Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: analysis

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Friday, June 20, 2025

Israel and its Arab Gulf Allies Are Still On The Same Page (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

The New York Times is at it again.

If the paper is to be believed, Israel Further Alienates Would-Be Arab Allies in Attacking Iran. In other words, by attacking the world's primary supporter of international terrorism, Israel has isolated itself from supportive Arab Gulf states even more. The article claims to have uncovered a reversal in the progress in the dynamic between Israel and the Arab Gulf states:

Gulf governments that were once warming to Israel — seen as a potential ally in their battle to contain Iran — have decided that courting Iran with diplomacy is more pragmatic.

And of course, this is true to an extent--from the beginning. Courting Iran with diplomacy is the pragmatic course for the Gulf states to take, and it is not surprising that the Saudis, for example, would hedge their bets. Consider when Biden publicly called Saudi Arabia a pariah during the Democratic presidential debates :

I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them. We were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are. There's very little social redeeming value of in the present government in Saudi Arabia, and I would also as pointed out I would end the subsidies that we have and the sale of material to the Saudis, where they're going in and murdering children. And they're murdering innocent people, and so they have to be held accountable.

That kind of talk did not endear the US to the Saudis. That comment, along with the Biden administration's clear disinterest in the Abraham Accords, added to the distance between the Biden Administration and Saudi Arabia. The Washington Free Beacon reported in June 2021 that the Biden State Department discouraged referring to the agreement by name, and when asked in May 2021, Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters:

We are not following the tactics of the prior administration. Aside from putting together a peace proposal that was dead on arrival, we don’t think [the previous administration] did anything constructive to really bring an end to the longstanding conflict in the Middle East.

It was not surprising when, in March 2023 (months before October 7th), the Saudis, Iran, and China announced an agreement to resume diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Carnegie Endowment explained:

For Saudi Arabia, the China-brokered deal is a pragmatic security choice that goes beyond hedging and balancing against Washington.

The European Council on Foreign Relations published a piece on their website in September 2024 about Iran's Hormuz Peace Endeavor (HOPE), which was intended to serve as an alternative to the Abraham Accords. Saudi participation signaled its lack of confidence in the Biden administration:

The Iranian HOPE initiative was never seen as credible in Riyadh. The kingdom was also unprepared to accept the initiative’s ultimate aim of accelerating the US retrenchment from the region, which would further solidify Iran’s military influence in the Gulf. At the same time, the fragility of US security guarantees, as well as the risk of an Iranian backlash, left Riyadh hesitant to fully embrace the Abraham Accords.

The point is that the Gulf hedging strategy and openness to maintaining "friendly" relations with Iran today are not some new policy in response to Israel defending itself from the Iranian threat. It is part of a cautious approach in that area of the region.

When it pursues its point using the UAE as an example of a growing distance between it and Israel, the article is no more believable:

Yet despite the Emirati government’s deep distrust of Iran, to many in the country there is only one party to blame for the escalating violence: Israel, which launched a devastating attack on Iran last week, igniting the fiercest conflagration in the history of the Israeli-Iranian conflict.

After the New York Times makes this simplistic claim, it then undercuts itself just two paragraphs later with the acknowledgement that "depending on how the war ends, some Gulf countries may gradually put partnership with Israel back on the table."

Even with the Saudis' public "strong condemnation and denunciation of the blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran," one has to wonder if those public expressions mirror what the Kingdom and the other Gulf states believe privately.

According to Egyptian-American writer Hussein Aboubakr Mansour,

While many of those who understand the evils of the Islamic Republic of Iran have responded with euphoria and talk of a “new Middle East,” prudence demands caution. Enthusiasm obscures deeper complexities, and transformative moments rarely unfold according to our most optimistic visions.

Gulf states are very much caught between a rock and a hard place. [While] they are quietly applauding the further weakening of Iran, they face real risks and have to play their cards carefully.

The New York Times comes close to acknowledging this dilemma and the complexity of the situation the Gulf states find themselves in:

While some in the Gulf are cheering on the bombing of Iran, the events of the past week have reinforced a belief that Israel is a rogue actor operating outside the international system and that Western powers have allowed it to do so.

The remark that "some in the Gulf are cheering on the bombing of Iran" links to a comment by journalist Saleh al-Fahid on X in response to a post by Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the former Emir of Qatar. Al Thani posted:

...We must emphasize here that it is not in the interest of the Gulf states to see their large neighbor, Iran, collapse. Such a development would inevitably lead to a devastating destabilization of our region, with dire consequences for all. To avoid this, the Gulf states must announce a clear and explicit position through their decision-making centers to immediately halt this madness initiated by Israel, the full extent of whose impact on the region has yet to be fully understood...[translated from the Arabic by Google Translate.]

Al Fahid responds

Your Excellency, the former Minister, what you expressed in this tweet reflects Qatar's well-known position on the Iranian regime, but not all Gulf states necessarily agree with you. You cannot claim to know the Gulf's interests better than they do.

Beyond the official positions of Gulf governments, many Gulf citizens believe that Iran is a greater threat to them than Israel, that the overthrow of the mullahs' regime is in the Gulf states' best interests, and that the price of this regime's demise, however painful, harsh, and costly, is far less than the state of attrition that this regime has been practicing against the Gulf states for four decades.

The truth is that some Gulf states view the mullahs' regime as a guarantee for regional balance. Other Gulf states view the mullahs' regime as a long-term existential threat. [translated from the Arabic by Google Translate.]

Pity that the New York Times article did not quote al-Fahid outright--it would have provided the much-needed balance that the article so sorely lacks.

The enmity that The New York Times claims now exists between the Gulf states and Israel is more clearly understood as a more nuanced and complex dynamic. And it is not an issue of rejection of Israel, as the New York Times is so eager to claim.

Mansour suggests that, from Israel's perspective, Iran's defeat will have a mixed result:

...Many pundits responded almost immediately to the Israeli attacks with hopeful predictions of a new era of Arab-Israeli amity. Unfortunately, such predictions are premature. It is much more likely that, despite private admiration and cooperation, public acknowledgment and overt alignment with Israel will remain restrained...

...Of all the Middle East’s leaders, the Gulf monarchs are most likely to put ideology second to practical and achievable goals. Their admiration for Israel, therefore, won’t translate into an enthusiastic embrace born of gratitude or generosity. On the contrary, the removal of the Iranian threat reduces, rather than increases, their incentive to make meaningful concessions to Israel.

Indeed, the Gulf states may quietly reach out to the now weakened Iranian regime. With their archenemy crippled, vulnerable, and desperate, these countries have a rare opportunity to extend a lifeline, albeit conditionally. In exchange for clear, enforceable guarantees that Tehran abandon its aggressive regional ambitions, they might decide that it’s possible to rehabilitate Iran as a subordinate regional actor. This move would enable them to leverage their newfound advantage, enhancing their strategic weight against Israel and the United States, and their standing on the world stage. Such maneuvers, blending quiet collaboration with Israel alongside a cautious and conditional outreach to Iran, reflect a longstanding desire to maintain the regional balance of power, which in this case means making sure that neither Israel nor Iran become dominant.

Whether the Middle East would have been different if Trump had won his second term in 2020 is a moot point. A key component of the Abraham Accords and the improved Israel-Arab relations was based on Israel's military strength vis-a-vis Iran, and not just the economic opportunities it could bring to the table. With the opportunity to cut Iran down to size, the Gulf states will want to maintain stability in the region. Whatever they decide, Israel will be included in the picture.

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The Developing Picture As Israel Preemptively Attacks Iran (Daled Amos)

It is Thursday night, and Israel has attacked Iran.Joe Truzman, FDD senior research analyst, posted on X:

The goal of the operation is to neutralize the nuclear threat from Iran to the degree that such a thing is possible. But in order to accomplish this, more than just the infrastructure is being targeted. Already, Iran has announced the names of various military leaders killed in Israel's initial attack.

Iran had crossed the line from the theoretical to a genuine threat:

Intelligence assessments showed the regime had enriched enough uranium to produce approximately 15 nuclear warheads and was actively conducting tests. The pace, the scope, and the intent had changed. What had once been described in abstract terms—potential, capability, intent—had now become operational reality.

This is only the beginning. There is more to come. But already there are hints--or hopes--for what may be coming.

Israel's goal is not to bring down the Iranian regime and free its people, but some have already expressed that hope.

(read the whole thing)

An Iranian Jew and advocate for the restoration of the Iranian monarchy posted

And there may be some basis to that:

On the other hand, there will be backlash on the streets in support of Iran, just as we saw after the massacre on October 7th.

Already, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has come out condemning Israel:

Israel’s attack on Iran, clearly intended to scuttle the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran, risks a regional war that will likely be catastrophic for America.

Similarly, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a member of the Armed Services Committee, criticized Israel.

Israel’s alarming decision to launch airstrikes on Iran is a reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence. These strikes threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians, but the stability of the entire Middle East.

It is only a matter of time before the more radical members of the Democratic Party follow suit and claim that Israel is the one creating tensions in the region.

We will have to wait to see what Trump's response will be and if he will take a position similar to Biden, helping Israel shoot down the rockets Iran will continue to fire in retaliation.

It is too early to say whether Israel has actually accomplished against Iran a strike comparable to what it did against Hezbollah, taking them out of the picture to a large degree, or comparable to Syria, where Israel weakened Assad to the point that he could be overthrown.

In the meantime, not the entire Arab world will be supporting Israel:

The focus should be on neutralizing Iran, not on a further redrawing of the Middle East.
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The media loves a good protest (Daled Amos)

Five years ago, CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez reported on the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

CNN had its own take on those "peaceful" protests:

At the time, CNN was widely mocked on social media for its "mostly peaceful" comment. However, CNN is not the only one that cannot distinguish between riots and protests. And that is not the only point of comparison with the pro-October 7th "protests."

There are also the lengths the media goes to defend the protests. When the District Attorney announced that no charges would be pressed against either the police or Blake, an AP reporter posted on X:

This is the popular version of events, as reported the previous year by NBC:

At 5:11 p.m. Kenosha police said officers responded to a call of a "domestic incident in the 2800 block of 40th Street. There, they would encounter 29-year-old Jacob Blake who is seen on video posted to social media in an altercation with officers before they Tase and ultimately shoot him seven times in the back as he leans into a vehicle. The Kenosha department does not have body cameras so officers were not wearing them at the time of the shooting. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Blake's family, said Blake was “simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.”

Joel Pollak, a senior editor at Breitbart News, responded to the AP post on X. He called them out on their misrepresenting the facts and ignoring the danger it represented:

Pollak's response is based on the information presented by the DA, as summarized by Legal Insurrection:

He went through the evidence and step-by-step timeline. Blake resisted arrest, fought by police, and by his own admission, was carrying a knife, after multiple attempts to subdue him, including taser, failed. Blake was shot when he made a move with the knife, having switched it to his right hand, towards the police officer. Contrary to the popular narrative, Blake was not shot seven times in the back, three of the shots were to his side consistent with the twisting motion with the knife towards the officer. The officer’s seven shots were objectively reasonable because police are trained to keep firing until the threat is removed, which in this case was when Blake dropped the knife.

Blake lied when he said he didn’t know there was a warrant for his arrest, his phone internet records proves he knew, which would provide motive for his to resist arrest in front of his children, and makes him a not credible witness at trial. There also was a 2010 incident in Chicago where Blake similarly displayed a knife resisting arrest, and actually slashed at the officer.

We see a familiar pattern of media negligence:

o Jumping the gun to get unsubstantiated headlines
o  Building a false narrative
o  Carelessly stirring up emotions without regard to the consequences
o  Presenting the resulting riots and destruction as mere "protests" and free speech

The media defense of what passes for "free speech" is now showing itself in the media's defense of anti-Israel protests on university campuses across the US.

But there are legal limits to free speech. In a recent interview, Alan Dershowitz explained:

When you take people on college campuses who are calling, “Death to the Jews,” who are calling to prevent Jews from going to class, who are calling for immediate attacks and harassment of Jews–that’s not protected speech. On the other hand, if you make an abstract talk and say, well, it would be good if there were no Israel–that hate speech is protected speech...Abstract arguments, even if they are hateful, are permitted under our Constitution. But direct incitements to kill or harm other people or block their access or deny them the opportunity to go to class–those are not protected by the First Amendment.

Journalist Douglas Murray raises a parallel point during a recent Tikvah webinar, The War Against the Jews Comes to Washington with Professor Ruth Wisse. The moderator asks Douglas about his book, The Strange Death of Europe, and whether we should be concerned about the strange death of America.

Murray responds (at 27:17):

I think there are early warning signs, and we remain almost incapable of rising to the challenge. The most obvious one has been thrown up very visibly. I don't really like to linger on the campus issue because most people don't go to Ivy League universities anymore, thank goodness, and so it always sounds like a rarefied point to make, but just consider how most of the ivy League universities in the last two years have permitted violence and intimidation as the norm, and pretended that the figures like those in Colombia University are free speech martyrs when in no other situation, would they have got away with this if they had done this against any other minority.

And, you know, people say, well, the limits of free speech and so on. Nobody has yet been able to persuade me. But if for the last two years, there had been people from abroad coming into America using their time or student visas to call for the lynching of Black Americans, nobody can tell me that from right to left, from the universities to people in politics--nobody can persuade me that this would have been a mere free speech issue. It would not have been. People would have said from the get-go, I would have thought no more than 24 hours, whether I think under a Democrat or Republican government. They would have said: no, we have no need in our society for importing racists calling for racist violence. The case of the Jews? Yes, that's been permitted and more than permitted, encouraged.

The media's sloppiness shows itself in its coverage of campus disruptions. They insist that university disturbances are merely expressions of free speech and that the Trump administration's attempts to hold universities responsible for the safety of their Jewish students are somehow proof of its authoritarianism.

Five years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton on the need to use US troops to support the police in the face of riots.

Once the op-ed was printed, the paper couldn't back off fast enough.

They ended up prefacing the article with a 5-paragraph apology, explaining the supposed flaws in the piece that prevented it from meeting the New York Times' standards. The paper went so far as to claim that maybe the piece should not have been printed at all.

The lengths they went to repudiate the op-ed were due, in part, to the rebellion in the New York Times newsroom:

More than 800 staff members signed a letter protesting its publication, according to a union member involved in the letter. Addressed to high-ranking editors in the opinion and news divisions, as well as New York Times Company executives, the letter argued that Mr. Cotton’s essay contained misinformation, such as his depiction of the role of “antifa” in the protests.

Dozens of Times employees objected to the Op-Ed on social media, despite a company policy that instructs them not to post partisan comments or take sides on issues. Many of them responded on Twitter with the sentence, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” More than 160 employees planned a virtual walkout for Friday morning, according to two organizers of the protest.

One of those employees was Taylor Lorenz, who in a since-deleted post on X, bewailed the alleged danger Cotton's op-ed posed to the black New York Times staff:

Taylor's claim sounds no less self-serving now than it did then. Just how concerned have the New York Times staff been about the actual danger posed to the Jewish community by their one-sided coverage of the October 7th massacre and its aftermath?

But the internal influence of the paper's staff and employees is clear. They forced the editorial editor to resign:

So much for an independent media and journalistic integrity.

The New York Times' bias goes beyond just the liberal bias at the top. The infectious agenda is hardwired into the paper, starting from the ground up. From the reaction to the riots in 2020, we could have predicted how the New York Times and others would frame the anti-Jewish riots on university campuses and whose side they would take.

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Once Again, A Killer Of Jews Is Portrayed As A Victim (Daled Amos)

On Wednesday night, two young members of the Israeli embassy were shot and killed by a radical pro-Palestinian sympathizer. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim were attending an American Jewish Committee Young Diplomats reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. Lischinsky was a German-born evangelical Christian about to be engaged to Milgrim.

Needless to say, these were not the optics the anti-Israel groups were looking for.
We should have known the kind of delusional response to expect on social media.

While AOC did make a reference to antisemitism in the second paragraph of her post, the Jewish identity of Milgrim is erased, as is the fact that the murderer was deliberately targeting those he thought were Jews, in revenge for a war taking place halfway around the world.

One post on X spelled out the left's need to redefine what actually happened. (h/t EOZ)

You see, the murder of two young people who had nothing to do with the war between Israel and Gaza may be tragic, but don't forget the context. In other words, this tragedy is nuanced.

In fact, the real victim is the alleged killer, Mr. Elias:

Elias's actions, while inexcusable, were reportedly driven by his anguish over the daily horrors and crimes against humanity inflicted upon Palestinians, not by hatred towards Jews as a people.

How he knew that the killer was driven by anguish instead of anger and hate is anyone's guess. Of course, to push the "anguish" narrative, the writer here has to paint Israel in the darkest colors--so the same propaganda that the killer fed on is conveniently regurgitated for the benefit of the audience. The word "genocide" is thrown in, independent of its actual, legal definition, along with the usual inflammatory descriptions.

The fact that the killer's actions are blamed on Israel is a nice touch.

And of course, he finishes off with the typical "both sides" flourish.

Oddly enough, what eludes the writer is the hypocrisy that he has fallen into. He carefully avoids mentioning the 1,200 Israelis murdered and the hundreds kidnapped by the Hamas terrorists. But it is exactly that massacre of Jews that led to the war he blames on Israel.

To phrase it in the writer's words: Israel's actions actually are being driven by their anguish over the crimes against humanity inflicted by Palestinians--and Hamas's promise to carry out more such massacres--not by hatred towards Gazans as a people.

Israel has the right to protect its people.

Going a step further, the psychological defense of the killer, based on his alleged anguish that drove him to kill the young couple, is reminiscent of what we have seen in France, where murderers of Jews have avoided justice because of their mental state.

Sarah Halimi Case (2017): Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman, was beaten and thrown from her apartment balcony in Paris by her neighbor, Kobili Traoré. a Muslim immigrant. He was never tried for murder because a lower court ruled he was not criminally responsible due to a cannabis-induced psychotic episode. Instead, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital with restrictive measures for 20 years.

Mireille Knoll Case (2018): Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times by Yacine Mihoub and Alex Carrimbacus. The attack was fueled by antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish wealth. Mihoub was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole. But Carrimbacus was acquitted of murder, in part because the defense emphasized his lesser role and mental state. However, he was convicted of theft with antisemitic motives.

René Hadjaj Case (2022): René Hadjaj, an 89-year-old Jewish man, was pushed from his 17th-floor apartment window by his 51-year-old neighbor. The attack was suspected to have antisemitic motives. The suspect was arrested, but no hate crime charges were initially filed. Early reports suggested consideration of the perpetrator’s mental state.

Have we moved on from using a killer's mental state as an indication of inability to judge right from wrong to their emotional state? How far would the writer have us go in judging the perpetrator as the victim?

If you support Hamas terrorists, these attacks on innocent Jews are the inevitable responses. Own it

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Allegations Against ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Are Back In The News, Along With A Suspicious Timeline (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal featured an article reexamining the allegations of sexual harassment against ICC prosecutor Karim Khan. It also focused on the possible connection between those allegations and the warrants he issued against Netanyahu and Gallant.

In the months following Israel's retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 massacre, both pro-Palestinian activists and ICC-member states in developing countries pressured the prosecutor to take action. According to the report, ICC sources indicated that the pressure was so great that Khan "was increasingly lashing out at his team."

The story is back in the news following revelations indicating the severity of the allegations against Khan and the revelation of new details on a timeline that implies a connection between the issuing of the warrants and the allegations against him. Just last week, UN investigators were interviewing Khan.

Critics believe that by ordering the arrests of Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan hopes to shield himself from his accuser. First of all, the warrants shored up his support from anti-Israel nations that would then be willing to side with him against the accusations of sexual harassment. Secondly, issuing the arrest order would discourage his accuser. She has supported the warrants and would not want to see them derailed by Khan's removal from the case:

The casualties of the allegations would include “the justice of the victims that are on the cusp of progress,” [Khan] said to her, according to a record of a call that is now part of an independent U.N. investigation into her allegations. “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants,” she said he told her on another occasion, according to the testimony.

One topic that has raised eyebrows is Khan's sudden cancellation of a fact-finding mission to Israel and Gaza, despite the work that went into the trip and his own admission of the importance of the fact-finding mission:

Khan tried for months to gain access to Gaza
Thomas Lynch, an American lawyer and close adviser to the ICC, made arrangements for the trip
Alan Dershowitz was arranging a private meeting with Netanyahu
Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Adviser Sullivan pushed Israel to let Khan in, seeing the visit as an important opportunity to convince him against the warrants
According to ICC minutes of a May 3, 2024, call, Khan told Blinken that he saw the trip as an important opportunity and would need time to analyze the information his team gathered before making a decision on the arrest orders

The May 3 call between Blinken and Khan is part of a series of events within 21 days that show the proximity of the allegations against Khan and his decision to call off his visit to Israel and issue the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant:

April 29, 2024: Khan’s accuser tells Lynch and another colleague that Khan had been sexually abusing her for several months, and she couldn’t take it anymore.
May 2: Lynch and two other aides confront Khan at his home. They tell him they were reporting the allegations to the court’s human resources office. According to people familiar with the conversation, Khan responds that he would have to resign, adding: “But then people will think I’m running away from Palestine.”
May 3: Khan speaks with Blinken on the phone about the trip and says he would need time to decide on an indictment. On the same day, his office puts out a statement that "all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence its officials cease immediately." There is no mention of the harassment allegations.
May 5: The ICC’s internal investigation agency contacts his accuser. She refuses to cooperate and will neither confirm nor deny her accusation. She later admits to colleagues that she didn’t want to disrupt the warrants by bringing a complaint against Khan.
May 19: Khan suddenly tells aids he is cancelling the trip to Israel (set for week of May 27). Lynch was set to fly to Israel the next day to prepare for Khan's visit.
May 20: Khan announces he is applying for the warrants.

Khan issued the arrest order two-and-a-half weeks after learning of the accusation.

Khan blamed Israel for his decision, saying through his lawyers that “no offer has yet been received from Israel that would permit [access to Gaza]." He claimed this even though Lynch was going to Israel that day to make preparations.

His lawyers claim that since the warrant applications were announced after the ICC had already closed its internal inquiry into the allegations, this disproves any linkage between the allegations and the warrants. On the other hand, if there were enough rumors that an independent UN investigation was found necessary, that could have led Khan to issue warrants to manipulate the situation.

Other issues imply that things are not going smoothly behind the scenes at the ICC.

Senior prosecutors and staff say Khan should take a temporary leave of absence to allow the independent UN investigation to do its job. Some ICC officials believe his presence at the court discourages witnesses from cooperating with the investigation. Khan has refused to take a leave.

Meanwhile, Lynch claims that Khan has retaliated against him by moving him out of Khan's office. According to the internal ICC investigation, following Lynch's reporting the allegation of misconduct, Khan's wife told Lynch she heard rumors about him having an "inappropriate relationship" with a colleague, which he denied. Lynch reported that he saw her comments as threatening, but Khan's wife denied making any statement to him “that could reasonably be construed as threatening.”

Anne Herzbert, human rights lawyer and legal advisor to NGO Monitor, commented on the Wall Street Journal article on Twitter:

Hungary already began the process last month to withdraw from the ICC--a move that was passed in its parliament:

Hungary is out. Today the Parliament voted to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. We won’t be part of a politicised institution. pic.twitter.com/mZTlJyi9oj
— Péter Szijjártó (@FM_Szijjarto) April 29, 2025

Hungary also openly invited Netanyahu to Hungary, snubbing the ICC and the EU.

While Brussels accused Hungary of disloyalty, Italy's deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, publicly supported Hungary's move.

Suspicions of impropriety at the ICC may taint the court, but that in itself may not be enough to quash the warrants.

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Genocide Inversion and the Assault on Jewish Peoplehood (Adam Louis-Klein)

From the Scapegoat’s Point of View by Adam Louis-Klein

Adam Louis-Klein is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, researching antisemitism, peoplehood, and comparative struggles over indigeneity and historical belonging. He writes regularly on these topics on Facebook, where he explores the ideological structures driving modern anti-Jewish hostility and the global assault on Jewish peoplehood.

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What we’re witnessing today is a coordinated assault on Jewish existence, divided between cultural erasure in the West and the pursuit of physical extermination abroad. But this is no longer just a scattered set of prejudices or disconnected political movements—it has cohered into a holistic ideology and, increasingly, an institutional framework. What began as a battlefield strategy of Iran, Hamas, and other jihadist movements—combining psychological warfare, propaganda, and asymmetric violence—has been extended into Western cultural, academic, and political institutions.

In the West, the activist-university-NGO class works relentlessly to push Jews out of public life unless they renounce their connection to their ancestral homeland and the people who live there. Jews are pressured to disavow their collective identity, redefine themselves as “White,” and deny their status as a distinct and indigenous people. This is a modern form of forced assimilation—one that echoes the historical forced conversions Jews endured for centuries under both Christian and Islamic empires. Then, as now, Jewish distinctiveness is treated as an intolerable affront to universalizing ideologies.

At the same time, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and jihadist militias openly pursue the physical destruction of Israel and the Jewish People. These forces operate in tandem: cultural erasure in the West, physical annihilation in the East. And at the center of it all is the same recurring target—Jewish distinctiveness—now conveniently labeled “Zionism,” a stand-in for the reality of Jewish Peoplehood and the right of Jews to live openly as a people among the nations.

This is why the constant accusation of “genocide” against Israel—used to demonize any Jew who refuses to sever ties with their people as a so-called “genocide supporter”—is not merely a lie. It is a political weapon, part and parcel of the broader project of antisemitic exclusion. These accusations are not isolated statements to be analyzed in abstraction; they operate as mechanisms of social control, enforcing the marginalization of Jews in cultural, academic, and professional life unless they publicly repudiate their peoplehood and sever their historical and emotional ties to Israel.

This discourse functions through a closed circular logic. The point is not the content of any single claim, but the form of the discourse itself: a self-reinforcing system that closes off critical inquiry and punishes dissent through moral panic and public shaming. We must not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed or demoralized by this endless flood of accusations, which do not proceed from a genuine concern for truth but from a self-sustaining strategy of escalating defamation. Instead, we must learn to recognize the structure of this discourse, expose the system that generates it, and refuse to be drawn into its trap—bypassing its manufactured moral crises and standing firm in the clarity of our own commitments.

At the same time, the universalism of international law—born in part from the memory of the Holocaust—has been twisted and weaponized against the very people whose suffering helped bring it into being. Instead of moving from the particular experience of the Holocaust to a genuine, principled universal concern with genocide, that universality has been distorted and turned back against the Jews themselves. We are witnessing a dialectical inversion: the language of universal rights deployed precisely to deny the Jewish People the right to exist.

This inversion has found its most powerful rhetorical vehicle in the language of anti-colonialism, where the accusation of genocide against Israel is presented not as a claim requiring evidence, but as a self-evident truth derived from a broader anti-colonial framework.

And yet, even this inversion relies on a dangerous historical simplification. The conversation about colonialism and genocide has become trapped in a narrow framework that views these phenomena almost exclusively through the lens of European imperialism. As a result, other imperial formations—and their long histories of conquest, domination, and genocide—are erased or excused. But no serious, honest reckoning with the global history of genocide can avoid confronting the imperial legacies of Islamism and their ongoing consequences for indigenous and minority peoples across the Middle East and beyond.

The Armenian Genocide stands as a critical case in point. Far from being an isolated outbreak of nationalist violence, it was carried out under the banner of an imperial Islamist ideology that fused religious supremacy with imperial ambition. The Ottoman Empire, in its final decades, sought to reassert control over its fracturing territories through the ideology of Pan-Islamism—declaring Jihad and mobilizing Muslim populations against Christian minorities, most brutally against the Armenians, but also targeting Assyrians, Greeks, and other indigenous Christian peoples of the region. This genocide was not simply a product of ethnic nationalism; it was driven by an imperial Islamic vision of religious and territorial purification.

A full and honest analysis of the relationship between colonialism and genocide would interrogate these dimensions of Islamist imperialism—both historical and contemporary. It would ask why the ongoing persecution and erasure of minorities in the Middle East—Yazidis, Assyrians, Copts, Kurds, and of course, Jews—is so often left out of the global conversation on colonialism and genocide. It would confront the reality that, long before European colonial powers arrived, many of these indigenous and ethnoreligious peoples had already suffered under Islamic imperial domination, forced conversions, and displacement. And it would recognize that this historical pattern continues today under modern Islamist movements that openly aspire to restore imperial dominance under the guise of religious or anti-colonial struggle.

Such an analysis would also challenge the assumption that genocide is primarily a byproduct of modern nation-state nationalism. In fact, it is often imperial nationalisms—ideological projects that combine the expansive ambitions of empire with a violent drive for cultural, religious, or ethnic homogeneity—that have been the most devastating engines of genocide. The Ottoman vision of a purified Islamic empire, Nazi Germany’s project of a racially pure Reich, and contemporary Islamist movements dreaming of a global Caliphate all share this imperialist structure. These are not defensive or localized nationalisms but expansive, totalizing visions that seek to dominate and erase entire peoples in the service of their ideological goals.

Genocide, then, should not be flattened into a simplistic narrative of colonial victimhood or tied exclusively to the legacy of Western imperialism. Nor should colonialism itself be reduced to a purely European phenomenon. If we are serious about universal justice, we must confront all imperial formations—Christian, Islamic, European, and otherwise—that have built their power on the conquest, assimilation, and annihilation of distinct peoples. And we must recognize that the genocidal ideologies of the present are not confined to the nationalist right, but are alive and well in the imperial ambitions of Islamist movements that continue to target Jews and other indigenous peoples of the Middle East for erasure.

Through a sophisticated interplay of media manipulation, NGO activism, and academic endorsement, we are seeing the seamless integration of this anti-Jewish ideological project into the very heart of Western discourse. This is not a coincidence. After World War II, while Europe underwent an intensive process of denazification, much of the ideological machinery of Nazism found refuge and continuity in the Middle East, particularly through figures like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the entrenchment of Nazi propaganda within the political cultures of the Arab world. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler, collaborated with the SS, and broadcast pro-Nazi, antisemitic radio propaganda to the Arab world. His ideological heirs include the Muslim Brotherhood, whose fusion of political Islam and antisemitism laid the groundwork for groups like Hamas—whose founding charter cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. After World War II, prominent Nazi propagandist Johann von Leers fled to Cairo, converted to Islam, and helped establish a center dedicated to antizionist agitation, blending Nazi conspiracies with Islamist thought. The Protocols and similar texts circulated widely among Islamist and pan-Arabist groups, forming a foundation for postwar antizionist ideology.

At the core of today’s genocidal rhetoric is a dangerously simplistic and abstract syllogism that now circulates almost unchallenged in activist, academic, and policy spaces:

“All colonialism is genocide; Israel is colonialism; therefore, Israel is committing genocide.”

This formula is presented with the force of moral certainty, but it collapses under even the most basic scrutiny. Its simplicity is precisely what makes it so seductive and so dangerous—it reduces history to a set of abstract categories, flattens complex political realities, and replaces concrete analysis with a priori ideological reasoning. Instead of investigating the specific facts on the ground, it proceeds by deduction from premises that are themselves historically and conceptually flawed.

The first premise—“All colonialism is genocide”—is itself a distortion. While colonialism has undoubtedly involved genocidal episodes, not all colonial projects have pursued or resulted in genocide. To equate the two absolutely is to erase important historical distinctions and to rob the concept of genocide of its specificity and analytical clarity. Genocide, as a distinct crime, involves the deliberate intention to destroy a people as such—something far more specific than the broad, often exploitative, but not necessarily annihilatory dynamics of colonial regimes. While colonialism and genocide may surely interact, they are not identical.

The second premise—“Israel is colonialism”—is simply false. It rests on a deliberate mischaracterization of Zionism as a foreign, settler-colonial movement imposed upon the Middle East by Western powers. This ignores the basic historical and anthropological fact that the Jewish People are indigenous to the Land of Israel, with an unbroken cultural, religious, and historical connection to that land stretching back millennia.

Zionism is not an expression of European colonial expansion—it is a movement of indigenous return, a national liberation movement responding to centuries of forced exile, persecution, and dispossession. To frame Jews as colonial invaders in their own ancestral homeland is to invert reality entirely, erasing the history of Jewish survival and return in favor of a politically convenient fiction. As Ben M. Freeman has shown, Jews fulfill every substantive criterion of indigeneity: their ethnogenesis took place in the Land of Israel; their ritual and calendrical life is tied to its ecological rhythms and seasons; their collective identity and ancestral memory are grounded in that specific territory; and their attachment to the land has endured for millennia, despite dispersion and exile. If these standards apply to others—and rightly so—they must apply to Jews as well. Anything less is not intellectual rigor but political selectivity.

Moreover, this ideological framework thrives precisely because it plays into a deeply narcissistic form of Western self-critique—one that centers the moral failings of the West while casting Jews, paradoxically, as both the eternal outsiders and the ultimate symbols of Western guilt. In this schema, the “White Jew” becomes the scapegoat par excellence, the one who must bear the weight of colonial sins that have nothing to do with Jewish history but everything to do with Europe’s need for self-absolution. The Jew is simultaneously cast out as a foreign body and condemned as the privileged insider, eternally caught in this double bind.

This is not analysis—it is a moralized abstraction that weaponizes both the language of decolonization and the memory of genocide, not to prevent genocide, but to justify and conceal new forms of antisemitic exclusion and, in the case of Israel, openly expressed fantasies of annihilation.

This is the reality we face: an ideological and institutional assault that works across every register—legal, political, academic, and cultural—to isolate, delegitimize, and ultimately erase Jewish distinctiveness. It takes the battlefield strategies of genocidal actors abroad and repackages them as moral imperatives in the West. It turns international law, born from the horrors of the Holocaust, against its very creators. It revives the specters of both Christian and Islamic imperial ideologies, erases Jewish indigeneity through false historical narratives, and weaponizes concepts like colonialism and genocide to render the Jews uniquely guilty among the nations.

Through circular accusations and closed discourses, antizionism creates a social environment in which Jews are accepted only on the condition of their self-negation—only if they reject their peoplehood, their history, and their living ties to Israel. And when they refuse, they are denounced not merely as wrong, but as inherently evil—as supporters of genocide, the most unforgivable crime imaginable. This is not a debate over abstract concepts; it is a deliberate assault on the political, cultural, and even physical existence of the Jewish People. And it will not stop with Israel.

At bottom, antisemitism constructs two contradictory realities: one for the jews, and one spoken endlessly about them—but rarely with them. A tiny, often invisible minority becomes symbolically inflated into the source of all social contradictions, and when Jews speak—when they assert their history or defend their peoplehood—their voice is met not with engagement but with suspicion.

This dynamic is amplified through the mechanisms of genocide inversion that we have described here. For non-Jewish societies, the image of the Jew as the ultimate victim of the Holocaust is an uncomfortable symbol of absolute suffering that imposes an unresolved moral debt. Yet, this very image conflicts with the deep-seated tendency to cast Jews as figures of power, wealth, and hidden control. The accusation of genocide against Israel functions as a backlash against that unresolved tension. It discharges the burden of Holocaust empathy by inverting victimhood itself—transforming Jews from the paradigmatic victims of genocide into its alleged perpetrators. Jews then appear either as absolute victims or absolute villains, but never as ordinary people in all their complexity and humanity.

And yet, despite every attempt to erase us—through forced conversion, forced assimilation, or outright extermination—the Jewish People endures, distinct and alive, refusing to disappear. This too is part of our story—the story of survival, resilience, and return. And it is precisely that story—the undeniable proof that a people can endure against the greatest odds—that they most wish to erase. Which is why, in the face of these pressures, we must take up the work of internal clarity, standing firm in who we are and refusing to let others define our history, our identity, or our future.

Thoughts About Douglas Murray, Dave Smith, entertainers and expertise (Daled Amos)

In a segment for 60 Minutes in 1979, Mike Wallace interviewed Today Show host Johnny Carson. He asked Carson for his response to those who criticized him for not tackling "serious controversies" on his show:

Wallace: Do you get sensitive about the fact that people say "he'll never take a serious controversy?"

Carson: Well, I have an answer to that. I said, "Tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton...any comedian used his show to do serious issues". That's not what I'm there for. Can't they see that? Why do they think that just because you have a Tonight Show that you must deal in serious issues. That's a danger, a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling, that what you say has great import. And you know, strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum. You could sway people, and I don't think you should as an entertainer.

Carson did not address whether a comedian should be knowledgeable enough to speak intelligently about the issue. Nor was he concerned about the comedian's ability to talk about a controversial issue objectively and fairly. His first concern was the influence that an entertainer could have on the public.

Just a year earlier, in 1978, the Supreme Court had similar concerns when it ruled that the FCC had the power to determine the language guidelines for broadcast media because of the media's "uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans."

Nearly half a century later, broadcast media has exploded way beyond television, and is now in the hands of anyone with access to the Internet and social media. Done correctly, broadcasting on social media has the potential to be very lucrative, and if you have your hand on the pulse of what the public wants to hear, you will be successful. Just ask Stephen Colbert, whose turnaround of The Late Show's ratings in 2017 is credited to his sharp attacks on Trump.

These days, if there is anything that ignites people's attention more than Trump, it might be Israel and the war in Gaza. And the great thing is that you don't even have to know what you are talking about to satisfy your audience.

Take comedian Dave Smith, for example. Here is a video of him on the Jake Shields podcast. The YouTube excerpt is entitled, Dave Smith EXPOSES "Greater Israel" Plan:

Smith: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it was, uh, I don't remember when, uh, when Netanyahu went to the U.N a few weeks before October 7th last year, and he had the map of Greater Israel right there.

Shields: I don't know how the states, but it was huge. It was multiple countries involved and that, yeah, they want to take all that land. It's not a secret if Netanyahu's wearing it.

Smith and Shields egg each other on how Netanyahu appeared before the UN General Assembly and revealed a plan that would be open and available on social media.

Actually, Netanyahu's map showed the peace established between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the potential that peace made possible:

Let me show you a map of the Middle East, in 1948, the year Israel was established. Here's Israel. In 1948, it's a tiny country isolated, surrounded by a hostile Arab world.

In our first seven years, we made peace with Egypt and Jordan. And then, in 2020, we made the Abraham Accords peace with another four Arab states. Now, look at what happens when we make peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The whole Middle East changes. We tear down the walls of enmity. We bring the possibility of prosperity and peace to this entire region. But we do something else.

You know, a few years ago, I stood here with a red marker to show the curse, a great curse. The curse of a nuclear Iran. But today, I bring this marker to show a great blessing, the blessing of a new Middle East between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and our other neighbors. We will not only bring down barriers between Israel and our neighbors. We'll build a new corridor of peace and prosperity that connects Asia through the UA, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel to Europe. This is an extraordinary change, a monumental change. Another pivot of History.

The disparity between the careless conspiracy theories of Smith and Shields and the clear intent of what Netanyahu actually said at the UN is more than a little unsettling. Smith is making the rounds on social media, spreading claims like this.

A few weeks ago, Douglas Murray appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast with Smith. Murray is a British political commentator, cultural critic, and journalist. One of the discussions that drew the most attention was the issue of being an "expert."

Murray has written about this point he made on the podcast:

From the COVID lab leak to the Hunter Biden laptop, we have lived through years after which distrust of experts has become inevitable.

Yet that doesn’t mean that expertise does not exist.

It does not mean that a comedian can simply hold himself out as a Middle East expert and should be listened to as if he has any body of work.

On the contrary:

[M]any people seem to think that what I mean is that they are not allowed to have an opinion.
That is wrong.
I think they are.
It’s just that there should be a price to pay for spreading bulls–t.
And one price is that you should be called out.

But that will not happen--at least not as long as these guests are entertaining.

Smith is no expert, and no one listens to him to get the facts. They listen to him for the satisfaction of having their own prejudices reinforced and justified.

So those who believe you should know what you are talking about and should have some kind of expertise, will side with Murray. But those who want to be entertained have no interest in legal definitions of genocide or how Hamas terrorists falsify statistics--and they will cheerfully defend Smith's saying whatever he wants to in order to amuse and please his audience.

So Smith talks as if he has knowledge.
But his audience does not care that he doesn't.

They have forgotten the point Daniel Patrick Moynihan made years ago: