01/23 Links Pt2: Don’t Legitimize ‘Anti-Zionism.’ Defeat It; The infantile Israelophobia of Ms Rachel; Shul Runnings: Israeli bobsleigh team makes Olympic history

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Don’t Legitimize ‘Anti-Zionism.’ Defeat It

I admit I winced when I read that last line. I had just been reading the Guardian’s coverage of Australia’s efforts to crack down on incitement. Initially the bill, set forth by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party, was reportedly far too restrictive of plain speech to the point of being unsalvageable. But Liberal Party MPs were able to “gut” the overreach and pare down the bill.

Still, the Guardian made sure to quote the Jewish Council of Australia, a progressive group called upon to As-a-Jew the issue into oblivion. The legislation, they said, represented “an attempt to slander and intimidate hundreds of 1000s of Australians who have been protesting against Israel’s genocide and egregious human rights abuses.”

Of course, a publication like the Guardian would quote an organization like this, despite anti-Israel lunacy being a distinct minority opinion among Jews. It’s useful to them. But besides the political tokenization angle, it’s also a reminder that the Jewish community contains within it organizations whose entire purpose appears to be to enable state suppression of Jewish rights and Jewish security.

The Jewish Council of Australia, it turns out, was founded in the spring of 2024—meaning it was launched after the October 7 attacks in order to join the global anti-Israel pile-on.

The Jewish community has an obligation to battle, not coddle, the anti-Zionism within its ranks. It has the same obligation to mount a full-scale fight against anti-Zionism in mainstream discourse. The movement of anti-Jewish assault shutting down Jewish shops and restaurants calls its worldview anti-Zionism. So the proper response is clear: That which calls itself anti-Zionism must be defeated.

How the Internet Fell for a Supposed Condemnation of Christian Zionism

Despite the unanswered questions, or perhaps because of them, a fight soon erupted. Evangelical Christian Zionists defended their theology. “It’s hard for me to understand why every one who takes on the moniker ‘Christian’ would not also be a Zionist,” wrote US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

Meanwhile, Catholic critics of Israel promoted the statement on X, declaring that the top Catholic figure in the Holy Land, Latin patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, had definitively rejected Christian Zionism.

Unfortunately for them, he did nothing of the sort.

Pizzaballa is a fluent Hebrew speaker who is well regarded by Jewish leaders. Though he is not afraid to speak out about pressures on Christians in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, he is not looking to make headlines attacking the Jewish state or Zionism.

What’s more, breaking with its usual practice, the Latin Patriarchate did not publish the Christian Zionism statement or share it on social media. Pizzaballa’s name does not appear on the statement. Neither does his signature.

Custodia Terrae Sancte, a Catholic body that oversees Christian sites in the Holy Land, removed the statement from its website as well.

Even more tellingly, when asked if the Patriarchate supports the statement, an official from the Patriarchate said only, “No comment.”

So how and why did a statement go out that ostensibly speaks in the Latin Patriarch’s name?

Many assume that since Pizzaballa is part of the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches group, he must have personally signed off on the statement. But the group doesn’t work in such an orderly fashion. The group’s secretariat sends out a draft, and says that if there are no objections by a certain time—last week it was 5 p.m.—then it will assume that all the church leaders agree with the statement.

Needless to say, if a patriarch is traveling that day, the first time he sees a message may be when it is published.

The main impetus for the statement, according to sources from two churches, is a fight led by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate against a group of Israeli Christians calling themselves the Israeli Christian Voice and the Eagles of Christ Movement.

The movement leader, Ihab Shilyan, was a career officer in the IDF and actively encourages young Christians to enlist as well. He was recently welcomed at Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s annual reception for Christian leaders, and has met multiple times with Huckabee.

It is no coincidence that last Saturday’s statement was posted on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate website and shared with local journalists by a figure closely affiliated with the Greek Orthodox Church. The leader of Israeli Christian Voice boasted in response to the statement: “It appears that my meetings with senior and influential figures … have placed significant pressure on vested interests.”

What some touted as a clear rejection of Christian Zionism by the top Catholic official in the Holy Land was instead an episode in which one church rather disingenuously used a joint forum to drag other institutions into its fight. Far from expressing a unified Christian voice, the statement undermined the shaky trust between the historical churches in Jerusalem.

Why are the celebrities I used to love suddenly so anti, well… me?

So why have these stars all jumped on the bandwagon? “Different actor/ activists have different motivations,” says Jeremy. “Some are animated by prejudice against Jews (hi, Roger!), but fortunately I don’t think that’s many of them. And while it’s possible some performers are paid, others are terribly vulnerable to the anti-Zionism hate movement because, as an actor, you have to need to be “seen” and the publicity can help your career. Add to that the charge you get when the major news organisation asks you your opinions about world affairs, and anti-Zionism is positively addictive.”

For me, it’s the hypocrisy that grates. That old double standard of holding Israel (hence, Jews, and hence me) to a far higher standard than any other country or ethnicity. It’s been said many times before, but where are these performers on China, Sudan, North Korea, Iran?

The Iran case is particularly topical. Iranian stand-up comic Omid Djalili is – quite rightly – being feted by the mainstream press as a voice of the uprising in that country. Where were the corresponding Israeli voices in autumn 2023?

Of course, there are some pro-Israeli (hence, pro-Jewish, and pro-me) voices: Gal Gadot, Jerry Seinfeld, Pink, Jamie Lee Curtis – all of these have stood up in support. But all these actors are Jewish – or have Jewish heritage – and so it’s somehow less meaningful. There’s an irony in how Jews historically have always stood up for civil rights causes, but when the table are turned, no-one seems to stand up for us.

With hope in my heart, I started to Google. Tom Cruise? Nope, he supported his agent when she was sacked for anti-Israel commentary. Paul Mescal participated in the Cinema for Gaza auction, donating items to raise funds for Palestinian humanitarian aid. Brad Pitt is a producer on pro-Gaza film, The Voice of Hind Rajab.

There is, perhaps, a silver lining in the post. Jeremy feels there may be a backlash down the line. “Despite what Sam Goldwyn once said, there is such a thing as bad publicity,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some actors have done long-term damage to their careers and legacy as they cross the line between responsible empathy into antisemitism.”

That aside, there are signs of hope. Quentin Tarantino recently gave an interview where he declared he would "die a Zionist". And just today, I came across an X post of actress Sydney Sweeney posing with released hostages, Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or.

As a final word, we probably should remember those who have said nothing at all. There is, after all, no constitutional duty to proclaim ones political alignments. It’s a small field, but let’s keep our fingers crossed for Leonardo di Caprio, Zendaya, and Taylor Swift. As long as Taylor is (implicitly) on our team, we should be ok.

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01/18 Links: Why Netanyahu Asked Trump to Wait on Attacking Iran; US considering asylum for British Jews; Iran doctors put death toll in suppressed uprising at over 16,500; Syria’s Next Phase Offers Little Hope for Kurds

From Ian:

Why Netanyahu Asked Trump to Wait on Attacking Iran

Israel has reportedly urged President Trump to postpone any immediate military action against Iran. Israeli decision-making is not rooted in diplomatic hesitation or lack of defense systems but in a sober intelligence assessment.

Israel's intelligence establishment has concluded that the current moment is strategically unfavorable for a strike and that such an action would be unlikely to achieve the collapse of the Iranian regime.

Regime change in Iran is not determined by popular dissatisfaction alone, but by the continued loyalty of the state's coercive institutions - most notably the regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The regime has demonstrated a willingness to use unprecedented and brutal force to suppress dissent. Israeli intelligence analysts assess that as long as the Iranian military and the IRGC remain cohesive and willing to shoot protesters, the likelihood of regime collapse remains low.

History has shown repeatedly that authoritarian governments fall not when protests erupt, but when security forces fracture, refuse orders, or shift allegiance. At present, there is no credible indication that such a split is imminent within Iran's power structure.

In short, Israeli intelligence concludes that the Iranian regime will not collapse as long as the army and the IRGC remain willing and able to fire on their own population. Until that reality changes, restraint is viewed not as weakness, but as strategic prudence.

Amb. Alan Baker: Are Israelis Not Entitled to Human Rights?

On a daily basis, we are witnessing a mass-phenomenon of deliberately one-sided accusations being leveled solely against Israel, alleging human rights violations against Palestinians. Slanted social media platforms, once-reputable international media outlets, politically-biased UN bodies and human rights committees, and clearly ignorant show-biz celebrities all unthinkingly accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid, cruelty and disproportionate military actions.

Curiously, all these "paragons of international virtue" appear to be selectively blind as to the human rights of everyone else in the world. They flagrantly ignore the fact that Israel and its citizens are no less deserving of human rights. They ignore the fact that the public in Israel suffer from ongoing and daily acts of terror by Palestinian terror groups and Islamist fanatics. They have deliberately chosen to forget, or deny, the tragic massacre, rape, butchery, burning, and torture of many hundreds of Israelis and foreign citizens on Oct. 7, 2023.

All this is being orchestrated through a meticulous, well-oiled and well-financed system of brainwashing, emanating from the coffers of the likes of Qatar, Iran, and Turkey. Sadly, this is all being willingly and enthusiastically absorbed and cheered-on by an international choir in Europe and other Western countries, all too willing to absorb and propagate such propaganda and brain-washing and to direct it solely against Israel.

It is high time that the states and organizations within the international community, as well as international media outlets and the manipulated social media platforms, become aware of the absurdity and acute lack of any logical proportion in their anti-Israel fixation.

US considering asylum for British Jews

The Trump administration is discussing the possibility of offering asylum to Britain’s Jews, The Telegraph can reveal.

Robert Garson, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, said he had been in talks with the State Department about providing sanctuary for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in the UK.

Mr Garson, who was born in Manchester, told The Telegraph that the UK was “no longer a safe place for Jews”.

He said the Islamist attack on a Manchester synagogue and the widespread anti-Semitism evident in the wake of the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel had led him to conclude British Jews should be offered refuge in the US.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Garson said he could see “no future” for Jews in the UK and laid much of the blame on Sir Keir Starmer for allowing anti-Semitism to flourish.

Mr Garson said he had raised the idea of offering the US as a safe haven to British Jews with Mr Trump’s anti-Semitism tsar in his capacity as a board member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Mr Trump appointed Mr Garson to the council last May after firing board members appointed by Joe Biden.

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12/21 Links: Arsen Ostrovsky: My Family Survived Bondi Beach; The Real War Is Islamism's Infiltration of Western Democracies; Tucker Carlson named ‘Antisemite of the Year’

From Ian:

Arsen Ostrovsky: My Family Survived Bondi Beach

Three weeks after my family had relocated from Israel to Australia, we were in the crossfire on Bondi Beach. One of the gunmen's bullets hit my head. I fell to the ground and bled profusely. To my right, an elderly man crouched, covering his wife. He was also hit, not moving. To my left, a few feet away, I saw body parts strewn on the ground. Another man ripped off his shirt and lent it to me to help stop the blood gushing from my head. My wife had managed to escape unharmed and found refuge with our children. Doctors later told me it was millimeters between life and death, "a miracle" I survived.

Over the past two years, the Jewish community has warned time and again that when hatred is allowed to fester, when it is excused, normalized or mainstreamed, it inevitably leads to violence. Australia doesn't need another inquiry, strategy document or press release expressing sorrow. We need urgent, decisive action. Our laws must be enforced. Incitement must have consequences. Intelligence must be acted on and radical Islamic extremism must be confronted, not managed.

Bondi Was Not a Surprise

I am angry at the government for ignoring antisemitic violence and intimidation, at the media for whitewashing it, at the academics who provided it with intellectual legitimacy, and at everyone who marched and chanted and who justified or minimized antisemitism in Australia because of their feelings about a conflict on the other side of the globe.

I am angry at every official who failed to do their due diligence: in neglecting to vet immigrants from countries where vicious antisemitism is endemic; in allowing a man whose son was suspected of involvement with ISIS to legally own multiple firearms; in never taking a clear stand against Jew-hatred in this country. I am angry at the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who has blamed the tragedy primarily on firearms and who seems unable to name the cause clearly. I can name it: the poisonous hatred of Jews.

I believe that a silent majority of Aussies are heartily sick of the attacks on our harmony, our culture, and our Jews. At Quillette, we stand with Jews in Australia, in Israel, and throughout the world. RIP: Boris Tetleroyd, Boris Gurman, Sofia Gurman, Reuven Morrison, Edith Brutman, Marika Pogany, Dan Elkayam, Eli Schlanger, Yaakov Levitan, Peter Meagher, Alex Kleytman, Tibor Weitzen, Adam Smyth, Tania Tretiak, and ten-year-old Matilda. May their memories be a blessing.

Jonathan Conricus: The Real War Is Islamism's Infiltration of Western Democracies

The global civilizational conflict between the Free World and the forces of Islamism - a movement that seeks not coexistence, but domination - has only begun. Islamism's most violent expression erupts in the bloodlust of Hamas, ISIS, or al-Qaeda. Yet its more patient, insidious face belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates - groups that have mastered the art of slow infiltration, cultural manipulation, and institutional takeover. Their ambition is the same: the imposition of Sharia and the submission of free societies.

I was raised in Malmo, Sweden, where I watched firsthand the quiet surrender of a liberal Western city to Islamist intimidation. Today, similar scenes unfold in London, Paris, Toronto, Sydney, and New York, where since Oct. 7, 2023, Islamists have marched openly through Western capitals, waving the flags of terror movements and calling for "global intifada."

The response from many Western governments has been paralysis: fear of being called "Islamophobic" outweighs the courage to name the threat. Listen carefully to what Islamists say in their own rallies and mosques. They boast of taking over Western institutions. They preach that democracy is a tool to be exploited until the day it can be replaced. They view liberal tolerance not as a virtue but as a weakness to be exploited.

The same ideology that sent Hamas terrorists across Israel's border on Oct. 7 now works methodically to seize student unions, civil-society groups, and local councils across Europe and North America. In Britain, dozens of municipalities are now governed by officials who declare loyalty not to the United Kingdom but to the global Islamic nation. In the process, this ideology has fueled a resurgence of antisemitism and social fragmentation in the West.

This war is not over. It will only end when Islamism - violent and non-violent alike - is defeated intellectually, financially, and politically. Education must be our front line. That begins with dismantling UNRWA, whose curriculum perpetuates hate and martyrdom in Gaza's classrooms. A generation taught that killing Jews is holy cannot build peace.

Governments should outlaw Islamist organizations where evidence ties them to terror networks. The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates should be designated terrorist entities. Qatar and Turkey - state sponsors of this ideology - must face consequences, not indulgence. Political correctness is a luxury we can no longer afford. This war will decide the fate of the entire Free World.

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06/12 Links Pt2: Federal judge: Trump can’t deport Mahmoud Khalil; Will BBC Verify apologise for spreading disinformation?; Why privileged Israelophobes can’t handle Azealia Banks

From Ian:

Gerald Steinberg: From Durban to Geneva: How the global human rights industry turned on Israel

When Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were founded in 1961 and 1978 respectively – both by Jews and Zionists – they quickly earned reputations as principled defenders of universal human rights. Yet over time, both organisations have drifted from their original mission of confronting the world’s most brutal regimes. Today, they are increasingly politicised, with a marked and obsessive hostility towards Israel.

The hostile takeover became clearly visible in August 2001, when the NGO Forum of the UN’s Conference on Racism brought 5,000 activists from self-proclaimed human rights groups to Durban, South Africa. The orchestrated assemblage declared Israel to be guilty of apartheid, genocide, colonialism, among similar propaganda labels.

This was the beginning of NGO-led lawfare, boycott campaigns and other forms of demonisation based on exploiting the principles and frameworks of human rights. Twenty-two years later, immediately after the October 7 atrocities, the world-wide propaganda attacks (“the 8th front” of the war) highlighted the same slogans in much more virulent form, feeding blood libels, antisemitic violence and intimidation.

The failure of the Israeli government, including the IDF, as well as the leaders of major Jewish organisations, to recognise and prioritise systematic responses to NGO warfare allowed this danger to fester and expand. The malign political influence of groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and their numerous allies increased continuously. But the IDF and various ministries paid little attention to their propaganda reports, parroted in headline articles by prominent journalists around the world, which labelled every response to mass terror as a “war crime”.

In 2009, the Goldstone report (the UN “Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”) accused Israel of “possible crimes against humanity”, with recommendations for possible action by the newly created International Criminal Court. Amnesty International wrote the list of alleged war crimes, and the majority of the more than 500 citations of “evidence” in the final document were sourced to 50 anti-Israel NGOs. Months later, after Judge Richard Goldstone met with critics (including myself), he acknowledged that his document was deeply biased and inaccurate, but the damage was done.

The threat of international legal action against soldiers got the attention of the IDF, government lawyers and other officials, but the responses were ad hoc. The counter-strategy consisted of claims that the IDF was “the world’s most moral army”, that Israel investigated all allegations of violations, as well as numerous learned legal briefs arguing that the ICC and other international frameworks lacked jurisdiction.

This approach had little to no impact on the lawfare and propaganda campaigns that singled out Israel for demonisation. On the contrary, the advocacy NGOs and their allies in the media, UN, and university campuses (particularly under the headings of human rights and international law programmes) amplified the highly disproportionate attacks, and their influence increased with every round of the Gaza conflict.

Why privileged Israelophobes can’t handle Azealia Banks

We live in an age of grotesque double standards and cloying fakery from celebs. The overwhelming majority seem to think that their job is not to entertain us, but to strike fashionable poses and shove hypocrisies down our throats.

And then there’s Azealia Banks. She is, as the kids say, a real one.

The 34-year-old rapper from Harlem has been controversial for quite some time, sounding off on social media on a variety of topics. But last week she outdid herself by bluntly standing up for Israel at a time when pretty much all of the luvvie class has gone the other way.

‘I’m a Zionist’, she posted last Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, this unleashed a torrent of largely hostile commentary. Many young, privileged Westerners now unthinkingly loathe Israel. For them, a black rapper’s refusal to toe the ‘progressive’ line just doesn’t make sense.

It’s been particularly difficult for woke, finger-snapping white girls. They’re normally only too eager to shout ‘yaaas queen!’ when a black woman speaks. But on this occasion, they’re struggling, as Banks has not stuck to the script.

It should be said that, at points, Banks’s Israel commentary has veered off into dodgier, identitarian territory. ‘BITCH DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FUCKING BLACK CHILDREN HAVE BEEN MURDERED AT THE HANDS OF ARABS?’, she tweeted last week. Then there was this: ‘I do not support the expansion of genocide of any more peoples of the world at the hands of Arab Muslims.’ Banks, it seems, was referring to the the centuries-long Arab slave trade, which involved the enslavement of millions of Africans right up until the 20th century.

No wonder Banks got progressives’ knickers in a twist. We know that blaming anyone other than the bad white / Jewish man for slavery and genocide is enough to trigger a mass-casualty event at Columbia University.

We live in an age where female celebrity takes mainly two forms: Meghan Markle’s grandiose self-delusion and manufactured virtue, or hectoring harpies with pronouns in their bios. But here comes Banks to shred her opponents openly, and with the most inventive use of swear words I have ever heard. And I grew up in Brooklyn!

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01/28 Links Pt2: The Holocaust Cannot Be Hijacked to Describe Other Conflicts; The religious mania of Owen Jones; What the Irish President Should Have Said about His Country and the Shoah

From Ian:

Elisha Wiesel: Will We Continue Giving Moral Credibility to Voices Who Say Israel Is the Villain for Refusing to Die?

Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago Monday. The world told itself they were doing all they could - even as the railroad tracks to Auschwitz were not bombed; as the St. Louis ship, full of Jewish refugees, was turned back from Florida to Europe; as Britain froze European Jewish immigration to the British Mandate for Palestine, preventing the escape of hundreds of thousands who could have been saved.

It is hard to look evil in the face. To see the jihadists in Gaza fire rifles in the air as 90 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for three Israeli women. One of the terrorists set to be released by Israel is Abu Warda, who was responsible for killing 45 civilians in the 1996 bus bombings in Jerusalem. Does he occupy the same moral universe as these women?

It is easier to believe that this militant mob wants their own state than to hear, really hear, what they shout: that their mission is the eradication of Israel. Americans must not forgive Hamas. We must confront evil when and where we see it.

Will we continue explaining away the images of non-uniformed Palestinian civilians celebrating - and actively aiding Hamas - in the Oct. 7 attacks? Will we continue confusing the concepts of perpetrator and victim? Will we continue giving moral credibility to voices who say that the tiny nation of Israel is the villain for refusing to die?

Seth Mandel: Food for Thought for the Anti-Zionists

Perhaps one reason this type of vandalism has so few defenders even among progressives is because they like to claim that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism—and the accusations of food appropriation demolish that ridiculous fiction like almost no other argument.

Israel is the name of a geographic location; if you are upset about Israelis eating or making a particular kind of food it is because you actually object to Jews eating or making that food. The fact that a person in one region of the world would be eating the same food as his neighbor across the street is unremarkable. But when one of those two people is a Jew, it becomes fodder for the fever swamps.

You will not find, for example, vandalism by Syrian activists against Palestinian-identified shops for making a version of a dish in, say, Nablus even though the dish predates Palestinian Arab nationalism. Which is why my Syrian Jewish friends, as they cook their centuries-old family recipes, don’t whine about Palestinians also cooking a similar Syrian dish while putting a slightly modern twist on it and calling it Palestinian. You’d have to be insane to do something like that.

Easily my favorite such controversy, however, is the recurring one over couscous. Pro-Palestinian activists get particularly upset over seeing dishes labeled “Israeli couscous.” Columbia’s anti-Zionist professor Joseph Massad claims he once stomped out of a New York restaurant after seeing it on the menu.

A more recent example comes from Yale. Last year, students posted pictures from the dining hall purportedly showing that Israeli couscous suddenly had the “Israeli” part removed. Things had gotten so tense on campus that the school, it turned out, had decided to remove regional or cultural labels from the dishes they served. But then “Israeli couscous” reappeared. Yale explained to JTA: “In this case, Israeli Couscous is indeed an actual ingredient and is explicitly listed on the ingredient list. Considering it is the main ingredient, it is appropriate to remain in the title, and we will correct this oversight.”

The reason for this is that Israeli couscous isn’t couscous at all, and Israelis never tried to pass it off as such. It’s a relic of Israel’s early days when food manufacturers were pushed to make a grain product that was cheaper than rice. It looked like couscous but wasn’t. Israelis didn’t call it couscous. They called couscous, couscous. They didn’t call it Israeli couscous either. It acquired that name later to differentiate it in stores from couscous.

Which is to say: when something is labeled “Israeli couscous” it is not to “steal” couscous but to announce that it isn’t couscous.

This is indicative of the larger point: There are no winners in the food wars, because merely participating in this stuff makes you sound like a lunatic. Objections to Israeli food are thus helpful only because they identify people who have way bigger problems than ill-formed opinions on geopolitics.

Yisrael Medad: ‘Shofar’s call to ‘rehabilitate’ Zionism

Shofar, an interdisciplinary journal of Jewish studies whose editors are committed “to publishing a diversity of beliefs, ideas and opinions,” is a project of cooperation with Purdue University. The academic institution was beset, as were many campuses, last year with pro-Palestine rallies and demonstrations, and even set up a “Liberation Zone,” although it would seem none for any Israeli hostages. I have no information that those events had a direct influence on the publication of an issue dedicated to anti-Zionism, but it exists.

Shaul Magid of Dartmouth College led that Shofar special issue, which was devoted to “Zionism and Its Jewish Critics.” He claimed that “while some scholars argue that the concept [of Zionism] has biblical origins, most acknowledge that it is a modern Jewish iteration of Western European nationalism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.” Who are these “most” scholars who champion perverse purposeful ignorance? What is their academic weight? Are these the instructors properly suited to lecture university students, Jewish and non-Jewish?

Magid and fellow travelers would have us believe that the many dozens of Torah commandments, hundreds of verses of Tanach, thousands of Midrashic, Talmudic and Second Temple literature pieces, as well as thousands of rabbinic dicta and responsa spanning some 2,500 years of Jewish core religion, culture and ritual revolving around Zion, Jerusalem, the Land of Israel and a Jew’s obligations to the same are to be erased and ignored. Similarly, the constant presence of Jews residing in the Land of Israel—immigrating and traveling to it, and sending charitable dollars to those living there all during the 1,800 years of our Exile, not to mention the Return to Zion during the sixth-century BCE—is to be disregarded.

In a follow-up response, Lior Sternfeld of Penn State University addresses the topic of “Settler Colonialism, From the River to the Sea, and the Israeli Case After October 7.” He intends “to offer a way to unpack some of the volatile concepts often used to analyze the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Nevertheless, he promptly engages in a volatile position and, as if objectively, observes that “well-meaning scholars and activists have sought to rehabilitate the concept of Zionism.”

And what is the need for that? Sternfeld knows and suggests that “Zionism, at least in its twenty-first-century form, negates the very existence of Palestinian identity and Palestinian nationalism. As such, the peaceful existence of the two peoples, enjoying freedom, independence, and self-determination, could never be achieved.” All the fault of the Jews. Sorry, the Zionists. For what is Zionism if not, according to Sternfeld, “settler-colonialism”?

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07/09 Links Pt1: Let Hamas Lose Already; Rescued Israeli hostage suing US employer of Hamas operative that held him; UN refers Albanese probe to colleagues who defended her

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Let Hamas Lose Already

“The enemy gets a vote” is a common expression that is invoked when your plans go awry. But what happens when events go according to plan?

There have been plenty of rocky roads during Israel’s nine-month military campaign in Gaza, but one of the underlying concepts guiding the IDF brass and the country’s political leadership hasn’t changed: keeping total victory as the goal puts pressure on Hamas.

This principle has been so maligned lately—even President Biden dismissed it as “an unidentified notion of total victory” that “will only bog down Israel in Gaza”—that it’s easy to forget it was the consensus among Western allies after October 7. Yet it’s not Israel that has just received a rude reminder of the limits of long-term planning—it’s Hamas.

“Several officials in the Middle East and the U.S. believe the level of devastation in the Gaza Strip caused by a nine-month Israeli offensive likely has helped push Hamas to soften its demands for a cease-fire agreement,” reports the Associated Press. To which the response might be: Well… yeah. Losing a war can do wonders in adjusting your refusal to compromise.

The AP isn’t just going on intuition. It has seen internal messages from senior Hamas officials describing “the heavy losses Hamas has suffered on the battlefield and the dire conditions in the war-ravaged territory.” According to the AP, “a person familiar with Western intelligence…said the group’s leadership understands its forces have suffered heavy losses and that has helped Hamas move closer to a cease-fire deal.”

This story coincides with Hamas leaders deciding to drop their demand that any ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel contain an up-front IDF concession it will not restart hostilities—thus meaning the war would be, for all intents and purposes, over. That would have effectively guaranteed Hamas’s survival. Instead, reports the Times of Israel, Hamas has expressed its “desire for ‘written guarantees’ from mediators that Israel will continue to negotiate a permanent ceasefire deal once the first phase of a ceasefire goes into effect.”

As I wrote in November, relentless Israeli pressure was key to the first ceasefire-for-hostages agreement. Hamas’s first true openness came when it wanted to forestall an Israeli ground invasion. Then it became pliable once again when the IDF was on the verge of taking Shifa hospital, forcing Hamas fighters to flee and leaving Israel in position to reveal the military use of the hospital by Hamas. That pattern continued until a deal was in place.

In contrast, the times any deal looked least likely were during moments of paralysis—US threats to withhold weapons from the IDF, Israeli domestic political instability, perceived Israeli diplomatic isolation. Pressure works. Unfortunately the Biden administration went from pressuring Hamas to pressuring Israel, and the hostages languished in Gaza dungeons or camps—except for the few rescued by the IDF.

Rescued Israeli hostage suing US nonprofit linked to Hamas operative who held him

A rescued Israeli hostage is filing a lawsuit Tuesday against a U.S. nonprofit with financial ties to the Hamas operative who reportedly kept him prisoner.

Twenty-two-year-old Almog Meir Jan was held captive by Hamas for nearly 250 days following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack and was found in the home of Abdallah Aljamal, a contributor to the website The Palestine Chronicle who also worked as a spokesman for the Hamas-run labor ministry in Gaza. Aljamal was killed during the IDF's rescue mission.

The Palestine Chronicle is run by the tax-exempt group, the People Media Project.

Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were also held captive at his family’s home in Nuseirat, Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Forces.

"Under the leadership of Defendants [editor-in-chief] Ramzy Baroud and [People Media Project governor] John Harvey, Defendant Palestine Chronicle employed Hamas Operative Aljamal and offered him its U.S. platform to write and disseminate Hamas propaganda, ultimately subsidized, through its status as a tax-exempt charitable organization, by U.S. taxpayers," the court filing reads. "Following the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, while Hamas Operative Aljamal imprisoned Plaintiff, Defendants permitted Hamas Operative Aljamal to use their platform to whitewash Hamas’s crimes and attract international support for its terrorist cause."

"By providing this platform to Hamas Operative Aljamal and compensating Hamas Operative Aljamal for his propaganda, Defendants aided, abetted, and materially supported both Hamas Operative Aljamal and Hamas itself in their acts of terrorism, including kidnapping and holding Plaintiff hostage for 246 days, in violation of international law," the suit continued.

The lawsuit, which will be filed Tuesday in Washington state's western district court, goes on to claim that the defendants "knowingly and willfully procured and disseminated Hamas propaganda to the Palestine Chronicle’s readers in the United States," citing reports alleging "at least six Palestine Chronicle writers and contributors have been affiliated with Iranian propaganda outlets."

It also links Baroud with Aljamal by citing an opinion piece they co-authored in 2019 for Al Jazeera.

Eli Lake: Iran’s New ‘Reformist’ President Is Anything But

If you saw the headlines in the Western press about Iran’s election over the weekend, you might have thought it had yielded a miracle: the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is a “reformer.”

Spoiler alert. He is not. But it’s worth examining why so many media outlets, including The New York Times and NPR, have leapt at the chance to declare Pezeshkian a liberal.

On the campaign trail, Pezeshkian was critical of the morality police who enforce the regime’s policy requiring all women to cover their hair. The 69-year-old heart surgeon, who has served as health minister in Iran’s parliament, also expressed a desire to revive the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran, America, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

But these campaign promises mean nothing when you consider Iran’s president has little if any power inside the Islamic Republic. That belongs to the country’s ailing Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his Revolutionary Guard Corps, which directs proxy wars in the Middle East and has acquired banks, real estate, and businesses inside its own nation.

“He is a garden-variety regime guy,” Mariam Memarsadeghi, the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum for Iran’s Future and a longtime Iranian democratic activist, told The Free Press. “There is nothing about his past to suggest that he is interested in anything other than complete subservience to the Supreme Leader.”

Pezeshkian has spent most of his life in politics as a back bencher inside Iran’s parliament. In 1994, he lost his wife and son in a deadly car crash. He did not remarry and raised his daughters as a single dad, a rarity inside Iran.

One sign of Pezeshkian’s subservience is how he describes his own political ideology. He says he is a “reformist principlist,” which refers to the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution that give the Supreme Leader and a guardian council power to overturn initiatives from the legislature if they do not cohere with Islamic law.

In short, Pezeshkian has pledged loyalty to a Supreme Leader who has cracked down against demonstrators and consolidated power among Iran’s unelected Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“Pezeshkian is a safe bet for Khamenei,” Alireza Nader, a former Iran analyst with the RAND Corporation, a private think tank that works closely with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, told The Free Press. “He’s totally loyal to him and the Revolutionary Guards. He’s stated that he has no separate agenda from Khamenei and will pursue the regime’s policies, for example, fully supporting Hezbollah.”

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05/20 Links Pt1: Biden doomed the Palestinians to another generation of war; ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant; Palestinians Threaten to Attack US Troops

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Biden doomed the Palestinians to another generation of war

Biden and the foreign-policy establishment have had ample opportunities in the last 30 years to try and fail to create a Palestinian state, as well as to see what happens when one allows Islamists to survive rather than to seek their complete defeat. That is not true of Chamberlain, who had not tried and failed at appeasing a totalitarian and antisemitic power before he futilely attempted to bring “peace in our time” to Europe by handing Czechoslovakia over to Hitler.

But Biden and the so-called foreign policy “wise men” drew all the wrong conclusions from their experiences.

They failed to understand that Israel’s goal in Gaza was not an Iraq-style counter-insurgency in which, as Fareed Zakaria wrote recently in The Washington Post, the IDF should have sought to “win the hearts and minds” of Gazans who had cheered the crimes of Oct. 7. Nor were they right when, as The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof claimed, that Israel couldn’t and shouldn’t defeat Hamas or finish them off in Rafah. Both lacked the self-awareness to realize that their advice had been a self-fulfilling prophecy that might ensure Hamas’s survival even when that didn’t have to be so.

If Biden and these foreign-policy pundits had a scrap of honesty, they would have admitted that their willingness to ignore the truth about the Palestinians’ refusal to give up their eliminationist goals was proven over and over in the 1990s by the failure of the Oslo Accords to bring peace. If they had drawn appropriate conclusions from the last three decades of peace processing in which the obstacle has always been Palestinian rejectionism—a lesson that the Trump administration had absorbed and that guided their successful efforts to craft the Abraham 2020 Accords—they might have charted a different course post-Oct. 7. At the very least, it wouldn’t have brought worse results than hamstringing Israel with Hamas now clearly at the apex of Palestinian politics and with the Palestinians believing that the destruction of Gaza notwithstanding, the terrorists have gotten international opinion behind them.

Instead, Biden and the leftist voters whose support he seeks have vindicated Hamas’s belief that no matter what Israel did in response, the terror group—and its cause of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population—would benefit from the attacks. Indeed, as far as they were concerned, the more Palestinians who were killed in the war the terrorists started, the better. They were counting on international pressure and sympathy for their cause would outweigh any horror felt about the orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction their “soldiers” and other Palestinians who followed in their wake had committed. And that is exactly what has happened.

International Criminal Court seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor on Monday will seek arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for Hamas leaders.

The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant will include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” Karim Khan told CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour.

Charges against Hamas terrorist leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, chief Ismail Haniyeh and Al-Qassam Brigades armed wing head Mohammed Deif will include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention,” he said.

In a statement published following the CNN interview, Khan’s office said he had “reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed since Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the northwestern Negev.

However, “the independent judges of the International Criminal Court are the sole arbiters as to whether the necessary standard for the issuance of warrants of arrest has been met,” the statement noted.

A panel of three justices from the ICC’s Pre-Trial Division will now consider Khan’s application for the arrest warrants.

If the court in The Hague greenlights the warrants, it would constitute an “unprecedented antisemitic hate crime,” Netanyahu warned last month after reports surfaced of Khan’s intentions.

“The possibility that they will issue arrest warrants for war crimes against IDF commanders and government leaders is a scandal of historical magnitude,” stated the premier.

“Eighty years after the Holocaust, the international bodies established with the goal of preventing another Holocaust are considering denying the Jewish state its right to defend itself,” he continued.

Netanyahu noted that this marks the first time that a democratic country committed to international law is defending itself from accusations of war crimes while at the same time facing existential threats.

Ebrahim Raisi’s Iran was one of brutal repression

Given his reputation for lethal repression, Raisi’s election as president in 2021, succeeding the more moderate Hassan Rouhani, might seem surprising. But then this was an election in which the Iranian people played only a walk-on role. Iran’s theocrats, through the Guardian Council, effectively decided who was able to stand for president, weeding out any candidates who didn’t subscribe to their hardline Islamist position. As one of his nominal rivals put it, the regime had aligned ‘sun, moon and the heavens to make one particular person the president’. Little wonder the majority of Iranians didn’t bother to vote at all, with turnout reaching a record low of just 49 per cent. Raisi wasn’t so much elected as appointed president by the powers-that-be.

In power, Raisi was everything his line managers could have wished. As Iran strengthened its alliances with Moscow and Beijing, Raisi combined anti-American posturing with anti-Semitic, anti-Israel bile. In 2022, he suggested that more research needs to be undertaken to prove that the Holocaust really happened, called Israel a ‘false regime’ and declared that ‘the only solution is a Palestinian state from the river to the sea’. Needless to say, within 24 hours of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year, Raisi praised the terrorists for mounting ‘a legitimate defence of the Palestinian nation’. Which is one way to describe the slaughter and rape of hundreds of civilians.

Above all, President Raisi indulged in large-scale repression, eagerly subjecting Iranians to the ever harsher dictates of an Islamist regime. In the summer of 2022, he ordered the authorities to enforce the ‘chastity and hijab’ law. He described the growing numbers of Iranian women who weren’t wearing a veil in public as the ‘corruption’ of ‘Islamic society’. A few months later, Raisi’s crackdown on hijab-less women led to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She was arrested and detained by the morality police for not wearing the veil. Three days later, she died in a hospital in Tehran.

News of Amini’s death prompted outrage across Iran. For weeks and months, young women and men from across the country gathered in the streets to burn hijabs and express their hatred of the ayatollahs. Raisi’s response was entirely in keeping with his record in every public office he had held. He cracked down hard. Hundreds were murdered by security forces. Many more were arrested, tortured and some were executed. All because they wanted more freedom. To think, speak and dress as they – and not the ayatollahs – saw fit.

Raisi was a vicious Islamist apparatchik, one all too willing to repress and murder his own people. Yet what was striking about his presidency is how little outrage it generated among Western progressive circles. They listened to his anti-Semitic spiels. They saw what he was willing to do to his own people, the lengths he was willing to go to force them to adhere to his regime’s intolerant demands. They saw those brave Iranian women and men try to stand up to the de facto Islamist dictatorship after Amini’s death in 2022. Yet aside from a few token gestures, no real solidarity was forthcoming. It’s almost as if brutal repression doesn’t count for as much, if it’s being conducted by one of the West’s implacable enemies.

As we absorb the news of the death of Ebrahim Raisi, we should remember his many victims – and the brave Iranian rebels who continue to risk it all in pursuit of a freer future.

Seth Frantzman: Raisi set the Middle East aflame but his death will not put out the fire

Iran’s foreign policy manoeuvres during the Raisi era enabled it to knit together closer ties with Russia and China, as well as to get China to broker reconciliation with Saudi Arabia. Raisi also attempted outreach to Egypt this past year.

All this was key to Raisi’s goal of isolating Israel. He wanted to empower Iranian proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as proxies in Iraq and Syria. These groups could be mobilised at a moment’s notice to attack Israel, the US or other countries. Raisi understood that many Arab states were tired of wars and extremism, having faced off against ISIS and been divided during the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Iran preyed on this preference for calm by Arab states.

Raisi and his regime moved systematically to increase Iranian ties with Arab states, while also encouraging the region to become closer to Russia and China. Meanwhile behind the scenes, groups like Hamas were plotting the October 7 attack.

The architecture he put in place will remain now he has gone. Close ties between China, Iran and Russia will continue. Drone exports and Iranian drone and missile threats will increase. Iran’s backing of Hamas has already led to a massive war and Iran’s goal is to keep that war going and keep its proxies attacking Israel. The longer the war drags on, the more Israel will be stuck fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, while Iran can increase its influence in the Gulf, Egypt and other places.

With Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian gone, Iran will fall back on the IRGC which controls much of the country behind the scenes. It is the IRGC that moves drones and weapons to groups like Hezbollah. The fires lit by Raisi that are consuming the region will continue to burn even though he has left the stage.

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04/09 Links Pt2: Surprised at anti-Israel hatred?; UNRWA is the opposite of the two state solution; The Psychological Obsession with Netanyahu

From Ian:

Surprised at anti-Israel hatred?

I cannot ignore the similarity between the smear campaign reaching new heights in the last four years against Israel abroad compared with the demonization of the Kohelet Policy Forum here in the past and still ongoing today. On a 16-hour break I had from fighting in Gaza, I got messages from people threatening to “settle accounts after the war” and accusing me of having the blood of the Oct. 7 victims on my hands. The people writing such things have not read a single Kohelet policy paper. One of the “Brothers in Arms” members attempting to scare voters in municipal elections about Kohelet influence repeated the lie about the “Kohelet civics textbook,” and another member affirmed in a TV interview that he does not regret their invasion and blockage of our offices. The fact that many of my Kohelet colleagues and I have been called up to serve in the war has not moved such haters to so much as wait for our return home.

Both the State of Israel and Kohelet Forum could have done more to fight for an image that aligns with reality. In both cases, however, a well-organized and well-funded smear campaign has succeeded in pushing decent people to take too firm a stance and avoid dialogue. Just this week, a lecture by a well-known, leftist Jewish-American professor who wanted to discuss “the two-state solution” was canceled in California, and a talk by center-left former Knesset member Tzipi Livni was transferred to Zoom for fear of disturbances. Even having a dialogue with someone defined as a “Zionist” is off the table.

And here?

In the past year, an established high school canceled a lecture by a law professor after discovering that he participated in a doctoral program at Kohelet Forum around eight years ago.

Perhaps we should be a little less impervious to other opinions and stop attributing ill intentions to the other side before we complain about the treatment Israel is getting on the world stage.

Horror and Humiliation in Gaza

Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”

All too well have the Western-educated, multilingual leaders of Hamas gauged the spiritual state of the West, and invented an atrocious way of conducting war in order to psychically paralyze it. Hamas cannot win a war against Israel, but it has sufficient power to force Israel to fight a war that cost many civilian lives. Whether the civilian death toll is the 32,000 that Hamas claims or the 18,000 estimated by pro-Israeli analysts is of minor importance.

During the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah 20 years ago, I wrote that the battle for that city brought into focus the vulnerabilities of both the Americans and the Sunni resistance. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West, which cannot endure without faith in a loving Heavenly Father. For the Islamic world, meanwhile, humiliation—the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.

The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.

This toxic combination of horror and humiliation poisons world opinion against Israel. There is no near-term remedy. Horror elicits irrational responses. Never mind that Hamas forced an urban war upon Israel through unspeakable acts of brutality against Israeli civilians, and that it embeds terrorists in hospitals, schools, and other civilian installations to maximize casualties among its own civilians. Never mind that Israel’s response has occasioned fewer civilian casualties in urban combat than any other fighting force on record. As West Point urban warfare expert John Spencer wrote in Newsweek:
The UN, EU, and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world’s most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists.

Russia and China denounce Israel simply because it is an ally of the United States, and many former colonies of the West, prominently South Africa, shoehorn the Gaza war into their own traumatic narrative of national liberation. That’s to be expected.

What’s new and dangerous is the extent to which the Hamas theater of horror has demoralized the remnants of the Christian world. Support for Israel in the United States has dropped to 36% in March from 50% in November, according to the Gallup Poll.

The Prophet of October 7?

In America and Western Europe, the progressive left’s response to the October 7 attacks has largely been one of hostility toward Israel. There are many reasons why this is so, but among them is the malign and outsized influence in intellectual circles of Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique 1925, Fanon wrote extensively on race and the evils of colonialism, and did much to shape how both topics are thought about in universities. Fanon spent the last years of his life collaborating with the terrorists who liberated Algeria from French rule. He died in 1961, just before his comrades drove the Jews out of the country.

Reviewing a new biography of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz, Leon Hadar writes:
The fighting in Algeria radicalized Fanon. His writing about the colony and the meaning and utility of political violence was militant. “At the individual level,” he wrote, “violence is cleansing. It rids the colonized of his inferiority complex, of his passive and despairing attitude.” In other words, killing colonizers was not only tactically expedient, it was also therapeutic for the colonized. “The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence,” he wrote. What the colonized needed was not concessions granted by the master but “quite literally the death of his master.” . . . And readers of Fanon are left in no doubt that he believed attacks on civilians to be the “logical consequence” of colonial oppression.

Nor did Fanon express much interest in limiting what forms redemptive violence takes. Hadar observes that in a different work he posed the question: “Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?”

Shatz, Hadar notes, is an editor for the virulently anti-Israel London Review of Books, and is “an anti-Zionist polemicist who believes that Israel is ‘the world’s last settler-colonial state.’” And that may not be unrelated to Shatz’s “sympathetic” treatment of his subject:
Shatz has told a Ha’aretz journalist that he doesn’t know if Fanon would have supported the October 7 massacre. The point is moot, but since Fanon never met a murderous militant he didn’t like, it’s plausible that Shatz is simply being coy in his judgment. He does, after all, remark that Hamas’s terror operation on October 7 was a “classic example of Fanonian struggle.”

There can be little doubt that Fanon’s writing influenced and radicalized Palestinian nationalism. Shatz reminds us that the first Arabic translations of Fanon’s work, which appeared in Beirut’s bookshops in 1963, helped to shape the emerging Palestinian nationalist movement.

Daniel Greenfield: Swastikas Are Progressive Now

Flying a progressive swastika is the climax of making antisemitism into “something honorable”.

The path to the progressive swastika and the “honorable antisemitism” had plenty of stops that all involved mainstreaming antisemitism while swearing up and down that it was only anti-Zionism. The media mainstreamed hate sites like Mondoweiss where editors and contributors admitted that, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but I can understand why some are” and “Liberals like to deceive themselves about Jewish power.”

The DSA, which has led the campaign for Hamas, had invited a representative of Melenchon’s Communist allied party from France, who claimed that when a “man of the left” is “called an anti-Semite, it means he’s not far from power.” That same party became the only one to refuse to condemn Oct 7 and political figures from the party accused Israel of killing its own children.

In 2014, academia and the media were justifying antisemitism. By 2024, they’re rehabilitating the swastika as a progressive symbol. And this change is about more than the Jews.

Jews tend to be the canaries in the coal mine. Fanatics and totalitarian movements may start with the Jews, but they never end there. The Jews are just a convenient inciting incident.

Both the Nazis and Communists understood that the persecution of Jews would legitimize the worse crimes they intended to commit. When the Nazis began rounding up and killing Jews with no protest, it became easier to justify the killing of the German disabled and mentally ill, and later the larger eugenics program that would have wiped out the Slavs and many other peoples. And when the Communists began shutting down synagogues and executing rabbis, it became easier to justify the takeover of the church and to build a cult of personality around Stalin.

While there are single-issue antisemites out there, major movements that start waving fascist or progressive swastikas don’t intend to limit their plans to just killing Jews. The Jews are a symbol of the power they want, as Melenchon put it, and the justification for it, as Islamists contend.

Hamas, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, originally financed by the Nazis, claims that it just wants to destroy Israel. But other arms of the Brotherhood tried to seize control of the entire Middle East during the Arab Spring, have been integrated into Al Qaeda, and operate in America and Europe to aid Islamic terrorists around the world. When they brandish the swastika, it’s not cautionary, it’s aspirational. And the same is true of their leftist allies.

By defining the Jews as the new Nazis, leftist movements like the DSA justify the mass murder of the Jews, and the violent tactics they use to seize power to fight the Jews. But the DSA’s vision of totalitarian socialism, National Socialism one might say, will not end with the Jews.

The swastika, whether used as a banner or a symbol of reversal, mainstreams antisemitism, not just to call for the murder of Jews, but for the killing of all those who stand in their way.

The progressive swastika is a symbol of death for Jews and for everyone else.

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03/26 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Israel alone Weep for America; Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Israel alone Weep for America

America is punishing Israel for a catastrophe that the Biden administration itself facilitated. The atrocities of October 7 that started the war took place because Hamas’s patron, Iran, correctly perceived that America would ultimately abandon Israel rather than itself get stuck in. If the Biden administration hadn’t shown such weakness in defending the interests of the free world from Afghanistan to Yemen and Iraq and Ukraine, Hamas would not have been unleashed on October 7.

After the war started, despite the two aircraft carriers the US dispatched to the region, the Biden administration responded to continued attacks by Iranian proxies — even against its own interests — with a mere limp wrist. It has done nothing to deter Iran’s proxy army Hezbollah from bombarding northern Israel from Lebanon with hundreds of rockets and anti-tank missiles.

It could have stopped the war in its tracks by telling Hamas’s protector Qatar that, unless it instructed Hamas to release the hostages and surrender, the US would end their profitable relationship and treat Qatar instead as a global pariah. Instead, the US is not only feeding Israel to its mortal enemies; by failing to use its muscle to end this war, it is also facilitating Hamas’s war crimes against the civilians of Gaza by using snuff movies of their distress to incite hysterical hatred of Israel in the west.

Biden and Cameron fail to acknowledge that Israel is fighting in this manner because it has no choice. With Hamas almost entirely underground, Israel cannot get at it in any other way. If it doesn’t defeat Hamas, Israel will continue to face genocidal attack. Only by defeating Hamas and killing or capturing its Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, does Israel have any chance of getting any of the hostages back. Only by defeating Hamas does Israel have any chance of avoiding an infinitely more terrible all-out war with Hezbollah.

This is the rupture with America that some of us have seen coming for a very long time. But the US and UK don’t realise what they have now done. This isn’t just about Israel. It’s also about them.

The October 7 pogrom was a clear inflection point for the west. Would it support Israel in the battle for civilisation against barbarism? Now we have the answer.

But there’s a deeper question. The UK is busily destroying itself by making a bonfire of its historic culture and values. Its public administration has all but collapsed, its indigenous people are dying out and it has lost control of its borders.

In the US vicious culture wars are raging, there are unbridgeable political and social divisions, its elites have torn up its historic global mission of exceptionalism — and it has also lost control of its border.

Do the US and UK actually want to survive, or are they now in a death spiral?

Throughout centuries of persecution, the Jewish people have survived against impossible odds — while every civilisation that has tried to destroy them has disappeared. Whatever horrors lie ahead, Israel will survive. The same certainty cannot apply to Britain and America. Today has demonstrated that they don’t even know how to do so.

Richard Goldberg: Bring them home . . . or not — Biden just sold out Israeli hostages at the United Nations

Against the backdrop of a hostage negotiation in which Hamas remains maximalist in demands and the arrival of Israel’s defense minister in Washington to meet with senior White House officials, the United States needed to veto any Security Council resolution that could further embolden the terrorist group.

Biden chose a different path: abstaining on a resolution that decoupled a demand for a cease-fire from a demand for the release of hostages, thus severely undercutting Israel at the hostage-negotiating table.

The resolution had other severe flaws that demanded a US veto.

It made no mention of Oct. 7 or Hamas, let alone note Hamas is a terrorist organization, as if the world woke up one day in a vacuum outraged to find Israel at war in Gaza and Palestinian civilians in distress.

Why Israel is at war, who Israel is targeting and who is to blame for civilian suffering are unimportant questions for a resolution that simply says Israel must lay down its arms and hope a terrorist group that savaged 1,200 people and took 250 hostages will care what the Security Council demands.

These outrageous omissions, however, were no longer automatic triggers for a US veto.

During his recent State of the Union address, the president pledged to the families of Hamas-held hostages, which include American citizens, that “we will not rest until we bring their loved ones home.”

Apparently that vow did not include vetoing resolutions that disconnect demands for hostage releases from any potential cease-fire — reducing the odds of bringing them home.

The State Department claimed Monday the resolution reflected the administration’s “principled position that any ceasefire text must be paired with text on the release of the hostages.”

But that explanation itself reflects how far Biden policy has shifted. No longer must a cease-fire be conditioned on the release of hostages; the two demands must only appear next to each other for optics.

On a policy level, the two demands now exist independently — meaning America supports a cease-fire even without the release of hostages.

Israeli strength backed by American political support is needed to bring hostages home, defeat Hamas in Gaza and deter Iranian threats throughout the Middle East.

To counter the perception of an Israel crumbling under American pressure, Jerusalem must respond with reaffirmed determination to destroy Hamas on the battlefield.

And members of Congress should reaffirm their support for that objective, including a potential operation in Rafah.

Hamas scored a political victory with Biden’s help.

Israel must now fight that much harder to reverse the damage — with or without Biden’s approval.

John Spencer: Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It?

In its operation at Shifa hospital in Gaza to root out Hamas terrorists, the Israel Defense Forces took unique precautions to protect the innocent. Doctors accompanied the forces to help Palestinian patients if needed. The IDF also brought in food, water and medical supplies for the civilians inside.

I've never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy's civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings. In fact, Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history - above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The international community, and increasingly the U.S., barely acknowledges these measures while repeatedly excoriating the IDF for not doing enough to protect civilians - even as it confronts a ruthless terror organization holding its citizens hostage.

The predominant Western theory of executing wars seeks to shatter an enemy with surprising, overwhelming force and speed. No warnings to the civilian population or time to evacuate cities is given. Yet Israel has abandoned this established playbook in order to prevent civilian harm.

The Hamas-supplied estimate of over 31,000 deaths in Gaza does not acknowledge a single combatant death (nor any deaths due to the misfiring of its own rockets or other friendly fire). The IDF estimates it has killed about 13,000 Hamas operatives, a number I believe credible because I believe the armed forces of a democratic American ally over a terrorist regime. That means 18,000 civilians have died in Gaza, a ratio of 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians - a number that would be historically low for modern urban warfare.

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02/02 Links Pt2: Elliott Abrams: The Two-State Delusion; Seth Mandel: The Lazy Fantasy of a ‘Palestinian Mandela’; Britain’s Jews are being terrorised

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: The Two-State Delusion

Everyone knows what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Arrange the “two-state solution.” That has been a commonplace for decades, going back to the Oslo Accords, all the international conferences, the “Roadmap,” and the efforts by a series of American presidents and their staffs of ardent peace processors.

In the West, the call for a “two-state solution” is mostly a magical incantation these days. Diplomats and politicians want the Gaza war to stop. They want a way out that seems fair and just to voters and makes for good speeches. But they are not even beginning to grapple with the issues that negotiating a “two-state solution” raises, and they are not seriously asking what kind of state “Palestine” would be. Instead they simply imagine a peaceful, well-ordered place called “Palestine” and assure everyone that it is just around the corner. By doing so they avoid asking the most important question: Would not an autocratic, revanchist Palestinian state be a threat to peace?

No matter: The belief in the “two-state solution” is as fervent today as ever. The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it’s the “only solution” and Britain’s defense minister chimed in that “I don’t think we get to a solution unless we have a two-state solution.” Not to be outdone, U.N. Secretary General Guterres said, “The refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, are unacceptable.” The EU’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said recently, “I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.” What if Israel does not agree, and views a Palestinian state as an unacceptable security threat? Borrell’s answer was that “One thing is clear—Israel cannot have the veto right to the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people. Nobody can veto it.”

In the United States, 49 Senate Democrats (out of 51) just joined to support a resolution that, according to Sen. Brian Schatz, is “a message to the world that the only path forward is a two-state solution.” Biden administration officials have been a bit more circumspect in public. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, Secretary of State Blinken told his interviewer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that regional integration “has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called for “a two-state solution with Israel’s security guaranteed.” And President Biden meandered around an important security point: “there are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that … don’t have their own military; a number of states that have limitations, and so I think there’s ways in which this can work.”

The Biden administration, then, joins all enlightened opinion in saying there must be a Palestinian state, but adds that it must not have an army. No other precondition seems to exist for the creation of that state once the Palestinian Authority has been “revamped” or “revitalized” so that it becomes “effective.” And most recently, Blinken has asked his staff for policy options that include formal recognition of a Palestinian state as soon as the war in Gaza ends. This would be a massive change in U.S. policy, which for decades has insisted that a Palestinian state can only emerge from direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But the pressure is growing, it seems, to skip niceties like negotiations and move quickly to implement the “two-state solution.”

There are three things wrong with this picture. First, none of the current proposals even acknowledges, much less overcomes, the obstacles that have always prevented the “two-state solution.” Second, the “effective governance” reforms fall very far short of creating a decent state in which Palestinians can live freely. And most important, any imaginable Palestinian state will be a dangerous threat to Israel.

Joe Biden Hates Israel

A second, almost as atrocious, low point in Blinken’s speech was his reiteration of Biden administration policy that Israel not allow Gazans to leave Gaza. In what war is the population of the war-torn country not allowed to leave? Much like the U.N. has been falsely claiming refugee status for Palestinians for 75 years so that they can continue to be used as political pawns, the United States’ refusal to allow Gazans to leave serves only one purpose: to make it harder for Israel to “de-Nazify” the radicalized Palestinian population, to allow whatever remains of Hamas to survive, and to add fuel to its obsession with a “two- state solution.”

The U.S. wants all areas depopulated because of the war to be repopulated, thereby making it impossible for Israel to repopulate its southern towns/cities. So effectively, a security zone with Gaza would mean a reduction in Israel’s territory.

Blinken also demanded that no action be taken in the North against Hezbollah, effectively turning Northern Israel into a similar security zone, precluding 80,000 Israelis there from returning to their homes.

Lastly, he invoked the atrocious line about a “cycle of violence” and reaffirmed the administration’s demand for a “two- state solution.”

It's not a “cycle of violence” when thousands of animalistic, sub-human, monsters murder, brutally rape, and mutilate thousands of civilians, followed by a war targeting those responsible for the atrocities. And, at this point does anyone seriously believe that a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, in the heart of central Israel, plus territory in Gaza, wouldn’t be a death sentence for Jews?

More recently, Blinken was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. While there, he was interviewed by the New York Times’ resident Israel hater, Thomas Friedman. Incredibly, Blinken seemed to say that the Israelis of today are the terror loving Palestinians of yesterday:
“The profound difference now, I think, is in the mindset of leaders throughout the Arab world and in Muslim countries, and in a way it’s a reversal, it’s a flip, as you know so well better than anyone. When in previous times we came close to resolving the Palestinian question, getting a Palestinian state, I think the view then – Camp David, other places – was that Arab leaders, Palestinian leaders, had not done enough to prepare their own people for this profound change. I think a challenge now, a question now: Is Israeli society prepared to engage on these questions? Is it prepared to have that mindset?”

Did you get that? After thousands of Israelis were murdered, raped, mutilated, and wounded, America’s Secretary of State is blaming Israel for not being as gracious as the Arabs who murdered us for decades before 10/7.

Israel, after decades of giving up territory, not utterly destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, not attacking Iran and its proxies (another demand of the Biden administration), prioritizing Arab civilian life at the cost of IDF soldiers, all while 136 Israelis are still being held hostage and brutalized, is not enough for this administration.

Israelis have the wrong “mindset.”

Some friend to Israel.

Seth Mandel: The Lazy Fantasy of a ‘Palestinian Mandela’

Hamas’s latest negotiating ploy is to ask for Israel to release Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah leader who is serving a handful of life sentences for murder. Barghouti is often compared by the press and his Western admirers to Nelson Mandela, because his admirers have very active imaginations.

Freeing Barghouti is the “break glass in case of emergency” option for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The belief is that he has become both popular enough and moderate enough to lead the Palestinian Authority after Mahmoud Abbas, who is still alive and refuses to hold elections and therefore cannot be replaced by the Palestinian Mandela or the Australian Ghandi or the Ecuadorian Martin Luther King or the Scandinavian Dalai Lama or anyone else.

In the absence of any other changes, therefore, what freeing Barghouti would accomplish is the further destabilization of the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank. Hamas thinks this is a great idea. The Israelis are unconvinced.

Barghouti’s advocates in the West like to tout his support for a two-state solution. But Barghouti’s starting position is at the 1967 lines, from which Israeli-Palestinian negotiations moved on a decade and a half ago, so perhaps his supporters like him because he’d actually undo some of the progress made toward a two-state solution.

The other pro-Barghouti talking point has long been his renunciation of some violence in some places. (This is why calling him “the Palestinian Mandela” is deeply insulting to Nelson Mandela.)

Barghouti was the most prominent signer of a coalitional letter known as the Prisoner’s Document back in 2006. It was a manifesto of sorts for incarcerated Palestinians of various parties and stripes, including Hamas. That manifesto trumpets “[t]he right of the Palestinian people to resist and to uphold the option of resistance of occupation by various means and focusing resistance in territories occupied in 1967 in tandem with political action, negotiations and diplomacy whereby there is broad participation from all sectors in the popular resistance.”

This is the great compromise document. It boils down to: Kill Jews in the West Bank, Gaza, and at the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, but inside “Israel proper” just call general strikes and marches intended to bring the economy to a halt. Because Barghouti is a man of peace who has learned his lesson, apparently.

How could anyone say no?

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01/21 Links: Documenting the Enablers of Hamas War Crimes; Biden Admin, Qatar, Egypt Propose Hostage Deal Where Israel Loses War; Unmasking Gaza's so-called journalists

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Documenting the Enablers of Hamas War Crimes: UN Agencies, Government Aid Programs and NGOs

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: UN agencies, government aid programs and NGOs have consistently and willfully aided and abetted Hamas as it built its vast terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. They diverted aid money to Hamas to fund its terrorist activities, provided propaganda and disinformation support to Hamas in its efforts to tarnish and discredit Israel, and indoctrinated Gazan schoolchildren to hate Jews. Systematic documentation of the roles played by UN and government officials, as well as NGOs operating under the vast framework of international humanitarian aid, in enabling and cooperating with Hamas, both tacitly and actively, is vital to prevent a repetition of this abdication of responsibility and accountability.

Detailed documentation of the brutal Hamas mass slaughter of October 7, 2023, which included rape, torture and other heinous crimes, is essential in preserving the historical record, particularly in an era dominated by social media propaganda and disinformation. Documentation has begun through Israeli frameworks, both governmental and private, and also by journalists, including at The New York Times. In addition, Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation is conducting a project to document the “unspeakable brutality.”

In parallel, there is discussion of a special tribunal under the Israeli court system for trials of the perpetrators, particularly Hamas leaders who surrender or are taken alive. As in the trials of Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the testimonies of survivors will inform future generations in the face of campaigns working to erase and deny the atrocities.

A third layer is also required: the systematic documentation of the complicity of Hamas enablers and allies. This category includes numerous UN agencies and officials operating in Gaza, governmental aid organizations and diplomats, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to promote human rights and humanitarian aid. Evidence of their involvement and behavior – specifically with respect to the large-scale theft (“diversion”) of aid for construction of the massive terror infrastructure beneath Gaza and tens of thousands of lethal rockets – is available in numerous photographs and videos from the IDF. This and other information needs to be consolidated and systematically organized and made available in different forms to the general public.

The compilation of verifiable evidence is also essential in planning for “the day after” the war in Gaza and is independent of whatever political arrangements are eventually implemented. By carefully examining the activities of the organizations operating under international humanitarian aid frameworks, policies can be formulated to prevent a repetition of this behavior.

Many of the agencies and organizations comprising the multibillion-dollar Gaza aid industry have been active since at least June 2007. At that time, Hamas violently overthrew the Palestinian Authority, which had taken control when the Israeli government unilaterally ended its presence in Gaza in 2005. These agencies and organizations allowed Hamas to devote all available resources to building the terror network underground while relying on aid providers to supply the general population with food, water and essential above-ground services. As Hamas official Musa Abu Marzuk boasted in October, “We built the tunnels to protect ourselves from airplanes… The refugees, the UN is responsible for protecting them.”

Throughout the 17 years since the Hamas takeover, numerous reports have been published and videos posted detailing the growth of the terrorist capabilities inside Gaza. The frequent clashes with the IDF exposed additional information on the terror network and command centers located under and inside civilian locations, such as hospitals, mosques, schools and residential buildings. In the course of the operation that began following the October 7 attack, the IDF and journalists have added to this information, posting numerous pictures and videos showing the links between the aid operations and Hamas installations.

Accusing Israel of genocide is a perverse moral inversion

No decent person could be unmoved by the tragic suffering of innocent Palestinians. The ongoing debate about how this war can be prosecuted in a way which minimises that suffering is more than legitimate. It is vital. Yet, the enthusiastic clamour by some to declare it as something which belongs in a different moral category to the many other just wars with horrific humanitarian consequences, represents a moral failure built upon a foundation of hatred and disinformation.

That failure is compounded by the inescapable truth that if there is indeed a genocidal force in this conflict, it must surely be Hamas, whose rape, sexual mutilation and cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians, which it proudly broadcast to the world, is clear evidence of its dehumanisation of Jews. It is the leaders of Hamas who have made it clear that they will repeat their atrocities “again and again” and whose founding charter makes it clear that killing Jews is among its very reasons for existing.

The Biblical Prophet Zecharia declared, “Love truth and peace!” Sadly, truth is often the first casualty of conflict. When facts are presented selectively and truth becomes inverted, peace drifts yet further away.

Next week, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis simply because they were Jews, alongside millions of other victims. It is also a day when we recall more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The misappropriation of the word ‘genocide’ is an affront both to the victims and the survivors of these unspeakable crimes.

Its use in the context of this conflict is the ultimate demonisation of the Jewish State. It is a term deployed not only to eradicate any notion that Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens, but also to tear open the still gaping wound of the Holocaust, knowing that it will inflict more pain than any other accusation. It is a moral inversion, which undermines the memory of the worst crimes in human history.

Israel finds itself caught between the anvil of Jihadism on its border and the hammers of a global hatred whose proponents seem to care more about demonising the world’s only Jewish state and lionising terrorists, than about peace. Those are conditions which have already inspired a widespread view within Israel, that whatever it does, it can never win. If we are to yet make any meaningful contribution towards forging a peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians, the world must ensure that its discourse around the conflict is far more sober and honest. The destructive and manufactured hyperbole, which reaches its nadir with the accusation of genocide, can only harm the cause of peace.

Bret Stephens: In Davos, Israel’s Hostages Get a Hearing

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is largely an opportunity for the powerful to mingle with the even more powerful. For the most part, I’ve spent my time here listening to government leaders — Iran’s foreign minister struck me as an exceptionally talented dissembler — and schmoozing with business leaders, think tankers and officials at Davos’s famous private dinners and after-parties.

But the most moving stories I heard this week came from some of the least powerful people here.

“I open my eyes and feel my throat close,” Rachel Goldberg told me, describing her mornings over the previous 100-plus days. “I say a Jewish prayer and ask, ‘Let today be the day.’ And then I say, ‘Pretend to be human.’ And I put on this costume because, if I’m a ball on the floor, I can’t save him.”

She was speaking — with extraordinary self-composure — of her 23-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. On Oct. 7, he was attending the Nova music festival with a friend when terrorists from Hamas, arriving in paragliders and vans, murdered 364 people there in cold blood. Hersh and nearly 30 others tried to hide at a small roadside bomb shelter. Terrorists attacked it with hand grenades, then an R.P.G., killing nearly everyone inside.

Hersh survived the assault, barely. Goldberg showed me video footage, taken by Hamas, of him being put into the back of a truck and driven off to Gaza. The lower half of his left arm has been blown off, leaving a bloody stump. It’s stomach-churning to watch.

Hamas, Inc.: The Property Empire That Funded Militant Attack on Israel

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