zionist entity’ while concern about Islamism is damned as bigotry. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral deceit, where those of us worried about the rebirth of an ancient hatred are ourselves called ‘hateful’.

It remains to be seen what Ghazali thought he would achieve with his butchery at Temple Israel. Whether he fantasised that he was avenging Lebanon or whether his anti-Jewish animus flowed from the Islamist pox in Dearborn. Yet it is reasonable to ask if Dearborn’s virulent Israelophobia pushed this man deeper into the cesspit of anti-Jewish hate. A striking feature of our time is that leftists and liberals will always go looking for the ‘architecture of hatred’ that inspires racist attacks on blacks, Muslims or Latinos – but they never do that when there are attacks on Jews. In fact, they warn against it. Don’t ‘weaponise’ this attack by raising concerns about the broader public culture, they say. It’s only ever Jews who are accused of ‘weaponisation’ for wondering if their persecution might spring from social trends.

Does the cultural elite really expect us to believe there’s no link between its own frothing hysteria over the Jewish State and the march of hostility against Jewish people? It’s a childish delusion, and a dangerous one, to think you can spend your every waking hour lamenting the supposedly unique cruelty of the world’s only Jewish nation and that there will be no consequences for Jews. The ceaseless libels against the Jewish homeland, the cries for more ‘intifada’ – these have consequences. You would think an activist class that says it’s vile bigotry to call ‘transwomen’ men would understand that the bourgeois clamour for the violent dismantling of the Jewish homeland is likely to entail blowback for Jewish people.

This is why it’s sickening to hear the likes of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani mourn the events in Michigan. This is a man who refused to condemn the cry ‘Globalise the intifada’. This is a man whose wife liked Instagram posts celebrating an orgy of anti-Jewish violence far worse than Michigan’s – 7 October. Then there’s Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, wringing his hands over the ‘horrific news’ from Michigan. Mate, your deputy leader is a man who celebrated the pogrom of 7 October. A party that cheers the murder of Jews in Israel has no business lamenting the attempted murder of Jews in Michigan.

Things are getting serious. Over the past week there have been violent incidents at synagogues in Liege in Belgium, in Toronto, and now Michigan. Violent Jew hate is spreading. And the first step to tackling it is to dismantle every snivelling effort to censor public concern. The Orwellian forces who call us bigots for speaking about bigotry need to be put back in their box. The stakes are too high for such slippery, tyrannical games.

Read More

03/13 Links Pt2: Normalizing the grotesque; The Concept of Jewish Collective Guilt Goes Mainstream; US defends Israel at ICJ against South Africa’s allegation of genocide

From Ian:

Normalizing the grotesque

Provoking outrage was the point. Mamdani wanted to take the photo of his love-in with his anti-American friend and shove it into the public’s face, implying, “Suck it up, America, because you can’t do anything about it. We have the power now, and we’re getting stronger.”

Mamdani’s goal was to normalize the grotesque. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a very different kind of New York Democrat, called this “defining deviancy down” 33 years ago in an essay about American culture and society being pulled apart. That’s what Mamdani, Duwaji, and Khalil are doing — trying to pull our culture, society, moral framework, and self-assurance apart.

Like the Islamist forces they support, their deepest desire is to change — that is, destroy — who we are, what we believe, and how we conduct ourselves. That’s why Duwaji posted in joyous celebration of Hamas’s tortures, rapes, and massacres in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The point of Mamdani’s dinner and photo, of Khalil’s activism, of Duwaji’s delight in slaughter is to repudiate the norms that have always guided public speech and conduct in America.

Hamas terrorists did the same on Oct. 7, normalizing the grotesque. They didn’t just slaughter Jews, but captured their enormities on video — they hacked off the head of one victim with an agricultural hoe — and published the evidence on social media around the world. They calculated, rightly to the shock and horror of many of us, that this would attract rather than repel support.

TRUMP GETS THE LAST LAUGH
Horrors, the perpetration of which would once have revolted and alienated every sane person in the West, instead sparked mass support. Hamas terrorists, like their supporters in Gracie Mansion, defy norms to normalize what used to be utterly unacceptable. They seek to wreck the moral parameters of Western civilization. The more that extremists, especially public figures on the Left, reject the traditions of a coherent society, the more they sow doubt in the minds of the population.

It should be disqualifying for the New York mayor to sup with a terrorist sympathizer, but Mamdani wanted to jam his crowbar deeper into a fissure splitting our society. He expected this to encourage his leftist base and demoralize his foes. It probably has. It is a measure of the fantastic success the Left-Islamist alliance has had in its campaign to undermine this couvntry.

Maryland Dems propose bill targeting nonprofits tied to Judea and Samaria

Maryland Democrats introduced a bill that would prohibit certain nonprofit organizations registered to solicit charitable donations from supporting “Israeli settlement activity” in Judea and Samaria and allow lawsuits against groups that violate the measure.

Titled the “Not on Our Dime Act,” HB 1184 was introduced on Feb. 11 by Gabriel Acevero, Ashanti Martinez and Caylin Young, Democratic members of the Maryland House of Delegates. At a March 11 hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee, representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations debated with Lauren Arikan, a Republican delegate, on whether the legislation should also include charitable organizations that support Iranian-linked causes.

“We’re going to have to have these difficult conversations,” Sean Stinnett, a Democratic delegate, said at the hearing, asking supporters of the bill why Jewish advocacy groups felt it was “singling out Israel.”

“There is no other country that is currently building illegal settlements that is condemned by the United Nations, by the ICJ, by the U.S. Department of State under the Obama and Biden administration,” a CAIR representative responded, claiming that Washington is funding this activity with “billions” of dollars.

The bill says a nonprofit registered with the state “may not knowingly engage in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity.”

It describes “unauthorized support” as aiding or abetting actions by the Israeli government or Israeli citizens in what it defines as “the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Under the proposal, Maryland’s attorney general could file civil lawsuits against nonprofit leaders accused of violating the law and seek “not less than $1,000,000 in damages.” Private individuals could also bring lawsuits seeking injunctions and damages.

Nonprofits found liable would be removed from the state’s registry of charitable solicitations. The state would be required to ensure that organizations that are no longer registered stop soliciting in Maryland, according to a policy note attached to the bill.

Turning Terror Into Context by Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
What about the part that the New York Times isn’t telling you—or at least not in bold type? Where’s the headline reading “More Than 100 Children in Temple Israel Pre-K at Time of Attack”? Or how about this for a story on the terrorist’s family back in Lebanon? “Synagogue Attacker’s Brothers Suspected of Being in Hezbollah”?

Not at the paper of record. The important thing for the Times, and many other outlets, is to bring everything back around to supposed Israeli crimes.

Even if we were to pretend that Israel is guilty of every invented charge hurled at it, what does that have to do with 100 Jewish American children sitting in classrooms in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on a Thursday afternoon? The only moral statement one need make about yesterday’s attack is that it’s right and just that the perpetrator is dead.

From October 7, 2023, to this day, every last bit of the psy-op against Israel and the Jews has relied on inverting both morality and truth. Hamas attempted a genocide, so Israel is accused of genocide. Zionism is, among other things, a means of preventing genocide, so Zionism itself is framed as a genocidal ideology. Hamas targeted innocents, slaughtered babies, and raped women, so Israel is accused of all three. Hamas kept food from Gazans, so Israel is accused of a starvation plot. Jews are indigenous to Israel, so Israel is accused of colonizing a native population. Jews are attacked across campuses and elsewhere in America, so we’re lectured on Islamophobia. The Iranian regime has been waging a half-century-long war to destroy Israel, so Israel is accused of starting a war with Iran.

Here's another regularly inverted truth: Children die in Israeli airstrikes for the simple reason that genocidal Jew-haters keep trying to rid the world of Jews. This is what liberals might call the “root cause.” If the family of the terrorist who carried out yesterday’s attack was killed in Lebanon, that’s entirely the fault of Hezbollah. That his brothers are suspected of being in Hezbollah perfectly encapsulates the larger pathological loop: In their effort to extinguish the Jews, Jew-haters kill their own—at which point they must go out and try to kill more Jews.

Whether they succeed or fail, the media will be sure to get their message out.

Read More

03/13 Links Pt1: Regime Change Without Nation Building; The Strange Coalition Defending Tehran; US strikes Kharg Island in Iran, Islamic Regime 'Crown Jewel

From Ian:

Jonathan Schanzer: Regime Change Without Nation Building

Here is where it is useful to remember that the people of Iran are arguably the country’s greatest resource. They are educated. A less radical, more pragmatic regime existed in Tehran in the memories of everyone older than 55, and the experience of living under theocratic tyranny has been the only experience young Iranians know.

Is Iran ripe for regime change? In 2009, Iranians overwhelmingly voted for liberalization, only to have the mullahs fix the result—leading to an uprising that had to be crushed, though not nearly as brutally as the killing spree in January 2026 that showed the regime’s truly murderous colors in the mass slaughter of tens of thousands. Indeed, Iranians have in recent memory sought to carve a different path and, just two months ago, were in open revolt. This is not a quiescent population whose will has been shattered.

Unfortunately, little is known about the opposition on the ground right now. But Iranian unity will be crucial to any effort to reach a stable end state in this war. We’ll soon see if the Persian-speaking majority can join forces with the complex patchwork of Iranian minorities.

Self-defined experts on these matters look at the prospect of Iranian common cause with deep skepticism. But we Americans are hardly the best judges of the ways to achieve common ground. Our divisive politics have in recent decades rendered American foreign policy schizophrenic, with key principles shifting violently every four or eight years. The debates over military intervention, regime change, and even America’s place in the world have yielded chaos and confusion, both at home and abroad.

While Americans have been exceptionally vociferous in expressing their varying political views in recent years, the Iran war has finally brought a major fault line to the surface. This heated battle on both the left and the right is between neo-isolationists and interventionists. For those who believe no good can come of war and that America fails when it fights, no argument exists that will penetrate their hard shell of determinist defeatism. But foreign policy theorists in the neo-isolationist camp—those who do not want to appear to be isolationist but rather realist—warn that whatever America does is merely a distraction from the real issue of the 21st century. That issue is our “great power competition” with China. Any cent we spend for any purpose other than countering China is a penny wasted. Of course, since China is allied with Iran and sees Iran as an extension of its sphere of interest, an American defeat of Iran would serve the purpose of putting China on notice that we will not look kindly on another totalitarian regime’s effort to spread its shadow across the globe. Nor will we sit idly by.

The task before Donald Trump is finding a middle ground that appeals to the isolationists and interventionists, on the left and the right, all of whom fervently believe that they are putting “America First.” To secure his place in American history, and to end this war on his terms, he must find a way to validate both camps while engineering a decisive victory in Iran that heralds a new Middle East, sets back rivals like China and Russia, and does not empty out the U.S. Treasury.

None of this is simple or intuitive. But history is replete with American regime-change experiments that did not bankrupt America and did not thrust it into a forever war. Should Trump find a way of repeating that history, and not the failures of the early 21st century, while vanquishing the greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East, “America First” won’t just be a political slogan. It will be a blueprint for other important battles amid the litany of geopolitical challenges that lie ahead.

Brendan O'Neill: War on Iran was not ‘unprovoked’

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase ‘unprovoked war’. It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. This week, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and scores of hoary peaceniks wrote a letter to the Guardian insisting Britain should have nothing to do with America and Israel’s ‘unprovoked war’ in Iran.

Here’s my question: is the rape and murder of Jews not a provocation? Was the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust – 7 October – not a provocation? The tyrants of Tehran were the paymasters of the jihadist brutes who carried out that slaughter. They lavished guns and training on that army of anti-Semites that invaded Israel by air, sea and land not even three years ago. That wasn’t a provoking act?

Is it not a provocation to rain thousands of missiles onto a neighbouring country? Is it not a provocation to subject a nation to a ballistic swarm that causes the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians and the deaths of scores of innocents, including 12 Druze kids playing football? That’s what Hezbollah has done these past three years. Hezbollah received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Islamic Republic to pursue precisely such violent badgering of the Jewish state. That isn’t a provocation?

You can say many things about America and Israel’s war in Iran. Some say it’s valiant, others that it’s reckless. But one thing you can’t say, not if you want to be taken seriously, is that it is ‘unprovoked’. Unless, of course, you think the mass murder of Jews should have no repercussions. That, just like in the 1930s, or the 1490s, mobs of anti-Semites should be free to kill Jews with impunity. If I were you, I’d keep that view to myself.

Traditionally it was the pursuers of war who engaged in linguistic trickery to justify their actions or disguise their true motives. Tariq Ali calls it the ‘grammar of deceit’. Today, such semantic duplicity is more readily found among war’s opponents.

Indeed, President Trump, in contrast with his predecessors who dolled up their warmaking as ‘peacekeeping’, has spoken with uncommon frankness about the nature of war. He has told of the ‘death, fire and fury’ that will be visited upon the Iranian regime. Ugly, but honest. It’s the other side, Trump’s noisy doubters and Israel’s legion haters, who are using language as a weapon not of clarification but of concealment.

‘Unprovoked war’ – that isn’t only factually wrong, it’s intentionally dissembling. It draws a thick veil over the events of the past three years. It absolves the Islamic Republic of its sins of violent anti-Semitism. It memory-holes the war crimes funded by that regime and conditions us to think of Iran as an innocent party under ‘imperial’ assault by the Jewish State and its American lackeys. It is a lie masquerading as a critique.

John Spencer: War Reveals the Truth: Russian and Chinese Weapons Are Outmatched

Modern warfare is no longer defined by individual weapons platforms alone. It is defined by networks. Western militaries have spent decades investing in systems that integrate satellites, aircraft, drones, sensors, cyber capabilities, and precision munitions into a unified battlefield architecture. This allows forces to detect targets faster, share information instantly, and strike with extraordinary precision.

Russia and China have attempted to replicate elements of this model, but the battlefield evidence suggests their systems remain less integrated and more vulnerable to disruption. Battlefield performance carries geopolitical consequences.

In 1982, during the Lebanon War, Israeli fighters destroyed more than 60 Syrian aircraft supplied by the Soviet Union without losing a single plane. Soviet air defenses that had been widely exported suddenly appeared far less formidable. Moscow’s reputation as an arms supplier suffered.

Something similar is happening again today, and the battlefield evidence is mounting.

When Russian air defenses fail to protect Russian forces in Ukraine, defense planners around the world take notice. When Chinese-supplied air defense systems fail to prevent precision strikes in South Asia, potential buyers pay attention. And when Iranian defenses built with Russian and Chinese technology fail to prevent repeated penetrations by U.S. and Israeli forces, the message becomes unmistakable.

The battlefield is the ultimate arms exhibition.

Countries that spend billions of dollars on military equipment are not buying hardware for parades. They are buying systems that must function in the most demanding conditions imaginable. Every destroyed radar, every neutralized air defense battery, and every successful penetration of an air defense network sends a signal to the global defense market.

That signal is increasingly clear.

Western military technology, particularly that developed by the United States and Israel, continues to demonstrate a decisive advantage in real combat conditions. From stealth aircraft and precision-guided weapons to advanced electronic warfare and integrated intelligence networks, these systems are proving their effectiveness across multiple wars.

Russia and China will continue to export weapons. Many countries will still buy them because they are cheaper or politically easier to obtain. But the evidence from modern battlefields is mounting.

Russian and Chinese systems have not saved Iran. They have not protected Russian forces in Ukraine. And they did not prevent India from striking precisely where and when it chose during Operation Sindoor.

War is the harshest evaluator of military technology.

Right now, the verdict from the battlefield is unmistakable.

US military supremacy shines as China fails big in Iran, Venezuela

China has become the laughingstock of the international community.

For years, its leaders showcased their powerful HQ-9B missiles as the best air defense system. But they were lying. In less than a year, their system has failed catastrophically in Pakistan, in Venezuela and now in Iran.

The U.S. remains by far the most modern and feared military power in the world, and President Trump has proven it. In one day, U.S. and Israeli forces wiped out Iran’s military leadership, along with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In one day, U.S. forces entered Venezuela and extracted Nicolás Maduro without a single U.S. fatality.

Recall that it took President George H.W. Bush several days to capture General Manuel Noriega in Panama; the tracking and elimination of Osama Bin Laden took almost 10 years. Here is a historical fact for which no is crediting the current administration: Operations Absolute Resolve and Epic Fury have set a new standard.

Returning to China, the HQ-9B missiles and JY-27A radars were always impressive at military parades, but they have performed poorly in actual combat. They are blind, deaf, and mute.

The HQ-9B, also known as Red Flag 9, is a cheap copy of the powerful U.S. Patriot missiles and the Russian S-300. In theory, they have built-in radar systems to track and engage multiple targets simultaneously. In practice, they have demonstrated the opposite.

Since May of last year, serious concerns have been raised about the HQ-9B’s inadequacy. In India’s Operation Sindoor against Pakistan, the Chinese missiles were soundly defeated for four consecutive days. They were unable to defend, destroy or track anything.

China’s JY-27 radar is a system capable of identifying and scanning targets between 280 and 390 kilometers away. It specializes in the early detection of fast, supersonic F-22 and F-35 fighter jets. But in real combat, when Maduro was captured in Venezuela, the Chinese radars became a point of national humiliation and shame, failing to detect even one of the 150 aircraft that penetrated Venezuelan airspace.

Operation Absolute Resolve also humiliated Russia. Venezuela had invested more than $2 billion in S-300 missiles. Despite their power, they were rendered immobile by powerful American fighters, bombers and electronic warfare aircraft.

Read More

03/12 Links Pt2: The Horseshoe Effect and Anti-Jewish Incitement; Gunman shot dead after ramming vehicle into Michigan synagogue

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The ethnostate illusion

Jews have benefited hugely from the civilized society that allowed them to prosper in America and Britain. So they have a duty to lend their voices to the defense of the West against Islamization and cultural takeover.

Unfortunately, virtually the only Jewish voices to be heard are those demonizing this as “white supremacy,” racism and “Islamophobia.” In Britain, Jewish leaders have supported government proposals to introduce protection for Muslims that will have a chilling effect on necessary debate about Islamic extremism.

This is very wrong in itself. But it’s also guaranteed to make resentment of the Jews even worse by appearing to prove the charge that the Jews “don’t care about the rest of us.”

“So what?” many Jews would say in response; “antisemitism lies beyond reason and it’s eternal, so there’s no point even trying to fight it.”

This is simply wrong. As I say in my new book, published this week, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, there’s plenty that can and should be done to combat it.

True, antisemitism can never be defeated, but Jewish passivity makes it worse. Failing to produce arguments and evidence to show that claims of Jewish power over U.S. policy are groundless reinforces the belief that they are true.

Jews have to stand up for themselves in the right way. The Jewish world has consistently been doing so in the wrong way, and then wonders why it hasn’t gotten anywhere.

In my book, I set out a strategy for both individuals and community leaders that turns many of these flawed assumptions upside down. Community leaders should start speaking truths that Jews shy away from, such as the prevalence of Muslim antisemitism or Israel’s legally watertight claim to the land. Individuals should use difficult encounters about Israel as an opportunity to surprise their foes and so open their minds by at least a crack.

Even in today’s poisonous climate, this can have a remarkable effect. In any event, Jews—who have an obligation to stand up for truth against lies—should take on those foaming right now about “war-mongering for Israel” simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Seth Mandel: The Horseshoe Effect and Anti-Jewish Incitement

Those Epstein files are public largely because of the efforts of folks like Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, and Tom Massie, a Republican from Kentucky. Khanna and Massie have coined the phrase “the Epstein class” to refer to a wide variety of people who don’t include Ro Khanna and Tom Massie and their friends, though it has mostly just poured fuel on the fire of Epstein-related anti-Semitic conspiracy theories not too dissimilar from Owens’s idiotic “Baal-worshiping” stuff.

Khanna’s cynicism is the subject of an excellent column by James Kirchick in the Washington Post today. Khanna responded to Kirchick’s reporting by accusing Kirchick of protecting “the Epstein class” and being a shill for Israel’s government. Then he defended Pat Buchanan.

Ah, Pat Buchanan, trailblazing anti-Semitic populist. The old Republican hand and former presidential candidate is having a moment. A new generation of young right-wingers are discovering him and hoping to carve his face into Mount Rushmore. A couple of Republicans in the Senate want him to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As should be clear from Khanna, Buchanan’s bipartisan appeal isn’t policy-based. Rather, it’s the insinuations that American Jews are disloyal citizens acting on behalf of the Israeli government. Platner sounds a bit like him but so does someone who once called out Buchanan’s anti-Semitism: Tucker Carlson. The influential conservative podcaster and former Fox News host has morphed into a Pat Buchanan cover band.

In addition to accusing Israel of controlling Washington, Carlson now also recites the classic pogrom-incitement propaganda of accusing the Jews of planning to conquer Al Aqsa, the old mosque at the Temple Mount complex. It’s an idea Tucker shares with his left-wing buddies in the Squad like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who goes back to the well of Al Aqsa incitement more than some Palestinian leaders do.

This is what is termed the horseshoe effect, where right and left go far enough to meet on the other side. When it comes to Israel and the Jews, the political horseshoe is more like a closed circle, dizzying and without exit.

And by the way, another possible motive for attacks on Jews these days all over the world is the activating of Iranian agents who are retaliating for Israel’s refusal to let the mullahs have a nuclear bomb. Iran’s terror regime has defenders on both sides of the aisle too, for what it’s worth.

The point is that in the past, knowing an anti-Semitic terrorist’s specific motivation was useful information, a knowledge trail that one could follow to see how to prepare for the next attack. But right now it feels like that trail would just send you around in a circle. America’s domestic radicalization problem is the new melting pot, where all the ingredients get mushed together into a one-bowl meal. If, somehow, you still have an appetite.

Seth Mandel: Canada’s Colossal Failure on Anti-Semitism Since October 7

Just after a Purim celebration on March 2, a synagogue in Toronto was hit with gunfire. Four days later, shooters fired into a different Toronto synagogue while people were still inside. A half-hour after that, shots were fired at a third Toronto synagogue.

It’s fair to say this is cause for alarm. Especially when you consider the recent history of such incidents. In the summer of 2024, a Jewish girls school in Toronto was hit with gunfire. A few months later, the same school was shot at again. Two months after that, it was shot a third time.

Also in 2024, in the span of a month, yet another Toronto synagogue had its windows and doors smashed up twice. By November 2025, that synagogue—Kehillat Shaarei Torah—was vandalized 10 times. Then there was the Jewish schoolbus that was torched, and the popular bookstore that was vandalized because it is owned by a Jew… welcome to Toronto.

This doesn’t include all the incidents of nonviolent anti-Semitism, which were numerous and saw a steep increase each year after October 7.

The pattern is easy to figure out: Anti-Semitic activists go around targeting Jewish institutions, and the more dangerous the attack, the more likely it is to be repeated.

Yet the mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, has decided the way to address rising anti-Semitism is to pour fuel on the fire. In November, she went before a national Muslim group and added her voice to the “genocide” blood libel against the Jewish state.

Read More

03/12 Links Pt1: The UN Can Condemn Attacks on Civilians. Just Not Israeli Ones; 60 wounded after Iranian missile strike in northern Israel; Israel targets Iran’s Basij members

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Trump’s decision to fight Iran is historic — but he needs to finish the job

For years excitable figures have warned that any attack on Iran would start World War III. The fact that the regime in Iran has spent decades trying to develop a nuclear weapon was always a problem for these people. After all, if a terrorist regime is developing a nuclear weapon and says it is going to use that weapon, what exactly is the world meant to do? Sit back and let it happen?

That’s what much of the world seemed happy to do. Or rather, they hoped that someone would take the problem off the world’s hands for them.

And so it fell to the governments of Israel and the United States of America to step up. To do what the German chancellor recently called the world’s “dirty work” for the rest of the planet.

But there are reasons why World War III has not remotely kicked off.

The first is that for the past three years the Israelis have taken out each of the Iranian Revolutionary Government’s terrorist armies one by one.

They smashed Hamas in Gaza, killing all their senior leadership and thousands of their terrorists.

They destroyed the infrastructure and leadership of Iran’s terrorist army in Lebanon — Hezbollah. They did that from the land, the skies and through history-making operations like the pager attack which killed or disabled thousands of Hezbollah’s terrorists.

They did it by taking out the leadership and weapons stores of Iran´s terrorist army in Yemen — the Houthis.

And now for the past two weeks, with America leading the way, they have taken the battle to the head of the snake.

People should be under no illusions. The success of this American-led campaign has been extraordinary.

The world’s biggest sponsor of terror has been hit in every single place where it hurts.

Khamenei Cemented the U.S.-Israel Alliance

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should be credited with elevating the Israel-U.S. military alliance to an unprecedented peak. Demonizing the "twin devils" of America and Israel was central to Khamenei's ideology and his regime. His followers murdered Americans, Israelis and Jews worldwide. The network of terror and nuclear ambition that this malevolent matchmaker built ultimately forced the U.S. and Israel to integrate their militaries in ways that would have been almost unimaginable a few years ago.

The moment that symbolized this transformation came with Khamenei's death. Central Intelligence Agency information from a human source pinpointed the location of the supreme leader. The intelligence was passed on to Israel, which sent 100 aircraft into Tehran to attack Khamenei's compound, killing him alongside other top officials.

Today, the operations are completely merged. American and Israeli F-15s and F-35s are flying almost side-by-side simultaneous strike packages, guided by shared intelligence. Hundreds of Israeli sorties have already been refueled by U.S. Air Force tankers. For the first time, the Israeli and American militaries are fighting the same war, in the same battle space, at the same time. Khamenei created the conditions for the most powerful military alliance the region has ever seen.

America Is Fighting a War that Iran Chose

Critics of the latest U.S. military attacks against Iran argue that the Iranian threat was insufficiently imminent to justify self-defense. However, this campaign continues an ongoing and long-term armed conflict with Iran. Iran's assaults against U.S. personnel, bases, ships and Israel over the years triggered the right to act in self-defense in response to an actual or imminent unlawful armed attack under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That U.S. right of self-defense continues until Iran's willingness or capacity to continue such aggression ends.

International law does not require a distinct self-defense justification for every attack conducted once the right of self-defense is triggered. Once that right is initiated, military action is justified to achieve the overall self-defense objective, in this case terminating Iran's capacity to strike the U.S. and its allies.

There are strong arguments that the conflict has been ongoing for the 47 years since the Iranian Revolution. Iran has been held responsible for the deaths of 603 U.S. troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, 241 service members in the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, three soldiers in Jordan in January 2024, and dozens of U.S. civilians. That the U.S. has historically chosen to tolerate acts of Iranian aggression or respond in limited ways in no way negates the reality of this conflict.

It is logical and legally valid for the U.S. to target enemy military sites when and where such strikes are most likely to accomplish objectives and produce maximum advantage. This approach is inherent in the numerous times U.S. presidents and military officials have stated the U.S. will respond to Iranian aggression "at a time and place of our choosing."

International law does not require the U.S. and its allies to endlessly endure and absorb Iranian aggression. The U.S. military is engaged in decisive action to permanently stop Iranian attacks. America is fighting a war that Iran chose.

Read More

03/11 Links Pt2: Zionism for Everyone; Documentary: How the Bondi Beach terror attack unfolded; IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

From Ian:

Alana Newhouse: Zionism for Everyone

How do people change?

Some change involves things that happen to us, which isn’t what interests me. I’m curious about what happens, individually and to societies, when people face an unhappy reality—however it came to be—and decide to change what looks, at least at that moment, to be their fate.

In his 2015 novel, Submission, Michel Houellebecq sketches a portrait of a near-future France, in which an Islamic party allies with the Socialists to take over the country. The story follows a literature professor faced with a decision to convert to Islam for career advancement, as the country’s social and political landscape is transformed by Sharia law. His own disillusionment is heightened by his Jewish girlfriend’s decision to escape the Islamization of France by moving to the Jewish state. He almost goes with her but then doesn’t, uttering the book’s now-famous line: “There is no Israel for me.”

I remember snagging on that sentiment the first time I read it. I could see why a disgruntled non-Jewish academic might hesitate to make aliyah, but to the extent that Houellebecq’s fictional portrayal contained a commentary on the real world, the conclusion felt wrong. There quite clearly is, or could be, an Israel for this person. It’s France, if it could just get off the course it’s on.

This is hardly impossible. In fact, throughout history, humans have changed the way they organized or conceived of themselves in order to take advantage of new opportunities or to address new challenges or threats. Such moments of inflection are often brought about by advances in technology, from the invention of the wheel, to the building of roads, to the invention of the printing press, to time- and space-shrinking inventions like the telegraph and the radio, which in turn bring about large changes in the way human beings see themselves and envision their relationship to some large community—and which also introduce new dangers.

We are in one such moment.

The robots are coming, people. There are artificial wombs. We are genetically editing out diseases that have terrorized humanity throughout recorded history, heading to Mars, fighting wars with drones, rewilding parts of nature, and raising extinct animals from the dead (or something).

Are these developments good or bad? Who knows! That’s the thing about new inventions; their effects are—always, entirely—dictated by how humans interact with them.

In our case, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. The digital technologies emerging today are incredibly powerful; like unbacked stallions, they’ll be able to be used, for pleasure and profit, by secure, skilled, intentional humans. But they will also require weak ones to run on. (“This is definitely not a technology where everyone wins,” in the words of Palantir’s Alex Karp.) Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we’re all facing a future in which some people will enjoy the possibility of safe, ambitious, beautiful human lives, and others will become robot fuel and zombie food. It’s scary and confusing, and every day gets more so.

At just this wild moment, filled with questions so incredible they’re effectively spiritual—at what point does a genetically edited person become equivalent to a machine? are rocks animate?!—the world suddenly entered a vortex where, instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is … Zionism.

In Tehran he fooled the regime, in Israel he built an empire. Now he prays for a new Iran

Like all young men in Iran, when Roni Aynsaz graduated from high school, he was required to serve in the military.

That’s when Aynsaz’s story took its first Hollywood-esque turn.

Today, he’s a successful 52-year-old businessman and the co-owner of the SCOOP shoe chain with dozens of stores across Israel. But before his conscription, young Aynsaz was a member of Tehran’s small Jewish community and, as such, destined for low-level positions, either in the military or in the civil service.

Instead, Aynsaz made a decision that would change the course of his life and many others’: When presented with the form to declare his religion, he circled “Muslim” instead of “Jewish.”

He soon found himself working in the Islamic Republic’s legal system under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, often helping fellow Jews under investigation by removing their files.

Eventually, he was discovered and fled the country to establish himself in Israel, founding SCOOP and additional businesses.

His early experience in subterfuge recently came in handy. Aynsaz has become a sort of Israeli celebrity as the winner of the Israeli version of the reality TV series “The Traitors,” which aired on Channel 12 last spring.

More than 30 years after fleeing Iran, he continues to maintain close ties with its people, including family and friends, he told The Times of Israel in a phone interview against the backdrop of the war in Iran.

“For the people in Iran, the war is very difficult,” Aynsaz said. “On the one hand, they are happy that the government might fall; on the other, people are sad for those who are getting killed in the war, because there are also innocents who are dying.”

“I will also tell you that people are angry at [US President Donald] Trump, because he said he wants someone from within Iran [to lead the country] and not Reza Pahlavi,” he added, referring to the exiled son of the last shah, who is a popular figure among many Iranians who oppose the regime.

IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

For decades, the community center in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights was covered with a huge Syrian flag. This week, that flag was nowhere to be seen. The hundreds who filled the community center came to console the family of Master Sgt. Maher Khatar, a native of the town and an IDF combat soldier, who was killed in Lebanon.

In the 1980s, those few Golan Druze with Israeli ID cards were victims of a religious and social boycott, considered to have betrayed the Syrian nation. Dr. Ramzi Halabi, from the Israeli Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, said this moment symbolizes the breaking of the last barriers between the residents of the Druze villages in the Golan and the State of Israel. "The Druze in Israel...have long since defined ourselves first of all as Israelis, and hope that in the next stage the identification with Israel will reach the Golan Heights."

Dr. Salim Barik, a political scientist who studies the Druze, said the process of the Israelization of the Druze in the Golan began with the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. "It started in 2011 when people said, 'Syria is falling apart, so it's clear we won't return to Syria and it won't be able to liberate the Golan Heights. The story is over - we're Israelis, let's become part of Israel.'"

"What strengthened this trend most was the massacre in Sweida.... About 800 Druze were slaughtered there, thousands were wounded and displaced, and villages were torched. Today there's a genuine fear of Muslims."

Sheikh Zahir al-Din said, "Israel stood by our side in Sweida when accursed people massacred our brothers, and we'll never forget that. I asked someone here who was pro-Syrian how he agreed to let his son enlist in the IDF. He replied: 'At the time, we had children and relatives in the Syrian army. Now there aren't any, and if my son enlists he'll fight ISIS, and I'm very pleased about that.'"

Read More