From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
Why ‘Fauda’ has shocked the West
Many things have contributed to the insanity of the West’s obsessional delegitimization of Israel that has turned it into a pariah in mainstream political and cultural circles. This can only be properly understood as part of a broader and deeper Western civilizational crisis.
However, one factor, in particular, has turned truth and lies inside out in the minds of many. For decades, there’s been a settled view among progressives that Israel is a rogue state that behaves illegally and cruelly.
That’s because the overwhelming majority of media coverage of the Jewish state has consisted of lies and distortions intended to delegitimize it as a prelude to its destruction.
In recent days, a curtain has been lifted on a corner of this madness. Motaz Azaiza is a Palestinian Arab photojournalist lionized by Western liberals for his production of images that have fueled hatred and incitement against Israel. Time magazine listed him among its top 100 most influential people of 2024.
But in a long interview in Arabic, whose translation is now all over social media, Azaiza revealed that every claim or image coming out of Gaza during the war had been crafted to fit the Hamas narrative. If Gazan journalists didn’t toe the line, they disappeared. Every journalist in Gaza belonged to a Hamas-run group.
Said Azaiza: “They take the details of a specific person, publish his phone number in the group and instruct online activists to attack him, curse him and make his life miserable.”
As a result, photographers like him lowered their cameras the moment anyone said something bad about Hamas.
Furthermore, Azaiza himself supported Hamas terrorism. He related how he’d filmed Gazans beating and abusing Israelis who were captured and dragged into the Strip on Oct. 7, but he didn’t publish those videos because he didn’t want Israel to identify the abusers and kill them.
Not a word of Azaiza’s revelations has appeared in Western media. Of course not. That would reveal that they’ve been doing Hamas’s dirty work for it. Every report from Gaza should have carried a health warning that it was produced under Hamas censorship. Instead, it was all presented as credible or true.
And this has been the case for decades. The Western public has no idea that what it takes to be the truth about Israeli behavior and Palestinian suffering—because it’s “seen it on TV”—is a giant and monstrous lie.
Shockingly, many Diaspora Jews are now claiming that Israel’s terrible image in the world is due to the toxic nature of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremists in his coalition government, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Such a ludicrous misrepresentation of the civilizational emergency that has engulfed the West can only be explained by the desperate need for such Diaspora Jews to deny the danger to themselves from their own society that has simply lost its collective mind.
“Fauda” is delivering to the West a truth that it doesn’t even realize it has so devastatingly denied.
Why Did It Take a Massacre of Jews to Lift the Lid on Anti-Jewish Hostility?
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a leading voice in the U.S. Reform community, is senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. Here are additional excerpts from his Yom Kippur sermon on Monday:
Anti-Jewish hostility is simply part and parcel of our three millennia existence. It is one reason why we are still so tiny - a mere 0.2% of the world's population. What we are seeing today is not new, even in America. Our grandparents and great grandparents lived through worse.
I concede that I, too, was shocked, and am still unsettled, by how quickly so many past allies turned against us. Not because they were sensitive to Palestinian pain - I am, too - but because they were so insensitive to Jewish pain.
Why was Oct. 7 morally complicated? Even if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause - if you are a Palestinian, yourself - why the moral stuttering? What would have been more natural, normal and humane than to express empathy for the loved ones, demand that the hostages be returned immediately, and to condemn the savagery? Then - talk all you want about so-called apartheid, occupation and resistance.
I know Hamas. It was not surprising that they murdered Israelis - although their barbaric brutality, proudly filmed by them in their GoPro cameras live and in living color, was still stunning to me. What was shocking to me was Oct. 8. Why did it take a massacre of Jews to lift the lid on all this bile? And don't tell me Israel's response - the poison was released before the sun set on Oct. 7, before Israel could even clear its towns, villages and kibbutzim of murderers.
Deep down, we also know that the return of legitimated, tolerated, excused, contextualized, intellectualized and often violent antisemitism is a flashing warning sign of the decay of something uniquely precious about America itself. Some of the best minds of a generation are inflamed by an aggressive form of cultural encephalitis, distorting reason and impairing moral judgment.
If a politician or intellectual or journalist tells you that the Land of Israel has nothing to do with the People of Israel, the civilization of Israel, the religion of Israel, the God of Israel, or the State of Israel - why are you listening to them? They know nothing.
Why Does Ireland Hate Israel So Much?
Ireland and Israel will face off in a men's soccer match in Hungary on Sunday. The game was supposed to be played in Ireland, but such is the hostility there that it must take place at a neutral venue instead. A second match will take place in Serbia rather than Israel the following Sunday. The Football Association of Ireland doesn't want to play at all. It wants the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to boot Israel from the organization. Only Turkey and Norway share the Irish position.
In the days after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, no Israeli flags flew in solidarity outside public buildings anywhere in Ireland. Many politicians began displaying the Palestinian colors instead. The hostility of official Ireland stands out in Europe. Before Israel closed its embassy in Dublin last year, Israeli diplomats would quietly tell you that they regarded Ireland as the worst diplomatic posting in Europe. There are almost no politicians they can ever work with, and that was before the Gaza war. There are no friendly media.
Why is Ireland so anti-Israel? Irish history explains most of it. Ireland was occupied by Britain for centuries and most Irish people liken the Palestinians to themselves, and particularly to the Catholics of Northern Ireland. They liken Israel to Britain.
This startles a lot of Israelis. Surely if anyone was like the dispossessed Irish, it was the Jews. During the early days of the struggle for a Jewish state, leading figures such as future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir took heart from Ireland's successful fight for independence from Britain. Shamir's nom de guerre was "Michael," after Michael Collins, one of the leaders of the old Irish Republican Army.
From Ian:
How the UN Forges Anti-Israel Bias
Every annual UN Week comes with the certainty of abuse for Israel. The hatefest is already in full swing. Tuesday saw accusations of genocide, the lie du jour. Then, in criticizing Israel, France's Emmanuel Macron said, "Hamas was never forceful in the West Bank." On Sunday, a Hamas terrorist there murdered an Israeli father of six. Were Israel to exit the West Bank, Hamas would quickly take over.
Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 187 condemnatory resolutions against Israel, per UN Watch data, "more than twice the number adopted against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Qatar, Pakistan, Cuba, and Venezuela combined." The votes become building blocks of a permanent bureaucracy that supplies anti-Israel findings to be echoed by UN humanitarian and other agencies. The findings are then used by governments and courts to blacklist and sanction Israel.
Only Israel is subject by rule to a Human Rights Council agenda item at every regular session, plus an "open-ended Commission of Inquiry and a uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate." That's on top of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Division for Palestinian Rights, Information System on the Question of Palestine, and UNRWA, the forever refugee agency for Palestinians.
The question is why the U.S. and other democracies finance this discrimination, which undermines the ability of all to fight terrorism.
"The Cost of Not Doing Something about Iran Is Substantially Higher" than Doing Something
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday: "The southern lane of the [Hormuz] straits is open. Every day more and more barrels of oil are flowing through there. And they're open, thanks to the efforts of the United States military that's both defending shipping and has removed mines....I'm happy to see that the Saudis were able to restart the East-West pipeline again, which is critical for their economy and also critical for the global economy."
If the Iranians "continue to insist on the desire for a nuclear weapon, their support for proxies in the region - they're the world's leading sponsor of terrorism - then we're going to have big problems with them."
"I think the Iranians misread our system. I think the Iranians are under this illusion that Democrats are going to win in November, and the President will no longer be able to do things against them....The legislative branch is a very important branch of government. I served in it for 14 years, so I understand its powers, but also understand its limitations."
"When it comes to the national security of our country, when it comes to the imposition of both sanctions and the use of military force, the President has extraordinary powers. Every president does."
"The Iranian issue is not a political issue. It is the fact that for generations now - for almost 50 years - every American president...agrees that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. But ultimately, no one ever does anything about it...and he's doing something about it. And it comes at a price and at a cost...but the cost of not doing something about it is substantially higher, especially for future generations."
While the World Is on Fire, the Media Are Still Obsessed with Israel
Jeremy Musighi, an independent researcher, recently released a study analyzing 14.7 million news articles published across 65 languages over the last decade.
He found that, in 2024, news outlets published "more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined."
"On American cable news, Israel was the most-mentioned country - ahead of Iran, Russia, Ukraine, China. On the BBC's news channel, 1 in every 17 broadcast minutes mentioned Israel."
In 2019, long before the war in Gaza, "1 of every 112 news articles on Earth - from all the world's outlets minus Israel's - was primarily about Israel. 1.8 million international articles mentioned it."
From Ian:
Anti-Zionist Jews will always ultimately fail the purity tests their allies set them
Security based upon somebody else’s tolerance is not security.
For centuries Jews existed as minorities whose safety depended upon rulers, governments, neighbours and political movements continuing to tolerate them. Sometimes they did, until they inevitably didn’t.
England expelled its Jews, Spain expelled its Jews, across Europe Jews experienced pogroms, restrictions, dispossession and ultimately industrialised extermination. Across the Middle East and North Africa ancient Jewish communities dwindled dramatically in the decades around Israel’s creation amid persecution, violence, expulsions, state pressure, Zionist migration and war.
Jewish history contains an uncomfortable abundance of reminders of what happens when our safety depends entirely upon somebody else’s goodwill. That is a major, undeniable and historically essential reason Zionism exists.
Not because Jews believe ourselves superior to anybody else, but because after millennia of discovering how conditional somebody else’s protection could be, Jews concluded that our survival could not forever depend upon other people granting us permission to remain. And now that conclusion itself is being put on trial.
Ask yourself this crucial question. Why, among the world’s national movements, does Jewish national self-determination generate this particular obsession? Why is the answer to alleged crimes committed by Israel not merely to change its government, borders or policies but, uniquely, to question whether the country should continue to exist at all?
Britain committed atrocities during empire, nobody seriously proposes abolishing Britain. America was built through the dispossession of indigenous peoples and slavery, nobody demands the dissolution of the United States as the prerequisite for opposing racism. States throughout the world have disputed borders, bloody histories and governments that have committed terrible acts. Their citizens are not routinely required to renounce the existence of their countries before being permitted into polite society.
Yet somehow Jewish national self-determination is subjected to a different test.
Any political movement capable of imagining liberation and self-determination for peoples across the world but unable to imagine them for Jews should ask itself why the Jew is once again the exception.
That is why this isn’t really a story about Zack Polanski and it isn’t ultimately a story about the Green Party.
It’s about us.
For three years I have watched Jews desperately negotiate with people who despise Zionism, who are fueled by hate.
I’m Jewish, but…
Three words that have become almost a ritual incantation, three words that so many still think will guarantee them acceptance, save them from the mob. Three words that exemplify “suicidal naivety”.
Because there is always another purity test and eventually you run out of things to surrender. Except one, your Jewishness.
That is the lesson I want my children to understand. They do not need anybody’s permission to be Jewish. They do not need to apologise for Jewish history. They do not need to barter pieces of their identity for acceptance. They do not need to pass somebody else’s test of what constitutes an acceptable Jew and they should never imagine that making themselves smaller will make somebody else’s hatred disappear.
I cannot control the Britain in which my children will grow old, I cannot promise them that antisemitism will disappear, but I can teach them what generations before us learnt at an unbearable cost.
Never build your Jewish future around passing somebody else’s purity test.
The test will change, the line will move and eventually, whatever you say, whatever you condemn and however much of yourself you surrender, there will be one thing you can never wash off.
You are still a Jew.
So be one proudly, be strong, be unapologetic, be loud.
Do not whisper your Jewishness to make other people comfortable. Do not shrink it to fit inside somebody else’s politics. Do not bargain it away in return for an acceptance that history tells us was always conditional.
We are still here, after everything, we are still here and so we shall remain.
How Propaganda Uses Emotion to Teach You What Not to See
There is something profoundly revealing about the way the story of Jadallah Jihad Jadallah has been told.
A Palestinian boy from the al-Far’a refugee camp was shot by Israeli forces on November 16, 2025. Al-Far’a is in the northern West Bank, near Tubas. This was not a story from Gaza or Hamas. The details surrounding Jadallah’s death came instead from the West Bank, from his own community, and from Fatah, the movement led by Mahmoud Abbas.
The death itself is not disputed. He was shot, and forty-five minutes later, he died. What is revealing is everything that followed and has been left out. His case provides a clear example of how narrative framing is created and how effective emotional propaganda works.
Propaganda does not always require fabricating an event. Sometimes the more powerful technique is to take a real event, select the facts that support a particular emotional response, place those facts in a carefully constructed sequence and narrative, and leave other relevant facts out. The audience is then given a story that may contain real images, real people and real events, while being guided toward a particular conclusion that contradict the very evidence right in front of their eyes.
That distinction is particularly important when the subject is the death of a child. The image of a wounded fourteen-year-old boy can produce an immediate and powerful emotional response. Once that emotional frame has been established, everything else becomes irrelevant. Who he was, whether the circumstances surrounding his death are actually as reported, and how ordinary military protocol or acts of self-defense are being reframed as evidence of criminal conduct. Reality and critical thinking disappears when faced with an emotional narrative.
That is why the story of Jadallah deserves to be examined not only for what was reported, what was left out, but for how narrative framing and propaganda is constructed and works.
Across social-media posts surrounding his death, Jadallah was described in the language of martyrdom, heroism and fighting. Posts on associated with the al-Far’a camp also presented him as a “heroic martyr” from the beginning. Other material celebrated him as a child fighter.
Fatah-associated imagery was displayed prominently throughout the camp and surrounding community. There was also an official Fatah vigil following his death, held specifically for people to offer condolences to his family, by invitation only. These were not obscure details buried somewhere beyond the reach of a journalist or an “human rights organization.” They were part of the environment in which Jadallah’s death was being publicly commemorated locally in real time.
But his death wasn’t just glorified by Fatah, the party of Mahmoud Abbas. The public record also includes a TikTok post attributed to Jadallah from before his death that can reasonably be read as anticipating or embracing the possibility of death that day. That is a very important part of the story. Did Jadallah leave his house wanting to become a “martyr” and commit suicide?
But this is where narrative framing becomes visible. Haaretz published a lengthy account under the headline, “Watch: A 14-year-old bled to death for 45 minutes as Israeli soldiers stood nearby.” The BBC followed with, “Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian boy and stood around as he bled to death, video shows.” Both framed the story around soldiers allegedly failing to provide life-saving treatment.
Both publications also displayed an image of Jadallah that tells another part of the story: a Fatah martyr poster calling him a “Hero Martyr,” presenting a fourteen-year-old boy as a heroic fighter, publicly celebrated by his own father.
Yet the reader encounters the emotional frame first: a wounded child, “bled to death,” “shot,” and soldiers who “stood around.” The poster is visible, but its meaning is not explained. The audience is shown the evidence, but taught how to interpret it.
That is how propaganda can work without fabricating every fact. The information remains in plain sight, yet becomes psychologically irrelevant once the emotional conclusion has already been established.
The question, therefore, is not only what these reports showed their audiences. It is what they taught their audiences not to see.
But the framing does not end with the headline or the photograph. In fact, that is where the more consequential part begins.
First, the security-camera footage shows Jadallah throwing something toward an IDF soldier immediately before he is shot. That is not a minor detail. It provides a clear explanation for why the soldier fired. A rock is not necessarily harmless simply because it is a rock. Being struck by a thrown object can cause serious injury, and even death. The relevant question in a military engagement is not whether the object looks like a conventional weapon, but whether the soldier reasonably perceived an immediate threat.
From Ian:
Ambassador Jeff Bartos: UN must abandon anti-American, anti-Western legacy of Durban Conference
Over the course of the past half-century, virulent anti-Western ideology has become a permanent feature of our international institutions. One of the key inflection points in this transformation took place at a United Nations conference 25 years ago: the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.
The conference’s stated purpose was to confront alleged racism and bigotry. Today, the United Nations touts the Durban Declaration — the ideological framework adopted at the conference — as "the U.N.’s blueprint to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance globally." In reality, it represented the instantiation of a set of radical ideas about race, history and Western civilization as the formal dogmas of our most powerful global institutions.
Since then, the anniversary of the Durban Declaration has frequently served as an opportunity for radical bureaucrats to reaffirm and double down on their anti-Western hatred. Nearly every five years since the conference, including next week, the U.N. commemorates and revels in the falsehoods and civilizational self-hatred that the conference has propagated across the international system. The United States will not have any part in celebrating this poisonous legacy. In fact, we are urging countries to join us in rejecting this propaganda and taking a meaningful step forward in repairing the rot within the U.N.
The U.N.’s embrace of racial grievance, collective guilt, unapologetic antisemitism and fervent hostility toward our shared Western heritage is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life. It runs counter to American virtues established 250 years ago. Americans need no instruction from international bureaucracies on the principle that men are created equal. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders declared that our unalienable rights did not come from kings, emperors or any earthly government — least of all unelected globalist bureaucrats. They were inherent in man, endowed by God.
Because of the Durban conference, extremist ideologues who had long festered at the fringes of the international system were pulled under one tent, handed credentials and microphones and given the imprimatur of the United Nations.
The result was radically anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian, antisemitic and dedicated to the destruction of the very civilization that gave birth to the United Nations itself.
The Durban conference itself was a testament to the radicalism of this project. Attendees used the event as a platform to demand reparations from the United States and other Western nations for slavery and colonialism. These calls were backed by speakers such as Fidel Castro, the brutal communist dictator of Cuba, who used the conference’s stage to denounce the West for its crimes of "conquest and colonization, of slavery, of the ruthless exploitation and the extermination of hundreds of millions of people."
From Ian:
David Collier:
The Church of England is a runaway train – and its driver is out of her depth
Within the space of a few days, two Church of England institutions were forced into humiliating retreats.
At Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury withdrew an award she had personally presented to Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, a leading Pakistani cleric who was honoured for “reconciliation and interfaith cooperation”.
Ashrafi was no genuine interfaith operator. He helps uphold Pakistan’s brutal blasphemy laws, has supported the persecution of Ahmadis, declared the October 7 massacre an act of religious pride, and in 2007 he honoured Osama bin Laden with the title Saifullah – “Sword of God.”
“Come to Light”
When Ashrafi’s record was exposed, Lambeth Palace claimed that his previous remarks had “come to light” and withdrew the award.
They would have been better off saying nothing.
The Lambeth Palace statement makes it sound as if the information about Ashrafi was hidden away in some intelligence file. The truth is that just a few minutes of searching was all that was needed to uncover Ashrafi’s extremism. Lambeth Palace simply never bothered to look before selecting him as a worthy recipient.
There was no explanation of the vetting failure and no apology to 9/11 survivors, persecuted Pakistani minority groups, or Jews appalled by Ashrafi’s rhetoric.
Nothing but an “oops.”
“Stitch their Names”
While this farce was unfolding at Lambeth Palace, another was occurring two hundred miles further north, where Leeds Minster was forced to close an exhibition that had portrayed numerous Hamas fighters as innocent victims of Israeli aggression. During the controversy, the Minster’s rector, Canon Paul Maybury, was asked about the murder of the Bibas children – two Israeli children taken captive and brutally murdered by Hamas. He replied that “the history is complex.” Asked what he thought of Hamas, he answered: “No comment.”
The names in the tapestry have simply been taken from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and the advert Leeds Minster published notably described those names as “Gaza’s martyrs.”
Institutional Decay
The Lambeth Palace Award and the Leeds Minster exhibition are not identical incidents but they expose the same signs of institutional decay. The Church is so eager to align itself with a particular message that symbolism replaces scrutiny, producing morally indefensible acts that are exposed when outsiders do the work the Church neglected to do itself.
Take the tapestry. The concept itself is not unique, but intentionally serious memorial projects invariably involve dedicated bodies researching and confirming the identities of those being commemorated. Stitch Their Names Together simply draws its names from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry without verification. The result is empty Palestinian advocacy that promotes the libel of genocide against Israel and helps to spread antisemitism. It should have been nowhere near the inside of Leeds Minster.
With the award it was the symbolism of interfaith, with Leeds Minster it was alignment with the anti-Israel bandwagon. Different causes, but the same failure. As Church of England vicar Rev Giles Fraser recently wrote, “the Church leadership has become ideologically captured by the progressive lanyard class.”
Which leaves the Church of England increasingly resembling a runaway train – while its driver, the Archbishop of Canterbury, looks totally out of her depth.
From a Church that Protects to One that Threatens
I want to add a little personal context here. I never had a problem with Christian England. When I was just three years old, I went to a kindergarten inside a Methodist church, before attending a state school that held Christian prayer services. My Jewish identity was always accommodated and I never felt threatened by the Christian majority.
In fact, my family home sat directly opposite a large church, and during heavy storms we would talk about the protection it gave us: its lightning conductor helped keep our house safe. I still see that today as symbolic of the protection the Church provided as I grew up Jewish in Britain.
So there is no inbuilt hostility here. Quite the opposite. What has emerged over the years is a growing sense of betrayal at the direction parts of the Church of England have taken.
Anyone researching the resurgence of antisemitism in Britain will eventually encounter Anglican figures such as the now disgraced Reverend Stephen Sizer, along with a strand of supersessionist theology that continues to have influence in some Anglican circles. That part is relatively easy to identify.
But during the years I spent undercover inside the anti-Israel movement, I encountered something else. I found myself all too often sitting inside Anglican buildings listening to anti-Jewish hostility being spread within their walls. A two-day conference at Lichfield Cathedral provides just one example: an event where Jewish history was rewritten, frustrated Jewish audience members were silenced, and material from the Islamist group Friends of Al-Aqsa was freely distributed.
The symbolism is difficult to ignore. The church building that stood opposite my childhood home represented shelter. Decades later, I found myself sitting inside Anglican buildings listening to hostility towards Jews being given a platform.
Yet when Jewish concerns are raised today, too often the response seems to consist of little more than words and carefully staged gestures.
The New Archbishop Meets the PFLP Activists
Let me start with the current Archbishop’s performative gestures towards British Jewry. Just days before her recent pilgrimage to Israel, she paid a visit to the NOVA exhibition in London, a travelling memorial providing an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at the Nova Music Festival on October 7.
Yet the Archbishop was not one of the many Londoners with no access to the actual site of the atrocity. She was literally about to travel to Israel. If she wanted to make a meaningful gesture of solidarity, why not visit the real thing – the site where hundreds were murdered, just a couple of hours’ drive from Jerusalem?
She didn’t.
Instead, during her five-day pilgrimage, the Archbishop was presented with carefully selected Palestinian voices. Among them were two women I subsequently identified as having documented links to PFLP activism.
I covered the full story and the evidence in an investigation published at the time. There is no need to repeat it all here. The point is what it tells us about the Archbishop’s judgement, and the judgement of the team around her.
Within days of standing at a London memorial to the victims of October 7, she travelled to the region and gave a platform to activists associated with a terrorist organisation that participated in the October 7 attacks.
Once again, the scrutiny came afterwards – and from outside the Church.
Maureen Lipman:
Read on for the best-laid plans of mice, men and Maureen
Many of you will have been aware that I am politically “hot” these days. Due to my writings in this very tome, my reflections in The Spectator and a rather charged interview on Sky TV, nominally about my play Allegra, but actually about their agenda. My belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state has thrust me, in my near dotage, into a sort of “Mo of Ark” situation.
I was due a break after my stint in Allegra, so, as a delayed honeymoon, David and I travelled first to Puglia for a friend’s wedding, to be followed by a week on a sailing boat to three Greek islands to meet with other chums. Afterwards, I had signed up to do a one-day play reading, called Right Before I Go; a moving compilation by Stan Zimmerman (of Roseanne and The Golden Girls fame), of letters written by actual suicides. It was to be followed by a discussion with the audience to raise awareness and funds for a charity. But… read on for the best-laid plans of mice, men and Maureen.
My phone bleated out the news that an actor has withdrawn from the reading on the grounds that he could not countenance my political views. His name was McCarthy and being me, I couldn’t resist wondering – in the Telegraph whether this might be the “New McCarthyism”. The phrase was taken up, although not credited, by none other than The Wall Street Journal, then the Times, and then, wonder of wonders, The Hollywood Reporter. Goodness, it was going viral – or at least, mildly infectious all through the holiday.
I offered to meet with Mr McCarthy and discuss our differences. Or, better still, celebrate our similarities. I mean he might have been marching behind me on the anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine demos or standing in front of me with a placard outside the Chinese Embassy protesting the treatment of the Uyghurs. I suggested hummus and mint tea in a restaurant of his choice and that he might rejoin the show as colleagues who agree to differ, but both support an anti-suicide charity.
McCarthy would not look at my olive branch let alone pick up my gauntlet.
He was interviewed in the Belfast Times and protested loudly that he never asked for me to leave the cast, he never bullied me, he just made his point. He omitted to add that his appearance at Soho would have been on a different night to mine.
The fascinating part of the actor’s moral incapacity to share a lectern with a British Jew was heightened by his being a member of the audience at the opening night of my play Allegra at Richmond. He is on camera at the vox pop, singing the show’s praises, and mine as he made his way to the after-show party. Apparently, he came to see the show again in London. Only my husband visited Allegra more than once and we share a bed.
I have never made it secret that I am a proud, outspoken Jew, but something must have radicalised the actor in the six weeks that followed the party, to the point of issuing a statement on social media. He didn’t have to withdraw quite so publicly. He could have quietly told the producer that he’d forgotten on that particular Wednesday, he’d promised to take an elderly aunt to have a boil lanced.
Two days later another actor chose to exit the reading for the same reason. Now I was slightly getting the wind up enough to toss around in my bed on the ferry to Corfu. My dreams were uniformly about being thrown off buses in Hull and everyone I’ve ever met crossing the street to avoid me.
Sayeeda Warsi is minimising the Islamist threat
Among the front-runners to be appointed the UK’s first ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ tsar is Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi. Earlier this month, we had a grim taste of what she might bring to the table in this position.
Warsi delivered the inaugural lecture at University College London for Equi titled ‘Patriotism: Pride not Prejudice’. Warsi’s carefully curated talk, as well as the nod to Jane Austen, was peppered with quotes from Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, along with paeans to cricket and village fetes. But these whimsical references concealed a darker message.
During the Q&A, I challenged Warsi on the framing of her lecture. We hear much from Labour and progressives about ‘Islamophobia’, but less about Islamic attitudes towards the West. What, I asked, about the profound hostility of the Deobandi and Salafi movements – which control the majority of British mosques – to the Enlightenment philosophy of personal autonomy, pluralism and universal human rights, including gender equality?
Her answer displayed a flippant disregard for the kind of threat Western nations face from Islam. In particular, the profound challenges that supremacist, exclusionary Islamic theology presents to public security, social cohesion and democracy in the UK. She said:
‘Does the Muslim community have nutcases? Absolutely. Does the Christian community have these nutcases? Absolutely. Does the Jewish community have these nutcases? Absolutely. And they’re always on display for all of us to see.’
This was a strange response. ‘Nutcases from the Muslim community’ – her phrase, not mine – have killed dozens and inflicted life-changing injuries on hundreds of Britons, including children, in the past several decades. They have stabbed two sitting MPs, one fatally. The vast majority of the suspects currently on MI5’s 43,000-person terror watchlist – as many as 39,000 – are jihadists. So why is Warsi telling me not to ‘waste my time’ interrogating the motives and goals of these ‘nutcases’?
I then asked her about support for Hamas among parts of the Muslim community and the willingness of many to deny the atrocities of 7 October. Yet rather than address these concerns, Warsi deflected and denied there was a problem. ‘I honestly don’t know who the six freaks are that you speak to that give you all this data’, she said. ‘But the people I speak with and I spend time with… hundreds and thousands of them, I have yet to meet somebody who’s told me Hamas is a great thing and I want to go out and, you know, kind of support them.’
Does Warsi really expect us to believe that only ‘six freaks’ support Hamas in the UK? It would be hard to explain, then, how a hardline Islamic platform like the UK-based 5Pillars boasts one million readers. Or the celebrations in cities across the UK after Hamas’s 7 October pogrom and the rampant anti-Semitism that accompanied them. In June 2025, 40 organisations – including students’ networks, religious groups and advocacy organisations – called for Hamas to be removed from the UK terror list.
From Ian:
Israel Derangement Syndrome
When the subject turns to the Jewish state, formerly robust minds are turning to mayonnaise. Frontal autolobotomies are eagerly being carried out on every campus. Israel Derangement Syndrome (IDS) is a drug that gets you high on self-righteousness while disabling your cognitive faculties.
In reviewing for Variety a movie called "NAZA," about the alleged depravities of the IDF, Jay Weissberg presented with an advanced case IDS, claiming: "The Israeli government has stocked its jails and morgues with Arab men in order to use them as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges."
Israel doesn't "stock its jails with Arab men" so it can "use them as bargaining chips." Israel is a liberal democracy with written law, due process, proper judicial procedure and carefully vetted judges - all the stuff that Hamas rather famously overlooks. Israel arrests terrorists and other criminals. If they're convicted, they go to prison. Israeli police don't cruise down the streets with tuna nets picking up random Arabs while exclaiming, "Caught another bargaining chip!"
Call Israel a genocidaire, and you're violating what John Erskine called "the moral obligation to be intelligent." Israel's prosecution of the war Hamas started has resulted in around 24,000 combatant deaths among 73,000 war dead in Gaza. That's a civilian-to-warrior kill ratio of about 2 to 1. Women and children are among the innocents killed due to Hamas policy.
No matter how many heart-rending pictures of war carnage appear, genocide means taking major steps toward wiping out a people. A 2 to 1 ratio ain't close to genocide. It isn't even genocide lite. It's tragic that Hamas operations guarantee the deaths of lots of civilians. But that's their way. They embed themselves among innocents, use hospitals as weapons depots, and skulk in a 400-mile network of tunnels. When you're pro-death, all of this comes naturally.
An entity that launches a war has no moral right to complain when it faces a justified counterattack. Japan's response to losing a war it started wasn't to beg for sympathy, but to drop its death cult, join the ranks of liberal democracies, and cease attacking its neighbors. Gaza could move on from Hamas and do the same.
Israel's Enemies Misjudged the Resilience of Israeli Society
The assumption that Israel would collapse under three years of missile attacks has proved mistaken, according to a recent position paper published by Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research, based in Haifa. It said Israel's Jewish public has demonstrated sustained resilience, broadly supports the continuation of military campaigns, and is willing to bear the human and economic costs because of a shared perception of an existential threat.
Similar observations have been made by Dr. Abdel Moneim Said, chairman of the advisory board of the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies, who highlighted conceptual failures that worked against Hamas leaders and Iran's "axis of resistance." The first was a misreading of the effect Israel's internal divisions would have on Israeli society. Instead, Israeli society came together and displayed a resilience that surprised decision-makers in Gaza and Tehran.
Israel's war is not yet over, but victory will be unmistakable if it produces a change in the enemy's consciousness: a recognition that Israel cannot be defeated by force and that attempting to do so is not worthwhile.
Iranian Children Recruited for "Self-Sacrifice" Campaign
Male children under the age of 15 will soon be recruited to join the Islamic Republic's Janfada (self-sacrifice) campaign, the Iranian Labor News Agency reported. Females would need to reach the age of 18.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit the recruitment of minors under the age of 15 by armed groups, while Iran has admitted recruiting children as young as 12.
Military training for the campaign is set to begin in Tehran this week.
They will be trained in "ensuring local security, general war preparations, observation, surveillance, and intelligence measures," as well as "guiding micro-aircraft (drones), which are used in military operations," and "the possibility of using shoulder-launched weapons."
The campaign's spokesperson, Sasan Zare, said it was centered on the cultural slogan, "We have one life, and we give it for Iran."
From Ian:
Khaled Abu Toameh:
How Hamas Controls the Story Coming Out of Gaza
Azaiza revealed details about how journalists operated under Hamas rule. He described an environment in which journalists were pressured to suppress criticism of Hamas and, in some cases, to stop filming when Palestinians expressed anger toward the terrorist group.
These are not allegations coming from an Israeli government official or a pro-Israel advocacy organization. They are admissions by a Palestinian journalist who became internationally famous for documenting the war.
When Palestinians blamed Israel, the cameras kept rolling. When Palestinians blamed Hamas, the cameras were turned off.
He acknowledged that stepping outside this framework exposes journalists to intense backlash, including organized online campaigns, accusations of treason, and physical intimidation inside Gaza.
He openly acknowledged that initially he struggled with whether to publish material showing Palestinians criticizing Hamas. He said he had never seen a Gaza journalist publish such material. He also disclosed that he grew up supporting Hamas and that Hamas's ideology and the culture of "resistance" were part of his childhood environment.
This is a remarkable admission. It helps explain why the outside world has heard relatively little from Gaza about Hamas's responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians under its rule. It also raises an obvious question: How much of the story coming out of Gaza has been shaped not only by what journalists saw but also by what they believed they were permitted to show?
Azaiza's account should therefore prompt media organizations that used his work – and the work of other Gaza-based journalists as well as journalists covering other terrorist entities and their sponsors – to examine their own reporting practices. Who supplied the information? Who was present when it was gathered? What material was not published? Were journalists pressured? Were interviews conducted freely? Were Palestinians allowed to criticize Hamas on camera? Most importantly, did international media organizations independently verify claims coming from a territory controlled by a terrorist organization?
Azaiza's interview is ultimately a warning about the dangers of accepting any side's narrative without scrutiny.... It should be a wake-up call.
The question is no longer simply what the cameras show. It is also what they do not show.
Gaza journalist who met with Mamdani admits he buried Oct. 7 footage of Israeli hostages being beaten to protect perpetrators
A Gaza journalist who has met with Mayor Mamdani and been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and a spot on the Time100 list admitted that he buried footage of Israeli hostages being beaten by a Palestinian mob on Oct. 7, 2023 in order to protect the perpetrators.
Photographer Motaz Azaiza also revealed that all media in Gaza is controlled by Hamas through a single WhatsApp group — and the terror group will target any journalist who publishes criticism.
Azaiza — who has become one of the most famous journalists in Gaza — was in the territory on Oct. 7, when Hamas marched the hostages taken from Israel through the streets of Gaza, where all hell broke loose.
“People got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed,” Azaiza told the Taqarrab podcast.
“But I did not publish those videos.”
“Why? Because I did not want to ruin the lives of the people who were filmed,” the photographer said.
“I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them.”
“I did not want to be responsible, even indirectly, for the deaths of those people in exchange for a few likes and views online,” he added.
Aziza also revealed that “every journalist in Gaza” is in a Hamas-run WhatsApp group called “Smart” that coordinates coverage in Gaza. One of the Hamas media directors based at the Rafa Crossing ran it, he said.
Aziza went on to say that he was targeted by pro-Hamas media — run through that channel — when he showed a video of a Gaza resident cursing Hamas.
Friday, September 25, 2026
