From Ian:
Explosive Archives Confirm the Nazi Origins of Palestinian Terror Finance
Archival material newly unsealed in Belgrade casts a harsh spotlight on collaboration between Nazi Germany and Islamist leadership during the Second World War. Hidden for decades in Yugoslavia’s national archives, a slim investigative file on Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, confirms both the scale of his operational role in Nazi Europe and the political suppression that later ensured the case would never be pursued.
The file is not thin because evidence was lacking. It is thin because the investigation was stopped.
The documents reinforce a historical continuum stretching from the Mufti’s wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany to the postwar survival of Nazi capital networks that later financed the emergence of Palestinian terror organizations. This is precisely the through-line Patricia Posner and I documented in our 2024 joint investigation published by the Jewish Chronicle, Revealed: Nazi Financial Fixer Who Funded Palestinian Terror. In that exposé we traced how François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi financier, preserved Hitler’s political and financial legacy and redirected looted Nazi assets into Middle Eastern militant causes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The Belgrade materials focus heavily on al-Husseini’s activities in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina. Far from acting merely as a political intermediary or propagandist, the Mufti pushed aggressively for operational control. He helped facilitate the creation of multiple Waffen-SS divisions composed of local Muslims, units that went on to commit mass atrocities against Jews and Serbs, including village burnings, executions, rape, and systematic terror.
What emerges from the archive is not only violence, but design.
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Documents assembled by Yugoslav investigators before their work was halted reveal how deliberately the alliance between the Nazi leadership and the Mufti was constructed. A wartime memorandum authored by a senior German official responsible for Muslim minority affairs in occupied territories records extensive coordination between Nazi authorities and al-Husseini aimed at mobilizing Muslim populations for the Nazi war effort.
The Mufti was not simply endorsing Third Reich objectives. He was shaping policy. He advocated embedding religious authorities directly within German military units, arguing that imams should be used to indoctrinate and motivate Muslim soldiers serving in both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. He pushed for the creation of formal training institutions designed to fuse political Islam with National Socialist ideology, producing cadres capable of spreading both doctrines in tandem.
This was not theoretical. A similar religious training model had already been implemented under his direction in Bosnia. Graduates of that system were deployed across the Balkans, reinforcing Nazi control and participating directly in atrocities against civilian populations. The Belgrade files confirm that the fusion of Islamism and Nazism was neither accidental nor rhetorical. It was institutionalized.
The archives also expose another dimension of the alliance that resonates powerfully with what followed in the postwar period: money.
UK must stop giving millions to the corrupted fiefdom of Unrwa
The West is divided into nations that recognise the dangerous reality that has crept up on them, and nations that cling onto the hope that appeasement underpinned by the mirage of international law will prolong the illusion of peace.
While Israel has been forced to confront threats on seven fronts, the West has mostly had the luxury of appeasement.
A newly assertive United States has been awakened from the “All eyes on Rafah” delusion under President Biden, which obstructed Israel’s fight against antisemitic Hamas terrorists, to siding with Israel when President Trump neutered Iran’s threats of a second Holocaust by bombing their underground nuclear facilities.
Then there is the United Kingdom, which, along with others, continues to feebly call for “restraint” every time Israel strikes a blow against common enemies who hate Jews and the West, while keenly lapping up one piece of propaganda after another.
As Israeli hostages were starving in the dungeons of Gaza, Sir Keir Starmer demanded an end to the “man-made humanitarian crisis” there while recognising a State of Palestine without even conditioning it on the return of the hostages. He handed hardened terrorists the diplomatic jackpot free of charge. So much for moral clarity.
CAA’s polling now reveals that 91 per cent of British Jews opposed the move, with barely 5 per cent in favour. This was a climax of Britain’s immoral and self-defeating foreign policy, after decades under the spell of anti-Israel propaganda. Unsurprisingly, Israel pays little heed. British calls for “an immediate ceasefire” no longer land when Israeli children have been kidnapped in the wake of Palestinian terrorists committing the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.
Nothing demonstrates willing Western gullibility more than the United Nations. For decades, the UN has been a parody of itself. Its Human Rights Council bulges with the worst perpetrators of human wrongs. As Israel witnessed in southern Lebanon, UN peacekeepers are simply a shield behind which terrorists prepare for mass murder.
Perhaps the worst UN agency is Unrwa. Whereas all the world’s refugees fall under the remit of UNHCR, Unrwa focuses only on those designated as refugees under their own special definition in Gaza and other territories neighbouring Israel. Founded in 1949, Unrwa spends over $3 billion a year on six million people, while UNHCR spends $11 billion on 21 times that number.
Unrwa is a corrupted fiefdom within the already distorted world of the UN. Its practices have been exposed endlessly. Its educational curricula have referred to the Jewish state as the “enemy”, taught mathematics by counting “martyred” terrorists, used phrases such as “jihad is one of the doors to paradise” in grammar lessons, and more. Its facilities have been used to store munitions and as rocket launch pads in practically every conflict with Israel.
Perhaps the worst open secret has been that Unrwa teachers and officials repeatedly moonlit as terrorists. Israeli intelligence alleged that 12 of Unrwa’s staff participated in October 7, including taking hostages. UN Watch investigators claimed that 490 Unrwa staff had links to terrorist organisations. Yahya Sinwar was found carrying an allegedly fake Unrwa identification card but there was no such excuse when the leader of Hamas in Lebanon was found to have served as head of the Unrwa teachers’ union.
Hostages who made it out of Gaza alive described being held by Unrwa personnel or in Unrwa facilities, including British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari.
The importance of Unrwa to Palestinian terrorists perhaps became most blatant amid the storm that followed the establishment by the US of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which essentially briefly replaced Unrwa. Its Gazan workers were murdered by Hamas, and disinformation campaigns convinced many a credulous Western leader and journalist that Israel was massacring Gazans collecting food amid a supposed famine depicted using the emaciated figures of children suffering from congenital diseases.
In a pre-October 7, totalitarian, Hamas-run Gaza, one might argue that there was no way Unrwa could operate without becoming enmeshed with terrorist organisations using it for cover. I would agree.
It is therefore no wonder that our polling found that 89 per cent of British Jews do not want taxpayers to fund Unrwa. When the previous government suspended funding to Unrwa, it had good reason.
From Ian:
Is This Time Different in Iran?
So after two weeks of the largest nationwide demonstrations in Iran since the Islamic Revolution, what has changed and why? It had nothing to do with negotiating tables and a lot to do with battlespace.
First, let’s note that this month’s huge anti-regime demonstrations in more than 100 Iranian cities were not ignited by a single big domestic event like a blatantly stolen election or the murder of an innocent young woman. The Iranian rial has been crashing past a million to the dollar for weeks, and inflation reached the point where the Tehran bazaar was losing money on every transaction, so it closed. Something else drove the following events such as the South Pars energy strike and reported military defections.
The battlespace started shaping up six years ago this month under Trump, with the U.S. killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran, by U.S. drones at Baghdad Airport. He had just arrived from Damascus, where he was briefing former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a plan to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, as had been done in Tehran in 1979. Iran’s Iraqi cat’s-paw Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and 10 senior Iranian briefers and bodyguards were also killed in the strike. After 20 years of Bush, Obama, and Biden kid gloves, Tehran was legitimately frightened.
And then after the Tehran-directed atrocity against Israel in October 2023, Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, Muhammed Deif, Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Aqil, Hashem Safieddine, and Ismail Haniyeh in an IRGC safe house in Tehran, and almost a hundred more in Lebanon and Gaza. Deprived of its decapitated Hezbollah Praetorian Guard—the Syrian Ba’ath Party didn’t trust its own people any more than the Bolivarian Maduro trusted Venezuelans more than Cubans—the criminal Assad family fled to Moscow. Then, last summer, the Israeli and U.S. air forces wiped out much of the Iranian military’s general staff and key nuclear sites. The pro-Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing dominoes continued to fall with the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the massacre of his Cuban protection detail, the seizure of Russia’s ghost ships, and the spread of Starlink terminals in Iran.
Iranians have seen the regime and its backers exposed and humiliated by an American administration, and they were quick to exploit this roll of the dice. Unlike pro-Hamas nihilists from Berkeley to Dublin, they have hit their streets in millions without a single keffiyeh or “Allahu Akbar,” motivated by American successes against their regime and its feckless backers.
As of the time of writing, the regime has turned off the internet and all landlines, and Khamenei has emerged from a two-day silence to express defiance. This is no surprise to anyone who knows that Khamenei’s greatest fear is moderation that causes the regime to bend and then break. As expressed in Alex Vatanka’s The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran, Khamenei became obsessed with the prospect of an “Iranian Gorbachev” who would impose reforms and usher in a USSR-style collapse; the more so because this was addressed by Tom Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, in a 1996 column titled “Waiting for Ayatollah Gorbachev” after he visited Iran. That pressed all of the leader’s buttons. Expect his defiance to continue as long as he is alive or in power.
Which may not be long, because he faces two threats. The one in front of him is the unpredictable Donald Trump, who has already shed Iranian blood and has promised to “rescue” the Iranian people. The one behind him is the IRGC, which holds all the firepower in Iran and which knows—as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knew—that the mullahs are despised by nearly the entire population. They are unlikely to lay down their guns or give up the 40% of the Iranian economy they control. They are led by Ahmad Vahidi, an internationally sanctioned terrorist.
“Terrorists are assholes” was a wise saying of one of my counterterrorist colleagues at the CIA. She didn’t just mean that terror plots ruined our weekends and sleep schedules. She meant that terrorists are psychopathic, disloyal, and venal creatures who could and did mistreat each other and turn against each other. The top ranks of the IRGC are full of them.
What might lead the IRGC to sideline or overthrow Khamenei and his weak president, Masoud Pezeshkian? Two kinds of strikes: an anti-regime blow from the United States, or the labor variety that would shut down Iran’s energy sector. If both occur, my money is on a coup, and goodbye mullahs.
JPost Editorial:
As ceasefires unravel, Israel faces critical decisions on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria fronts
Doubts about Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa remain strong in Israel’s political and military echelons.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have accepted US President Donald Trump’s request to give Sharaa a chance. Israel should take the opening seriously and test it with hard requirements.
For Israel, a successful security understanding with Syria would preserve its ability to secure itself through control on the ground while laying the foundations for wider communication and cooperation.
The rare joint statement released on Tuesday signals Israel’s willingness to try a different approach on the Syrian front while tying any diplomatic steps to the protection of Druze minorities in the area.
That condition offers a real indicator of whether Damascus can govern responsibly and keep hostile actors away from the border.
As ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza remain in limbo, Israel now has a rare opportunity to pacify the Syrian border and strengthen the security of its northern communities.
Jerusalem should define redlines, demand verification, and keep freedom of action intact. It must also remain wary of a weak agreement that collapses at the first test.
The potential benefits feel closer than they did a week ago, including an image that once sounded absurd: Israelis and Syrians sharing Mount Hermon in peace – even if that vision starts with a jointly operated ski resort.
Jonathan Tobin:
What normalizing antisemitism looks like
In the last year, incidents of bloody antisemitic terrorism in Boulder, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Manchester, England; and last month, on Bondi Beach in Australia have demonstrated what happens when governments are indifferent to advocacy for these smears.
Jews internalizing hatred
But the willingness of some Jews to dismiss antisemitism, even after all the horror of the last two years, is also about something else. It’s clear that a minority—albeit a sizable one in places like New York, where so much of the Jewish community leans hard to the left—of the Jews have internalized the animus directed at them and now blame the victims, whether Israelis or Americans, of antisemitism for the behavior of the antisemites.
It is not atypical behavior for victims of discrimination to look inward to find the causes of violence rather than at the perpetrators and ideas that animate them. But it is more likely to happen when mainstream discourse becomes dominated by the Jew-haters. Under those circumstances, it is far easier for those who promote this noxious ideology to get away with pretending to be an advocate for human rights, as Mamdani does, and for the Jewish targets of victimization to be told to pipe down and stop complaining.
That was, after all, just how African-Americans who protested against those who promoted segregation and discrimination during the century of Jim Crow racism in the United States. In an era where such vile bigotry was made commonplace, they were also dismissed and told they were overreacting. Now, the very people on the left who falsely analogize that dark period of American history to the Palestinian war on Jewish existence, supported by Marxists and Islamists, are telling Jews to back down in much the same manner.
The only answer to Mamdani and those promoting the idea that those who notice the antisemitism of the left and American Muslims are just partisan hysterics must be the same one given by advocates of civil rights to the racists of America’s past. Those in the media and the political establishment must be told that members of the Jewish community aren’t going to be marginalized by being told to calm down and not believe evidence seen almost daily. Decent Americans of every faith and ethnic background must make it clear that Jews will not be silent or acquiesce to a mayor out for retribution. His actions must be resisted with the same loud and determined protests and political action that Americans have eventually meted out to other types of hate-mongers.
From Ian:
Hamas document casts shadow over former EU envoy’s role in Gaza
In the document, dated 28 September 2021, officials from Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry describe Kühn von Burgsdorff as “a professional figure” who “strongly supports and sympathises with the Palestinians”.
“He is demanding [that the EU] open official channels to engage with Hamas, but the public policy of the EU dismisses this,” the document states.
At the same time, Hamas officials acknowledge that the envoy’s stance did not reflect the EU’s institutional position and could change with his departure.
“The positive approach and inclinations of the EU representative to the Palestinian territories and his sympathy with the Palestinian cause are a personal approach, and this might change when the current EU representative changes, since the European position is committed to the red lines of American policies,” the document reads.
Asked about Hamas’ assessment of his conduct, Kühn von Burgsdorff told Euractiv that he acted fully within his mandate.
“I have defended the internationally enshrined right to self-determination of the Palestinian people in full compliance with and implementation of applicable EU policy,” he said.
He added that he consistently represented Brussels’ official position. “At no point have I made public statements that contradicted the EU’s officially adopted policy towards Israel and Palestine,” he said.
Last year, Kühn von Burgsdorff contributed two op-eds to Euractiv on the Gaza conflict, including one under the headline “The EU’s moral collapse”.
‘Jerusalemite martyrs’
The Hamas report also claims that Kühn von Burgsdorff was “hated by both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority” due to his solidarity with “Jerusalemite martyrs” whose homes were demolished, and his expressions of sympathy following the death in custody of Nizar Banat, a Palestinian activist and critic of the Palestinian Authority.
The document recommends strengthening coordination and communication between the EU and “Palestinian political, governmental and [Hamas] movement parties”.
Olga Deutsch, vice-president of NGO Monitor, said the documents confirm that Kühn von Burgsdorff “actively worked to undermine official EU anti-terror vetting policies”.
“It is deeply troubling to see a senior EU diplomat engage in open, ideological political advocacy, particularly when it serves an EU-designated terror group,” Deutsch told Euractiv. “In Hamas’ own words, he even ‘demanded’ the opening of official EU channels to engage with a proscribed terror organisation – an appalling subversion of EU regulations and a blatant contradiction of the Union’s public policy.”
She added that the EU must significantly strengthen its internal controls and vetting mechanisms. “How can the EU guarantee that its grantees are not engaging in terror glorification if it cannot even vouch for its own diplomats?” she said.
Amnesty International Refuses to Admit That Hamas Wants to Kill All Jews and Annihilate Israel
In its nearly 200-page report on the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, “Targeting Civilians: Murder, Hostage-Taking and Other Violations by Palestinian Armed Groups in Israel and Gaza,” Amnesty International omitted years of statements by Hamas leaders and language from its charter demonstrating genocidal intent against Jews.
This omission renders Amnesty’s account of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack fundamentally flawed — because it disregards strong evidence of Hamas’ genocidal intent and distorts both the nature of the massacre and Israel’s response.
According to the former Deputy Director of Amnesty’s now defunct Israel branch, Yariv Mohar, this report on Hamas’ attack was delayed by eight months. It had already been nearly finalized by the same time the organization released its December 2024 report, titled, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”
The organization, according to Mohar, told Israeli staff that the two reports would be published within weeks of one another.
According to Mohar, Amnesty delayed the Hamas report to keep the focus on Gaza, fearing that highlighting Hamas’ atrocities would undermine efforts to end the war. Mohar added that this was driven by a belief that Western audiences prefer a simplified moral narrative, and also because of Amnesty’s fear of backlash from its ultra-radical activist base.
Notably, the non-profit’s substantially longer Gaza report in 2024 used several out-of-context and debunked quotes by Israeli leaders to portray them as having genocidal intent.
Conversely, Amnesty’s treatment of Hamas sharply downplays the terror group’s own explicit ideology and objectives.
Hamas’ charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel as a condition for the liberation of Palestine, achieved through holy war (jihad). The charter specifically states that Hamas’ “struggle” is “against the Jews.”
Press Emblem Campaign Is the Latest Press Rights Org to Count Terrorists as Journalists
Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, the purportedly high number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces has been a consistent focus of mainstream media, social media pundits, and rights organizations.
At HonestReporting, we have been tracking this trend, noting that studies conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on journalists killed in Gaza include a significant number of Palestinians who are affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other Gaza-based terror groups. This affiliation takes the form of serving in a military capacity on behalf of these terror groups, working for media organizations owned and operated by the terror groups, and spreading propaganda on their behalf.
Now we can add another press freedom organization to the ranks of those that whitewash terror-affiliated journalists and diminish the integrity of journalism in the Gaza Strip.
The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), a Geneva-based organization that “aims at strengthening the legal protection and safety of journalists in zones of conflict and civil unrest or in dangerous missions,” has released its end-of-the-year statistics on journalists killed around the world in 2025.
According to the PEC, almost half the journalists killed in 2025 were killed in the Gaza Strip. However, a closer look at the 60 journalists reportedly killed in Gaza named by the PEC, 23 (roughly 38%) have some form of affiliation with Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Among these 23 terror-affiliated journalists are nine who are alleged to have been terror operatives active in the Gaza Strip, 13 who worked for terror-affiliated media organizations, and one who served as a terror propagandist.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
How international law has been weaponized against Israel
The ICJ case is a glaring example of how international law repudiates justice and truth in concert with its “human rights” enablers.
At the center of this web of hate squats the United Nations. People believe its self-designation as the ultimate custodian of peace and justice in the world. This is because it represents most of the world’s countries, and so plays into the pleasing fantasy of the brotherhood of man.
But most countries are dictatorships, kleptocracies or other human-rights abusers. These dominate the U.N. General Assembly, while the presence of tyrannical Russia and China on the U.N. Security Council makes a mockery of holding the world’s malefactors to account.
Last year, what was the number of times the General Assembly condemned Cuba, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan, Turkey, Hamas, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon or Venezuela? Zero. The number of times it condemned Israel? 15.
In its increasingly brutal crackdown against the current insurrection in Iran, the Tehran regime has killed at least 36 protesters. The number of U.N. resolutions or emergency sessions about this? Zero.
International law isn’t the pathway to a fairer and more civilized world. In its ferocious weaponization against Israel, it has been turned into the negation of justice and the legal instrument of evil.
The rules-based order has expired in disgrace. The only “might” it constrained was the ability of the victims of aggression to defend themselves. The only rule that should govern tackling evil is instead to bring about its total defeat.
The UN’s Apartheid Accusation: Political Narrative Over Facts on the Ground
It is now a well-established tactic to accuse Israel of any wrongdoing under the sun with a fancy name. Definitions get twisted deliberately in order to be leveled against the only Jewish state. Facts are either purposefully ignored or intentionally warped to fit a pre-determined narrative that frames Israel as a state continuously convicted of the most horrendous crimes.
The UN, on January 7, did exactly this yet again by accusing Israel of “racial segregation and apartheid” in the West Bank. The report spans several years, but focuses specifically on the period from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2025.
Although the report has yet to make front page news in the vast majority of outlets – likely because the UN accusations leveled against Israel have unfortunately become commonplace and therefore unnewsworthy – the BBC wasted no time in publishing the story, displaying the outlet’s obsessive desire to push an anti-Israel agenda.
Counterterrorism Efforts in the West Bank
Incredibly, while the focus of the report is on the aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, the report merely skims over them. Had it recognized the severity of the attacks, the UN would then also have to acknowledge that Israel’s counterterrorism and security strategy shifted in real time to prevent terrorist attacks before they occurred and counter any perceived threats.
From October 7, the potential opening of a new front in the West Bank was not just some delusional possibility but a high likelihood, as Hamas and other terrorist organizations have established strongholds in several cities. Hamas even called on Palestinians living in the West Bank to carry out armed attacks against Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7.
Any state that had just experienced a horrific terrorist attack against its civilians would be expected and indeed obliged to take more preventative and preemptive measures to ensure that nothing like that could ever occur again. This requires the IDF to implement new counterterrorism operations in hotbeds of terrorism such as Jenin and Tulkarm. This is not apartheid but counterterrorism and ensuring the safety of Israeli civilians.
The UN attempts to prove its point that the IDF is indiscriminately targeting Palestinians living in the West Bank, with a spike in deaths reported after October 7, using data provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Not only is the context of October 7 once again missing, but the UN also conveniently omits that many of these Palestinians were members of terrorist organizations, or operating as lone actors attempting to or committing terrorist attacks against Israelis. When the ongoing terrorist threat is considered alongside the fact that Israeli operations have been concentrated in cities long known as hotbeds of terrorism, the claim of indiscriminate targeting collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
While the UN attempts to draw a connection based on the disparity between Israeli and Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, the data more accurately reflects the effectiveness of Israel’s counterterrorism operations, resulting in the reduction of Israeli fatalities.
The Palestinian Authority’s long game in Gaza
Western officials speak endlessly about “the day after” in Gaza, as if it were a technical planning exercise rather than a brutal political struggle. For the P.A., the real endgame is the day after the day after.
It seeks to return to Gaza not as one faction among many, but as an internationally installed authority—armed with donor funding, security guarantees and insulation from blame for the war that preceded its return.
This is why it has invested so heavily in cultivating diplomatic respectability while doing almost nothing to improve Palestinian lives anywhere outside the patronage networks of its dictator, Mahmoud Abbas, now 90 years old. It assumes that any multinational transitional authority will either fail or depart—and that the final choice will be between the P.A. and anarchy.
The P.A. is positioning itself accordingly, maneuvering to be included in any transitional governance framework, even if it is just a small role, so that it can gradually assume more control until inevitably it has the job. Long-term thinking is an Islamist strength the West struggles to match.
Gaza’s civilians bear the cost. Hamas sacrifices them on the altar of resistance; the P.A. on the altar of legitimacy. Palestinian suffering in Gaza is not incidental to the P.A.’s strategy; it is instrumental. Each war, each humanitarian collapse, each funeral deepens a claim that only its rule can restore order and international standing. The message is simple: “You may not like us, but look at the alternative.”
This logic has worked for decades. Israel alone has consistently challenged this cynical and destructive formula.
When the P.A. finally moves to reclaim Gaza, it will insist that Hamas and Israel are gone, and that responsibility for the devastation lies elsewhere—with Israel, the global community or history’s arch itself.
What it doesn’t want is continuity. It wants a reset without reckoning. The P.A. doesn’t want to govern Gaza as it is, but Gaza as a symbol: liberated, suffering and returned at last to “legitimate” Palestinian hands.
This type of strategy is not confusion or incompetence; it is patience, weaponized. It is the belief that international guilt will eventually converge to restore its power without demanding reform, compromise or courage.
Until this strategy is named honestly and confronted openly, Gaza’s future will remain bleak. It will continue to be ruled by those willing to destroy it—and claimed by those waiting to inherit the ruins.
From Ian:
Norman Podhoretz Leaves a Legacy of Political Principle
Podhoretz’s death comes as the notion of even having political principles has become tenuous. On the left and right, many politicians and pundits refuse to criticize their own side. The principled and courageous perspective that marked Podhoretz’s life and writing, with a willingness to leave former allies, is rare. The few politicians who do it—like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who broke with their party over January 6—often pay a price for being courageous, and lose their seats.
Today, publications like The Dispatch and The Free Press exist because their founders and many of their writers were unwilling to embrace progressive shibboleths or MAGA elements and thus had to leave institutions where they’d once belonged. Last month, Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, demonstrated moral courage at a TPUSA event and may pay a price for it.
As a Christian who believes that human beings are made in the image of God, I resonated with Podhoretz’s perspective. We should we care about democracy and human rights around the world because humans are made in God’s image. Why should we battle Marxist and Islamist dictatorships and hope to see human flourishing expand through free markets, entrepreneurism, and innovation? Because people are made in the image of God. For Podhoretz, religion was not central, but his point of view had deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Podhoretz also understood the importance of stewardship regarding the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and stories. He was grateful for the gifts our forebearers bequeathed to us, and we should remember how his ideas shaped the understanding of Ronald Reagan, Kirkpatrick, and others who led the global movement to defeat the Soviet Union.
Podhoretz’s body of work reminds us that we don’t need to “make America great again,” because its principles, legal structure, history, and symbols are already great. It’s a treasury to be stewarded, as the Constitution says, to made more perfect rather than deconstructed.
Podhoretz’s legacy of principled stands based on deep moral conviction deserves remembering. As our Jewish friends often say at a moment of loss, may his memory be a blessing to us—a nation in search of its soul—at this fraught moment.
Seth Mandel:
It Was Ever Thus
Review of 'Antisemitism, an American Tradition' by Pamela S. Nadell
Indeed, American history is littered with instances of full-blown anti-Jewish violence. When Major-General Ulysses S. Grant expelled all Jews from the territory under his control during the Civil War after accusing them of disloyalty to the Union, he didn’t “merely” cause them economic loss and social disruption. He also opened them up to vigilante attacks from citizens who were riled up by their war leader and took matters into their own hands.
The discrimination discovered in hospitals surely cost some Jewish patients their lives—doctors and relatives of deceased patients later testified as much. In 1902 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hundreds of Jews participating in a funeral procession were attacked by factory workers and then the police; some victims compared it to pogroms back in Russia. And then there were the immigration restrictions: Calling it “social anti-Semitism” was of no consolation to the many Jews around the world who were condemned to systematic murder in their home countries because the gates of America were closed to them.
The lesson that jumps off the pages of Nadell’s book is not that some forms of anti-Semitism are harmless but that all forms of anti-Semitism are connected and will, with the reliability of a law of physics, proceed toward violence unless acted upon by an outside force. Responding to the Damascus Affair, Nadell writes, U.S. Jews “honed strategies that they would employ to counter discrimination and persecution in the future. They held public meetings, lobbied the government, appealed to the press, welcomed allies, and stood up individually and collectively against antisemitism wherever and whenever it arose.”
Which is why Nadell’s concluding chapter is so important. She weaves together the post-10/7 wave of discrimination against Jews in major institutions and across party lines. In Nadell’s telling, that very much includes not just the post–October 7 atmosphere on campus but the two decades’ worth of buildup to this moment in colleges throughout the country. “The battle lines over antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism—the disapproval or demonization of all things Israeli—on campus were drawn,” Nadell writes about such fights in the early years of the new century. “They would widen into deep trenches in the years to come. Jewish students and faculty experienced what they perceived as antisemitism no matter what others called it.”
Nadell should be commended for refusing to adjudicate the debate over terminology. What matters most is what is happening, not what name you give it. The goal of all these anti-Jewish and anti-Israel extremist movements is clear, ambitious, and evil: Exclude Jews from society, and put targets on their backs in the process. And they will ultimately fail so long as American Jews remain vigilant and willing to exercise their rights.
Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”
In May 1925, President Calvin Coolidge offered a vivid tribute to the “Hebraic mortar … of American democracy.” It should have been a vanilla speech at a prosy Washington event—the dedication of a new Jewish community center. But Coolidge took stock of the moment; a century later, his address is worth revisiting.
Just a couple of years earlier, in 1923, Henry Ford—America’s great industrialist, in many ways the Elon Musk of his time—had dominated multiple presidential polls, trumping the incumbent, Warren G. Harding. Ford never announced his candidacy for the 1924 election, nor had he ever held elected office. But he had captured the American imagination as an avatar for business ingenuity, education reform, and general uplift for the American middle class. It is also undeniable that Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. He ultimately endorsed Coolidge for president in December 1923, after Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack. In Coolidge’s 1925 speech to a largely Jewish crowd, he decisively broke with the anti-Jewish element of Ford’s movement.
In November 1920, Ford published the first installment of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. A multivolume anthology drawn from Ford’s anti-Jewish weekly, The Dearborn Independent, it was soon translated into sixteen languages—including six editions printed in Germany between 1920 and 1922. By the mid-1920s, the Dearborn Independent had reached a circulation of between 700,000 and 900,000. These numbers were in part due to the paper’s distribution in Ford automotive dealerships, but are nonetheless significant, considering that the New York Times had a circulation of 345,149 in 1925; the Chicago Tribune reached 608,130.
Of course, other forms of bigotry flourished in the teens and twenties. The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation was banned in cities across the Midwest for its insulting depictions of black people. Despite these widespread restrictions, then–President Woodrow Wilson watched the film upon its release, in the first-ever movie screening held at the White House. Birth of a Nation soon inspired a new iteration of the anti-Catholic, racist, and anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan. Hugo Black, the Alabama politician and sometime Klan member who eventually became a Supreme Court justice, built his early career attacking Catholicism; he delivered dozens of anti-Catholic speeches at Klan meetings across Alabama during his 1926 Senate campaign.
It was in this troubled atmosphere that Coolidge took the stage at a dedication ceremony for a community center, in 1925, “a year of dedications and rededications.” Hearkening to the start of the American Revolution in 1775, Coolidge attributed the success of the American project to a “common spiritual inspiration” powerful enough to “mold and weld together into a national unity, the many and scattered colonial communities that had been planted along the Atlantic seaboard.” He reminded his audience that tension among the early colonies seemed more organic and far more likely than cooperation. There was no guarantee that the colonies would form a national entity for revolution, and no clear idea of which colonies might agree to join it:
From Ian:
Trump withdraws US from dozens of international and UN entities
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from dozens of international and U.N. entities, including a key climate treaty and a U.N. body that promotes gender equality and women's empowerment, because they "operate contrary to U.S. national interests."
Among the 35 non-U.N. groups and 31 U.N. entities Trump listed in a memo, opens new tab to senior administration officials is the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change - described by many as the "bedrock" climate treaty which is parent agreement to the 2015 Paris climate deal.
The United States skipped the annual U.N. international climate summit last year for the first time in three decades.
"The United States would be the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC," said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"Every other nation is a member, in part because they recognize that even beyond the moral imperative of addressing climate change, having a seat at the table in those negotiations represents an ability to shape massive economic policy and opportunity," said Bapna.
The U.S. will also quit UN Women, which works for gender equality and the empowerment of women, and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the international body's agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries. The U.S. cut its funding for the UNFPA last year.
"For United Nations entities, withdrawal means ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law," reads the memo. Trump has already largely slashed voluntary funding to most U.N. agencies.
UN report accuses Israel of ‘systematic’ racial segregation, apartheid
A new report released on Wednesday by the office of Volker Türk, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, claims that “Israel is violating international law requiring states to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”
The report, titled “Israel’s discriminatory administration of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” argues that unequal treatment and abuses of Palestinians have intensified since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Jerusalem’s subsequent military response.
“There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank,” Türk stated, using the international term for the Judea and Samaria region. “Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends or harvesting olives—every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before,” Türk added.
The Israeli mission to the U.N. in Geneva condemned the publication of the report, stating that Türk’s office “abuses its position and dire resources to issue yet another unmandated report against Israel” while “other mandates remain nixed on account of budget cuts.”
The Israeli mission said the report itself contains “absurd and distorted accusations of racial discrimination” which ignore “fundamental facts that lie at the basis of the conflict.”
Hamas-Linked Groups in UK Launch Campaign Demanding "Freedom for Palestinian Hostages"
The Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) and the Global Sumud Flotilla have launched a joint campaign, “Demanding Freedom for Palestinian Hostages.” The initiative invites supporters to take part in a red ribbon online action by updating their profile pictures and sharing videos or messages that feature the ribbon for “Palestinian hostages.” The campaign begins at 8 p.m. Jerusalem time on January 15th and leads up to coordinated street demonstrations on January 31st.
The campaign has drawn attention for its deliberate use of a red ribbon, a clear appropriation of the yellow ribbon that has become an internationally recognized symbol of solidarity with the 253 Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas during the October 7th terror attack. By adopting similar imagery and language, the campaign seeks to reframe convicted or detained terrorist prisoners as “hostages,” attempting to draw a moral equivalence between civilians kidnapped by Hamas and individuals imprisoned for terrorism related offenses.
The collaboration, promoted on social media in early January 2026, comes as UK Treasury investigators examine whether to impose sanctions on PFB leader and Freedom Flotilla Coalition International Zaher Birawi under counter-terrorism regulations. Both PFB and the Global Sumud Flotilla have documented ties to individuals and entities designated as terrorist organizations and operatives.
Birawi Under Investigation
According to the Telegraph, HM Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation confirmed in December 2025 it is investigating Zaher Birawi for potential designation under Counter-Terrorism Sanctions Regulations 2019.
Birawi both chairs PFB and heads the International Committee for Breaking the Siege of Gaza. He has also called himself a “founding member” of the Freedom Flotilla International Coalition aid boat Madleen. He has denied all allegations, describing them as “baseless.” If sanctioned, he would face asset freezes and prohibitions on receiving funds or economic resources.
Labour MP Christian Wakeford named Birawi in Parliament in October 2023 as a “Hamas operative living in London” and asked, “Given the national security implications, can we have an urgent statement in Government time on what the Home Office is doing about Hamas operatives here in Britain?“ Israel designated Birawi as a main Hamas operative in Europe in 2013.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Question of Jewish Armed Self-Defense
A full investigation into the Bondi Beach failure, he said, might tell us which of several potential solutions, including arming the CSG, should be implemented: “It’s one of the reasons why we need a royal commission, to get the information [and] to provide it to government, so that we can make the changes to keep the community safe.”
Minns’s wording here is important. He called for a “royal commission,” which is the highest-level state inquest that Australia can initiate, and the one with the most far-reaching powers to gather evidence.
The very same day that Minns made these comments, a group representing families of 11 Bondi Beach victims released an open letter asking for a royal commission. Such a commission would not just investigate the attack but the overarching issue of Australia’s approach to combating anti-Semitism.
“We demand answers and solutions,” the families wrote. “We need to know why clear warning signs were ignored, how antisemitic hatred and Islamic extremism were allowed to dangerously grow unchecked, and what changes must be made to protect all Australians going forward. Announcements made so far by the federal government in response to the Bondi massacre are not nearly enough.”
Hard to argue with any of that. Unless, of course, you are Anthony Albanese. The prime minister announced that the investigation will be limited to the Australian security agencies and what was known about the suspects in the shootings. Valuable in its own right, surely, but as the Guardian’s chief political correspondent—yes, even the Guardian appeared disappointed in Albanese’s refusal to examine the question of anti-Semitism—wrote: “such a narrow inquiry is not a substitute for a commonwealth royal commission, with the powers it has to compel evidence and, just as crucially, the national public spotlight it commands to ensure accountability.”
This is a very important point. It is not only that there is very good reason for a royal commission here, but also that the very fact of an extended “public spotlight” on the problem would make it much more difficult for Australia’s political establishment to ignore. There is transparency that comes with any inquest conducted publicly into the state and its failings. The process itself would be part—only a minor part, to be sure—of the solution.
Albanese is plainly interested in avoiding full accountability. That, in itself, should answer Chris Minns’s question about arming the main Jewish security group. There are murmurings that Albanese can still be pressured into a royal commission. If he cannot, and if the national government refuses to protect its Jewish citizens, then the next best thing would surely be to enable the Jewish community, in partnership with the regional state government, to at least attempt to protect itself.
Understanding and Defeating the Assault on Jewish Moral Self-Confidence
A false conception based on underestimating and downplaying the enemy's intentions is the natural temptation of a peaceful people. The Jews of Poland, the most peaceable population imaginable, could not have imagined that the Germans intended to wipe them out. Yet Jews do ultimately respond to reality.
When it became too obvious to deny that they were marked for extermination, two Jewish underground organizations formed in the Warsaw ghetto. When the Germans entered the ghetto in 1943 to begin rounding up the remaining Jews and sending them to their deaths, the two organizations fought in an uprising that lasted from April 19 until May 16, the first urban anti-German uprising in Europe. They fought like lions.
The present war against Israel resembles the Nazi one in its aims and methods, and makes us realize how much the fate of the Jews remains subject to the depravity of others. Jews expected coexistence with the people around them. Jews do not aspire to expand territorially through conquest or demographically by evangelizing. But the nations they lived among were constituted very differently.
Coexistence requires reciprocity which cannot be willed into being. Ascribed where it does not exist, it invites escalating aggression of which the Hamas attack of October 7 is but the most recent demonstration. Hamas entrapped Israelis into the war they had done everything to avoid by surrendering Gaza in 2005.
Israel's enemies are the same forces that threaten America. This creates a congruence of loyalties. We are not in the position of American Muslims who may feel torn between the priorities of Mecca and Washington. The Hebraic roots and deepest values of America and Israel are one and the same.
All of America should be behind us, and the best already are. It is now our task to help reorient the rest. To keep being Jews in the world means to overcome our disappointment in the failings of our enemies, the cowardice of some of our friends, and the difficulties of resistance. To mobilize is the best way to overcome despair.
What Jews keep getting wrong about defending themselves
The British Broadcasting Corporation recently asked British Jews whether Israel’s actions in Gaza were responsible for the terrorist attack in Bondi, Australia. The watchdog organization CAMERA rightly criticized this absurd line of questioning. How could random Jews in London possibly bear responsibility for the tactical decisions of a government thousands of miles away, let alone for the heinous actions of a terrorist in yet another country?
Yet in our rush to defend ourselves against this inappropriate premise, the Jewish community often misses a deeper truth that lies at the heart of our identity: Jews around the world are responsible for one another.
This is the paradox that modern media discourse consistently fails to grasp, and one we as Jews sometimes struggle to articulate ourselves. The BBC’s question was wrong because it implicitly blamed Jews for terrorism. But the underlying assumption—that Jews in the United Kingdom are connected to Jews in Israel and Australia, or anywhere else, for that matter—is fundamentally correct, according to our own tradition.
The Talmud teaches us Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, “All of Israel are responsible for one another.” Jews don’t have the luxury of claiming we can simply wash our hands of each other’s welfare, even if we live in separate communities.
This doesn’t mean that British Jews are responsible for terrorist attacks or Israeli military strategy; it means that we’re called to care deeply about our fellow Jews everywhere, to feel their pain and share their struggles. The distinction matters, though it’s routinely lost in shallow social-media debates and cable-news soundbites.
This confusion extends to another common refrain heard from Jewish communities worldwide—that we just want to be left alone to live in peace and quiet. It’s a reasonable desire, even an understandable one. Yet history keeps proving it’s not an option available to us.
The book of Judges offers a haunting pattern: Whenever the text speaks of Jews living peacefully, “each person sitting under their fig tree or vine,” without unified purpose or centralized leadership, enemies inevitably rise up against us. Amalek first demonstrated this in the desert, attacking the newly freed Israelites not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were called to be.
Friday, January 09, 2026
