From Ian:
The Anti-Zionism Exception
Civil rights law has an anti-Zionism problem. In cases alleging discrimination, courts typically allow civil rights plaintiffs to use a contextual test—assessing what the U.S. Supreme Court has called the “totality of the relevant facts”—to prove that discrimination in fact occurred. And when key facts are disputed, courts rely on juries to resolve them. Juries are quintessential finders of fact, and discrimination is a quintessential fact question.
But now, for Jews and Israelis, there is an emerging exception to the customary contextual test. Under this exception, behaviors styled as “anti-Zionism”—opposition to Israel’s continued existence—are deemed inherently not discriminatory. Although this anti-Zionism exception started with progressive activists, it has recently jumped to the pages of a published decision by a federal appeals court, which seemed to imply that anti-Zionism, once draped over someone’s speech, generally disproves allegations of discrimination.
This anti-Zionism exception is wrong. It obscures that, in context, anti-Zionism can involve discrimination based on both national origin and race. If it stands, the civil rights of Jews and Israelis will be profoundly unequal to those of other groups that experience discrimination. And, for those who discriminate against Jews and Israelis, anti-Zionist arguments and rhetoric will function as a sort of “get out of jail free” card, enabling them to skirt legal accountability.
As a civil rights lawyer, I have had a front-row seat to the emerging anti-Zionism exception in civil rights law. For years, I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with other advocates to oppose discrimination of one kind or another, from racially disparate policing to President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. But through it all, there has been one constant: a broad, contextual approach to diagnosing discrimination. In no area of civil rights law is there a magic word that defendants can utter to automatically defeat the charge of discrimination.
Instead of following the typical path in discrimination cases, the court seemed to do something different just for anti-Zionism and just for Jews.
That’s because discrimination can be subtle, especially in an age when being seen as a bigot is often socially undesirable and legally risky. As a result, even the most serious cases of discrimination often manifest through tacit double standards rather than explicit bigotry. Consider a police officer who allegedly deems it suspicious when a Black man, but not a white man, puts his hands in his pockets. Or an employer who, as one court put it, deems a man “assertive” but a woman “pushy.” Normally, a jury or other fact finder would be asked to decide whether, in context, these situations reflect discriminatory double standards or instead something more benign.
So it should be with anti-Zionism.
For starters, when deployed as a reason to target “Zionists,” such as by excluding them from school buildings, anti-Zionism is at least arguably, as Harvard Law Professor Stephen Sachs has explained, “a form of national-origin discrimination.” The reason is simple: Discriminating based on national origin includes insisting that people disavow a specific nation, especially their own nation of origin. Just imagine how easily laws prohibiting national-origin discrimination could be defeated if courts were to indulge wordplay such as “Oh, I’m not refusing to hire Italians and Haitians; I’m refusing to hire Italianists and Hatianists.”
Yet activists have resisted that logic for people they deem “Zionists.” And it’s easy to see why.
Particularly since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Zionism has become a pillar of progressive movements. Sometimes it is bare opposition to Israel’s existence. But sometimes it is more extreme. Indeed, I have witnessed people who consider themselves civil rights supporters—people I know—express support for Hamas. But unlike their right-wing counterparts, who openly revel in Jew hatred, progressives want to believe that they oppose explicit discriminatory postures. Instead, they insist that there is something unique about “anti-Zionism,” which they view as a response to a “Zionist” political ideology, that exempts their statements and actions from standard antidiscrimination analyses.
The Weaponization of the Word “Ethnostate” Against Israel
Israel is, by its own description, an ethnostate, and saying otherwise would be a “ludicrous lie.” At least, that’s according to Tucker Carlson in a recent conversation with white nationalist Peter Brimelow.
Because Jewish identity is matrilineal, meaning a person is considered Jewish if their mother is Jewish, Brimelow and Carlson argue that the Jewish religion is racially based and therefore a “racial component” is inherent in the State of Israel. Being that the state was founded by atheists who “identified as Jewish racially,” Carlson suggests that Israel can only be described as such.
However, Israel, by its own description, is not an ethnostate in the way that Carlson and his guest describe. It is not a ludicrous lie to say this, but rather a simple understanding of the state’s laws and what an ethnostate actually is. This term, nevertheless, has become increasingly popular amongst anti-Israel influencers and journalists to negatively single out the only Jewish state for being just that – a Jewish state.
An ethnostate, at its basic understanding, is a state dominated by a certain ethnic group. But anti-Israel influencers have taken this term to mean something drastically different when applied to Israel, because, being a Jewish-majority state, would naturally make Israel an ethnostate in the same way that other ethnic or cultural majority states, such as Japan or Greece, would also fall under this category.
But when applied to Israel specifically, the entire understanding of the term changes to be one of racial discrimination based on fundamental misinterpretations of Israeli and Jewish laws.
Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state grants every Jew in the world the right to live in Israel, under the Law of Return. Under this law, anyone with one Jewish grandparent is eligible to become a citizen of the state. This is not a racial hierarchy as Carlson and Brimelow allude to, but rather a policy rooted in peoplehood, history, and refuge. The Law of Return exists because Jews are a nation with a shared identity that predates modern racial categories and has survived thousands of years, despite much of that time being in exile from the land of Israel.
Crucially, Israeli citizenship is not limited to the Jewish people. Arab Israelis account for 21% of the total population and hold the same rights as Jewish Israelis, including holding positions of government and law.
Yet this has not stopped journalists such as Briahna Joy Gray from incorrectly and continuously repeating that as an ethnostate, Israel denies Arabs equal rights.
Seth Mandel:
The American Jewish Novel After October 7
One of the more interesting questions about Jewish culture after October 7 is: What will the future of American Jewish fiction look like? It will be particularly interesting to see how Israel is portrayed in the imaginations of Jewish writers of the Diaspora.
Conveniently, two recent books, both just named finalists at next month’s National Jewish Book Awards, can shed some light on the topic. The best way to describe Israel in American fiction before October 7 is by conjuring the film trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Coined by Nathan Rabin in 2007, the term refers to the female character who “exists solely… to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
American Jewish novelists have just gone through a period in which Israel appears as the national version of this archetype: Call it the Manic Pixie Dream Country. In the books, American Jews are assimilated and spiritually adrift, while their Israeli counterparts are tan and fearless. The Americans are outwardly dismissive of the Israeli machismo but inwardly captivated by it. The Diaspora Jew and the New Sabra look at each other the way one imagines the Flintstones and the Jetsons might, as if their co-presence represents some kind of tear in the fabric of the universe. And if the American characters end up in Israel, it is at the end of a redemption arc, a moment of salvation and fulfillment.
In the most extreme versions, the plot involves Israel’s literal destruction, as if a non-Israeli Jewish future can only be imagined if there is no Israel, so strong is the Jewish state’s gravitational pull. As the novelist David Bezmozgis once said: “The Jewish future is to be found in Israel. The Jewish past in Europe. Where in this equation is North America?”
The apotheosis of this genre is, unfortunately, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2016 novel Here I Am, an absolute chore of a book. In it, an earthquake hits the Middle East, devastates Israel and leads to a mass invasion of it by regional powers. Even with Israel on the edge of the abyss, the U.S.-based Jewish family remains unable to find its own identity. (Like many of the books in this genre, it owes something of a debt to Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.)
A much better version of the disaster storyline plays out in 2024’s Next Stop, by Benjamin Resnick, in which a supernatural phenomenon that makes people disappear also makes Israel disappear. The Jews are blamed for the anomaly and in the U.S. they are herded into ghettos.
From Ian:
Trump signs bill ending shutdown, with more than $4 billion for Israel
Legislation that U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law on Tuesday included more than $4 billion for Israel, as well as several other provisions in support of the Jewish state, according to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Trump acted fewer than three hours after the U.S. House of Representatives cleared the bill that would reopen the federal government through Sept. 30 after a short shutdown. The Senate had passed the legislation earlier.
Atop the list is $3.8 billion for the U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding, which includes $3.3 billion in security assistance and $500 million for missile defense, such as Iron Dome and Arrow.
“Congress sent a powerful message about the strength and vibrancy of the U.S.-Israel alliance,” AIPAC stated. “This funding makes America safer, stronger and more prosperous, and ensures our democratic ally can defend itself from our shared enemies.”
Other funding includes $47.5 million for U.S.-Israel emerging technology cooperation (a $27.5 million increase), $75 million for U.S.-Israel counter-drone and directed energy investment (up $20 million), $80 million for U.S.-Israel anti-tunnel defense cooperation (a $32.5 million increase), $37.5 million for the Nita Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act that supports economic cooperation and peace building and $3 million for U.S.-Israel international development cooperation.
The measure also bans funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, both in The Hague; and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry against Israel.
“Congress once again came together to send an unequivocal and bipartisan message of support for Israel and the U.S-Israel relationship,” AIPAC stated. “This strong bipartisan support reflects that the enduring partnership between the United States and the Jewish state remains stronger than ever.”
US charges Elias Rodriguez with terrorism in Washington killing of two Israeli diplomats last May
A man accused of killing two Israeli diplomats in Washington last year was indicted on four additional counts of terrorism, in a new indictment that was unsealed on Wednesday.
The new indictment includes nine charges, including hate crimes, filed earlier. Several of the charges carry a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia said.
"These additional terrorism-related charges carry a mandatory life sentence under DC Code, while also reflecting the reality that this act was in fact an act of terror," US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said in a statement.
Prosecutors accuse Elias Rodriguez, 31, of opening fire on people leaving an event for young professionals and diplomats hosted by the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group that fights antisemitism and supports Israel.
He fired approximately 20 shots from a semi-automatic handgun, and called out "Free Palestine," according to prosecutors.
Lawyers for Rodriguez did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, who both worked for Israel's Embassy in Washington, were killed.
Darren B. Cox, the FBI assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, said Rodriguez wrote and published a manifesto as an attempt to "morally justify his actions" and inspire others to commit political violence.
US slams South Africa’s expulsion of Israeli diplomat
U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott said South Africa’s expulsion of Israel’s senior diplomat prioritized political grievances over the country’s national interests and its citizens’ well-being.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Pigott called Pretoria’s move “another example of its poor foreign policy choices. Expelling a diplomat for calling out the African National Congress party’s ties to Hamas and other antisemitic radicals prioritizes grievance politics over the good of South Africa and its citizens.”
South Africa declared Israel’s chargé d’affaires, Ariel Seidman, persona non grata on Jan. 30 and ordered him to leave the country within 72 hours, according to a statement from the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Department of International Relations and Cooperation, DIRCO).
South African officials said the decision was based on what they described as “violations of diplomatic norms,” including the alleged use of official Israeli platforms to criticize South African leadership and a failure to notify authorities of visits by senior Israeli officials.
In response, Israel’s Foreign Ministry designated South Africa’s top diplomat in Israel, Shaun Edward Byneveldt, persona non grata, ordering him to leave the country within 72 hours. The ministry said that “additional steps will be considered in due course.”
The diplomatic exchange further strains relations between Jerusalem and Pretoria, which have deteriorated sharply since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Both countries recalled their ambassadors in the weeks that followed.
South Africa has been a leading critic of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and has pursued legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, both based in The Hague.
The United States has strongly opposed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. President Donald Trump last year froze most U.S. aid to South Africa, citing Pretoria’s positions toward Washington, including its ties with Russia and Iran and its legal campaign against Israel.
Incoming U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Leo Brent Bozell has said that defending American policy on Israel will be a top priority when he assumes his post later this year.
From Ian:
Matti Friedman:
New Wave, Old Land
Can a foreign observer show up in another country, without living there or speaking the language, and say something original and definitive about it—something that wouldn’t strike locals as illiterate or banal?
Almost never. My answer would be the same, I imagine, as that of most Israelis, flooded as we are with the confident fantasies of countless such observers in every corner of social media and what’s left of the international press. Whether believing themselves to be journalists or tourists, what most outsiders see in a foreign country is nearly always what they bring with them from home. They mine distant lands for shiny rocks in which to view their own reflection. This seems truer of Israel than of other places because of the way this country and its residents have featured in the fantasy lives of others for so long.
But there are glorious exceptions. One of them was screened in a recent exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem: a documentary film of under one hour, shot in four weeks in the spring of 1960 by the French director Chris Marker. The film, Description of a Struggle, deserves to be more famous than it is. This is not just because it’s a portrait of this country—now weathered and scarred by hard living—as a newborn. It’s because the film is a master class in how to see a place and its people, and a restorative for anyone despairing of our ability to look at the world and create an impression in words or images.
When Marker arrived in Israel with his French crew, another foreign film was already shooting here: the Hollywood epic Exodus, starring Paul Newman. This movie, like the Leon Uris bestseller that inspired it, is an example of a fantastical projection with little connection to the actual place in question. In ticket sales and press attention, Exodus was to Marker’s modest film—in which the stars are anonymous kids, farmers, and a few Israeli cats and owls—what a Royal Caribbean liner is to a birch canoe. Sixty-five years later, Exodus is unwatchable and Description of a Struggle is hypnotic.
Chris Marker, who became famous as part of the French New Wave of the 1950s, was a slippery and playful artist. He claimed at times to have been born in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. In fact his birth occurred, more mundanely for a Frenchman, in France, to parents who called him not “Chris Marker” but Christian Hippolyte François Bouche-Villeneuve. He chose his new name, he once explained, to make it easier to travel. Marker was active into his eighties, experimenting with video games and YouTube in his little studio in Paris. He died in 2012 at age ninety-one.
Seth Mandel:
What People Don’t Understand About Jewish Security
This is where the misconception comes in. Jewish institutions across Western Europe, especially in places like France and Germany, have beefed up security. So in many cases, the Jewish children are safe—inside the building.
“But if we take three steps outside,” the Potsdam Jewish leader said, “we are completely on our own.”
When the German office tasked with tallying and categorizing incidents of anti-Semitism completed its report on 2024, it found a rise in Jew-hatred that was not particularly unexpected but nonetheless striking: “In 2024, RIAS reporting offices documented a total of 8 incidents of extreme violence, 186 assaults, 443 cases of targeted property damage, 300 threats” and, for good measure, about 7,500 “cases of abusive behavior.” One example of “extreme violence” was an ISIS terror attack that killed three.
One type of abusive behavior tracked by RIAS: anti-Semitic gatherings, of which there were over 1,800 in 2024: “In 2024, there was an average of 35 antisemitic gatherings per week, compared to 16 in 2023.” Such gatherings—think of the ubiquitous pro-Hamas marches and rallies in major Western cities since the war began—act as a way to “mobilize” anti-Semites, RIAS notes.
Let’s boil it down: There are daily calls for violence and near-daily violent anti-Semitism in Germany. These incidents aren’t taking place inside fortified daycares. The presence of secure buildings in Germany did nothing to slow down the country’s incidence of anti-Semitic violence: People have to get to and from those buildings.
In this way, the argument over securing physical locations, while important, remains incomplete. A wave of anti-Semitism hit Jews in Germany in broad daylight. The only way to avoid it would be for Jews to have simply stayed home. That’s one reason for the suggestion in the Potsdam case that the benefits of securing the daycare center might be offset by the downside of calling attention to the presence of Jewish children: The building will be a gathering place of Jews coming to drop off and pick up their children.
Jews work at offices, eat at restaurants, visit parks, etc.
In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL, investing more in Jewish identity
In a speech that described antisemites as an “axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incurably stupid,” Bret Stephens asserted that supporters of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish defense groups should largely abandon their current strategy for combating antisemitism and instead redirect their resources toward strengthening Jewish life itself.
Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist and founder of the Jewish thought journal Sapir, said antisemitism is largely impervious to appeals to tolerance, reminders of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments, or mandatory Holocaust education.
Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership, arguing that the infrastructure already exists but lacks sufficient scale and coordination.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted, effort,” Stephens said, delivering the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Sunday. “We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere.”
In an onstage conversation after the talk, Stephens told Rabbi David Ingber, the Y’s senior director for Jewish life, that if it were up to him, he would “dismantle” the ADL, the leading Jewish group fighting antisemitism.
“That’s not how Jewish money should be spent,” Stephens told Ingber, acknowledging that the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was in the audience. “That’s not helping raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness as something other than the fact that they saw ‘Schindler’s List’ and they visited the Holocaust Museum. That cannot be the locus of Jewish identity. If we’re going to survive, victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity.”
From Ian:
Khaled Abu Toameh:
The Trump Administration's Delusional Gaza 'Master Plan'
Even if Hamas does agree to surrender some of its weapons as part of a façade to appease Trump, the terror group will undoubtedly continue to keep or replace as many as possible to maintain a military, political and security presence in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is not worried about the newly established Palestinian technocratic committee that is supposed to govern the Gaza Strip: the committee does not pose a direct threat to the terror group. The committee is primarily tasked with managing civilian affairs, delivering essential services such as water, electricity, healthcare and education, and rebuilding infrastructure. Security will remain in the hands of Hamas....
Building skyscrapers and an airport in the Gaza Strip will not change the Palestinians' views on Israel. The Palestinians are not going to give up the "right of return" because of foreign investment in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is not going to recognize Israel's right to exist or give up its Jihad (holy war) against the "Zionist entity" because of new homes, luxury apartments and tourist resorts. The only way to change the hearts and minds of Palestinians is through a deep and thorough process of re-education and actual serious pressure, for once, from the outside world. This requires brave, strong and pragmatic leadership -- both from the Palestinians and the international community -- an attribute that, unfortunately, does not seem to exist.
Ruthie Blum:
Doctors Without Borders is getting the treatment it deserves
If there was any doubt about that, NGO Monitor has provided proof that MSF is not only far from a neutral humanitarian organization, but is openly partisan. Against Israel, of course.
It’s accused Israel of “genocide,” “collective punishment” and “apartheid,” while lobbying foreign governments to halt arms sales to the country. Nor has it ever condemned the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.
But it has frequently decried Israeli operations in Gaza, downplaying or omitting Hamas’s systematic use of hospitals, ambulances and medical infrastructure for terrorist purposes. No wonder it’s been refusing to disclose the identity of its employees.
By resisting such transparency, it thought it could dupe Israeli authorities into allowing it to continue collaborating with mass murderers under the protective international cloak—and guise—of selfless physicians devoted to helping Palestinians in need of medical treatment.
How ironic that it’s been doing so for the very people whom the terrorists have purposely maimed and killed, as well as tried to starve, in order to frame Israel for their deaths. Talk about giving new meaning to the Hippocratic Oath.
As NGO Monitor founder and president Gerald Steinberg told JNS’s David Isaac on Monday, “MSF has gotten away with using its massive annual budget ($2.4 billion) and the influence this buys to promote antisemitic propaganda … and to avoid accountability for links to Hamas. But attempts to use bullying tactics through journalists and European political allies to avoid vital Israeli counterterror registration have failed. Their moral medical facade has been exposed for all to see.”
Indeed, even the best surgical masks can’t hide the group’s true face and ill will—for which there’s no cure.
Au revoir, MSF. Don’t let the door hit you in the derrière on your way out of Gaza.
Seth Mandel:
Is Iran Attending Its Own Funeral?
A Mideast summit this Friday looks like it will play host to a group of countries that claim to want to save Iran from U.S. strikes—but in reality want to bury the Islamic Republic alive.
For Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which both plan to be represented at the meetup in Istanbul, it’s pretty straightforward. The Saudis are rivals for Iran’s influence and power projection around the Gulf, and Egypt stands to benefit from a loosening of Iranian proxies’ troublemaking in the Red Sea shipping lanes and its sponsorship of Hamas.
The reason for Turkey and Qatar’s bad-faith participation in the summit becomes clear when you see the kind of proposed “solutions” coming out of Ankara. Haaretz reports: “Turkey might propose, among other things, that the enriched uranium in Iran — including around 440 kilograms (970 pounds) that are enriched to 60 percent — be transferred to Turkey, with a promise that it would never be returned to Iran.”
There’s no reason to spend time listing all that’s wrong with that idea: Everything is wrong with it. But the Turks might as well shoot their shot; Haaretz notes that Russia has offered to hold the nuclear material for Iran and that “Trump may see Turkey as a more reliable entity than Russia.” Well, the planet has yet to see an entity less reliable than Putin’s Russia, so it’s all relative.
Though Ankara’s diplomats will never say so, Turkey is essentially proposing that Iran and Turkey switch places, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the steward of all the mullahs’ ill-gotten gains. Nuclear material? Put it in Turkey. Terrorist proxies around the region? Let them answer only to Turkey. Russia’s regional patsy? Turkey reporting for duty, comrade. Counterweight to Israel? Turkey.
The Qataris are playing a similar game. They have an American air base and have ingratiated themselves with Trump’s team. They may be Iran’s ally, but they do not need Iran’s protection. Iran’s newfound weakness poses minimal threat to Qatar, but Doha stands to gain substantial clout in Tehran’s absence. The Qataris, therefore, don’t want Iran to be destroyed by American and Israeli strikes, but they would like Iran to be locked into its current state of weakness, preferably through a deal that would freeze it in place without enabling its resurgence.
Right now, Iran doesn’t have a lot of friends, even among its friends.
From Ian:
David Collier:
The BBC Sides With the BDS Agenda
The Extremists Within the “Minor” NGO
Both the BBC’s legitimisation of the UNHRC, and the whitewashing of the SPSC were inexcusable. This leaves the article’s remaining credibility resting almost entirely on Uplift, the minor NGO which commissioned the legal report.
Uplift is not a neutral or detached actor either. A brief review of some of its personnel highlights serious concerns. Its Digital Content Manager, Oliver Goulden, also serves as a trustee of Take One Action, an organisation with a documented history of supporting BDS initiatives, including campaigning alongside Mick Napier’s group, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Other figures associated with Uplift reinforce the same pattern. Lauren Macdonald, the group’s Lead Stop Rosebank Campaigner, maintains public timelines containing demonstrably inaccurate and demonising claims about Israel that are entirely unrelated to the Rosebank project. Meanwhile, Uplift’s Head of Strategic Communications, Tamasin Cave, previously led Spinwatch, a research group with a longstanding fixation on Zionism and lobbying, alongside the conspiracy theorist David Miller. Cave was a director of “Public Interest Investigations” the legal entity behind both Spinwatch and Powerbase, and her footprint is still visible in numerous documents focused on pro-Israeli lobby groups.
Eddy Quekett, Uplift’s Social Media Officer, has posted imagery containing the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“. The image incorporated a “Friends of Al Aqsa” (FoA) Palestinian flag. Friends of al Aqsa is a hard-line Islamist organisation led by Ismail Patel, and opposed to many of the fundamental freedoms taken for granted in the West. FoA seeks Islamist control over Jerusalem. This post has nothing to do with climate issues. It was a straightforward call for the destruction of Israel.
At this point the final pillar collapses. This is not a collection of disinterested experts raising a narrow legal concern. It is a network of highly politicised climate activists with a clear and established record of engagement in anti-Zionist campaigning. Treating their claims as though they carry inherent national news value, without disclosing that background, materially misleads the audience.
The undeniable pattern at BBC News
British Jews have seen it all from the BBC:
Repeated attempts to rewrite Holocaust history.
The shifting of blame onto British Jews for the violence directed at them.
The sanitisation of Hamas operatives by presenting them as medical staff.
The production of a documentary that concealed the Hamas ties of its central figure.
The creation of misleading reports about Israeli military actions in Gaza.
The reframing of an errant Islamic Jihad rocket into an Israeli strike on a hospital.
The use of Iranian IRGC-backed figures as impartial media sources.
The presentation of children with underlying illnesses as starving victims of famine.
The creation of a flagship “BBC Verify” populated by hacks spreading false claims about Israel.
The situation is so hostile that the Jews left working in the BBC village have become targets of internal campaigns to smear them and force them out.
There is an undeniable pattern here. This is a one-way traffic pattern which demonises the Jewish state, acts as a mouthpiece for terrorist factions, invents stories, revises Holocaust history, and invariably places Jewish people as hostile actors who incite whatever violence befalls them.
Yet in some respects, this latest article is even more revealing than those earlier institutional failures.
Creating a BDS narrative
First, a non-story is elevated into national news. Then, institutional authority is imported through an unqualified reference to the UN. Finally, activist groups are presented without disclosing information that would materially affect how readers assess their claims.
The result is a familiar pattern: activist lawfare against Israel, repackaged through climate discourse and laundered through respectable-sounding institutions.
But this is taking place on the BBC website, not in some fringe student-led magazine.
The BBC will respond by claiming it has placed dissenting voices inside the article, but this is a false position. The BBC does not need to explicitly endorse boycotts or anti-Israel campaigns. It achieves the same effect by deciding which claims deserve oxygen, and by stripping away the context that would allow audiences to judge those claims critically.
What the BBC has done here is elevate the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign into a conversation for the day.
This is not journalism exposing power. It is journalism amplifying it – selectively, predictably, and at Israel’s expense.
Jewish groups warn of ‘agenda-driven’ anti-Israel programming at US universities
There is a “disturbing” pattern on U.S. college campuses of academic programming that prioritizes political, “agenda-driven” activism over scholarship, according to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and the American Jewish Medical Association.
In a joint statement issued on Monday, the organizations cited a January speaker series at Harvard Medical School focused on Gaza and an upcoming “Conference on the Jewish Left” at Boston University.
“When Boston University lends its name and resources to a slate of speakers who minimize the scope of antisemitism and spin the Oct. 7 massacre as a moral indictment of Israel and its supporters in the Jewish community, it suggests university support for rhetoric that targets the identity and safety of Jewish students,” the organizations stated.
Jewish student leaders at BU told CAMERA that they fear for their safety, concerns echoed by the campus Hillel chapter. A university working group formed after Oct. 7 found Jewish and Israeli students had been targeted by aggression and cited insufficient protections.
Last year, Douglas Hauer-Gilad, an adjunct professor, said he resigned from Boston University’s law school after facing hostility for being Israeli and opposing anti-Jewish rhetoric.
A member of BU Students for Israel stated that the conference reflects a broader trend on campus.
“After everything that has happened on campus this year, it’s hard not to see this conference as part of a pattern,” he said. “Jewish students are repeatedly told these events are ‘academic,’ even when the rhetoric involved mirrors the hostility we experience day to day.”
Bar-Ilan University to award Jonathan Sacks Prize to historian Deborah Lipstadt
Professor and Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt, former U.S. envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism from 2022 to 2025, is set to receive Bar-Ilan University’s 2026 Jonathan Sacks Institute Prize for Outstanding Achievement as a Public Intellectual.
The award, established by the Gewurz family of Montreal in memory of Samuel Gewurz, honors figures whose work advances the ideas and moral vision of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, who died in 2020.
It comes with $32,500, which will be presented to Lipstadt at a Bar-Ilan ceremony in May, where the 78-year-old is slated to deliver a public lecture titled “Antisemitism: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”
“Professor Lipstadt exemplifies the rare combination of intellectual rigor, moral courage, and public engagement that Rabbi Sacks so deeply admired,” said Jonathan Rynhold, professor and academic director of the Jonathan Sacks Institute. “Her work has shaped global discourse on antisemitism, truth and democratic resilience at a moment when these issues are more urgent than ever.”
Professor Arie Zaban, president of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that “Lipstadt’s work reminds us that standing up for truth requires courage, clarity and persistence.”
Lipstadt, a longtime Emory University professor, is known for her successful legal defense against British Holocaust-denier David Irving. In the announcement from the university, Bar-Ilan highlighted her books Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and Antisemitism: Here and Now.
“I have been blessed to receive many honors in my life,” Lipstadt said. “But this one, to paraphrase the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, surpasses them all because of its connection with Bar-Ilan.”
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
This ayatollah fanclub heaps shame on London
We need to grapple with the seriousness of what happened in London on Saturday. Mobs of people sided with Islamist fanaticism. They cosied up to the killers of women. They aligned themselves, publicly and proudly, with the venal ayatollah classes who are content to lay waste to thousands of lives if it will help them to preserve their Koranic power. Rarely has the moral decay of the protesting classes been so starkly on display – a psychotic religious regime massacres thousands and these people either say, ‘But what about Israel?!’ – or worse, ‘Good’.
Saturday’s march was a funeral for moral decency. No one of good conscience, no one of sound moral standing, can be the least bit confused as to what side to take in Iran. This is a theocracy that savagely punishes women for living freely, and which ruthlessly locks up dissenters and apostates, and which has brazenly slain thousands for daring to desire freedom. If you look at this and think to yourself, ‘It’s complicated’, then you have fully vacated the realm of reason. You have made your peace with barbarism.
Some say the Gazaholics of the activist class are being hypocritical. These people weep for the dead of Gaza but shrug their shoulders over the dead of Iran. I disagree. There’s moral consistency here. For in both their anti-Israel fury and their nonchalance over the butchery in Iran, these people are siding with the carnival of bloody reaction that is Islamist fanaticism. Their 7 October apologism and their shameful silence on the Iranian massacres spring from the same dark, warped source – a creepy sympathy for Islamism, a belief that this religious mania represents some kind of resistance to the West, to Israel, to capitalism, to modernity. Their anger over the war in Gaza and their coolness over the mass murder in Iran are both grim proof of the moral rot of identitarianism.
For how much longer will we surrender our streets to the Israel haters and the ayatollah fanclub? To the intifada-cheering middle classes and the mullah-loving Islamists? To those who think the Jewish nation fighting back against its invaders is ‘genocide’ but the mass murder of protesters by tooled-up theocrats is nothing to get worked up about? Mass solidarity with Iranians is what we need right now. The only time I want to see the flag of the Islamic Republic on the streets of London is in the minutes before someone sets it on fire.
Anti-Israel, former president of Chile nominated to be next UN secretary-general
Backed by Mexico and Brazil, Gabriel Boric, Chile’s outgoing president, nominated former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, a harsh critic of the Jewish state, to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations.
Boric, who is also anti-Israel, made the announcement on Monday. José Antonio Kast, a right-wing politician who is set to assume the Chilean presidency next month, would be unlikely to nominate Bachelet, 74, for the role.
Bachelet, who was Brazil’s president twice—from 2006-10 and 2014-18—was the first head of U.N. Women and served as U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
She was a frequent critic of the Jewish state, which broke ties with her office in 2020 over her decision to implement a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution mandating the publication of a blacklist of companies engaged in business in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.
According to U.N. Watch, Bachelet issued 14 comments about Israel, more than any democratic country. She made the same number of statements about Syria and fewer about Iran, according to the watchdog.
Bachelet used her final hours in office to decry Israel over its denial of visas to her staff. She ignored antisemitic comments made by a member of the Human Rights Council’s commission of inquiry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for which the commissioner later apologized.
New York Times Misleads Readers on Gaza Death Toll
Edward Wong, who covers the State Department for the New York Times, has a news article in the Feb. 2 newspaper that says "the Israeli military has killed about 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants."
That’s more or less standard Times language. It’s problematic in its own right, failing to disclose that the health ministry is part of the Hamas-controlled Gaza government, and using the term "combatants" instead of "Hamas terrorists."
What really caught my eye, though, was the new language in the following paragraph. It says, "A senior Israeli security official told Israeli journalists that was an accurate number."
This is scraping the bottom, even by the Times’s own very low standards—relying on what an anonymous source supposedly told some other journalists. For verification, the online version of the Times article links not to anything written by "Israeli journalists" but rather a piece in the far-left British newspaper the Guardian by a former visiting scholar of Chinese literature at Peking University who "also worked in Cuba for a year," Emma Graham-Harrison. That Guardian article relies largely on the far-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose own published articles on the topic say nothing about "a senior Israeli security official." The Guardian also links to an article from the Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian, who mentions an anonymous "senior Israeli military official."
Even the Times’s "senior security official" is a vague term and could apply to a variety of figures, including political rivals of the current Israeli prime minister and disgruntled former military officials who have been ousted.
Meanwhile, the official Israel Defense Forces international spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, posted on Jan. 30 to debunk the false claim that the IDF has accepted the casualty figures. "The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data," Shoshani said. "Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels." The Times didn’t share that denial with its readers.
From Ian:
Jake Wallis Simons:
Genocide once meant something. Now the term is just political invective
Of the many examples of moral collapse that followed October 7, the debasement of genocide has been among the ugliest. Using the megaphone of social media, activists, hostile states, the media and non-governmental organisations have corrupted a precise legal term to smear troops who were issuing evacuation orders, facilitating aid handouts and fighting an enemy that used human shields. What begins with Jews never ends with Jews. If the meaning of genocide is lost, no Western army will be safe.
As Keir Starmer’s failed attempts to marshal international law against our own troops who fought in Iraq demonstrated, such instincts are strong amongst progressives. As in London and Strasbourg, so in the Hague. On Thursday, judges at the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, finished hearing a genocide case against Myanmar. Given the appalling atrocities against the Rohingya, few would dispute the verdict if the crime is confirmed. Scratch the surface, however, and trouble is brewing.
Genocide as a modern legal concept first emerged in print in Axis Rule In Occupied Europe, a 1944 book by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Crucially, it described mass violence with the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Lemkin was influenced by the 1915 Armenian massacres, but it was the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews – in which 49 members of his own family were murdered – that provided the catalyst for its inclusion on the statute books.
Since 1945, only five legally-confirmed genocides have been recognised by the British government: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and the liquidation of the Yazidis by Islamic State. Between the Srebrenica massacre – the last time the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a guilty verdict – and Myanmar, times have changed.
As part of the hearing this week, hostile Facebook posts were presented as evidence. Social media has become part of life since 2007, but there are fears that relying upon such contextual and emotive ephemera may eclipse the hard facts, especially as the ICJ’s next case is against Israel.
Aggressive posts and videos of soldiers chanting bloodthirsty slogans already form the backbone of the prosecution’s case against the Jewish state. Are these really evidence of genocidal intent in an army that warns civilians to flee before it attacks? The Myanmar precedent may lead judges – who are human, after all – to give such things undue weight.
Similarly, NGOs giving evidence against Myanmar included Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of which have a well-established bias against Israel. None of this necessarily invalidates the case. But it reveals the weakness of the court.
Ben-Dror Yemini:
Responsibility for Death Toll in Gaza Lies with Hamas
Recently, multiple media outlets reported that unnamed sources within the IDF were inclined to accept Hamas's casualty figures from Gaza.
But who exactly were these sources? I repeatedly contacted the IDF Spokesperson's Unit and was told: "That's not our position."
The IDF spokesperson to the foreign media, Nadav Shoshani, said: "The details published do not reflect the official data of the IDF."
An investigation reveals that, indeed, an IDF source did say something in a background briefing. But he wasn't an authorized spokesperson.
He didn't intend for his words to be understood the way they were. And his comments were twisted and distorted. But the damage? Enormous.
Hamas Health Ministry figures on the numbers of dead in Gaza identify no Hamas fighters, no deaths from natural causes, or those killed by rockets misfired by Gaza terror groups.
They do show that the majority are men of combat age.
Hamas alone is to blame. It is Hamas that for years incited genocide against Jews. It is Hamas that launched a murderous rampage on Oct. 7.
The silence of the graveyard: Why the West abandons Iran to the ayatollahs
In January 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out what may prove to be one of the largest episodes of state violence against its own population in modern history. Reports from within the Ministry of Health and independent monitors suggest that on the nights of January 8 and 9 alone, the death toll exceeded 30,000.
It was a methodical, ruthless slaughter of students, workers, and women whose only crime was a refusal to submit to theocratic cruelty. The regime plunged the country into digital darkness to shroud the carnage, yet the subsequent mass executions have been met in the Western public sphere with a curious, stifled silence.
Contrast this with the totalizing mobilization surrounding Gaza – a cause that has dominated Western activism, academia, and media ecosystems for over two decades. Rather than a mere shortage of facts, this staggering disparity represents an active ideological filter that renders certain atrocities invisible.
The Foucault ghost and the red-green alliance
The roots of this silence run deep into the bedrock of French Theory. When Michel Foucault traveled to Tehran in 1978, he famously romanticized the Islamic Revolution as a “political spirituality” that could challenge Western modernity. That intellectual legacy persists today.
Modern activists have inherited a neo-Marxist framework that has replaced the old class struggle with a rigid hierarchy of identity groups. In this moral cartography, social legitimacy is derived from one’s place in the “Oppression Olympics.” Because the Iranian regime frames itself as an opponent of the West – the source of all evil in the world – its crimes are “decoded” or contextualized away. To stand with the Iranian people would require activists to admit that an anti-Western regime can be a totalitarian engine of slaughter. For many, that admission is ideologically intolerable.
Wednesday, February 04, 2026
