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

From Ian:

Alana Newhouse: Zionism for Everyone

How do people change?

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

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

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

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

We are in one such moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

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

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

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

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

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

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03/11 Links Pt1: Iran’s threats of military destruction have proven utterly hollow; Iran’s missile fire rate has collapsed by 92%

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Iran’s threats of military destruction have proven utterly hollow

When it comes to the rest of the regime’s performance, the kindest interpretation is that they are focussing on attritional endurance rather than decisive retaliation, hoping that political and economic pressure, combined with the structural resilience that the regime has developed since the 12-day war last June, will force the American president to curtail the war with the new leader still standing. The most likely interpretation, however, is that amid the shock and awe of the American-Israeli campaign, they have been reduced to reacting defensively rather than strategically. Panicking, in other words.

Of the 2,000 Iranian drones and more than 500 ballistic and cruise missiles fired into neighbouring countries since the start of the war, the overwhelming majority have been intercepted. The few that sneaked through have caused a handful of deaths and injuries and destroyed some military equipment, but no major base has been disabled. In recent days, the launch cadence has dropped by as much as 90 per cent, suggesting a collapse in stockpiles, launchers and command and control. And as for the second pillar of Iranian belligerence, its foreign proxies, they have been equally unimpressive.

After a hesitant start, the most important of these, Hezbollah, has in recent days swung into action, raining hundreds of missiles into Israel’s north (some of which have fallen short). But Jerusalem’s response has been aggressive; the lesson of the aftermath of October 7, which saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced within their own country as a result of Hezbollah fire, has been well learnt. Today, the IDF’s doctrine is simple: attack us and you will be the one forced to flee, not us.

The Israeli incursion into Lebanon, which has so far cost the lives of a small number of soldiers, should be seen in this context. Analysts believe that Hezbollah may be rationing its rockets to avoid a suicidal total war and preserve its options for the future. But after the pager operation and subsequent battering it sustained in September 2024, the fanatical militia is also in a degree of disarray.

The other big question mark hangs over Iran’s nuclear programme, much of which lay in ruins even before this war began. Buried deep underground near the city of Isfahan, 270 miles south of Tehran, lies the regime’s bloody crown jewels, about 400kg of uranium that has been enriched to 60 per cent. This material, which in certain contexts could be weaponised in a matter of weeks, is the regime’s buried treasure; if allied boots do hit the ground during this war, they will likely belong to commandos sent to secure the site, excavate the uranium and spirit it safely out of the country.

The overwhelming likelihood is that defeat, and not just a cosmetic one, lies ahead for the worst regime on the planet. If I was a betting man, I would not give much for Ali Larijani’s chances of surviving the month, or indeed for those of the regime’s new leader. Nobody knows what kind of a country will emerge after the dust has settled. Nobody knows if we will see chaos or peace. But given Trump’s resolute posture and the vast firepower at his disposal, the president will likely be having his shoes polished in the Oval Office long after Larijani is dead.

Bernard-Henri Levy: Netanyahu Is Pulling Trump's Strings? Antisemites Will Believe Anything

Some experts say the U.S. war with Iran was inspired by Israel and imposed by Israel, and that the U.S. is merely the executor of "Israel's war." I don't deny that the two countries have converging interests, or that their military and intelligence agencies are operating in close coordination. But that is called an alliance.

Would anyone have said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was being manipulated by Charles de Gaulle? Or that Winston Churchill - who in 1919 said Bolshevism should be strangled in its cradle - became Stalin's puppet 22 years later?

In this case, Israel has one concern: neutralizing a threat that it rightly considers existential. The U.S. has its own concerns: defending its allies (Arab countries as well as Israel), weakening a strategic axis that runs from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing, and washing away the humiliation that has remained for 47 years - the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and holding of American hostages for more than a year.

To believe that a country the size of New Jersey could twist the arm of a country of 350 million, equipped with the most powerful military and the most sophisticated network of bases in history, and governed by a president of unrivaled egotism? To imagine that Donald Trump would have given any foreign prime minister the gift of a war of this magnitude? It is simply grotesque.

But the more serious problem is that this fable revives a very old and toxic lie. This is how people thought in the 1930s - those who saw in "the Jews" a community of conspirators pushing nations toward war, pulling the strings of catastrophe, and scheming to provoke conflicts from which they expected to profit.

The Forgotten 444 Days in Tehran

In 1979 Iranians held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. From 1979 to 1981, the captives seized from the American Embassy were humiliated, paraded around blindfolded for cameras and jeering crowds and threatened.

Diplomatic immunity is a concept that goes back to ancient times. It evolved over centuries to an accepted standard between governments. Even Adolf Hitler respected diplomatic immunity.

The Iranians used diplomatic immunity when it was in their murderous interest. They used diplomatic immunity to bring in the bomb material used in the car bomb detonated outside a Jewish center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, killing 85 and wounding another 300.

Tens of thousands of human beings would be alive today, and the entire Middle East wouldn't have been destabilized for half a century, had the Iranian theocracy been stopped at the start.

Dr. Houman David Hammati: On Iran, We Stand with Israel and America

47 years ago, I stood at a window in Tehran as a 3-year-old boy, smelling burning tires and hearing the chants that would steal my country. I do not celebrate war. No decent person does. What I celebrate - what millions of Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora have prayed for in secret for decades - is the possibility that a regime which has no right to exist may finally be forced to go.

This is the same regime that armed and cheered the Oct. 7 massacre against Israel for no reason other than pure genocidal hatred; murdered tens of thousands of its own sons and daughters who dared to walk peacefully in the streets demanding the most basic freedoms; gouges out the eyes of young women for the "crime" of wearing makeup; hangs teenagers from cranes for posting a tweet; exports terror, poverty, and darkness to every corner it can reach including the U.S.

No nation, no people, should have to live under that. Not Israelis. Not Americans. And certainly not Iranians. I am a son of Iran who has spent his life mourning a stolen homeland. What we are witnessing is not aggression - it is necessary surgery to remove a tumor that has metastasized for 47 years. The tumor is the Islamic Republic that has hijacked Iran.

To the brave pilots of the Israel Air Force and the men and women of the U.S. military now carrying out this mission: You are not invaders. You are the answer to the prayers of millions who have whispered "enough" in the dark since 1979. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. The Iranian people - the real Iran - will never forget.

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03/10 Links Pt2: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting; Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?; Pro-Iran Al-Quds Day march in London CANCELLED

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting

The word ‘Islamophobia’ might be gone, but the tyrannical impulse is the same: to keep a beady eye on commentary about Islam. To ensure the masses’ rude blather on that religion is not too ‘intimidating’, too ‘stereotyping’, too far beyond the government-decreed bounds of ‘the public interest’. This is a blasphemy law by the backdoor. Once more, it is the policing of irreligious speech in the drag of anti-racism. For all the lip service the new definition pays to freedom of speech, the entire point of singling out Islam as uniquely deserving of government pity and attention is to circumscribe discussion. As shadow justice minister Nick Timothy says, this latest effort to lavish special protections on Islam is yet another ‘attack [on] our freedom to criticise, satirise and scrutinise ideas’.

The announcement of a bureaucratic offensive on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ would be worrying at the best of times. That it has come now, at the outset of the Iran War, as we are witnessing explosions of Islamist intolerance, is mindblowingly reckless. The evidence of our eyes is that Britain and the West are afflicted with Islamism. With large numbers of people who feel a greater affinity with the anti-Semitic tyrants of Tehran than they do with the nations in which they live. Where’s the tsar for that, Keir Starmer?

Forget ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – who will protect us from the anti-Western hosility of the Islamist mob? To weep showy tears over the ‘rise of hatred’ without mentioning the hatred for our own civilisation that courses through the veins of the Islamist movement and its suicidal allies on the bourgeois left is nothing short of insane. That we only ever hear chattering-class bleating about ‘hatred’ when the targets are Muslims is so striking. It confirms how catastrophically blind these people are to the hatred for our society. The hatred for our values. The hatred for our citizens, almost a hundred of whom have been slain by Islamists these past 20 years. The hatred for our working-class girls, who were raped by gangs disproportionately made up of Pakistani men, who called them ‘white slags’, as officialdom looked the other way. And the hatred for our Jewish compatriots, who remain the key victims of religious hate crime, many carried out by Islamists.

The Iran crisis has shone a harsh light on our moral troubles on the home front. In the US, the UK, Europe and Australia, people have openly wept for the ayatollah and prayed for the defeat of America and destruction of Israel. Now that is hatred. That is hostility. This week there was an explosion outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. We saw the allegedly ISIS-inspired hurling of a homemade bomb in New York City. The Iranians suspected of spying on Jewish institutions in London remain in custody. And you want us to fret over some muppet on the internet making a joke about the burqa? This is something worse than fiddling while Rome burns. It’s the throwing of petrol on to Rome’s flames. For in sanctifying Islam as the most put-upon religion, the ideology most deserving of special protection, the UK government risks inflaming the very cult of grievance that powers the Islamist mindset. They think they’re tackling hatred when in truth they’re inflaming it, giving ever greater licence to the anti-civilisational self-pity of the West’s Islamists.

What a betrayal this is of the good people of Iran who thirst for freedom. There they are praying for the demise of their Islamist oppressors while we shake our heads over mockery of Islam. There they are tearing off their hijabs while we worry about ‘hijabophobia’. So long as we fear ‘offending Islam’, we will be incapable of standing up for our own values or offering solidarity to those valiant warriors for liberty in the Islamic Republic.

Seth Mandel: Blaming Jews for Global Sadness

There are two primary points to consider here. The first is the subject of O’Neill’s column, which is that the cause of “Palestine” is not about helping Palestinians but about helping Sally Rooney—and the legions of likeminded bored-to-death Europeans—get out of bed in the morning.

Indeed, Rooney asked in her speech: “What else can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these? What else, in the face of such horror, can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves.”

To some people, the permanent war against the Jewish state is all there is.

But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.

In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.

It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.

Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.

Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.

All these things are real and, to judge by the public discourse, on the rise. But scapegoating Jews is not the cure. One can imagine a television ad in which hand-drawn clouds morph into words describing the symptoms of depression, as a voiceover recommends one consult one’s physician before taking anti-Semitism. The civilizational side effects, after all, are pretty rough.

And those civilizational side effects are precisely what the superstars of the People’s Congress for the Hague Group are threatening to bring down on everyone’s head. Rooney’s assertion that Israel is the great enemy of all the earth is the reason for the war in the Middle East in the first place. It is a battle cry that brings death and destruction to innocent people all over the world. And bored literary poster children have no right to make it their coping mechanism.

Seth Mandel: On Coexisting with Supporters of October 7

Essentially, October 7 became the kind of dividing line that made a lot of Jews understand history.

So it’s a useful question to ponder: How should we act? After all, not only must we maintain precisely the values we did before, but we also should work toward returning society to a place in which support for October 7 is brings public shame. What follows are a few guidelines.

First, Jews must not permit our own beliefs to be diluted by a society that makes excuses for pogroms. Nor should it temper our own criticism of October 7. Fact is, October 7 should be a red line for all civilizations, and it must remain a red line for us. We should not hesitate to state and restate that fact—that unqualified condemnation of that day is a basic human litmus test—even in front of those who justify Nazi barbarism. Especially in their presence, perhaps. We do not accommodate, out of misguided politesse, those who think our children deserved to be burned alive.

Second, and this goes for non-Jews just as much as for Jews: Use October 7 as a barometer for political, ideological and moral hypocrisy. Not because we’re looking for “gotcha” moments, but because it is impractical to remain unaware of who can be trusted in public life. We know, for example, that people who travel in the same circles as Duwaji and her husband Zohran Mamdani are not interested in protecting women from sexual assault, and that when they sign on to such campaigns it is because they are lying. We know that when they falsely accuse Israel of child murder it is because they support the murder of the children of Israel. Another example: The war began with Hamas carrying out the largest massacre at a music festival in recorded history. Musicians and artists who ignore this and instead parrot the propaganda of those who carried out the massacre do not believe in artistic expression; they only believe in dogmatic political expression. Indeed, they support regimes that would abolish the arts entirely.

Third, do not “trade” for condemnation of October 7. Do not dignify someone’s attempt to say “if you want me to condemn October 7, will you condemn [some random perceived crime they want you to falsely equate with October 7]?” October 7 is not something to be bartered away to some bad-faith ideological actor. October 7 is not an opening bid in some negotiation. Take it or leave it.

Finally: Punish people politically for their refusal to recognize the barbarousness of October 7. Just add it to any public figure’s civic record. This isn’t holding a grudge, it’s just more practical politics. People on the wrong side of October 7 are expecting to benefit from some sort of statute of limitations—or the limitations of human memory. Instead, let’s help them remember.

Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?

In case anyone out there might still be under the impression that the violent fanaticism of the lefty culture warriors is abating, Saturday’s events should lay that to rest. Lang’s stunt was undoubtedly designed to cause maximum offence, but the cognitive dissonance of the counter-protesters and the media was truly something to behold. It was the most clear example yet of the theory that ‘words I don’t like’ are literally violence, but literal violence from ‘people I like’ is not violent at all.

One counter-protester, Walter Masterson, was in the middle of delivering a Kumbaya, we-love-everyone speech when one of the two attackers threw the first bomb. ‘We want everyone here to stay in New York. You don’t get to come from outside, and then tell everyone else…’, he was saying as Emir Balat – who had indeed come from outside New York – appeared behind him and, with a facial expression filled with rage and hate, appeared to hurl the nail bomb just above Masterson’s head, before running away.

Another video posted to X showed the attack from Lang’s perspective. As he stood there, annoying the counter-protesters, the bomb landed near him, prompting him and his supporters to run away. ‘Somebody threw a fucking bomb, bro!’, says one man. ‘That was a nail bomb!’, says another. Voices are heard thanking Jesus that the nail bomb did not go off. Eventually, someone calls out, ‘Somebody’s gotta get the goat’, and a female voice is heard saying, ‘Oh the goat!’.

The mayor’s immediate reaction was to condemn the ‘vile protest rooted in white supremacy’. New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed ‘both’ sides. Never mind that one side came armed only with a goat and a bad attitude, the other with multiple bombs and gave a statement to police that read in part: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. Die in your rage you kufar.’ (sic)

Masterson, the now famous counterprotester, posted on X earlier this week: ‘I stand by [my speech]. As a born and raised New Yorker, everyone is welcome. Everyone except chief goat-fucker Jake Lang.’

So according to these truly thick white liberals with precisely zero self-preservation skills, coming to New York to chuck bombs at non-Muslims is just part of life in an open, tolerant city. If anything, it should be celebrated! However, coming to New York to loudly complain about Muslims wanting to bomb non-Muslims is an outrage of the highest order and will not be tolerated.

Good luck with that, ya dumb bastards!

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03/10 Links Pt1: Fall of Iran an opportunity to uproot ‘Palestinianism’; The Iranian footballers show what real courage looks like

From Ian:

Missiles Over Levinsky

Every Iranian Israeli merchant I interviewed on Levinsky Street told of carrying pleasant associations of their or their parents’ homeland. Each expressed hope that the regime would fall. All looked forward to flying to a free Iran to visit.

Simnian told of living as a teenager with relatives in Los Angeles in the 1970s. He made friends with Iranian Jewish émigrés but spoke even more fondly of the Muslim, Christian, and Bahai Iranians he labored with.

“They’d tell me they loved the Jews and Israel,” he said. “I worked with them, sold to them. We ate together.” Asked how he sees Iranians’ revolt against the regime, which this winter has killed more than 30,000 of its citizens, Simnian said, “Set them free.”

“I think the population wants to be liberated from the dictatorial regime there,” he said. “The country has resources but gives money to its [anti-Israel] proxies, and people don’t have water. Why should such a country be in need?”

On the next street, Bijan Barchordari sat at a table outside his restaurant, Gourmet Sabzi, which he bills as serving “authentic Persian” meals.

Barchordari cited social factors—and a lack of weapons—to explain Iranians’ inability to depose the regime, despite their massive protests in January that resulted in the massacres of civilians. (Aghajani said 15,000 Jews still live in Iran, nearly all in Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan.)

“Iranians are the most normal people: very cultured, learned, with self-respect. That’s why they haven’t succeeded in overthrowing the regime. They’re not animals,” said Barchordari, a Tehran native who visited Israel as a backpacker in 1977 and stayed on when his parents reported the deteriorating situation back home.

Ninety minutes after the siren sounded, Levinsky Street seemed suddenly to have filled with pedestrians, and Barchordari would last 10 minutes in the interview before excusing himself to assist behind the counter as diners lined up. Two young Haredi men set up a folding table and asked passing males if they’d yet donned tefillin. Lovers held hands. Parents pushed baby carriages; in one woman’s carriage sat not an infant, but a puppy.

In Barchordari’s place at the table soon sat Hezi Fanian, born in Israel to parents who’d come in the 1950s from Yazd and Borujerd. He’s a singer, specializing in Persian, and some of the songs he’s written and recorded mean to bridge the divide between his ancestral lands. One such song is “Salaam” (Peace). Another is “From Tel Aviv to Tehran.”

He and two men in Iran—a composer and a singer—are collaborating on a love song they’ll be recording. They’ve spoken a lot in the past year, but Fanian said that their connection, and the recording, is in limbo, perhaps temporarily, following the regime’s cutting of internet access.

“I hope they’re both okay,” he said.

The song, he said, will be issued in the open. Fanian thinks that collaborating musically “could be a point of pride for them, because we’ve become a superpower.”

He added, “If [the regime in] Iran falls, it’ll be because of Israel and the United States.”

That’s a point each of the Iranian Israelis raised in my conversations with them. They said it not haughtily, but matter-of-factly: We are pounding the regime to eliminate its plans to destroy Israel with ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and, even better, we’d simultaneously be freeing the Iranian people from tyranny.

Fanian reached back 2,500 years to state that modern-day Jews are making good on an ancient debt from when the Persian king, Cyrus II, facilitated exiled Jews’ return to the land of Israel and the building of the Second Temple following the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple.

“I’m proud, as an Iranian and as a Jew,” he said, “that in my generation, we’re honored to repay the Iranians’ good deed that Cyrus did for us.”

Melanie Phillips: We Must Eliminate the Islamist Threat

In Israel, the public are having to run repeatedly into the shelters day and night under barrages of missiles and drones, including banned cluster bombs, from Iran and more barrages from its proxy army in Lebanon, Hizbullah. Most missiles are being intercepted, but the fragments that hurtle down from the sky can be as big as a bus, destroying houses and killing people.

The Gulf states, whose defenses are less sophisticated than Israel's, have been attacked by even heavier barrages of missiles from Iran. Despite this, both the Israelis and the Gulf rulers want the war waged by America and Israel to continue until the Iranian regime has been destroyed. The Gulf states - including Iran's erstwhile ally, Qatar - are astounded and outraged that Iran has turned on them.

The Israelis - who for more than four decades have been attacked by Iranian proxy terrorism and rockets, and have shuddered at the regime's steady advance towards nuclear capacity and mass-production of missiles designed to wipe them off the face of the earth - are united in support of the war.

There is little understanding in the West of the Tehran regime's particular kind of fanaticism. Its dominant members are Shia "Twelvers," who believe that an apocalypse will bring to earth the Shia messiah, the "Twelfth Imam." Anyone who thinks there can ever be any compromise with such fanatics is on a different planet.

The Iranian threat can never be totally neutralized unless the regime itself is brought down. This war could be seen as utterly reckless - unless the alternative is fully understood. Then it becomes utterly imperative, and essential that it is pursued until the Iranian Islamic regime is no more.

WSJ Editorial: Iran Isn't Winning This War

The reality inside Iran is that the U.S. and Israel continue to make progress. The regime loses more of its military each day, along with the ability to hurt its neighbors. At 10 days in, the war can hardly be considered prolonged.

The regime for now thinks it can outlast the U.S. News reports say Russian intelligence is helping Iran target U.S. forces and radars. That reinforces the point that the U.S. is fighting a larger axis.

The spike in oil prices due to the traffic stoppage in the Strait of Hormuz wasn't unexpected. While it will be costly for Iran, which relies on oil exports for its financing, the U.S. has ample oil and gas supplies. Mr. Trump is right that the disruption is a "small price to pay" for major security advances.

For now, the regime still has capabilities to destroy. It would make no sense to leave so many loose ends, from missiles and production facilities to nuclear sites at Pickaxe Mountain and the Isfahan tunnels. There is also little reason to leave standing any IRGC or Basij bases. Stopping now amid some short-term economic discomfort would be a victory for the mullahs. They can't be allowed to conclude that shutting down oil flows is their passport to survival now and in the future.

How the Iran War Ends

So far, air supremacy hasn't prevented Iran from putting massive political and economic pressure on Washington by choking off the Middle East's oil flow to the world. There are no signs yet of a popular rebellion capable of toppling the regime. And waves of attacks against Iran's strongholds and assets haven't yet enabled any surviving pragmatists to steer the regime away from its radical approach.

Yet the pessimism is likely premature. The lesson so far is that Iran's threat to America is both greater than many Iran doves understood and more difficult to address than many Iran hawks hoped.

Since World War II, U.S. presidents of both parties believed that preventing any hostile country from blackmailing the rest of the world by blocking exports from the Gulf was a vital national interest. This reality, not Israeli lobbying, has been the driving force behind American Middle East policy.

If Iran pressures the U.S. to end the war before it can break the blockade and cripple Tehran's ability to impose new blockades down the road, the mullahs will hold an acknowledged veto power over the ability of their Gulf neighbors to trade with the world. The Iranian regime could then threaten a global economic crisis at will and would build up the weapons and war chests that will make its position unassailable.

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03/09 Links Pt2: Is October 7 the Exemplar of the ‘Palestinian Cause?’ The Western Left Says Yes; Australian PM Will Grant Iranian Women’s Soccer Players Asylum

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Is October 7 the Exemplar of the ‘Palestinian Cause?’ The Western Left Says Yes

Duwaji and the Times both speak like any Western leftist about the conflict. But the larger question is whether they are correct. Is it true that, as the Times reports, the Palestinian cause is what Hamas and hundreds of other Gazans did on October 7?

Again, the Hamas apologists who brand child murder as “resistance” seem to think they’re helping the Palestinians somehow. But this euphemism game has exactly the opposite effect: In the public’s mind, it connects the Palestinians to the worst actions of their worst representatives.

Many people would support the “Palestinian cause” if it were defined as self-determination in the areas currently governed by Palestinian institutions. Fewer would support the “Palestinian cause” as the Times describes it: unfiltered bloodletting.

For example: Palestinians kidnapped a baby, then killed him with their own hands and mutilated his corpse to hide their work. Hamas soldiers then put the remains in a coffin and danced around with it in a public ceremony.

Is this the Palestinian cause, or is it an aberration? Is it the rule or the exception? The Palestinians’ so-called supporters in the West say it is the cause in its purest expression.

Jared Kushner, who represents the Trump administration, doesn’t believe that. Nor do most Israelis (and certainly they did not before October 7). Which is to say: The parties who are supposedly irredeemably biased against the Palestinians would never talk about them in the kind of harsh, dehumanizing terms that their champions use.

Which tells us much about these champions. Whatever the Palestinians might consider their “cause,” the pro-Palestine movement in the West lustily describes it as a nightmarish, phantasmagoric horror show. And they absolutely cannot get enough of it.

They might be wrong about the Palestinians—that is, Palestinians themselves may still believe in a cause with more noble ambitions. But we are not wrong about these Western activists: They have traded human decency for a life of fetishized and demented violence, especially against Jews. They have become something truly monstrous, and they want us all to know it.

The Architecture of Unseeing

How Ireland's Anti-Israel Obsession Became a Case Study in Collective Intellectual Dishonesty

I. The Mechanics of Collective Delusion
As used in popular psychology, “gaslighting” describes a form of coercive control whereby the perpetrator manipulates the victim into questioning his or her own sanity, memory, or perception of reality, adding up over time to a profound assault on that person’s sense of self. Most frequently noted in abusive domestic relationships, gaslighting is also prominent in the workplace, where targeted employees are manipulated into an alternate reality where they can do nothing right and are blamed for everything that goes wrong, which erodes their competency, confidence, and productivity.

Gaslighting can be traumatic on an individual level, but when scaled up from the personal to the political, it can become a powerful sociological weapon. Political polarization, now prevalent across the West, has metastasized into a system of collective gaslighting that ever more aggressively demands a culture of intellectual dishonesty, requires people to “unsee” what is plainly visible, and ultimately degrades the critical faculties and moral clarity of an entire society. The phenomenon has mutated far beyond differences of policy to become a clash of manufactured realities, to the point where belonging to a polarized tribe necessitates wholesale denial of factual evidence and observable truth.

Living in Ireland, I have become acutely aware of this dynamic as it has shaped our current obsessive discourse regarding Israel. Especially since October 7, 2023, this Middle Eastern conflict has become for the Irish an epistemological and ontological fracture that forces people to ignore history, marginalize a minority community, and court profound political and economic self-harm, all while claiming the moral high ground. What has unfolded in Ireland over the past two and a half years is not merely a foreign policy disagreement; it is the wholesale capture of a national consciousness by a single, simplifying narrative so totalizing in its grip that it has begun to corrode the very institutions (diplomatic, cultural, sporting, economic) upon which the country’s international standing rests.

What makes Ireland’s case particularly instructive, and particularly poignant, is the size of its Jewish community. Numbering around 2,500 to 3,000 people, Irish Jews have watched with growing alarm as a political consensus has hardened around them, transforming the country they call home into what Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs has characterized as one of the most hostile environments for Jewish life in Europe. That a nation of five million people, fond of proclaiming its historical empathy for the oppressed, could so comprehensively fail to see what it is doing to its own smallest minority is the central paradox of this post. It is a paradox sustained by the architecture of unseeing.

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03/09 Links Pt1: Gulf states have a stark choice — and Trump must make them face it; Benny Morris: Iran’s Risky Gamble; NATO downs second Iranian missile over Turkey; Iran may be activating sleeper cells

From Ian:

"Revolutions Are Impossible Before They Happen and Inevitable After They Happen"

Prof. Ali M. Ansari, 58, is a historian at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, where he directs the Institute for Iranian Studies. He says, "I'm a firm believer in what Hannah Arendt says: Revolutions are impossible before they happen and inevitable after they happen."

Inside Iran, "the vast majority of people are struggling. The political system is hated. The economic system isn't delivering." Salaries "no longer meet the basic needs of life. There's an environmental crisis - they've drained the water table. And now, they have an international crisis."

"People tell me, 'Oh, but it's strong and stable.' Well, it can't be that strong and stable because people are rebelling every few years, and on a scale the regime deems existential." Regime supporters, whom Ansari pegs at 10-20% of the population, "are convinced they are going to defeat the U.S. in this war. They are not going to do it."

In January, "the regime carried out such a mass slaughter that it actually proved counterproductive. If they had suppressed it with, say, 'only' the 3,117 dead that they claim, it might have succeeded." But having killed "10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of your own in the random manner that they did, and shooting people in hospital beds, it creates an anger that is difficult to suppress."

Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13), auditing bodies were dismantled and many state assets transferred to the IRGC. By one assessment, $800 billion in revenue went missing. "A lot of them in the IRGC made a lot of money and they don't want to lose it all." That's now a stronger motivation to fight than old revolutionary fervor.

When Iran's economy is in shambles, the reflex is to blame U.S. sanctions. "That doesn't explain why the Iranians have mismanaged their water. It doesn't tell you why, well before the real sanctions arrived in 2011-12, they were never able to get any foreign direct investment into the country....It's the corruption, the kleptocracy, the short-termism, the opaqueness, the lack of accountability, the uncertainty." Sanctions didn't befall Iran. They were a consequence of the regime's behavior.

Gulf states have a stark choice — and Trump must make them face it

Gulf leaders now face a stark choice, and Trump must frame it that way.

They can continue absorbing blows and hope Iran eventually runs out of missiles — or they can help shorten the war.

That means more than quiet coordination: It means building a formal, defense-focused regional security architecture that integrates air and missile defense with shared intelligence.

The Gulf states should have joined such a framework long ago.

In fact, the basic architecture already exists.

In 2024, when US CENTCOM guided an international defense effort to thwart Iran’s missile and drone attacks on Israel, multiple Arab states joined in.

Now, Washington should turn that ad-hoc cooperation into a permanent regional shield — linking Gulf radar networks, air defenses and early-warning systems with American and Israeli assets in the region.

That means real-time intelligence on Iranian launches, integrated air and missile defense coverage across Gulf airspace, and joint command centers capable of intercepting threats.

The payoff would be immediate.

It would turn today’s patchwork of national defenses into a single protective umbrella over the Gulf, freeing American forces now defending Gulf skies to focus on the source of the danger.

It would send Tehran a message that the Gulf is part of a coordinated security bloc that won’t be intimidated by missile terror.

And if Iran continues to rain missiles and drones on Gulf cities, those same states may decide that defense is not enough — and that helping shut down the launchers is the fastest way to restore security.

Some Gulf leaders will hesitate, worrying that overt alignment with Washington or Jerusalem will spark domestic backlash and paint a target on their backs.

But last week proves equivocation doesn’t buy immunity.

The choice here is between a short, decisive confrontation and a prolonged cycle of bombardment that erodes stability.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Trump should make this clear to his Arab partners: Iran has chosen to target you.

The path to security is not to distance yourself from Washington, but coordinated action that eliminates the common threat.

Mark Dubowitz: Israel Didn't Drag the U.S. into War with Iran - They Enabled Us to Fight It Smarter and Faster

A dangerous lie has taken hold in Washington: that Israel somehow pressured the U.S. into war with Iran. Both President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio have said this is wrong. Rubio said the U.S. faced "a threat that was untenable."

Iran has spent years building nuclear weapons, developing long-range ballistic missiles, and encircling Israel with a terror army stretching from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It has fired ballistic missiles directly at Israeli civilians. No Israeli government could ignore that. Jerusalem's decision to join a combined American-Israeli operation targeting Iran's missile and nuclear capabilities drew near-universal support across Israel's political spectrum. It was a national security imperative.

When Netanyahu met Trump at Mar-a-Lago last December, the president had already green-lighted an Israeli strike on Iran's missile infrastructure. When they met again at the White House, Washington knew exactly what was coming and decided to lead the war. The claim that Israel pressured the U.S. president into war is not just factually hollow - it veers dangerously close to antisemitic fringe narratives.

But the bigger point that keeps getting buried is that Iran's missiles and nuclear program and terror are America's problem. They are being fired right now at U.S. forces, American bases, our embassies, and our Gulf Arab allies. Iran is actively developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could one day reach the American homeland. Dismantling that regime's nuclear, missile, and terror infrastructure is core American national security.

Israel didn't drag us into this war. It enabled us to fight it smarter, faster, and at far less cost than we ever could have alone.

To Defend the Abraham Accords, Trump Must First Defend the UAE

The Trump administration needs to pay close attention: The UAE is not merely another Gulf monarchy, another energy partner. It is one of the clearest examples in the Arab world of a country that deliberately chose modernization over ideological stagnation and development over the old politics of grievance.... This choice is precisely what makes it so important — and precisely what makes it so threatening to the forces that thrive on disorder.

The UAE... demonstrated that sovereignty can be defended without fanaticism, and that prosperity can be built through peace rather than perpetual war. This is why attacks on the UAE are not merely attacks on a country. They are attacks on a model for peace.

President Donald Trump no doubt sees this with clarity: his extraordinary Abraham Accords remain one of the defining strategic achievements not only of the century but of history.

Defending the UAE, therefore, is entirely consistent with a hard-headed American strategy. America did not help broker the Abraham Accords only to watch their boldest Arab partner become an exposed target. A serious policy... requires seriousness: tighter intelligence coordination, stronger integrated air and missile defense, firmer deterrence against Iranian aggression and proxy warfare, and unmistakable public clarity that the United States forcefully stands by the states that choose peace over terror and an alliance with the US over revolutionary blackmail. That is not charity toward Abu Dhabi. It is a defense of American interests, and a regional balance that works in America's favor.

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03/08 Links: International Law Is Becoming a Suicide Pact for Western Democracies; 7th US service member dies in Operation Epic Fury; Israel's Secret Weapon

From Ian:

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg International Law Is Becoming a Suicide Pact for Western Democracies

Former head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth argued in the Guardian on March 1 that joint American-Israeli strikes against the Tehran regime constitute an illegal "act of aggression." He claims that, according to the law of armed conflict, the use of force is illegitimate unless it responds to an attack that has already occurred and is acknowledged by the UN Security Council.

His simple theory is dangerously removed from the real world. Roth condemns the U.S.-Israeli decision as though it was taken totally out of the blue, and not a necessary response to aggression. He conveniently omits the central fact that, for decades, the Islamic Republic has been waging a violent war against the U.S. (the Big Satan), Israel (the Little Satan), and many of its Arab neighbors. The regime's fingerprints are on the missile arsenals targeting Israeli cities, on proxy terror militias embedded across Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, and on terror plots around the world. When an adversary arms, funds, and directs forces committed to the destruction of a neighboring state - and increasingly to the intimidation of the West - this is not peace. It is war.

The moral and legal question is whether, in the real world, states have the right - indeed the obligation - to defend their citizens against a fanatical regime that clearly proclaims its intentions to wipe out its opponents and builds rockets and centrifuges for making nuclear weapons for doing this.

Iran's own forces and proxies have launched or facilitated hundreds of lethal strikes against Israeli civilians in recent years. No international law or principle of justice requires a nation to absorb such heinous attacks while waiting for some UN body to authorize defensive action. Article 51 of the UN Charter affirms the inherent right of self-defense.

A regime that calls for the elimination of another UN member state cannot reasonably expect that state (i.e., Israel) to treat its march toward nuclear capability as a routine matter of sovereign discretion. In a world of precision missiles and nuclear breakout timelines measured in weeks, not years, waiting for the mass slaughter of a mushroom cloud is not prudence; it is abdication. The war against Iranian tyranny is not the result of lust for conflict in Washington or Jerusalem. It comes because Tehran has made the status quo untenable.

Faced with Diplomatic Impotence, War Against Iran Is Legitimate

When rogue states like Iran or terrorist organizations such as Hizbullah or Hamas sow terror, blatantly disregard signed agreements, and pursue their nuclear program, international law is rendered irrelevant and sidelined by force of arms, the only means to impose the diplomatic agenda.

How can we admit and tolerate that for more than five decades the Islamic revolution has been responsible for the majority of acts of terror and terrorist attacks around the world and that its spiritual leader has the blood of many innocent people, women, children and old people on his hands?

Western powers have tried several approaches to negotiate with the Iranian regime, including appeasement, negotiations, and sanctions. Yet the Iranian government has not been deterred or convinced to end its nuclear program, whose primary objective is the destruction of the Jewish state.

French President Macron rushed to convene the Security Council, citing the risks of renewed conflict, instead of showing solidarity with the American fight against the Axis of Evil. Macron remained completely silent on the victims of Iranian ballistic missiles targeting the Israeli civilian population, some of whom are French citizens.

During this war, we observe that the residents of Tehran can move about freely on foot and by car, aware that Israeli strikes are precise and surgical, unlike their missiles launched indiscriminately against innocent people, that only target the civilian population.

7th US service member dies in Operation Epic Fury

A US service member wounded in an Iranian attack against US troops in Saudi Arabia has succumbed to their injuries — the seventh American soldier to have died during Operation Epic Fury.

The unidentified soldier was “seriously wounded” in the March 1 attack as Iran launched missiles and drones at US installations across the Middle East at the start of the conflict, according to CENTCOM.

“Last night, a U.S. service member passed away from injuries received during the Iranian regime’s initial attacks across the Middle East,” CENTCOM wrote on X on Sunday afternoon.

“The service member was seriously wounded at the scene of an attack on U.S. troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on March 1.”

CENTCOM said it is withholding releasing the identity of the slain servicemember for 24 hours pending next-of-kin notification.

The news comes a day after NYPD Officer and decorated Army veteran Sorffly Davius died during a health crisis while deployed in Kuwait with the National Guard.

On Saturday, President Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the bodies of six Army Reserve members were flown to after they died when an Iranian drone struck a US facility in Kuwait.

Israel's Secret Weapon

The human element of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is our true secret weapon. Technology is only a force multiplier; it is the spirit behind it that gives it power.

Both men and women, in regular service and the reserves, are determined, committed, and deeply patriotic. Nowhere else do 18-year-olds routinely take on life-risking missions as a national duty.

In moments of crisis, volunteers emerge everywhere, caring for displaced families and assisting soldiers at the front and on the home front. An entire nation mobilizes.

Israel's air defense units operate around the clock, with nearly half of the soldiers being women.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has been living through two years of continuous war, painful losses, thousands of wounded, families shattered, and entire communities displaced. Yet Israeli society's resilience has become even more visible.

Citizens follow life-saving instructions, adapt to emergency conditions, support the war effort, and continue to function as a society, even under constant threat.

The Israeli public understands that defending the country is not only the army's responsibility; it is a collective national effort.

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