From Ian:
‘Never Again’ means ‘now,’ Florida Jewish Dem says in new ad
In a new campaign ad, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) focuses on fighting Jew-hatred and says that “‘Never Again’ is now.”
The Jewish congressman is running a newly drawn district against Scott Singer, a Republican and mayor of Boca Raton.
“My grandmother escaped the Nazis as part of the Kindertransport out of Berlin as a child,” Moskowitz told JNS. “My grandfather escaped the pogroms. Most of their family members were killed.”
Moskowitz currently represents Florida’s 23rd Congressional District. He is running in the 25th Congressional District, where an estimated 25% of residents are Jewish. He beat democratic socialist Oliver Larkin in the primary.
“Jews in this district and around the country see the significant rise of antisemitism and are worried that their kids and grandkids will not grow up in the same America that we did,” Moskowitz told JNS. “Now is the time for action.”
In the 30-second ad, Moskowitz quotes from the Passover Hagaddah: “In every generation, they rise against us.” He also talks about his great-grandparents, who were murdered at Auschwitz.
The Democratic congressman points to contemporary Jew-hatred, including a school shooter who carved Nazi swastikas into a gun.
“That’s why I’ve fought antisemitism, leading bipartisan laws to increase security at synagogues and Jewish nonprofits and expanding education so we can stop hate crimes before they happen,” he says in the ad. “Because ‘Never Again’ is now.”
Jonathan Sacerdoti:
The firework attack on my Maida Vale synagogue is horrifying but not surprising
So: am I surprised? Why would I be? How could I be? Surprise needs a first time, and we are long past ours. We stopped being surprised somewhere between the marches and the ambulances and the Green party and Tucker Carlson and Zohran Mamdani and the people hiding who they are in NHS hospitals. What replaced it is sense: the thing you feel in the stomach before you let it into the head, because the head has been trained to say: don’t exaggerate.
And that is the loop in every one of our minds. Are we exaggerating? Jumping to conclusions? Safe, or in danger? A firework, or a warning? Each nudge pushes us to the next dot, the next quiet conversation about what we should do, and when. Wouldn’t we be stupid not to?
Because something got out on 7 October, and it has not gone back in. The murderers filmed themselves, and a part of the world watched and felt not revulsion but appetite. Jews had been made to look weak again: people who could be slaughtered in their beds. And weakness, in a certain kind of mind, is not pitiable. It is exciting. It suggests the job might be finishable. That excitement reaches a hooded teenager in Maida Vale as surely as it reached a man with a knife in Crumpsall. It is the oldest trap we know: look weak and you whet the appetite; look strong and you are punished for spoiling it. Israel is being punished this month for strength. My synagogue was attacked for looking weak. If I must be, I know which I would rather be punished for.
Edward Miliband stood up in the Commons this month, as a ‘proud British Jew’, to announce £250 million for Jewish security, as if that would distract us from the ‘reset’ he instigated on our country’s relations with the Jewish nation. The money had already been announced in July, and it felt even more useless the second time it was thrust at us as a deflection from our very real concerns for our safety. Imagine paying for more fire hoses as you throw accelerant on the flames, feigning bafflement or blindness as the heat keeps rising. Perhaps Miliband was the Jew his friend had once thought of when he said we don’t understand British irony.
Jew-hatred has always been useful: it lets a country avoid looking at itself too hard. A government with a by-election to lose finds it far easier to talk about far-off settlements than about a growing climate of furious conspiracy and aggression aimed at its own Jewish citizens. Or about immigrants from places where they hate us lot, and hate Britain, too. This is one climate change Miliband and Burnham don’t care to try to halt. If we Jews feel things getting hotter, they’ll just promise us more fans.
How did I come to be away this year, I wondered? Who knows. Consciously, I had travelled to be with my in-laws, and for work. But I couldn’t help but notice that unconsciously I had chosen to be in a place designed for my safety, even if it cannot always guarantee it. Maybe Israel’s founders hoped a state would make the hatred fade. It changed its clothes instead. But the state changed something else: what Jews can do about it. Nobody there has to ask a minister, politely, to care.
In an email trying to keep itself calm, my community told us there was no reason to change our plans. We will be back in the pews this Shabbat, and again on Yom Kippur. We have sensed exactly what is going on, but will be there anyway.
Real human evaluation comes in our actions and behaviour, not our thoughts and hopes. That goes for governments too. We feel it. We sense it. Then we act: some by staying, some by going, all of us by no longer pretending. Joining the dots and looking behind us to trace the picture is not hysteria. It is the minimum intelligence required to stay alive.
Two fireworks launched at London synagogue by gang of youths on Rosh Hashanah
A gang of hooded youths launched fireworks at a west London synagogue on Sunday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, according to the local Jewish community.
Five teens waited outside the Lauderdale Road Synagogue in Maida Vale before two of them launched two fireworks toward the building at 3:23 p.m., startling a family walking by, according to a statement by the community and security footage cited by The Telegraph.
The Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi Community, which runs the synagogue, informed members of the incident and said the building was empty and no injuries or damage were caused by the “rocket fireworks.”
The incident was reported to Police and the Community Security Trust, the UK Jewish community’s security organization.
“Jewish families should be able to come together to celebrate Rosh Hashanah safely, openly and without fear,” said Rabbi Amir Ellituv, of the synagogue, which was built in 1896, vowing not to allow such incidents to “deter us from coming together as a community.”
A CST spokesman told The Telegraph that it was “aware of the incident,” saying despite the absence of injuries or damage, it was “nonetheless a serious incident that will undoubtedly cause concern.”
Police officers patrol the high street after two people were stabbed in Golders Green neighborhood, that has a large Jewish community, in London, April 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
“CST attended the scene and is in contact with the synagogue, and is working closely with the police to establish the full circumstances,” the spokesman added.
Antisemitic incidents in the UK have risen sharply since the war against Hamas in Gaza began in 2023, with the Community Security Trust, a Jewish community watchdog, saying in August that such incidents rose 21 percent in the first six months of 2026 compared to the same period last year, reaching the second-highest total on record for the first half of a year.
From Ian:
The ICJ's Pernicious Plan to Redefine Genocide
The Trump administration is working to dismantle the International Criminal Court. But a different tribunal, the International Court of Justice, could become a greater threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies. The ICJ is deciding a case, Gambia vs. Myanmar, that could drastically lower the legal threshold for genocide. This would pave the way for a genocide finding in South Africa's pending case against Israel. The lower threshold would also unleash genocide claims against the U.S.
The Genocide Convention requires proof of "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such." The ICJ is being urged to replace that clear, high standard with a vague, politically malleable one: a range of "facts and circumstances" assessed "comprehensively and holistically." Adopting a standard inconsistent with the Genocide Convention would transform the ICJ into a legislative body rewriting the treaty.
Lowering the threshold is unnecessary to find Myanmar committed genocide. Myanmar's forces reportedly perpetrated repeated mass executions of Rohingya civilians, including dozens of children, lining them up and shooting or hacking them to death. In this case, genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference.
This differs factually and legally from civilian deaths incidentally caused by Israeli strikes targeting Hamas fighters, particularly given Israel's precautions and Hamas's documented use of human shields.
WSJ Editorial:
If the International Court of Justice Lowers the Threshold for Genocide to Smear Israel, It Will Backfire
While the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutes individuals, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) adjudicates disputes between states. For each court, the temptation has been to expand its authority to pile on Israel. The ICJ is looking to use the case of Myanmar's attacks on the Rohingya minority to redefine genocide in preparation for South Africa v. Israel.
In Gaza, where Hamas built 400 miles of tunnels beneath cities, taxed and stole aid, and did everything to endanger its own civilians, genocide is far from the only reasonable inference from the war's casualties. The more reasonable inference is that Israel fought a defensive war against Hamas in the most difficult urban conditions ever seen, a war it stopped when Hamas released the hostages.
"Lowering the genocide threshold would transform genocide from a narrowly defined legal crime into an expansive vehicle for litigating the conduct of states at war," said Andres Munoz-Mosquera, chief legal adviser to the NATO Supreme Allied Commander, 2014-25. "A new and malleable standard could become a precedent through which virtually any military campaign involving substantial civilian casualties is recast as a genocide claim." He sees it being used by dictatorships and rogue states to handcuff Western democracies.
Holocaust Studies Professor Rips Apart Genocide Charge
There are too many excellent points to note in University of Florida Professor of Holocaust Studies Norman JW Goda’s masterful essay in The Telegraph, “How ‘genocide’ lost all its meaning.” But the central arguments are:
“Genocide” has been stripped of its precise legal meaning in the Gaza debate. Historically, genocide requires proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group, not simply mass casualties, destruction or even serious violations of the laws of war.
He says the genocide charge against Israel has become a political tool rather than a rigorously proven legal conclusion. He accuses activists, NGOs and some scholars of cherry-picking evidence, redefining genocide through ideological frameworks and using the accusation to delegitimize Israel and invert the historical legacy of the Holocaust.
Here are some excerpts:
Yet there is a new and notable self-assurance with which Israel is accused today of genocide, and has been since 2023. It comes from ceaseless allegations – at teach-ins, on talk shows and social media – which echo the carefully constructed illusion of authority that “genocide experts”, many of whom are not experts at all, are in consensus on the matter. In fact, the “consensus”, though noisy, never existed.
The intensity also comes from a misrepresentation of Israeli military operations together with a deliberate untethering of genocide from its legal definition to one created by the academic obsession with settler colonial theory – a social-justice-driven understanding of European settlement that ostensibly creates a long-term, white-supremacist genocidal structure which steadily eliminates indigenous peoples. As Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories and the troubadour of genocide accusations against Israel, puts it: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler-colonialism in Palestine.”
Albanese’s harangues show that anyone can allege anything. Indeed, one of the chief advantages of endlessly repeating accusations while leaning on the slender reeds of settler-colonial theory is that facts can be displaced by righteous rhetoric. In Israel’s case, allegations of Western settler colonialism erase Jewish indigeneity to the region, ignore that the descendants of Middle Eastern Jewish people who fled Arab countries after 1948 comprise up to half of Israel’s population, and delete that Zionist leaders accepted the 1947 UN partition resolution (and other peace initiatives) while Arab leaders rejected them.
—
It is possible to cobble together a more legalistic genocide accusation in similar bad faith. One can ignore that Hamas fights among the Palestinian civilian population and that it uses mosques, schools, and hospitals for everything from arms depots to headquarters. One can dismiss Israeli efforts at civilian harm mitigation. One can imagine, as a reenactment of medieval blood libels, that Israel targets children (and even embryos) rather than armed fighters. One can maintain that the destruction of buildings in Gaza has nothing to do with the fortified tunnels beneath them or the booby-traps within them. One can insist that Israel somehow intended to cause a famine by allowing 2,174,489 tons of aid into Gaza between October 2023 and today. And one can imagine that Israeli efforts to spare civilians are all part of a vast scheme called “humanitarian camouflage”, by which Israel commits genocide beneath a faux canopy of lawfulness. Or one can simply pretend that Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto.
The problem with all this is that genocide is defined not by proclamation, but by international statute and that ultimately, proof is required to render accusations into adjudicated crimes. The text of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention took two years to write. It received a unanimous affirmative vote in the UN General Assembly, and it has been ratified by 154 states, all of whom presumably read the text before signing. Briefly put, genocide is defined by one or more of five defined acts, headed by killing, “committed with intent to destroy” an ethnic, national, or religious group in whole or in part. The criterion is physical and biological destruction. UN debates between 1946 and 1948 reveal awareness that the definition was imperfect. There were concerns, legitimate as it turned out, that a looser definition could open the door to politically inspired accusations.
From Ian:
Federal Court Holds North Korea Liable for Terror Support Behind October 7 Attack
On September 8, a federal court held Iran and North Korea jointly and severally liable to American plaintiffs over seven terrorist attacks, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s October 7, 2023 assault on Israel, in a ruling that details a largely overlooked North Korean role involving training, weapons and underground-warfare assistance.
In a memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema granted default judgment on liability in a case brought by 47 U.S. nationals, including people killed or injured in seven terrorist attacks between 2019 and 2023 and immediate family members of the victims. The court concluded that the plaintiffs had established Iran and North Korea’s liability under the terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
The October 7 portion of the ruling is particularly striking. Brinkema wrote that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad jointly carried out the attack that severely wounded American plaintiffs Bernadette and Nir Brauner. According to the court, Iran provided funds, weapons, recruitment assistance and incentive payments to operatives involved in the attack. North Korea, the opinion states, provided training to Hezbollah, Hamas and PIJ operatives involved in the attack, as well as weapons or weapon components and “tunnel-building assistance.”
The underlying complaint is even more explicit. It alleges that North Korea aided the October 7 attack by providing training to operatives from Hezbollah, Hamas and PIJ, supplying weapons including rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and providing assistance related to tunnel construction. Because Iran and North Korea did not answer the lawsuit, those allegations were uncontested. The court nevertheless found that the plaintiffs had presented an adequate legal and factual basis to establish liability and held the two governments jointly and severally liable for the plaintiffs’ injuries and deaths.
A Decades-Old North Korean Pipeline
North Korea’s ties to Middle Eastern militant movements predate Hamas itself, while its military relationship with Iran stretches back to the early 1980s.
The complaint, summarized by Brinkema, describes Pyongyang as Iran’s “most powerful nation-state partner” and traces decades of cooperation involving missile development, weapons, military training and assistance to Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah.
The opinion recounts allegations that North Korean military personnel were dispatched to southern Lebanon in the early 2000s, where they used Pyongyang’s expertise to help develop underground military installations and an extensive network of tunnels. It also describes North Korean training provided to the IRGC and Hezbollah that allegedly flowed through Iran’s broader network of proxies.
That history has previously reached American courts. In a 2014 federal decision involving Hezbollah’s 2006 war against Israel, a U.S. district court found by “clear and convincing evidence” that North Korea had materially supported Hezbollah. The court identified weapons, military training and assistance constructing underground military infrastructure among the support supplied by Pyongyang.
A Congressional Research Service report similarly documented reports that North Korean trainers were sent to southern Lebanon to instruct Hezbollah personnel in constructing underground military facilities. The report also detailed longstanding North Korean weapons relationships with Iran and Syria and reported on the movement of North Korean arms believed to be destined for Hezbollah and Hamas.
Eugene Kontorovich:
Houses of Worship Deserve Protection from Disruption
Many conservatives have a bad taste in their mouths from any mention of “buffer zone” laws because of their widespread use in restricting protests and counseling activities outside of abortion clinics. But buffer zone laws are uncontroversially in force to protect the sanctity of places like cemeteries and funerals.
Congress has, in fact, protected houses of worship since 1994, but only as a secondary provision of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a statute to address a different problem and built around that problem’s assumptions. FACE reaches only force, threats of force, and physical obstruction — but not other kinds of conduct that can in practice disrupt or seriously interfere with religious services.
The free exercise of religion is a core First Amendment right. Thus, it is important to protect churches and synagogues with a free-standing statute. Because the Right to Worship Act protects against interference in religious exercise by private parties, it does not protect the constitutional right per se, which addresses governmental interference. But constitutional protection for worship does demonstrate its safeguarding to be a compelling government interest.
At the same time, it does not sweep nearly as far as abortion clinic access laws, some of which the Supreme Court has struck down on First Amendment grounds. For example, McCullen v. Coakley (2014) struck down a law that in effect barred any kind of speech, including one-on-one conversations within the buffer zone around a clinic. The Court found that while the state had a valid interest in “preventing harassment and intimidation,” a de facto no–speech zone swept too far. But that is exactly what the Right to Worship Act doesn’t do.
The federal bill only restricts particularly disruptive activities, which falls well within the constitutional allowance for time, place, and manner restrictions and is in line with McCullen. One person’s exercise of their rights cannot come at the expense of another — and thus the statute only “buffers” “conduct that meaningfully interferes with the ability of people to participate” in a scheduled religious service, or that “unreasonably hinders or deters” entrance.
It is also quite clear that many local authorities — like New York City’s mayor, who has cheered on synagogue demonstrations — will never enforce available local nuisance laws that could be used against such disturbances.
We recognize that disturbances around houses of worship are, in a sense, matters of local law and order which under a well-functioning system of federalism should not be within the purview of the federal government.
Yet 100 years of expansive Commerce Clause jurisprudence means that as a matter of current constitutional doctrine, it clearly is within federal power. The FACE Act, for example, lacks any statutory requirement connecting the conduct to interstate commerce, a gap the Supreme Court has yet to address.
The Right to Worship bill, by contrast, makes a “substantial effect on interstate commerce” an element of the offense — which means it can only be used in cases that truly do cross state lines. This language was borrowed from the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, not widely thought of as massive government overreach.
Thus, the Right to Worship Act doesn’t change the federalism landscape. Moreover, there is no need for conservatives to deny themselves, and themselves alone, the protections of existing constitutional law, while working to change it based on conservative principles.
At a time when religious values are under attack, it is more important than ever to safeguard the sanctuary itself. The Right to Worship Act is modest, bipartisan, and well within what the Constitution allows, at least as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Man arrested for allegedly making Jew-hatred threats against Ben Shapiro
Korby Aaren Strube, 29, of Horton, Kan., was arrested in Florida for allegedly posting threats to kill political commentator Ben Shapiro, referencing the Daily Wire co-founder’s Jewish faith.
Strube was arrested on Sept. 12 and faces 23 counts related to written or electronic threats to kill or cause bodily harm, as well as two counts related to using a two-way communications device to facilitate a felony, according to court records and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
According to an affidavit obtained by JNS from the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller of Palm Beach County, Strube allegedly made threats against Shapiro in social media posts on July 31, Aug. 1 and Aug. 2. The posts said he would be “giving the world a boost by killing Ben Shapiro for being Jewish” and that he was “killing this stupid Jew,” according to the affidavit.
“He invoked antisemitic conspiratorial themes as justification for the intended killing, attributing violence to ‘semites,’ to ‘Tel Aviv’ and to ‘a foreign government,’” the affidavit stated.
The Aug. 1 and Aug. 2 posts also included countdowns of 52 and 51 days, respectively, to the intended killing. The countdown pointed to Sept. 21-22, the dates of Yom Kippur this year, according to the affidavit.
The investigation began Aug. 4 after a private security firm providing protection for Shapiro alerted authorities to the posts, according to the sheriff’s office. Investigators subsequently determined that Strube was behind the social media account from which the threats were posted. Shapiro told investigators that he believed the threats were motivated by his Jewish faith and wanted to pursue charges.
From Ian:
JPost Editorial:
This year, Israel must move from its October 7 reckoning to national repair
The multitude of Israeli security challenges
What is the strategy for Gaza? How will Israel prevent another October 7 rather than merely promise that it will? How will it confront Iran and its proxies without allowing conflict to substitute for policy? How will it rebuild communities, care for the wounded, and support those who have carried the burden of military service?
The same test applies at home. A government cannot demand sacrifice from reservists and their families while indefinitely avoiding a fair arrangement for military and national service. It cannot claim to defend democracy abroad while treating independent institutions as domestic enemies. Nor can it restore public trust while accountability remains something demanded only of political opponents.
Israel’s international standing must also form part of this reckoning.
This week, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband accused extremist settlers of carrying out ethnic cleansing in parts of the West Bank and announced measures against settlement trade. Israel has every right to challenge accusations it considers false, selective or inflammatory. It should continue to expose the double standards, historical distortions and antisemitism that too often accompany international criticism.
But indignation is not a foreign policy. This newspaper warned in 2024 that Israel could not afford to become a pariah state and that the belief that it could simply fight alone was dangerous.
That warning has only grown more urgent. Israel cannot control the prejudices of its enemies, but it can control its own policies, the conduct of its officials, and whether extremist violence is confronted or tolerated.
When allies believe Israel will not restrain lawlessness in the West Bank, they begin making distinctions and imposing consequences. Condemning their response does not remove the underlying danger. Israel must enforce the law, protect Palestinians from violence and prevent ideological extremists from determining the country’s diplomatic future.
Hope does not rely on one camp alone
There is reason for hope in the new year, but it does not rest solely on the victory of one camp or the defeat of another. It rests on Israel’s continuing ability to correct course through democratic means.
Voters should demand concrete answers: an independent October 7 inquiry, a fair sharing of national obligations, clear political objectives for Israel’s military power, protection of democratic institutions and a serious plan to repair relations with allies and Jewish communities abroad.
The shofar is not a sound of self-congratulation. It calls us to wake up from slumber.
Israel’s strength has never depended on pretending that it makes no mistakes. It depends on recognizing danger, adapting to it, and refusing to lose the moral and democratic purpose for which the country exists.
This year must be the year in which reckoning finally becomes repair.
Aviva Klompas:
Palestinians deserve the dignity of accountability
If Palestinians are entitled to sovereignty, as the Carney government believes they are, then Palestinian leaders should be responsible for building the institutions that make sovereignty viable.
They should be responsible for whether their people vote, whether public money rewards violence, whether schools prepare children for co-existence and whether their political culture treats negotiation and compromise as diplomacy or betrayal.
None of this absolves Israel of responsibility for its actions. It is held accountable for the decisions of its elected government because that is what it means to treat a nation as a sovereign political actor. Palestinians deserve the same standard.
Successful states are built on institutions, accountability, the rule of law and political leadership capable and willing to make difficult choices. Foreign governments cannot manufacture a viable Palestinian state by removing the expectations placed on the people who would govern it.
This is what makes Canada’s decision so baffling. Ottawa granted one of the Palestinians’ most important diplomatic objectives before the reforms it deemed essential to statehood had been adopted. The message was that Palestinian leaders could receive the benefits of statehood before demonstrating their willingness or ability to assume its responsibilities.
The international community speaks about Palestinian dignity and self-determination. But dignity is inseparable from agency. Treating Palestinians with dignity means recognizing they are not victims of forces beyond their control, but a people whose leaders make choices about war and peace, democracy and authoritarianism, education and incitement, corruption and good governance.
The refusal to hold those leaders accountable has real consequences. A Palestinian born when Mahmoud Abbas was elected president could now be old enough to have children without ever having voted in a presidential election. That is not an Israeli policy. It is a Palestinian political failure.
Nor should Hamas’s continued armed presence in Gaza be treated as an unfortunate fact that everyone else must accommodate. Its leaders made choices, its members committed atrocities and its continued brutality carries consequences for the society in which it operates.
A serious commitment to Palestinian statehood requires more accountability, not less.
Canada says it wants Palestinians to exercise the right of self-determination. Then it should treat them as a people capable of exercising it, with all the responsibilities that entails. Palestinians do not need the international community to expect less of them. They need it to take their aspirations seriously enough to expect more.
Bassam Tawil:
The Palestinians' Dead-End Choice: Fatah or Hamas
Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority [PA] owe the Palestinian people – as well as Israelis and other victims – countless apologies. They owe apologies for corruption and mismanagement. They owe apologies for failing to build transparent and accountable institutions. They owe apologies for suppressing dissent and freedom of expression and for persecuting political opponents, journalists, human rights activists, and critics. They owe apologies for repeatedly rejecting compromises and peace initiatives and for policies that have contributed to decades of Israeli and Palestinian bloodshed. They owe apologies for failing to use international assistance to build a functioning economy and institutions that serve ordinary Palestinians. They owe their people an honest explanation for why Palestinians remain divided between two rival governments and without a functioning democratic political system.
The timing of this latest dispute is particularly significant.
Hamas has decided to participate [in the upcoming PA elections on November 28]... if true, such an arrangement would allow Hamas to re-enter Palestinian politics through the back door.
So, instead of changing its goals – brutally ruling Gaza and destroying Israel – Hamas will simply change its "name, structure and framework"?
Changing the label does not change the organization. A Hamas-affiliated candidate does not cease to be affiliated with Hamas simply because the word "Hamas" does not appear next to his name on the ballot.
Such a maneuver would turn the election into a political fiction: Hamas would be permitted to obtain parliamentary representation while avoiding the political consequences of openly running as Hamas. Allowing Hamas— in disguise or not – to run in the election would also legitimize the terrorist group without requiring it fundamentally to change.
That would be a serious mistake. The Palestinians have already seen what happens when Hamas acquires political power.
Hamas is bad, but who said that the PA is any better?
Palestinians have experienced corruption, political repression, and an absence of meaningful political renewal.
The problem is: What if one of the negotiating parties decides never to come to the table? Is the other party just supposed to hold everything in abeyance – unsettled forever – in case one day the other party might change its mind?
The Palestinians need a genuine third way – not merely another faction with a different name. They need leaders who are prepared to challenge the entrenched political culture of Fatah and Hamas. They need leaders who believe that the Palestinian national interest is more important than factional interests. They need leaders willing to confront corruption, reject authoritarianism, protect freedom of expression, build functioning institutions, and end the glorification of violence.
Above all, Palestinians need leaders courageous enough to tell their people an uncomfortable truth: there can be no genuine progress so long as the political choice remains confined to Fatah and Hamas, and that the primary objective of both groups remains the obliteration of Israel.
From Ian:
The Gaza casualty figures the West was too frightened to question
It is particularly revealing that Hamas and PIJ have now begun publishing names of their own dead fighters. Those obituaries provide information which was largely unavailable during the war. In several cases, they have effectively contradicted the original classification of the dead by international media and monitoring organisations.
The response should not be to conclude that every dead Palestinian journalist was a terrorist, or that every Palestinian doctor was secretly a militant. That would be very wrong. The proper conclusion is that every casualty database requires scrutiny.
There is another uncomfortable possibility that Western commentators have been reluctant to contemplate: Hamas and PIJ may have understood perfectly well the extraordinary political and emotional power of civilian status in the Western information environment.
A dead journalist generates headlines, as does a dead doctor. A dead paramedic produces photographs of ambulances, uniforms and bloodied medical equipment. A dead Hamas fighter produces none of these things.
If militant organisations deliberately blurred those categories, they were exploiting precisely the protections that democratic societies have painstakingly established for civilians and humanitarian workers, and that would be a particularly cynical form of information warfare.
But there is an equally important warning for Israel. The discovery of genuine Hamas or PIJ members among journalists and medical personnel does not give the Israeli military a licence to regard every journalist, doctor or paramedic as a terrorist. Nor does it eliminate Israel’s obligation to establish, before an attack where feasible, that a legitimate military target actually exists.
Indeed, recent events demonstrate why that distinction matters. An investigation published this week into the 2024 killing of World Central Kitchen workers has raised serious questions about Israeli targeting practices and the use of guilt by association.
Similarly, the Israeli military has recently opened criminal investigations into the deaths of five-year-old Hind Rajab and 15 Palestinian paramedics, after previously denying or disputing aspects of what happened.
So there are two truths which ought to be capable of existing simultaneously. Hamas and PIJ may have exploited civilian professions for military and propaganda purposes, and Israel can still be responsible for unlawful or reckless attacks against genuine civilians.
The refusal to acknowledge the first truth because it complicates the second is propaganda. The refusal to acknowledge the second because it complicates the first is propaganda too. What is most troubling is the intellectual laziness of the Western debate.
For years, journalists and politicians have demanded that Israel substantiate allegations about Hamas operating from civilian infrastructure. That demand is legitimate, but the same standard should now be applied in the opposite direction.
When an individual appears in hospital photographs wearing medical clothing and subsequently appears in militant imagery carrying a weapon, journalists should investigate, and when the evidence does not stand up, that should be reported too.
That is what journalism is supposed to mean.
The greatest danger is not discovering that Hamas sometimes lied about its dead, it is in discovering that Western media organisations were so invested in a particular leftist narrative that they stopped asking whether it was true.
Gaza has produced enough suffering without adding another casualty to the list: the credibility of journalism itself.
New York Times’ Gaza war coverage was clearly biased against Israel, damning study reveals
The New York Times’ coverage of the first months of the war in Gaza displayed a clear bias against Israel by downplaying the country’s casualties while minimizing Hamas’ role in sustaining the conflict, a new study found.
A review of the Times’ 1,559 articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, showed that the Times often omitted deaths sustained by the Jewish military while looking the other way on ongoing Palestinian violence once the war began after Hamas terrorists’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management, who published his findings in the Studies in Conflict & Terrorism academic journal, said the Times’ coverage was clearly skewed against Israel.
“Drawing on a corpus of 1,559 news articles I document a dominant narrative consistent with a framing that assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict,” Pinker wrote.
“It describes Hamas’s October 7 attack followed by Israeli military violence and mounting Palestinian casualties, while largely omitting Israeli casualties post-October 7, Hamas fighter casualties, and post-October 7 Palestinian violence.
“Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering appear two out of every three days, while comparable accounts of Israeli suffering rarely appear,” he said.
A total of 437 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the Jewish state began its offensive in Gaza, with dozens of police officers and civilians also killed and injured in terror attacks throughout the war, according to Israeli officials.
Pinker argued that the Times’ coverage ultimately portrayed Israel as the “sole aggressor” in the conflict while Palestinians were depicted as “passive victims.”
Mahmood urged to ban Doctors Without Borders over ‘terror links’
Shabana Mahmood is being urged to proscribe Doctors Without Borders (MSF) over its staff’s alleged links to terrorist groups.
UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) has written to the Home Office, Charity Commission and Fundraising Regulator demanding that it investigate alleged ties between Doctors Without Borders and Palestinian terror groups.
The pro-Israel lobbying group is calling on Ms Mahmood, the Home Secretary, to ban the charity in a manner akin to Labour’s proscription of Palestine Action.
Palestine Action was banned by the Government last year after officials claimed that serious criminal damage it had inflicted met the threshold for proscription under the Terrorism Act. The move made membership of, or support for, the group a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
A report produced by UKLFI, seen by The Telegraph, describes the alleged connections between MSF employees and terrorists, including the late Fadi Jihad Mohammed al-Wadiya, a Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militant.
Wadiya, a physiotherapist who was employed by MSF between 2018-22 and then again from Oct 7, 2023, was killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on June 25, 2024, in an attack condemned by the charity.
Doctors Without Borders initially denied Wadiya’s involvement with the terrorist group, but on Feb 24 this year the PIJ published a poster naming him as a “martyr commander” and identifying him as “deputy head of its military manufacturing unit”.
Only then did Doctors Without Borders, who still have Wadiya listed as an employee on their website, edit their post about him to say: “On 24 February 2026, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) publicly stated that Fadi Al Wadiya had been a member of the group.
“MSF had no indication that Fadi Al Wadiya might have been involved in military activity of any kind prior to his killing by the Israeli Forces.
“If the Israeli authorities had any reliable information about Fadi’s involvement in military activity, they never shared it with MSF either prior to his killing or when we reached out immediately after he was killed to ask for clarifications around the circumstances of his death.
“We would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity. Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and patients.”
The report also raises concerns about Nasser Hamdi Abdelatif Al Shalfouh, an MSF driver who is accused by Israel of being a sniper for the Hamas Jabaliya battalion.
Doctors Without Borders has never addressed allegations of Mr Shalfouh’s involvement with the proscribed organisation.
In 2023, MSF UK raised £11.3m, and ring-fenced around £1m for projects in the Palestinian territories. In 2024, this amount was increased to £2.7m, according to research by UKLFI.
UKLFI claims that despite these sizeable donations, appropriate safeguarding measures are not in place to minimise the risk that money raised by Britons could be used to benefit people associated with proscribed groups.
A UKLFI spokesman said: “British donors giving money to MSF are entitled to expect the highest possible standards of vetting and due diligence, particularly where substantial sums are being transferred into territory controlled by Hamas.
From Ian:
Israel celebrates first Rosh Hashanah in three years without hostages in Gaza
Israeli Jews ushered in Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, at sunset on Friday, the first in three years without any hostages in Gaza or major fighting in the Strip or elsewhere, though conflicts on several fronts remain on a low boil, and the military was on alert in case of escalation in the war with Iran.
“Last Rosh Hashanah eve, we asked for a better year to come. But before any other requests, there was one simple, clear request above all: that all of our hostages would come home,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a video published to his personal X account.
It was shortly after the Jewish New Year in 2025 that the US-brokered ceasefire deal secured the return home of the last 20 living hostages whom the Hamas terror group abducted in its October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, and held captive in the Strip.
Netanyahu, with uplifting music in the background, surveyed Israel’s military accomplishments over the last year, declaring: “Do you know another nation that fights on seven fronts and wins on all of them?” – though the claim was sure to come under scrutiny, as Israel has not secured the promised “total victory” on its major fronts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Netanyahu’s boast also comes as Israel heads into an election next month, with the prime minister’s role in the failures of October 7 a key issue.
On Thursday, it was reported that Israel was preparing to counter the possibility of Iranian ballistic missile fire, as the Islamic Republic’s persistent attacks against Jordan and the success of the US economic blockade against Iran were both seen to point toward a potential escalation.
However, there was no concrete warning or specific plot uncovered ahead of the holiday.
Bruce Pearl:
New boycott of West Bank Jews is based on lies
Much of the reporting relies on a United Nations database treated as a running scoreboard of settler crimes.
A 2025 study by Israeli security expert Gabi Siboni compared the UN’s count of roughly 1,800 settler-related incidents with Israeli law enforcement’s numbers for the same period.
Police opened 967 investigations; 61 led to indictments.
The Kohelet Policy Forum, examining an earlier version of the UN data, found it included confrontations with Israeli security forces and events involving no violence at all.
We saw the same rush to judgment last year when Jews were accused of torching a 5th-century church in the Christian village of Taybeh.
There was a fire nearby, but the church wasn’t touched. Israeli investigators found no damage, while video showed young Jewish men from a neighboring farm running toward the flames with firefighting equipment.
The fire was real, but the story built on top of it wasn’t.
So, yes, condemn violence and hooliganism. Arrest the perpetrators. Prosecute them.
But don’t turn the crimes of a few into an indictment of hundreds of thousands of Jews while treating vastly more numerous Palestinian attacks against those Jews as background noise.
False narratives have consequences.
Britain says its new policy isn’t a boycott of Israel, only of Jews and businesses in Judea and Samaria. So Jews can live and do business in certain places but not in others.
We’ve seen that in the past. That’s called a ghetto.
Florida Rep. Randy Fine has already warned that British companies complying with such a boycott could themselves face exclusion under Florida’s anti-boycott law.
Other states and the federal government should follow suit.
Europe has a long and ugly history of deciding where Jews may live and with whom people may do business.
Before Britain and its neighbors head down that road again, they ought to check both their own history and their facts.
American lawmakers ought to make them.
Hamas planned Berlin-Vienna attacks for Oct. 7 anniversary, indictment shows
Hamas planned coordinated terrorist attacks in Berlin and Vienna to mark the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, according to a 214-page indictment filed by Germany’s federal prosecutor.
The attacks were to take place simultaneously or in close succession around Oct. 7, 2025, targeting Israeli and Jewish interests in the two European capitals, according to the indictment, obtained by WELT, which — like POLITICO — is part of the Axel Springer Global Network.
The plot was supported by an international weapons-procurement network that moved pistols, an automatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition through Denmark, Germany and Austria.
Federal prosecutors said last year that they had arrested men linked to the Palestinian militant group who were suspected of planning attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Germany. The indictment, which has not been made public, reveals that Vienna was also an intended target — and that the attacks in the two capitals were to be coordinated. The principal targets included Israeli diplomats, Jewish community centers and pro-Israel demonstrations.
Seven men have been charged in connection with the plot and remain in pretrial detention, according to the indictment. One of the accused was working as a confidential informant for Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. The files show that the informant continued reporting to his intelligence handler while allegedly failing to disclose the full extent of his own involvement in obtaining ammunition for the group.
The indictment portrays the plot as part of a broader shift in Hamas’ operations in Europe. Intelligence assessments cited in the filing say plans existed even before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack to establish and train operational cells on the continent, using Turkey as a base and directing attacks remotely from abroad.
From Ian:
John Ondrasik:
What 9/11 taught us about courage, unity and the price of freedom
Twenty-five years after 9/11, America finds itself in another battle — this one for the soul of our nation and, more broadly, for the future of Western civilization.
Remembering 9/11: How educators teach the tragedy 25 years later Video
The threats are not identical to those we faced in 2001. But they are real. Radical Islamism remains a global threat, while antisemitism and anti-American extremism increasingly find expression across the ideological spectrum. Ideas once confined to society’s fringes now travel instantly, and with little consequence, through universities, political movements and social media. The enemy is in the building, and time is not on our side.
That is why "Never Forget" cannot become merely a slogan printed on a bumper sticker or repeated once every September.
It is an obligation. It is our obligation.
We have a duty to teach our children what happened on September 11, 2001: about the evil fanatics who attacked us, why they attacked us, and the carnage of what unchecked extremism can produce.
But "Never Forget" means something more.
It means remembering the best of us.
It means telling our children about the firefighters who climbed stairwells while everyone else was running down. The police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens who ran toward collapsing infernos to save people they had never met. The passengers of Flight 93 who understood what was happening and, knowing the probable cost, fought back.
They represent the best of humanity.
Twenty-five years later, their courage should still challenge and inspire us.
Their sacrifice should remind us that America is not sustained merely by institutions, elections or slogans. It survives because generation after generation chooses to defend the principles that make the country worth defending.
Memory fades. History becomes distant. Tuesdays come and go.
But some Tuesdays must never be forgotten.
May the memory of those we lost — and the example of the heroes of September 11, 2001 — give us the strength, courage and fortitude to fight for America every day, especially Tuesdays, for the next 250 years.
Let’s Roll…
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us
I began this essay with Mohamed Atta in a Hamburg apartment, calmly writing instructions for his burial while living inside one of the richest and freest societies in the world. That image matters because it strips away the comforting explanation the West preferred: that beneath the theological language there must always lie a more familiar material grievance waiting to be negotiated, subsidized, or therapeutically addressed.
Twenty-five years later, the more uncomfortable truth is that the West has become much better at finding, capturing, or killing men like Atta, but still hesitates to confront the milieu he emerged from: the institutions, networks, doctrines, funding streams, and civilizational ambitions that shape him long before he appears on a watchlist.
Civilizational resilience is not a vague confidence that democracies always muddle through. It is the hard capacity of a people to see its vulnerabilities clearly, repair them in time, and deny its enemies the use of its virtues as weapons. To do that, it is important for us to acknowledge that our virtues are real, and uniquely our own—so much so that millions of men have fought and died over centuries to make them real and widely shared. We did not fight those battles because all cultures are the same, or all values are equal. Rather, our ancestors, real and imagined, sacrificed on a civilization-wide scale, so that men and women of all races and backgrounds could think and live freely, according to the dictates of one’s own conscience. Those who share our foundational values belong among us; those who deny the primacy of those values have every right to pursue their own versions of happiness elsewhere.
It is high time that our elites understand that the primacy of the West is not an accidental gift of fate, nor was it largely unjust. Injustice is a feature of all societies and cultures. The West is unique because of its regard for the individual conscience and its ability to correct its mistakes. It is frankly insane to demand that the West recognize the right of our enemies to destroy and replace the civilization that we built according to the values of the Reformation and the Enlightenment with the values of other cultures distinguished by centuries of stagnation and decay. No such right of replacement exists in any society or culture.
To deny the radical and positive importance of Western culture to the human inheritance is more than a form of historical and individual blindness; it is a death wish that we can no longer afford to indulge. Tocqueville wrote that the greatness of America lay in her ability to repair her faults, not in being more enlightened than other nations, and that is still the right standard by which to judge the republic at 250. The question now is no longer whether America can kill terrorists faster than they regenerate. A resilient civilization would redesign its protections so that free information, migration rules, and associational liberty function as intended, to shelter citizens rather than adversaries. It would rebuild formative institutions, repair its leadership class, and recover enough constitutional confidence to resist civilizational subversion without abandoning liberty itself. It would also build a wall against people who do not share our culture and indeed actively wish to destroy it.
If America and Europe can still do that, 9/11/2026 will be remembered as the moment they chose survival with clarity. If they cannot, Mohamed Atta’s will and the quarter-century that followed will stand as evidence that a civilization can know its enemies, kill their foot soldiers, send mighty armies halfway around the world, and still fail to save itself.
If 9/11 happened today
Osama bin Laden himself would be reframed with remarkable speed. In 2001 he was correctly understood as the operational and ideological leader of the Islamist global insurgency that declared war on the United States and its allies, celebrating the slaughter of civilians and rooting its programme in a coherent reading of Islamic texts and history. Who knows – his image may even be held high by Australian celebrities or emblazoned on our iconic monuments. Elites, academia, politicians and activist networks would insist on ‘context’. So perhaps bin Laden’s oldest son, Hamza, was right when he said, ‘We are all Osama.’
Osama would be presented as a complex, charismatic figure shaped by Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, American support for the mujahedin, Saudi politics and legitimate grievances against the West. Mainstream politicians would still formally condemn the attacks, yet the surrounding conversation would soften the edges: ‘Bin Laden was wrong, but he had a point.’ Replaying the videos of his statements or the celebrations that followed 9/11 might risk ‘stigmatising’ communities and could see demands by our e-Safety Commissioner for further crackdowns on what we can say and who can say it.
One reason 9/11 today would be turned upside down is a deep strategic failure to understand the enemy. As retired US Marine Corps General Jim Mattis explains in Call Sign Chaos, anyone who has studied history knows that the enemy always moves against your perceived weakness. One of ours is allowing those who hate our way of life to migrate to our country believing eventually they will love us.
One of the least-known yet most strategically influential al-Qaeda figures was Abu Musab al-Suri, who was arrested in 2005 in Pakistan. No other individual did more to transform al-Qaeda’s strategy into a globalised umbrella. He saw how jihad could become mainstreamed into many aspects of Western society – not just physical terrorism, but merged with leftist grievances and victim-based struggles now highly visible in Western cities. Al-Suri recognised the opportunity for mass mobilisation. He saw the Palestinian intifada as the prototype, scaled up to reach the home of the American invaders and their infidel allies from every race and place. Al-Suri was a revolutionary mastermind.
Sadly this revolutionary movement will not be tamed by riding the four horses of weakness: apology, appeasement, acquiescence and acceptance. Nor will it be understood through conventional Western thinking and DEI workshops run by earnest facilitators who fear the consequences of offending others with realism. As explained by Richard Belfield in Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, the 12th-century commander Saladin found when he threatened the Ismaili Assassins that they welcomed violence. Their letter replied: ‘We have read the gist and details of your letter and taken note of its threats against us with words and deeds, and by God it is astonishing to find a fly buzzing in an elephant’s ear and a gnat biting statues. Others before you have said these things and we destroyed them and none could help them…. You know the outward aspect of our affairs and the quality of our men, what they can accomplish in an instant and how they seek the intimacy of death…. Prepare means for disaster… for I will defeat you from within your own ranks and take vengeance against you at your own place and you will be as one who encompasses his own destruction.’ This is just as we see it today.
The eerie and evil manipulation by the Islamist global insurgency is the implied threat of further Bondi-style attacks if we do not accept their demands. Yet if this trajectory continues, future generations will inherit a West that has already conceded the decisive terrain – its own population, its own language and its right to name the enemy.
The price of continued denial is not theoretical. It is the slow, irreversible loss of a commitment, and a diminishing courage to fight for something greater than ourselves that is the bright light of Western civilisation.
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
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