11/11 Links Pt1: US envoy Mike Waltz blasts UNIFIL as 'human shield for terrorists,' announces Lebanon visit; ‘Vile hatemonger’ Francesca Albanese accused of ‘hijacking’ words of Primo Levi to condemn Israel

From Ian:

Netanyahu's 1996 promise to end US aid to Israel fulfilled after 30 years, PMO claims

The Prime Minister's Office said Benjamin Netanyahu has fulfilled his 1996 promise to gradually end US financial support for Israel in a Wednesday post on X/Twitter.

Netanyahu, the PMO claimed, promised at the time to end the financial support, which then totaled $1.2 billion, compared to the current total of nearly $4 billion.

"He did just that," the post reads.

Israel is "strong enough economically to gradually end military support," 30 years after Netanyahu's initial promise, the PMO wrote, adding that this is because "today, Israel has a strong and stable economy."

"Israel and the US are making the important move from aid to partnership," the PMO said, using similar terminology to a Friday statement, in which the PMO said that it views US President Donald Trump's announcement to stop aid to Israel by the end of the year as a shift from military aid to "partnership," as reported by The Jerusalem Post.

"Today, Israel has a strong and stable economy. The move by PM Netanyahu and President Trump from aid to partnership shows the strength and sophistication of our relationship, and its ability to adapt and stand strong over time," the PMO wrote.

"This joint move by Netanyahu and Trump shows the strength of our relationship and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances," the PMO said.

The statement also used similar language to Netanyahu's May interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, in which he called for reducing US financial support to Israel down to zero, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's "affirmation" in Paris earlier this week, citing the US's top diplomat as calling the decision "something the Israelis themselves have offered us."

Rubio says Israel's economy is at a point where Jerusalem no longer needs Washington's financial aid
Rubio recently said that Israel has become sufficiently prosperous to purchase US weapons without relying on financial assistance, the Post reported at the time.

“On the question of financing, I think Israel has clearly graduated beyond that,” Rubio also said.

PMO spokesman Doron Spielman told Fox News that "while the aid has been incredibly important, the prime minister has been working with President Trump to make the correct transition out from aid towards partnership and mutual investment."

Trump claims Netanyahu personally proposed ending US aid to Israel
On November 3, Trump claimed that Netanyahu personally proposed ending the aid during a telephone interview with Fox News' Fox & Friends.

However, the Israeli defense establishment was shocked by Trump's November 3 announcement of his decision to cut off aid, and is unclear on what it implies for immediate budgetary and weapons sales issues, the Post reported on Sunday.

US envoy Mike Waltz blasts UNIFIL as 'human shield for terrorists,' announces Lebanon visit

US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz delivered a blistering attack on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) at the gala evening of the second annual Israel Hayom Summit in New York, announcing plans to visit Lebanon next week to push for fundamental changes to the peacekeeping mission in the country's south.

Waltz described the UN force as a "human shield for terrorists" and made clear that the Trump administration was seeking to overhaul its operations. "I'm going there next week to get rid of this human shield known as UNIFIL and change the peacekeeping mission that has been there for 20 years," Waltz declared. "This mission costs half a billion dollars a year, and instead of promoting peace, it has provided a human shield for terrorists," he said, adding that the goal was to turn the UN into an organization that genuinely advances peace in the region.

Turning to Iran and its network of proxies, Waltz portrayed Tehran's influence across the Middle East as significantly diminished. "The Iranian regime is weaker than it has ever been," he said, pointing to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the blows dealt to Hezbollah and developments in Lebanon as part of a broader erosion of Iranian influence. "The cancer of the Middle East is being eradicated, step by step, by a president who had the courage not to put off the difficult decisions," he said.

Waltz also highlighted growing security cooperation between Israel and Arab countries, describing military coordination between Israel and Gulf states as one of the most significant developments of recent years. "To see Israeli soldiers fighting alongside Arab soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, and to see Arab countries helping defend the State of Israel when Iran launched its attacks, would have been absolutely unthinkable just six years ago," he said.

He pointed to what he described as a significant shift on the international stage as well, noting that 146 countries had condemned Iranian attacks on civilian targets, including ships, hotels, resorts and airports, at the UN.

A substantial portion of Waltz's speech focused on the Abraham Accords and President Donald Trump's Middle East policy.

Waltz recalled that when Trump first unveiled his vision for normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries, many experts and diplomats dismissed it as impossible. "They said there could be no broader peace between Israel and the Arab world until the Palestinian issue was resolved. They called Trump's vision a fantasy. But we proved them wrong," he said.

Waltz, who attended the signing ceremony for the Abraham Accords at the White House in 2020, stressed that predictions that successive wars in the region would bring about the agreements' collapse had also proved unfounded. "First they said the Abraham Accords would never happen. Then they said they would never last. On October 7, they said the war would destroy them. Then they said the war in Gaza would destroy them, and now they're saying the war in Iran will destroy them. So what's the answer? Not only have they survived, they're expanding."

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11/07 Links: From France to America, hatred of Israel is eroding the West; US Jews urge unity, but Israelis must live with the consequences; Britain’s colonial legacy undermines its moral lectures against Israel

From Ian:

The Upside of Aiding Israel

Israel's American critics fundamentally fail to understand their own country's interests. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt met Saudi monarch Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1945, the United States has sought to prevent any other power from dominating or destabilizing the Middle East's energy reserves. This has been a core U.S. interest whether we were exporting oil or needed imports, because stable oil markets are critical for a functional global economy that benefits Americans. For its part, Israel does not want to be dominated by any of its neighbors, so it too opposes aspiring regional hegemons. The two have worked closely together for decades because of this confluence of geopolitical interests, more than anything else.

Washington did this not because of Holocaust guilt or scheming Shylocks, but because of Israel's strength. The strategic partnership only took root after Israel became too powerful to ignore. During the Cold War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger realized they could use Israel as a lever to pry the Soviets out of the Middle East. Nixon prized allies who could handle smaller adversaries on their own, and the Jewish state proved more than capable of doing that. But Israel was socialist and therefore poor, so at first it needed significant amounts of aid for the partnership to achieve its full potential.

The alliance has been helpful ever since. Without Israel's strike on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in 1981, the United States might have faced a nuclear Iraq 10 years later. The 2007 strike in Syria prevented the nation's civil war from turning into a nuclear nightmare. Israelis and Americans have fought all kinds of Islamist terrorism side by side.

Some Americans on both sides of the aisle want to blame Israel for the floundering campaign against Iran. But as Trump made clear on Wednesday, his concern about the "death to America" crowd acquiring nuclear weapons has to do with preventing an attack on Washington, not Tel Aviv. Israelis rightly fear a nuclear Iran too, which is why the IDF was a capable partner during the fighting.

Ironically, Israel is exactly the kind of ally the America First crowd claims to want. It has the same enemies as the United States, sustains a military that complements American power, and tries to take care of as much of its own affairs as possible without involving U.S. forces. Many Americans who are not sympathetic to Trump’s views also want to reduce our involvement in the Middle East, which is not feasible without relying more heavily on the Jewish state.

Israel is important for other American interests too. The competition with China for global technological leadership is fierce, and Israel is a world leader in a variety of fields, including cybersecurity and biotechnology. When U.S. policymakers gather allies and partners to stay ahead of America's enemies, the Israelis are at the table.

The relationship has taken different forms while still benefiting both countries. Transitioning from aid to joint partnerships could be appropriate. Earlier this year, Benjamin Netanyahu stated that American aid to Israel should eventually come to an end as Israel grew wealthier.

But there is a difference between helping a friend grow more self-reliant and abruptly cutting off 20 percent of an ally's defense budget in the middle of a war. One choice is prudent. The other? Madness.

From France to America, hatred of Israel is eroding the West

The defamation of Israel and delegitimization of Jews/Zionists is boomeranging on the Western world.

Let’s begin with France, which is being consumed by a toxic brew that blends Marxism, Islamism, Palestinianism, and antisemitism into a potent assault on the state and on French culture and civilization.

The ideological depravities that undergird the deepening chaos have long and deep roots in French society and politics, particularly in France’s perverted policies toward Jews and Israel.

This is the elephant in the room that French President Emmanuel Macron and his predecessors will never admit to: that their ideological elevation of the Palestinian cause into a monster master political storyline has willy-nilly birthed a narrative of nihilism, a swell of anti-civilizational contempt wearing a keffiyeh that goes far beyond Israel.

The moral inversions that excuse October 7 as “resistance” and heroize calls to “globalize the intifada” now excuse the torching and looting of iconic French buildings and boulevards. The diplomatic grandstanding at Israel’s expense (“Palestinian statehood now!”) and the indulgence of Islamo-fascist and leftist mobs who hail Hamas have started aeonian fires of self-immolation and devastation.

My late father, Prof. Henry H. (Zvi Meir) Weinberg, was a scholar of French literature and a keen observer of socio-cultural trends in France. He passed away in Jerusalem almost 20 years ago (after serving as an MK in the Knesset for Natan Sharansky’s immigrant party).

Psychological warfare against the Jewish state
Forty years ago, he wrote a book called The Myth of the Jew in France 1967-1982 in which he dissected the techniques by which highbrow publications such as Le Monde and the upper echelons of French literary society pursued a long campaign of psychological warfare against the Jewish state.

Under the mask of high-minded objectivity and fealty to human rights, they adopted narratives fiercely hostile to Israel, inevitably sliding into the murky waters of anti-Jewish prejudice.

My father chronicled the lifting of taboos on public expression of antisemitism in France – beginning with the writer and philosopher Voltaire and the Encylopaedists of the 18th century; to the French laboratories for “scientific” racism and national socialism of the 19th century; leading to French collaboration with the Nazis under the Vichy regime and subsequent far-right French preoccupation with Holocaust denial.

Other notable markers on the way: president De Gaulle’s notorious “Sermon to the Hebrews” in 1967; French policies of appeasement toward Palestinian terrorism under presidents Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s and 1980s; the vehemence and consistency of French attacks on Israeli policy ever since the First Lebanon War (1982); and the malicious depredation wrought by fashionable antagonism to everything Israeli peddled by French intellectuals.

Since then, the “myth,” or defamation, of the Jew and the Zionist in France and other high-minded democracies has only darkened.

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11/03 Links Pt1: Trump: Netanyahu agreed to end $4 billion in US aid to Israel by end of 2026; RFK Jr. In Defense of Israel; The sacrifice of Haley Stevens and the future of the Democrats

From Ian:

Walter Russell Mead: Why the Middle East Is Hard to Quit

Every president since George W. Bush has come into the White House hoping to limit America's risks and costs in the Middle East. The longing for an exit is understandable. Over the last generation, the burden of America's commitments in the region has grown, yet our need for Middle Eastern oil has diminished.

The shale revolution has turned the U.S. into an energy superpower, producing more oil than Saudi Arabia. The Western Hemisphere produces more oil than the Middle East, with increasing fossil-fuel production from Canada, Venezuela, Guyana, Brazil and Argentina. Given this, people ask why we spend billions, even trillions, to police a region whose oil resources we don't need.

Yet the Middle East still matters. The Western Hemisphere may have pumped 37.4% of the world's oil against 30.9% from the Middle East in 2025, but a price shock still reverberated around the world this year when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. Similar shocks hit the world's farmers as Middle East exports of urea and phosphate fertilizers fell.

If the forecasts of the U.S. Energy Information Administration prove accurate, projected increases in Western Hemisphere production of fossil fuels won't be enough to prevent price shocks from the Middle East. For the foreseeable future, American security and economic interests are going to keep us engaged, no matter how many presidents in both parties dream of walking away.

Instead of fantasizing about an escape from the Middle East, Americans need to think harder about how to safeguard our essential interests at the lowest possible risk and cost. We need to cut the burden of our commitments without sacrificing interests that still matter.

Facilitating smarter security cooperation between Israel and key Arab states will remain a crucial American objective, and Indian and American interests are broadly aligned in the Middle East. Besides securing energy supplies, India cares deeply about the millions of its citizens who work in the Persian Gulf.

Deepening defense and tech ties with Israel and shared concerns about terrorism commit India to promoting cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. And with Pakistan closely aligned with China, India's interests in countering Pakistani influence in the Middle East line up with American concerns about Beijing.

Robert Kennedy Jr.: In Defense of Israel

Media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world's 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. However, the reporters omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.

However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as "Political Islam"), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad.

Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar - the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought - has rejected Islamism as "false Islam" and a "perversion of the Islamic religion" and accused it of "barbaric crimes."

Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women's rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct.

I pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood's antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam's historical affinity for science and learning. During the 8th through 15th centuries as well as during the Ottoman Empire, Muslim leaders promoted a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today.

Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. In 1948, the world's 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations. In Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s faith in the Democratic Party

Hers is a theory of coalition politics: reject the radical left’s ideas, fight them in primaries, keep moderates in control, and if one of their candidates wins the nomination, tolerate him rather than sacrifice a Democratic majority.

That tolerance is where many in the Jewish community are uncomfortable. They fear that tolerating such candidates gives cover to antisemites and to those who accuse Israel of genocide. Their concern is not that most Democrats share those views, but that ideas can move from unacceptable to tolerated to normalized long before they command a majority. A party does not have to embrace a fringe to be changed by it.

She said that being a Democrat is no more difficult for her today than it was two decades ago. Asked about pro-Israel colleagues who say the caucus feels lonely, she acknowledged that it can feel lonely, though she attributed much of it to reactions to the current Israeli government.

I respect Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and I admire her commitment. She is trying to defend her convictions while remaining inside a coalition under strain. It is not easy to be a pro-Israel Democrat right now, and she has not walked away from the party or the fight.

But I left our conversation unable to reconcile the line she draws with the compromise she accepts. She rejects the DSA and El-Sayed’s genocide accusation, and says she would never campaign for him. Yet when I raised Harris and Obama standing with him, her answer was about other priorities. Each position is defensible on its own. Together they expose the tension between the boundary she draws and what her party is increasingly willing to stand beside, or even endorse. Democratic Party arguing over Israel, socialism

That tension is what many American Jews see: a party arguing with itself over Israel and socialism. Representative Josh Gottheimer, also a Democrat, warned in The Free Press this August that the “socialist fringe is trying to hijack the Democratic Party,” and that for “a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test.” Both love the party. They are describing different parties.

Staying in the tent and fighting from inside is a legitimate choice, and it may prove right. But goodwill is not a boundary. A boundary matters only if crossing it has consequences. The real test comes after candidates who hold ideas she rejects win.

Her answer is that moderates will retain control and the fringe will not set the party’s agenda. That is the wager at the heart of her faith in the Democratic Party: that the party can tolerate the fringe without being changed by it.

Many American Jews hope she is right. But they are watching some of the Democratic Party’s most prominent leaders campaign for El-Sayed, who accuses Israel of genocide and appeared with the streamer she calls a “stone-cold antisemite.”

At what point does supporting such a candidate stop being merely a strategy for preserving a Democratic majority and begin to change what the party is willing to accept – and ultimately what it stands for? And for American Jews, how long can it remain their political home?

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The Rules Are Always Different For Israel (example #4,523)

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, tweeted:

Israel allows 2 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (who did not become refugees in 1948) to vote and run for office while it denies that right to 6+ million it has kept under a brutal illegal occupation for nearly 60 years. That is not democracy. It is Apartheid.

Say what? 

Apparently, Albanese believes that distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens when determining who may vote in national elections is, um, apartheid.

This is a peculiar definition of apartheid, since nearly every country on Earth distinguishes between citizens and noncitizens when deciding who gets to vote in national elections. But let's give Albanese the benefit of the doubt and try to figure out exactly what she thinks Israel should do to avoid the dreaded "A" word.

One possibility that would fit her formulation is that she wants Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza and offer Israeli citizenship to all the Palestinians who live there.

I somehow don't think she wants Israel to annex the territories.

Ok, then maybe Albanese believes that Israel should grant noncitizens the right to vote in national elections without requiring them to become citizens.

That is not entirely unprecedented. A 2023 academic study identified five countries that grant broadly available national voting rights to noncitizen residents: Uruguay, New Zealand, Chile, Malawi and Ecuador. The requirements vary, from one year of residence in New Zealand to fifteen years in Uruguay.  Five countries out of 193. 

But that is not what Albanese is demanding. In those countries, to vote you still must be a resident. Albanese is demanding voting rights for people who, according to her own argument, live in territories that are not part of Israel.

That would be an entirely new and unprecedented category of voting rights: noncitizens who are not residents of the country's sovereign territory. Literally everyone in the world would be eligible to vote in literally every national election by that logic, or at least every election that affects them. Iranians should vote in US elections!

Perhaps, in Albanese's twisted mind, the special circumstance is military occupation. Maybe Albanese believes that occupying another territory obligates a country to grant the occupied population the right to vote in its national elections.

But, again, no one has ever done that. 

Turkey has occupied northern Cyprus since 1974. Does Turkey allow Greek Cypriots living in northern Cyprus to vote in Turkish parliamentary elections? Of course not. Turkey reserves those voting rights for Turkish citizens, including Turkish Cypriots who have acquired Turkish citizenship.

The United States occupied Iraq from 2003 until the formal transfer of sovereignty in 2004, and maintained a massive military presence there for years afterward. Should the United States have registered millions of Iraqis to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain in 2008 merely because American troops were still stationed there? 

Is the United States guilty of "apartheid" because Iraqis could not vote for the American president? (Let's not even discuss how US citizens cannot vote for president or Congress if they live in non-state territories like Puerto Rico.) 

Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights "recognizes and protects the right of every citizen to take part in the conduct of public affairs, the right to vote and to be elected and the right to have access to public service."

The word "citizen" is pretty clear.

So what, exactly, is Albanese demanding? Can she seriously be saying that international law must be rewritten to apply only to one state and no others? Can she really believe that she just redefined "apartheid" to include giving full rights to the minority citizenship of a state?

Come on. It is clear what she really wants. She, and all the others who pushed the same logic in the wake of Israel's elections, wants the destruction of Israel above all. All their pseudo-legal arguments are not serious: they are just means to an end, to incite hate against Israel so it eventually becomes so isolated that it implodes and can be replaced with a Palestinian Arab state that can expel its Jews and everyone would be happy (except Jews, who don't count.)

Can you figure out any explanation that fits the facts better? 

---

 

Books by Elder of Ziyon

Reclaiming the Covenant Protocols He's an Anti-Zionist Too! At Ptach Lo (ebook) The Muslim Question (ebook, $8) Sarah Makes the World Better (ages 3-8)

More at: media.elderofziyon.com · Substack

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10/28 Links Pt2: Giving Up the Word "Zionism"; How did eco-idealists of the 70s descend into Israel-hating Greens of today?; Abdul El-Sayed: tribune of America’s Islamo-left

From Ian:

Giving Up the Word "Zionism"

Should Jews retire the word "Zionism" since it has become a lightning rod of hate?

Our enemies will persecute us given the chance. They don't play by the rules. They don't use evidence and reason. They are committed to their conspiracy theories, their resentments, their violence and their insatiable need for destruction.

The demands they place on us right now involve changing who we are - the names we choose for ourselves, our commitment to Israel. That alone should be reason enough to say "no."

There will be no relief if we give up the word "Zionist." The enemy will not pocket the win and go home. When it comes to antisemitism, every conciliation brings only further demands.

Zionism was the most important movement of Jewish liberation in thousands of years. It gave us back our homeland, our confidence, our spine.

To be a Zionist is to assert that Jews not only have rights, but also a home and a future.

To give up on that, of all words, is to concede the argument - to implicitly endorse the libel that Zionism is a genocidal, colonialist, supremacist belief.

But the first reason to say we are still Zionists is that it should be a necessary, reflexive response to anyone who wants us to submit to external pressure, as a precursor to pressing us on other things: our identity, our communities.

That's reason enough to say that, yes, we are Zionists. Look into our eyes. We won't give up the word.

Stephen Pollard: Jonathan Powell’s flawed approach to Israel is more dangerous than his wife’s views

Powell uses the Good Friday Agreement to buttress his view that the way to end conflicts is to talk to the other side. In 2008, for example (he left Number 10 in 2007) he said that Western governments should talk to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. His 2014 book is actually called Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts.

Powell’s approach is not merely naïve; it entirely misunderstands the nature of the Middle East conflict. The IRA were, like Hamas and Hezbollah, murderous terrorists. But the IRA wanted Northern Ireland’s status changed, not every Unionist dead. Meanwhile, Article 7 of Hamas’ covenant says that: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews."

Were it not for what Abba Eban famously called the Palestinians’ habit of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, it might have been that Powell’s penchant for negotiating with terrorists had worked: Oslo showed that the PLO could be negotiated with. But Hamas cannot.

The two most significant acts over Israel since Labour took office have been recognition of a Palestinian state last September and then, a year later, the imposition of sanctions on Israel.

The former is classic Powell. Even if we take it at face value, and ignore the domestic political pressures driving Middle East policy (Labour’s fear of the sectarian Muslim vote), the idea is at best naïve, at worst pure folly.

It is based on the notion that recognition without any quid pro quo arrangement is a statement of intent designed to build trust.

In reality, all it did was give a propaganda win to Hamas, who could claim that decades of talking got nowhere and it took the October 7 massacre to force the UK and other Western nations to recognise a Palestinian state.

But while Powell’s approach may be misguided, even he could see that Miliband’s decision to sanction Israel could only be counter-productive, showing Israel that the UK can no longer be trusted or even counted as an ally.

Sarah Helm may be a valid target for opprobrium, but her marital status is not what matters. It’s what her husband does that is important.

How did eco-idealists of the 70s descend into Israel-hating Greens of today?

So, what changed? Bale suggests that the most significant shift is in foreign policy. For years, he explained, the Greens saw the US as “the acme of rapacious and hegemonic industrial capitalism”, opposing Britain’s lucrative involvement in the global arms trade and its willingness to project military power overseas. Under Polanski, “Israel has taken over from the USA as the party’s bête-noir.”

Since taking the reins, Polanski’s leadership has seen the party criticised both from within and without for majoring too much on left-wing populism and too little on ecology and conservation, according to Bale.

Shahrar Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party from 2014 to 2016, described to the Jerusalem Post an "authoritarian shift” under Polanski, with party veterans increasingly uneasy about the direction of the party. “The rot [has] set in more deeply from Polanski’s tenure as leader,” Ali said. “Now we’re seeing the old guard like Caroline Lucas and Adrian Ramsay, and some of the MPs, notably Ellie Chowns, getting far more agitated around the direction of the party.”

Ali also pointed to insufficient guardrails and oversight as party membership has grown. “During the last 12 months, the party’s seen a huge increase in membership but a corresponding lack of control regarding who is entering the party and why. There are a lot more pro-Palestine campaigners, Corbynista types who were kicked out of the Labour Party because of antisemitism.”

Peter Cardwell, a Talk TV presenter, former government special adviser and author of Political Animals, offered a more damning indictment, telling me: “Islamist entryists have taken over the Greens and they have become a single-issue party. Even some of their MPs believe the antisemitic ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy is one with which they cannot be associated.”

Cardwell, who hosts an evening show covering UK politics and current affairs, added: “It seems quite a while since anyone I’ve interviewed from the Green Party has actually brought up anything to do with the environment.”

He contrasted the current trajectory of the party with past leaders, or “harmless eccentrics” such as Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas, who were at least impassioned defenders of Net Zero and public spirited representatives who truly cared about the core mission of the Green Party.

Greens are no longer a party of peace after ‘Zionism is racism’ motion

Deny, distort, and allege bad faith whenever Jews report antisemitism – it is a familiar, if disturbing, playbook from the Corbyn years. I fought against antisemitism in my own party then.

But even Jeremy Corbyn didn’t preside over a party where so many members actively voted for a discriminatory policy that is so utterly unbothered with actual peace for actual people in Israel and Palestine.

Let’s be clear – peace is the only lasting solution to the conflict in the Middle East, and it will be achieved by leaders and activists in Israel and Palestine. It will not be achieved by the Green Party of England and Wales – not least when its policy, and some of their politicians, won’t disavow “armed struggle”, and want a nation state to be actively “dismantled”.

Their policy is beyond even that advocated in mainstream Palestinian politics, and by the Palestinian Authority. I know more than most how the conflict in the Middle East is imported onto the streets of Britain.

Dealing with several antisemitic terrorist attacks in my constituency, Finchley & Golders Green, taught me that building more cohesive communities is the only way through. Politics as a unifying force, not a divisive race to the bottom.

The publication of the Bell Review underlines just how irresponsible the new Green Party is. Political discourse that favours simplistic slogans over nuanced and sensitive engagement creates a climate where antisemitism can be normalised. Three in five Jewish children surveyed had experienced or witnessed antisemitism in their school.

Our politicians cannot muddy the water by denying antisemitism or rejecting Jewish experiences.

Cllr Thompson’s views are extreme, out of step with the diverse communities she is supposed to represent, and do nothing to advance peace – not in Israel and Palestine, and not on the streets of north London.

The Green Party has turned its back on those of us who yearn for peace. I expect, if they haven’t already, those who yearn for peace will soon turn their back on the Green Party.

Israel-Palestine for Absolute F*cking Morons: Also Known As: Good versus Evil for Idiots

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10/26 Links Pt2: Sir Simon Schama: A howl against rising global antisemitism; Amanpour’s journalistic legacy at ‘CNN’: Neither truthful nor neutral; The BBC is anti-Jewish. Who can be in any doubt?

From Ian:

Liel Leibovitz: Abdul El-Sayed ad is vile, unapologetically Nazi drivel blaming Jews for everything bad

If you’ve ever shopped at a normal American supermarket, you’ve probably heard normal Americans having the following normal American conversation:

Normal American 1: Should we buy some bananas?

Normal American 2: We can’t afford bananas, because all of our money goes to help Israel commit genocide against innocent children in Gaza.

What’s that you say? No actual American talks like that, because Americans aren’t brainwashed zombies who believe everything is or should be about Palestine?

Nor are they antisemites who think Jews control American politics with their dirty money?

Tell that to Cenk Uygur.

Having recently been denied entry to the United Kingdom — even the pro-Palestinian Brits found his Jew-hatred excessive — the media gadfly turned to what he does best: defaming a certain Semitic minority.

Over the weekend, he released a new ad for Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, in which two Americans who look like they were cast by the Tucker Carlson fan club are moping around their local grocery store and complaining they can’t afford anything — from proper healthcare to a dozen eggs for their kids — because the federal government funnels so much of their cash to Israel.

Get that, Michigan voters? The Jews are to blame for all of society’s ills.

The Jews are our misfortune.

It’s such vile, unapologetically Nazi drivel that it’s tempting to laugh it all off, especially as the bloated buffoon who produced this bit of schlock is best known for such moral nadirs as his warm interview with David Duke and his denial of the Armenian genocide.

But Uygur’s ad strikes a deeper chord.

It reminds Jewish Democrats that no matter how hard they try to fit in, their party now truly and deeply hates them.

It’s a timely reminder, too, for Jewish Michiganders.

NYPost Editorial: Ilhan Omar hurls the ‘genocide’ charge at Israel — but it belongs much closer to home

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s apparent lies about her family and finances are bad enough, but nothing is as outrageous as the way she slanders Israel with the “genocide” libel when her own father in all likelihood took part in Somali dictator Siad Barre’s real genocide.

Omar in her memoir calls her father Nur Omar Mohamed an “educator,” yet it looks like the only educating he did was teaching Barre’s enemies lessons in brutality as a colonel in the Somali Army in the 1980s.

The Barre regime committed horrific atrocities against the Isaaq clan, killing at least 200,000 and displacing another 900,000 in a massive ethnic cleansing.

The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and virtually every other authority agrees that the campaign against the Isaaq was genocidal in intent and in practice: Government forces strafed fleeing civilians, planted land mines at wells and systematically raped girls and women.

There can be little doubt that Omar’s dad was involved in the genocide. As historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told The Post, “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.”

Nur Said and his family escaped Somalia as “refugees” following the collapse of Barre’s dictatorship, gaining asylum in the United States in 1995 — improperly, it seems, as war criminals are not entitled to refugee protections.

Omar has long been blatantly antisemitic, with comments like “Israel has hypnotized the world” and saying Jews bought control of US policy because “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”

But with her own family’s bloody history, it takes real chutzpah to join in the “genocide” slurs, e.g. by insisting Jewish students at Columbia University are “pro-genocide” and routinely condemning Israel’s supposed “genocidal” campaign against Palestinians.

Omar’s scandals include messy finances and a possibly fraudulent marriage as well as serious questions about the legitimacy of her citizenship, but this hypocrisy takes the cake.

UK antisemitism watchdog GnasherJew exposes 40 antisemitic healthcare workers in NHS

An investigative resource published on the UK watchdog GnasherJew website has exposed approximately 40 medical professionals across the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) who have used their public social media platforms to disseminate antisemitic rhetoric, propagate conspiracy theories, and celebrate violence against civilians.

GnasherJew is a team of Jewish online investigators who identify, expose, and report on antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and extremism. The watchdog group's page of Antisemitic Healthcare Professionals states, “Over recent years, we have exposed doctors, healthcare providers, and other medical professionals for posting antisemitic content on social media, supporting terrorism, and discriminating against Jewish people.”

The dossiers listed on the page detail extensive online activity by practicing doctors, consultants, surgeons, and therapists.

Among the cases documented on the page is Dr. Mazin Fageir, a senior trauma and orthopedic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

GnasherJew’s compiled dossier on him included screenshots of his X/Twitter posts showing that he shared a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing an armband with a Star of David and pushing a coffin draped in a Palestinian flag into an Auschwitz concentration camp oven beneath the phrase "ARBEIT MACHT FREI," which translates from German to “work sets you free” and was the sign on the gate at the front of the camp.

Dr. Fageir praises Hamas rocket fire on Israeli homes
In another post from May 2021, during Israel’s war in Gaza known as Operation Guardian of the Walls, Dr. Fageir replied to a post reporting a rocket striking a civilian home in Givatayim, saying, “May you live under rocket fire forever, amen,” and adding that Israeli citizens would be “wiped out one day.”

The page also includes a dossier on Dr. Nizar Ali Mhani, an NHS consultant orthodontist and Cardiff University honorary clinical lecturer.

In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Dr. Mhani posted material comparing the actions of Hamas to the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, writing, “Would anyone have the audacity or idiocy to ever suggest that the brave Jews who resisted the Warsaw Ghetto genocide used civilians as human shields because they used bunkers and tunnels?”

Another case involves Dr. Asaad Nemer Shamallakh, an anesthetist practicing within the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

Following the outbreak of the war, Dr. Shamallakh published a Facebook post on October 8, 2023, mourning family members, including his uncle and multiple children and women, who he wrote were killed in a missile strike. Writing, “Yes, the Zionist succeeded in gouging out our eyes with them, but he ignited fire and a hell in our souls that will not calm down until we are victorious, take revenge and regain our freedom and our homeland,” he added that after initial grief, “infants, girls and women from the Shamallakh family were the victims of the pigs today... and then you ask why we hate them and fight them with our nails and teeth? Yes, tears fell profusely, and hearts were broken, but we soon returned to the battlefield.”

In another October 8, 2023 post, set against a red background, Dr. Shamallakh wrote: “I swear that the battles of Badr, Uhud and Khandaq, militarily speaking, are a drop in the ocean of the Palestinian battle now. You are the Companions of the Prophet.”

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10/26 Links Pt1: Israel’s moment of truth: Knesset election pivotal to future US-Israel relationship; Israel Is Just the Pretext, The Real Target is the West; UN commission accuses Israel of war crimes in West Bank

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Liberal Jewish insecurity doesn’t come from Israeli policies

For years, liberal American Jews have sought to find a pretext to justify injecting themselves into Israeli election contests, in which those who share their blind faith in reviving the failed “two-state solution” myth have consistently been defeated. Some, like the left-wing J Street lobby, make no bones about their desire to override the verdict of Israeli democracy and to repeat the catastrophic mistake made in 2005 by the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip. They seek that for the far larger and more strategic “West Bank.”

As far as Gaza is concerned, that not only led to the creation of a Hamas terrorist state, but set in motion the events that would lead to the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, as much as the miscalculations of the Israeli military, intelligence and political establishment.

It is entirely true that both Israeli and Diaspora Jews should recognize the need to care about and defend each other, despite the fact that—aspirational rhetoric about Jewish unity notwithstanding—they don’t understand or really know that much about each other.

But the notion that “bad” nationalistic and religious Jews in Israel are embarrassing and hurting “good” liberal American Jews dedicated to coexistence is a misnomer. Whatever you may think of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those who support the current government, their primary responsibility is to defend a still besieged and beleaguered Jewish state. It’s not to make suicidal concessions to opponents who don’t want peace just so American Jews can feel better about themselves.

Diaspora Jews have every right to express their opinions about Israeli politics and policies, albeit while also showing a little humility about the fact that the Israelis are doing the fighting and dying required to ensure their nation’s survival.

American responsibilities
Instead of second-guessing their brethren, American Jews should realize that their role in the battle against international antisemitism is not to stand on the sidelines kibitzing about Israelis doing wrong. It’s to speak up and defend their own communities from people like El-Sayed, Uygur and Piker, as well as institutions that tolerate and encourage the hatred and bigotry that results in violence against them, not to mention targeting their children on college campuses.

A more realistic and productive approach to “shared responsibility” is not for liberal Jewish denominations to pat themselves on the back for not joining in antisemitic boycotts of Israel promoted by the left. Nor is it to prepare to help Democrats or even those Republicans who are hostile to the Jewish state to override Israeli voters if they don’t cast their ballots the way they want them to.

Rather, it is to deploy all of their energy and strength in confronting a growing antisemitic movement on their own front door. If they were truly interested in shouldering their responsibility to defend Jews, then they would be holding accountable those groups and politicians who prioritize partisan goals over Jewish security and well-being, betraying their constituents by supporting El-Sayed.

The failure of liberal advocacy and faith groups to mobilize against the rise of antisemitic politicians like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and their “progressive” allies is evidence of their inability to focus on what truly matters. That moral bankruptcy gives the lie to the high-minded rhetoric they deploy when bashing Israelis who don’t conform to their notions of how Jews are supposed to behave when attacked.

As they’ve made clear over and over again, these enemies of the Jews make no distinctions between the “good” Israelis that Jewish liberals root for and the “bad” ones like Netanyahu and his allies. Their complaint isn’t really about what Israel does but what it is: a Jewish state in the Middle East. And that intolerance for Jewish sovereignty and power is what is also motivating the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism Americans have experienced.

If liberal denominations and their supporters want to exercise responsibility for the Jewish future, they’d stop trying to second-guess Israelis and concentrate their minds on opposing the haters around them. If they don’t, their failings will be their own fault, not that of the Israelis.

Bassam Tawil: Israel Is Just the Pretext, The Real Target is the West

Why should anyone expect peace between the Palestinians and Israel while Palestinian leaders glorify terrorism and armed groups continue to attack Israelis?

Above all, how can there ever be peace in the Middle East if the Iranian regime is standing on its feet and supporting the jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel?

[A] central obstacle to peace: the continuing willingness of Palestinians to celebrate violence against Israelis while presenting terrorism as supposedly legitimate national resistance.

This central obstacle is not all that different from what we are seeing this month in France, as well as Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania and even South Korea, where there virtually are no Palestinians or Jews.

Israel is just the pretext. If you think that a Palestinian state, or an election defeat of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or even the disappearance of Israel itself — would solve anything, you would be wrong. What the West is up against is the desire of Muslim extremists, with a leg-up from Marxists, to overthrow the "corrupt" West and replace it with Islamic Sharia law and eventually global caliphate. Only after this transformation will the world have the "peace" part of the "Religion of Peace." Until then, as the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, vowed, "there will be struggle" (lit. jihad).

These statements, coming from terrorist groups backed by the Iranian regime, reveal a political culture in which murdering Jews is not merely celebrated as an achievement and the terrorists are elevated as national heroes — the same wish holds true for all "infidels" wherever they are.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre demonstrated the devastating consequences of an extremist Islamist ideology that treats people of other religions, in this instance Jews, as a legitimate target. In Nigeria, Islamists treat Christians as legitimate targets. In India, they treat Hindus as a legitimate target. In France and the West, they treat democratic governance as a legitimate target. It is the same war. A few clearly terrified leaders in the West — in France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Spain — might think that if there were a Palestinian state, it might keep the mob quiet for a while. Yes, until breakfast. That is also why US President Donald Trump should not make a "deal" with the rulers of Iran.

Hamas and other likeminded jihadists have no problem murdering civilians — whether in the US on 9/11, the London transit system, the Barcelona and Madrid attacks, Paris's Bataclan Theater, Nice on Bastille Day, German Christmas Markets, the Manchester concert or anywhere else. They are convinced they will be rewarded for it, not just by European politicians in this life, but by Allah in the next — so that no matter how many babies or elderly people they kill torture or mutilate, it is all good.

Iran's regime has recently slaughtered more than 36,500 of its own citizens, and continues to kill — so why should they care if they inflict the same horrors on anyone else?

Palestinian factions such as Hamas and PIJ, like the protesters throughout the West, continue to regard violence as a source of pride and a means of advancing their primary objective — in Israel, the elimination of the "Zionist entity" (Israel), and in the rest of the world, overthrowing man-made (as opposed to Allah-made) infidel democracies.

The silence of the Palestinian Authority — and other Arab and Muslim leaders — is also significant. No public statements condemning the Hebron attack have been issued by Palestinian leaders or representatives or any other Muslim world leader. They object only when it is their territory that is being bombed — which it often is by other Muslims.

Why does Moody’s rate France above Israel? The economic gap deserves scrutiny

Moody’s decision to keep France’s credit rating well above Israel’s raises a question: How much weight does the agency put on each country’s economic performance?

The US-based credit rating agency affirmed France’s sovereign rating at Aa3 over the weekend. Israel remains at Baa1, four notches lower. Both ratings are investment grade, meaning they fall within the categories generally considered suitable for mainstream institutional investment. The difference nevertheless signals that Moody’s considers lending to France substantially safer.

Sovereign credit ratings assess a government’s ability and willingness to repay its debt. They can influence borrowing costs and determine which investors are permitted to buy a country’s bonds.

Such assessments necessarily extend beyond a comparison of growth and debt figures. War, political stability, institutions, and access to financing all matter. Even so, the contrast between the French and Israeli economies deserves closer scrutiny.

Moody’s first downgraded Israel from A1 to A2 in February 2024, roughly four months after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack triggered the war in Gaza. In September 2024, it cut Israel’s rating another two notches to Baa1, where it has remained.

Israel’s economy has nevertheless demonstrated considerable resilience, acknowledged in assessments by the International Monetary Fund, the international institution that monitors economies and provides financial assistance to member countries.

France, meanwhile, has struggled with weak growth, substantial budget deficits, and political resistance to efforts to repair its public finances. Protests and unrest have added to the pressure on its government.

The question is whether the size of the ratings gap adequately reflects those competing realities.

A substantial gap in growth, debt
Consider economic output per person, a widely used measure of a country’s average prosperity.

According to the IMF figures cited here, Israel’s nominal GDP per capita is expected to reach approximately $72,400 in 2026, compared with about $51,400 in France. These figures measure output in current US dollars and are influenced by exchange rates; they do not directly measure household income or purchasing power.

The growth forecasts also differ sharply. The IMF projects Israeli economic growth of approximately 4.5% this year, while the Bank of Israel, the country’s central bank, forecasts 5.6%.

France’s economy is expected to expand by approximately 0.4%, according to both the IMF and the Banque de France, the French central bank.

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10/25 Links: The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left; There is always an idiot in the room; Nas Daily: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

From Ian:

Welcome to the era of champagne jihadism

Forget champagne socialism, we are now in the era of champagne jihadism.

The GQ poster boy of this movement is multimillionaire Hasan Piker, who has proclaimed that America deserved 9/11, that his favourite flag is Hezbollah’s and that he would ‘vote for Hamas over Israel’. Awkwardly, if he lived under Hamas, he wouldn’t be able to vote for anyone.

Champagne jihadis needn’t actually believe in God, let alone Islam. They simply need an unshakeable conviction that the West (aka the Great Satan) is the root of all evil, and that anyone fighting it must therefore be on the side of good, no matter their methods.

You can find champagne jihadis speaking from positions of privilege throughout the West. They can be found cosplaying holy war by cheering on the ‘Glorious Martyrs’ of 7 October from the comfortable surrounds of £10,000-a-year Glasgow University, where they’re probably studying queer theory – sadly not on the syllabus at schools in Gaza. Or they can be seen in New York shouting ‘long live Hamas’ during a vigil organised by Israelis for Peace to remember the Israelis and Palestinians killed since 7 October.

More recently, as rioters destroyed French businesses and historic buildings, the champagne jihadis were seen bravely manning the barricades of their verified social-media accounts. ‘Capitalism doesn’t need your grief’, commented actress and sometime Dior model Christina Ricci beneath a post lamenting the looting of a Dior store in Paris. The champagne jihadi is, in fact, the ultimate capitalist, capable of commodifying absolutely anything, including the destruction of capitalism itself. No doubt Ricci’s next Dior campaign will feature her throwing a Dior J’adore Molotov cocktail at a cop car in a $710 DIO(R)EVOLUTION t-shirt.

But the rioters are not destroying capitalism – one Bangladeshi phone shop at a time – for the love of la patrie. They’re doing it for Palestine, the flag of which has largely replaced the tricolore during the riots. I support a free Palestine, but I’m not sure how destroying a North African man’s shop in the French capital helps achieve that. Whether it’s the suffering of ordinary Gazans under Hamas or the destruction of an immigrant’s livelihood in Paris, the revolution demands sacrifice. Preferably someone else’s.

Julie Burchill: The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left

The concept of ‘suicidal empathy’ is having a moment right now. Coined by Gad Saad in his book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, it’s defined by Wikipedia as ‘a purported phenomenon in which excessive, misdirected and pathological forms of empathy are destructive for the party that exhibits them’. We see it in Western countries, whose leaders tell their shivering populations that they’re not allowed to have cheap fossil fuels because of the polar bears. We see it in young liberal women, who would have a fit if a white man whistled at them, but bend over backwards to make men from rabidly misogynistic cultures welcome in their countries – and this despite the fact that we certainly don’t need to import sex offenders when we have enough of the homegrown kind.

In extreme cases of this lunacy, we see alleged feminists voluntarily donning the hijab – the living shroud that so many brave Muslim-born women have been tortured and killed for trying to cast off. There was a shocking example of this in 2017 when Sweden’s self-proclaimed ‘first feminist government in the world’ donned hijabs and chadors on a trade visit to Tehran, in order to make themselves fit to be seen by the righteous Muslims of the Islamic Republic. They did this shortly after promising to promote a ‘gender-equality perspective’ internationally and adopt a ‘feminist foreign policy’, while ignoring the appeal by the Persian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, who had specifically asked European female politicians to defy the hijab demands when visiting Iran. Also in 2017 there was the Washington ‘Women’s March’, which involved the grotesque spectacle of many non-Muslim women voluntarily hijabing-up.

We certainly see a massive dose of suicidal empathy among the Islamo-left, from Queers for Palestine – often mocked as Turkeys for Christmas – to Owen Jones. Jones probably thinks that he’s so unique that he could sprout wings and fly if he got thrown off a Gazan roof by the local gay-haters. Do these fools honestly believe that the facts about Hamas hating homosexuals are Israeli propaganda? Or are they so bound up in The Wonder Of Me, so convinced of their exceptionalism, that they are as deluded as that strange girl on TikTok, who mused on how she would be treated if taken hostage by Hamas: ‘They would probably comfort me, make sure I had medical attention, make sure I was doing okay…’

The message is loud, clear and strikingly ignorant. Other women / gays / infidels may get raped and / or murdered, but those big angry men would see me as special. We assume that such people are simply thick, or perhaps suffering from extreme narcissistic exceptionalism. A lot of them are mad at their parents and are acting up or acting out. Is it performative social masochism, in which liberal young white folk seek to outdo each other as if in some silly and sinister sport?

David Collier: There is always an idiot in the room

Brichto says he cares about every life. Yet when Jewish people gathered to discuss the hatred threatening theirs, he promoted a film demonising Israel, mocked those who had not seen it, and questioned their concern for others.

He could have listened. Instead, he made himself out to be morally superior to the others in the room.

This from a man who has campaigned with Zack Polanski, whose Green Party has now declared that ‘Zionism is Racism’.

And having watched Naza myself, my suggestion to those in the room would be: don’t bother.

Watch October 7 footage instead. That will tell you far more about the Jewish position in today’s world and the need for a strong and secure homeland.

In the meantime, Jewish families do not have to pass Adam Brichto’s test before their fears deserve to be heard.

Perhaps Brichto should spend less time mocking those who think differently from him and more time watching October 7 footage himself.

Maybe it would make him a little less of an idiot.

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10/24 Links: Realignment and the Realities of the Middle East; Inside Israel, I see how little haters worldwide understand this election; Ireland, You're Not the Hero You Think You Are

From Ian:

Realignment and the Realities of the Middle East

Most diplomats are judged by their ability to stay out of the news, but Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack made headlines this week. Speaking at the Global Security Forum in Doha, he said, "America as the guarantor to the world, for the last 80 years, it is no longer there." Accordingly, the United States is changing its posture in the Middle East. The old arrangement, under which Americans provided security for the region's oil exports, is being restructured. "What's happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It's a message for realignment."

Barrack did not announce a change in policy so much as describe a shift that many Americans have hoped would occur for decades. The U.S. military has enabled its regional allies to break Iran's chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, but if the allies themselves could keep the Middle East relatively tranquil and allow the oil to flow freely, it would relieve a massive headache for Washington. Saudi Arabia's attempt to stop the Houthis from menacing its territory and the Red Sea shipping lanes shows how difficult this will be to accomplish without first defeating Iran.

The Doha remarks did not announce an immediate withdrawal, and the United States is still very active in the region: The military continues to protect ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, a third aircraft-carrier strike group and another Marine expeditionary unit are on their way there as rumors swirl of intense American and Israeli preparations for a post-midterm strike on the Islamic Republic.

American military might is upsetting Iran's strategy of impoverishing the world by bottling up the Gulf's resources. Thanks to the courage and skill of our service members, and the technical wizards who have found ways to bypass the Strait, more oil is leaving the Gulf now than before the war with Iran began. Gas prices remain high, but the extra output should help drive that down.

America's regional allies are still growing increasingly concerned about our steadfastness. It is not easy to draw a straight line between the foreign policies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. And as the danger from Iran has grown, princes and presidents have tried to reduce the risk of abandonment. Trump is far more willing to confront Iran than any of his predecessors, but his successors will likely be more cautious, particularly if the political cost to this administration is high.

For most of the last decade, numerous allies have tried to tie themselves more closely to the American-led regional order. Most have sought firmer security guarantees. Last year, President Trump designated Saudi Arabia as a major non-NATO ally and stated in an executive order that the United States would defend Qatar if it is attacked. Many of the Abraham Accords nations began coordinating more openly with Israel on defense issues.

The Netherlands confronts Israel while hiding from its own Jewish history

On September 22 the Netherlands began enforcing a decree that makes it a crime, punishable by up to six years in prison, to buy or sell Israeli goods produced beyond the 1967 armistice line. Customs officers at Schiphol Airport are reportedly searching luggage from Tel Aviv for wine and dates. The government says it is meeting its obligations under international law.

No Dutch decree threatens prison for a bottle of Turkish wine from occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan phosphate from Western Sahara, or a cotton shirt from Xinjiang. China, Turkey, Morocco, and many other governments with disputed territory can sell freely in Amsterdam. Of all the countries in the world, the Netherlands wrote a criminal statute for exactly one, and it is the Jewish state.

From most European countries that would be ordinary bias or hypocrisy. From the Netherlands, it is something else. To explain why, we are compelled to share our own families' experience in the country we grew up in, and about what Anne Frank's diary left out.

Many know the Dutch from cheese, herring and Anne Frank. Two of those are accurate. The diary gave the world an image of ordinary Dutch people risking everything to hide a Jewish family. That story is true, but as a portrait of the nation it is almost exactly backwards. The helpers were real, but they were rare. The diary turned these singular saviors into the whole country, and the Dutch were happy to let that be the narrative.

Here is the rest. The Dutch Nazi party had over 75,000 active members during World War 2, several times the few tens of thousands who ever joined the resistance. After the war, 425,000 Dutch individuals were accused of active collaboration with the Nazis, which is nearly 5% of the wartime population.

The machinery of persecution in the Netherlands was Dutch
The Germans did not even bother with a military administration. Unlike France or Belgium, the Netherlands got a civilian one, and the machinery of persecution was Dutch. The municipal registry handed over every Jewish address. Local police carried out the raids. The Amsterdam tram company drove Jews to the collection points and billed the occupier for the fare. In 1943, Dutch civilians formed a unit to collect a German bounty for every Jew in hiding they turned in. The Frank family was discovered, likely on a Dutch tip, and sent through that machinery to Westerbork and then east.

Of about 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, roughly 102,000 were murdered, three in four, the highest rate in Western Europe. Dutch authorities often implemented the anti-Jewish orders with zeal. Fortunately for our families, that was not the whole population: thousands of Dutch citizens disobeyed their authorities and risked their lives for their Jewish neighbors. But they were the exception. Survivors, our grandparents among them, came home to find neighbors occupying their houses, and in 1946 the city sent them back tax bills covering the years they had spent in concentration camps. Amsterdam's tram company was still chasing the German government in 1947 for payment on its final deportation run. The Dutch government did not apologize for the treatment of its Jews until 2020.

None of this obliges the Dutch to admire Israel's government or policies towards the Palestinians, and we don't doubt that the images from the war in Gaza produced real revulsion. But something else happened underneath it. The Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once put it in a sentence: the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. If the Jewish state can be cast as the perpetrator of the age, then the descendants of the people it was built for are owed nothing, and the tax bills and the tram fares and the bounties are finally paid off. The Dutch found a way to liberate themselves from feeling guilty.

When NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, began describing Israel's conduct as "genocidal violence," following a report about Gazan casualties that turned out to be incorrect, leaked emails published online showed the editor-in-chief applauding the decision and justifying it by the lack of complaint emails it received. True, there aren't many Dutch Jews left to write them.

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10/23 Links Pt2: Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history; Douglas Murray: France is a warning – our civilisation is not immortal

From Ian:

Barack Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history

Never mind 3,000 years of Jewish history, two Temples in Jerusalem, or centuries of Jewish longing for Zion. In Obama’s telling, the Jews somehow became interlopers in their own land.
MORE DISTURBING still was Obama’s treatment of Palestinian violence.

Speaking about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Obama declared that “you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”

Think about that.

When terrorists murder approximately 1,200 people and kidnap 251, the principal issue is not whether their actions will produce meaningful political change. It is that they committed an act of unimaginable barbarity.

By discussing the massacre in terms of its political effectiveness, Obama risks reducing a moral atrocity to a tactical mistake. Would the slaughter have been any less reprehensible had Hamas managed to advance its political objectives?

Indeed, no political claim, no matter how loudly asserted, confers a license to murder families in their homes or drag hostages into Gaza.

And terrorism did not begin with Israel’s founding, let alone the 1967 war. In 1929, Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in Hebron, destroying an ancient Jewish community nearly two decades before independence.

WHAT OBAMA did in Belfast was more than distort Israel’s history. He turned the descendants of ancient Israel into trespassers in their own homeland, while treating the massacre of Jews as a failed political strategy.

Obama is, of course, entitled to his own opinions. But he is not entitled to his own version of history.

The Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel long before Barack Obama entered the world stage. And they will still be there long after his shameful revisionism has been forgotten.

The Fraud Squad By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
There’s a whole lot more to the curious case of Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a.k.a. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, but it’s best to let the feds sort all that out. The point is, she’s a phony, and she’s made a career of pointing at Israel, AIPAC, the Jews, and the United States to draw attention away from her own fishy shenanigans.

On to Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed describes himself as a doctor and physician, yet he’s never held a license to practice medicine. Lately, he’s been playing up his all-American roots, but he’s also claimed to be an Egyptian citizen. El-Sayed portrays himself as a humble Michigander in a Senate race against fat cat Mike Rogers, who owns a yacht in Florida. But El-Sayed is also rich. He and his wife own properties around the world, including a place in Dubai. When asked about his family’s documented links to the Muslim Brotherhood, he simply lies. So, once again, a con artist.

And, once again, an Israel-hater and terrorist sympathizer. Like Omar, he attacks Israel and AIPAC to cast himself as a saint who wants to ensure that American resources go to Americans in need.

All the flimflam artists are on the same page these days, and it doesn’t matter if they’re associated with the “left” or “right.” Rich-kid socialists think that screaming “intifada” loud enough can drown out those calling them hypocrites. Democrats and liberal journalists regularly stage run-ins with Jews in Judea and Samaria to boost their resistance credibility. Hasan Piker—the Maoist with the $200,000 Porsche—says Israel is worse than Hamas. Tucker Carlson—who claims to have physically wrestled with demons in his bed—peddles Putin propaganda, nicotine pouches, and Jew-hatred. When Nick Fuentes inadvertently streamed himself watching gay porn, he blamed it on Zionist saboteurs.

At least these charlatans and imposters are getting something out of the anti-Semitism racket. Their earnest supporters and fans are just dupes.

Jonathan Tobin: Amanpour leaves ‘CNN,’ but a legacy of anti-Israel media bias remains

Amanpour may like to claim that she was “fiercely independent” and devoted to the facts, though that has never been true of her work. And there is no better illustration than the way she has used her influential perch to skew coverage against the State of Israel, and to depict it and its people as uniquely evil and almost always in the wrong.

Her bosses at CNN and elsewhere have not only tolerated her bias but encouraged it. Indeed, if she’s a role model for the rising generation of the press, it’s because she has practiced a form of journalism and reporting the news from her own biased perspective. From the time she first became a star during the First Gulf War to the present, Amanpour turned the skewing of stories into an art form. She always managed to make whatever she reported conform to her pre-existing ideas about the good guys to be extolled and the bad guys to be vilified.

Coverage of Israel and its ongoing battle for survival against Arab and Muslim opponents who want to destroy it demonstrated this regularly.

The list of outrageous examples of her anti-Israel bias is too long to relate here. Those who want to take a deep dive into the extensive catalogue of her journalistic malpractice can visit the CAMERA media monitoring organization’s website page devoted to her for a taste of the consistent way in which she misrepresented the truth when it came to anything about the Jewish state.

Some of the highlights include incidents such as when she said on air on Oct. 25, 2025 that the Israeli hostages held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, who were tortured, raped and starved by the terrorists, “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” Never mind that some of the hostages were actually being abused while held captive by “average Gazans.” While she was later forced to retract that lie, it was in line with the way she and others in corporate media became stenographers for Hamas, accepting every false claim the terrorist organization made, while treating anything coming from Israel with the deepest skepticism.

In 2024, she compared Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, currently serving a life sentence for five murders, to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years until he was freed and eventually became that country’s first black president.

Her toying with the truth didn’t begin on Oct. 7.

Six months earlier, during Passover, she described a terror attack in Judea and Samaria of a Jewish family in which the wife and two daughters of Rabbi Leo Dee—Lucy Dee, and daughters Maia and Rina—who were ambushed and shot and killed while driving in their car as being a “shootout.” She apologized for this, but the instances in which she “misspoke” (most of which never generated retractions) almost always demonstrated outrageous bias against Jews.

Years before that, she provoked justified anger from the pro-Israel community for her 2007 CNN documentary series “God’s Jewish Warriors.” It depicted all Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria, as well as their supporters, as mad fanatics. The series never acknowledges the Islamist extremism that defines mainstream Palestinian Arab opinion and that has impelled them to reject every attempt at compromise for a century.

Amanpour never hesitated to demonize Israelis. She also played fast and loose with Jewish history. In 2020, she compared President Donald Trump to German Nazis who perpetrated the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, a year before the start of World War II. Under pressure, she again apologized, though later retracted the apology.

In this, Amanpour was a forerunner for what would eventually become standard practice at liberal outlets like CNN or The New York Times. It’s an era in which a new generation of journalists considers it to be their obligation to promote their conception of woke truth, regardless of the facts, and dismiss efforts at objectivity and reporting both sides of a story as the “neutrality” she disdains.

And that’s why she fears any effort to return CNN or any other outlet to upholding honest journalism by Weiss and Ellison.

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10/21 Links Pt1: Dems betrayal of Israel fueled by Obama’s wrath toward the Jewish state; Postponed Palestinian elections expose blunder of “statehood” recognition

From Ian:

Dems betrayal of Israel fueled by Obama’s wrath toward the Jewish state

When Barack Obama was president and feuding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while apologizing to Arab potentates about America’s history in the region, a friend offered an observation.

To wit, that Obama was proving the truth of a deep suspicion among American conservatives that Democrats love Jews but ­secretly hate Israel.

Time and milestone events have passed since then, but the evidence that my friend was onto something important continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Acceptable
So much so that the Dems’ hard turn against Israel is now dangerously close to a fundamental party doctrine.

And a reasonable explanation is that Obama made it acceptable and even a requirement for officials and candidates to condemn the Jewish state.

His animus ran deep when he was in the White House, but didn’t stop when he left office a decade ago.

Even now, the former president continues to stir the pot of hatred, as demonstrated by comments he made last week.

Accepting an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, Obama said, in reference to the creation of the state of Israel, that Jews “took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’ ”

By ignoring the fact that Jews were indigenous throughout the Middle East for thousands of years before the state of Israel was created by the United Nations partition in 1947, Obama comes off as willfully ignorant.

All the more so when he insists that “the attitude of Israel is, now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone.”

He twisted the knife by saying that Israel has conceded the “moral high ground.”

He’s one of those lefties who likes Israel when it’s a victim, but hates it when it hits back and wins.

He also avoids any mention of the historic Abraham Accords, because that would mean giving President Trump credit and ­admitting that not all Muslims and Arabs hate Israel.

Bam-Mam link
His biased distortions recall the hateful ignorance that Mayor Mamdani often spews about Israel being an occupier and running an apartheid state.

It’s not a coincidence that Obama has become a Mamdani pal and adviser.

Netanyahu responded to Obama by noting that the former president’s argument is contrary to long-established facts.

“Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland; it’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years,” the prime minister said.

A more thorough and devastating response to Obama came in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, where Elisha Wiesel asks and answers the critical questions the former president conveniently ignores.

“Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state, an occupation or a West Bank settlement to blame?” Wiesel writes.

He goes on to ask, “Was it excessive for Jews to accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005?

“Is it excessive to want to live in peace?”

The writer’s authority on the subject is unassailable.

Dr. Brian Cox: Postponed Palestinian elections expose blunder of “statehood” recognition

This latest statehood recognition fiasco illustrates in near real-time the utter foolishness of what I have previously referred to as “fairytale foreign policy” so often practiced by the political left.

This approach is marked by repeated attempts to achieve significant strategic objectives by simply wishing them into existence. But as we often say in the military, especially in combat arms professions, “Hope is not a COA” (course of action).

All the statements from leftist governments recognizing the “state” of Palestine last fall expressed the desire then for free and fair elections, yet none of them included this—or any other development — as a precondition for recognition.

They all espouse belief in a viable two-state solution, and recognizing Palestine is, in colloquial terms, essentially an attempt to press the “easy button” to make it happen. The announcement last week postponing said elections until next fall demonstrates precisely why hope is not a COA.

In any event, Palestine has never met the conditions for statehood described in the Montevideo Convention since it was declared an independent country in November 1988. These criteria are widely considered to be an expression of customary law, yet the “state” of Palestine has no unified system of government and lacks the capacity to authoritatively enter into relations with other states

Simply recognizing Palestinian statehood, or clicking one’s heels three times and wishing that it were so, does not magically create the conditions necessary for it to be an actual state.

Far-left progressive activists like Canadian professor Mark Kersten and D.C. social welfare organization J Street are fond of rejecting the claim that recognizing Palestinian statehood is merely a reward for terrorism. The trouble is, terrorists tend to disagree with them.

Indeed, Hamas hailed announcements, all from leftist governments, recognizing the “state” of Palestine last fall as a “deserving outcome of our people’s struggle.” And when news broke that several Western governments were considering the move, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad celebrated prospective recognition as the “fruits of October 7.”

Governments like Australia, Canada, France, and the UK rewarded terrorism — according to the terrorists they rewarded — by recognizing Palestinian statehood last fall. It should come as no surprise now these governments complained in a joint statement last week that they “deeply regret” the decision to postpone Palestinian elections.

These liberal governments should take a page from President Trump’s business playbook.

They failed to secure the downside when they recognized Palestinian “statehood.” Now the upside — such as realization of free and fair elections in Palestine — is, rather predictably, not taking care of itself.

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10/20 Links Pt2: France in Flames: How the Red-Green Alliance Is Undermining Western Democracy; The Money Network Behind Mamdani, Tlaib, And El-Sayed; The Hamas apologism of Sarah Helm

From Ian:

France in Flames: How the Red-Green Alliance Is Undermining Western Democracy

The scenes unfolding across France in October 2026 - burned vehicles, looted shops, arson against public buildings, and clashes that left hundreds of police injured - reveals the operational success of the Red-Green Alliance: the tactical convergence of radical leftists and Islamist networks that has weaponized "Palestinianism" - into a moral solvent dissolving Western self-confidence.

Six months before the April 2027 presidential election, polling points toward a probable runoff between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon of the La France Insoumise (LFI) party. LFI and Melenchon have long cultivated proximity to Islamist-linked activists and pro-Palestinian networks while framing criticism of political Islam as "Islamophobia."

Melenchon's public support for the student movement, his criticism of police "maintenance of order" as the true source of chaos, and the presence of Palestinian flags and radical rhetoric within the protests fit a pattern: the Red-Green assault that unites Marxist radicals and Islamists against the liberal democratic West and the Jewish state.

At the heart of this alliance stands Palestinianism - the ideological elevation of the Palestinian cause into the master narrative of a global anti-colonial struggle. Palestinianism functions as the primary vector through which the Red-Green Alliance legitimizes political violence.

Once terrorism is reframed as "resistance," and once the deliberate targeting of civilians is excused, a moral inversion takes hold. Israel is recast as the aggressor; those who butcher civilians are recast as victims or even heroes. This inversion has now boomeranged onto Europe itself.

When successive French governments treated Israel's defensive wars as the primary moral problem in the Middle East while soft-pedaling the genocidal charter of Hamas and the Iranian axis, they helped normalize the idea that Western power is inherently illegitimate.

The 2026 riots are a symptom of a deeper loss of civilizational nerve. The same moral inversion that excuses Oct. 7 as "resistance" now excuses the torching of French town halls and the looting of French shops as expressions of "rage."

Humanities PhD students at US universities more likely to hold antisemitic views than peers

A comprehensive new study published in October reveals that American humanities doctoral students are significantly more likely than other US graduate students to hold anti-Jewish prejudice and hostility toward Israel.

The report, called “Antisemitism and Prejudice Among US Graduate Students,” was conducted by researchers Graham Wright, Shahar Hecht, Daniel Nussbaum, Samantha Shortall, and Leonard Saxe at the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies (CMJS) at Brandeis University, in partnership with the Steinhardt Social Research Institute and polling firm Generation Lab.

The research addressed a major blind spot in post-October 7 campus climate studies, which have focused predominantly on undergraduate students and faculty.

Researchers sought to examine graduate students, who make up majorities at many selective research universities, serve as teaching assistants and instructors, and often play central roles in campus political movements, to understand their views on Jews, Israel, other minority groups, political engagement, and protest tactics.

Generation Lab administered an online survey between March 5 and April 30, collecting responses from 3,107 graduate students across 222 four-year colleges and universities in the US.

The sample encompassed five major degree pathways: PhD students across STEM, social sciences, and humanities, and professional degree students in Master of Social Work (MSW), Master of Education (M.Ed.), Master of Business Administration (MBA), and Juris Doctor (JD) programs.

Distinct subgroups of graduate students harbor explicit hostility
The study’s key findings indicate that across all fields of study, nearly two-thirds of graduate students (62%) express low levels of prejudice toward Jews, Israel, Muslims, Blacks, and Asian Americans. However, the data revealed small, distinct subsets of students who harbor explicit hostility. Using Latent Class Analysis across ten prejudicial statements, researchers identified that 9% of graduate students fit a pattern characterized by hostility to Jews, 11% exhibited hostility to Israel, 12% showed anti-Black resentment, 4% demonstrated anti-Asian and anti-Muslim resentment, and 2% displayed hostility across multiple minority groups.

Humanities PhD students stood out across the data as the most likely to express anti-Jewish prejudice and hostility to Israel. While the majority of humanities doctoral students held low levels of prejudice, 26% fell into the “Hostile to Israel” category, and 12% fell into the “Hostile to Jews” category.

Ahmet Korkaya, Salam School, and American Muslims for Palestine

Man indicted in connection with antisemitic attacks in Michigan now teaches at K–12 school with links to American Muslims for Palestine, a group accused of having ties to Hamas. Ahmet Korkaya was indicted in June for his involvement in threatening U Michigan leaders and vandalizing their homes, as well as for attacking the Detroit Jewish Federation building and a Rolls-Royce building.

He is now teaching and coaching soccer at the Salam School, a private K-12 Muslim school in Milwaukee.

Salam School is operated by the Islamic Society of Milwaukee (ISM).

On October 9, 2023, ISM signed a statement condemning the "one-sided narrative...that posits Israel as a victim" and calling for "an end to US support of Israeli apartheid." The statement blamed Israel for Hamas's October 7 massacre and declared that "resistance to oppression is not terrorism."

ISM Personnel's Ties to American Muslims for Palestine (AMP)
Note: AMP has been accused of operating as a successor to the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which were shut down in the 2000s for fundraising for Hamas. AMP is a major backer of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

Othman Atta serves as Executive Director of both ISM and the Salam School. He wrote to the judge on behalf of Korkaya, acknowledging that Salam School is aware of Korkaya's indictment and requesting that Korkaya's ankle monitor be removed and his curfew be extended.

Atta has reportedly criticized the US’s designation of Hezbollah and Hamas as terror organizations, rejected a two-state solution, and invoked antisemitic tropes. He also has referred to Palestinian terrorism as “resistance” and contextualized the October 7 massacre. Atta has longstanding ties to AMP and has repeatedly spoken at their conferences.

ISM's president is Salah Sarsour, who is a board member of AMP. Sarsour was formerly a fundraiser for HLF. He also allegedly used his furniture store to pass money to the leader of Hamas’s armed wing. Sarsour was arrested by ICE earlier this year and faces deportation on national security grounds.

Sarsour’s attorney, Munjed Ahmad, serves as ISM's treasurer and is a member of AMP’s National Board. He previously served as AMP’s vice chairman and as ISM’s fundraising chair. At a 2014 AMP event, Ahmad called for Israel to be labeled a terrorist organization and justified violent terrorism against Israel.

Rami Bleibel is the imam and resident scholar at ISM’s Brookfield mosque. He previously taught Islamic Studies at Salam School and served as national chapters coordinator for AMP. Bleibel has publicly praised PFLP bomber Rasmea Odeh.

Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah served as ISM’s religious director from 2006 to 2024. Before that, he served as head of the South Asia Division of KindHearts, whose assets were frozen by the US Treasury in 2006 amid allegations of ties to Hamas and HLF. Shah has also reportedly praised jihad and allegedly warned that “If we are unable to stop the Jews now, their next stop is Yathrib” (Yathrib is the ancient pre-Islamic name for Medina, Saudi Arabia).

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