09/11 Links Pt1: What 9/11 taught us about courage, unity and the price of freedom; If 9/11 happened today; Douglas Murray & Dan Senor; 25 Years After 9/11

From Ian:

John Ondrasik: What 9/11 taught us about courage, unity and the price of freedom

Twenty-five years after 9/11, America finds itself in another battle — this one for the soul of our nation and, more broadly, for the future of Western civilization. Remembering 9/11: How educators teach the tragedy 25 years later Video

The threats are not identical to those we faced in 2001. But they are real. Radical Islamism remains a global threat, while antisemitism and anti-American extremism increasingly find expression across the ideological spectrum. Ideas once confined to society’s fringes now travel instantly, and with little consequence, through universities, political movements and social media. The enemy is in the building, and time is not on our side.

That is why "Never Forget" cannot become merely a slogan printed on a bumper sticker or repeated once every September.

It is an obligation. It is our obligation.

We have a duty to teach our children what happened on September 11, 2001: about the evil fanatics who attacked us, why they attacked us, and the carnage of what unchecked extremism can produce.

But "Never Forget" means something more.

It means remembering the best of us.

It means telling our children about the firefighters who climbed stairwells while everyone else was running down. The police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens who ran toward collapsing infernos to save people they had never met. The passengers of Flight 93 who understood what was happening and, knowing the probable cost, fought back.

They represent the best of humanity.

Twenty-five years later, their courage should still challenge and inspire us.

Their sacrifice should remind us that America is not sustained merely by institutions, elections or slogans. It survives because generation after generation chooses to defend the principles that make the country worth defending.

Memory fades. History becomes distant. Tuesdays come and go.

But some Tuesdays must never be forgotten.

May the memory of those we lost — and the example of the heroes of September 11, 2001 — give us the strength, courage and fortitude to fight for America every day, especially Tuesdays, for the next 250 years.

Let’s Roll…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us

I began this essay with Mohamed Atta in a Hamburg apartment, calmly writing instructions for his burial while living inside one of the richest and freest societies in the world. That image matters because it strips away the comforting explanation the West preferred: that beneath the theological language there must always lie a more familiar material grievance waiting to be negotiated, subsidized, or therapeutically addressed.

Twenty-five years later, the more uncomfortable truth is that the West has become much better at finding, capturing, or killing men like Atta, but still hesitates to confront the milieu he emerged from: the institutions, networks, doctrines, funding streams, and civilizational ambitions that shape him long before he appears on a watchlist.

Civilizational resilience is not a vague confidence that democracies always muddle through. It is the hard capacity of a people to see its vulnerabilities clearly, repair them in time, and deny its enemies the use of its virtues as weapons. To do that, it is important for us to acknowledge that our virtues are real, and uniquely our own—so much so that millions of men have fought and died over centuries to make them real and widely shared. We did not fight those battles because all cultures are the same, or all values are equal. Rather, our ancestors, real and imagined, sacrificed on a civilization-wide scale, so that men and women of all races and backgrounds could think and live freely, according to the dictates of one’s own conscience. Those who share our foundational values belong among us; those who deny the primacy of those values have every right to pursue their own versions of happiness elsewhere.

It is high time that our elites understand that the primacy of the West is not an accidental gift of fate, nor was it largely unjust. Injustice is a feature of all societies and cultures. The West is unique because of its regard for the individual conscience and its ability to correct its mistakes. It is frankly insane to demand that the West recognize the right of our enemies to destroy and replace the civilization that we built according to the values of the Reformation and the Enlightenment with the values of other cultures distinguished by centuries of stagnation and decay. No such right of replacement exists in any society or culture.

To deny the radical and positive importance of Western culture to the human inheritance is more than a form of historical and individual blindness; it is a death wish that we can no longer afford to indulge. Tocqueville wrote that the greatness of America lay in her ability to repair her faults, not in being more enlightened than other nations, and that is still the right standard by which to judge the republic at 250. The question now is no longer whether America can kill terrorists faster than they regenerate. A resilient civilization would redesign its protections so that free information, migration rules, and associational liberty function as intended, to shelter citizens rather than adversaries. It would rebuild formative institutions, repair its leadership class, and recover enough constitutional confidence to resist civilizational subversion without abandoning liberty itself. It would also build a wall against people who do not share our culture and indeed actively wish to destroy it.

If America and Europe can still do that, 9/11/2026 will be remembered as the moment they chose survival with clarity. If they cannot, Mohamed Atta’s will and the quarter-century that followed will stand as evidence that a civilization can know its enemies, kill their foot soldiers, send mighty armies halfway around the world, and still fail to save itself.

If 9/11 happened today

Osama bin Laden himself would be reframed with remarkable speed. In 2001 he was correctly understood as the operational and ideological leader of the Islamist global insurgency that declared war on the United States and its allies, celebrating the slaughter of civilians and rooting its programme in a coherent reading of Islamic texts and history. Who knows – his image may even be held high by Australian celebrities or emblazoned on our iconic monuments. Elites, academia, politicians and activist networks would insist on ‘context’. So perhaps bin Laden’s oldest son, Hamza, was right when he said, ‘We are all Osama.’

Osama would be presented as a complex, charismatic figure shaped by Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, American support for the mujahedin, Saudi politics and legitimate grievances against the West. Mainstream politicians would still formally condemn the attacks, yet the surrounding conversation would soften the edges: ‘Bin Laden was wrong, but he had a point.’ Replaying the videos of his statements or the celebrations that followed 9/11 might risk ‘stigmatising’ communities and could see demands by our e-Safety Commissioner for further crackdowns on what we can say and who can say it.

One reason 9/11 today would be turned upside down is a deep strategic failure to understand the enemy. As retired US Marine Corps General Jim Mattis explains in Call Sign Chaos, anyone who has studied history knows that the enemy always moves against your perceived weakness. One of ours is allowing those who hate our way of life to migrate to our country believing eventually they will love us.

One of the least-known yet most strategically influential al-Qaeda figures was Abu Musab al-Suri, who was arrested in 2005 in Pakistan. No other individual did more to transform al-Qaeda’s strategy into a globalised umbrella. He saw how jihad could become mainstreamed into many aspects of Western society – not just physical terrorism, but merged with leftist grievances and victim-based struggles now highly visible in Western cities. Al-Suri recognised the opportunity for mass mobilisation. He saw the Palestinian intifada as the prototype, scaled up to reach the home of the American invaders and their infidel allies from every race and place. Al-Suri was a revolutionary mastermind.

Sadly this revolutionary movement will not be tamed by riding the four horses of weakness: apology, appeasement, acquiescence and acceptance. Nor will it be understood through conventional Western thinking and DEI workshops run by earnest facilitators who fear the consequences of offending others with realism. As explained by Richard Belfield in Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, the 12th-century commander Saladin found when he threatened the Ismaili Assassins that they welcomed violence. Their letter replied: ‘We have read the gist and details of your letter and taken note of its threats against us with words and deeds, and by God it is astonishing to find a fly buzzing in an elephant’s ear and a gnat biting statues. Others before you have said these things and we destroyed them and none could help them…. You know the outward aspect of our affairs and the quality of our men, what they can accomplish in an instant and how they seek the intimacy of death…. Prepare means for disaster… for I will defeat you from within your own ranks and take vengeance against you at your own place and you will be as one who encompasses his own destruction.’ This is just as we see it today.

The eerie and evil manipulation by the Islamist global insurgency is the implied threat of further Bondi-style attacks if we do not accept their demands. Yet if this trajectory continues, future generations will inherit a West that has already conceded the decisive terrain – its own population, its own language and its right to name the enemy.

The price of continued denial is not theoretical. It is the slow, irreversible loss of a commitment, and a diminishing courage to fight for something greater than ourselves that is the bright light of Western civilisation.

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07/19 Links: Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews; US claims PA’s prisoner payments reform a con; Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

From Ian:

Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews

REVIEW: 'The Jews and the Left' by Batya Ungar-Sargon

This book gathers momentum and goes into high gear in its final sections leading up to and including the October 7 "wake-up call" to Jews and through them to the rest of America. Concentrating on the universities, the media, and sectors of the American public that she knows best, Ungar-Sargon shows how the Left's worldview, once based on right versus wrong, was replaced by the ideology of oppressor and oppressed. "That is the source of twenty-first century leftist anti-Semitism." The many strands of anticapitalist, anticolonialist, Orientalist, and other critiques of America come together in common opposition to Jews, now mostly in Israel. As she exposes the ideologies and promoters of the anti-Jewish alliance, the author punctuates her rebuttal with frustrated cries of "totally false" and "They are simply wrong." Having shown why American Jews became Democrats in the first place, and how they were then betrayed by former allies, she invites her fellow Jews to speak out as she has done, "not as Republicans" but as proud Americans.

It is heartening to read this rally against "a uniquely left-wing form of anti-Jewish hate and violence that has all but replaced right-wing antisemitism in America," but Ungar-Sargon's history is flawed and her awakening is late. Here is Commentary critic Robert Warshow writing in 1947 on America in the 1930s, "when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist party. If you were not somewhere within the party's wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition." The Communist Party was by then already in full anti-Zionist mode, Stalin having supported the Mufti's jihad in Mandatory Palestine as the start of the Arab revolution.

Warshow was writing not about the small percentage of Jews in the party but about his entire intellectual cohort. Some of the Jewish Left felt free to support Roosevelt in the late 1930s only because the Soviets had authorized the formation of the Popular Front that encouraged the cooperation with liberals it had previously prohibited. The communist "ideal" penetrated this country much deeper than fascism and for long after the threat of fascism fell away as its excuse for condoning its repressions and failures.

By the late 1960s and early '70s, some of Warshow's liberals were ready to mock their former subservience. In the American Scholar, Lionel Abel, another of the New York intellectuals, described their voluntary submission to Leftist thought control:
One must in no case do anything that might be harmful to the Left. What if the projected action seems a good one? Then one must be all the more careful. One must consider every possible consequence, even the most remote. Many actions that at first might seem beneficent when looked at more closely turned out to involve a possible damage to the Left. What Left? Which Left? Never mind. And do not ask. Indeed there is need not to ask, for the very fact that we don't know what the Left is today means that whatever it be, its situation is precarious.

When Irving Kristol, speaking for that generation, defined the neo-conservative as a liberal who was mugged by reality, that "reality" took the form of the anti-Zionist Left.

This is just to say that there have been earlier important wake-up calls in the American history of Jews and the Left, and the excommunication of "the Right" was used to keep them in line. That Jews among other Americans do not know this history makes it so much sweeter to keep pulling that football out from under them.

Ungar-Sargon's warning comes after the red diaper babies of the 1960s had metastasized into legions of progressives and merged with Islamists, fueled by more overseas funders, hackers, and influencers than the old communists ever dreamed of. Her explanation for the relation of Jews and the Left is partial at best, but her warning may still be timely. She insists that Jews under assault have to lead the way in speaking the truth: "To hate Jews is to hate America. We are an inextricable part of this nation." This is a fight that all Americans must win.

Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

I can only imagine how bizarre it must be for the people of North Herefordshire, who thought they were electing a Green MP to talk about nature reserves and pollution, to hear Ellie Chowns mention Israel and Gaza a combined 50 times and North Herefordshire just 37 times. Astonishingly, she has mentioned Israeli settlements in the West Bank more times than the pollution of the River Wye – a key local issue that she promised to make her top priority if elected.

The frequency with which these MPs have used their platforms in the Commons to pontificate Israel has been dizzying – and their use of parliamentary procedure has been shameless. In just the past few weeks, there has been a backbench business debate on trade with Israeli settlements and a Westminster Hall debate about Israeli influence on British politics.

In the Westminster Hall debate, we had the extraordinary sight of multiple MPs who have been on Qatari-funded trips to Qatar complain about other MPs going on trips to Israel, even though these were funded by British donors to British organisations, such as through Conservative Friends of Israel or Labour Friends of Israel.

To be clear, it is entirely justifiable for parliamentarians to go on state-funded trips, provided they are declared and the MPs go with open eyes. But as John Lamont noted in his brave and powerful contribution to that debate, those MPs were not calling for a review of lobbying regulations or foreign-sponsored trips. They were singling out one country. I will happily leave it to the reader to guess why they were so eager to single out this particular country.

Fortunately, there are many brave MPs who have stood up to all this in parliament. But the fight is extraordinarily one-sided. For even the most ardently pro-Israel MPs, this issue will just be one of many they care about. For some, their motivation for speaking out may be more driven by their principled belief that some balance is needed, rather than from a deeply held, organic desire to talk about Israel. Contrast this with the multiple MPs on the other side, for whom this is what they got into politics for and what gets them out of bed every morning. It’s the same on Britain’s streets. While many view the anti-Israel hate marches with contempt and horror, a small, angry and laser-focussed minority have been able to dominate public discourse.

Needless to say, none of this actually contributes to improving the situation for ordinary Palestinians, or for anyone else in the Middle East. As Hamish Falconer, the Middle East minister, admitted, ‘An inevitable consequence of the actions announced from this despatch box is that the warmth of my relationship with my counterparts in Israel has indeed suffered’. Combined with the UK’s unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, we have thrown away any leverage we had with the Israeli government and much of the influence we had over the Palestinian Authority. And we have done this merely to indulge a mob who do little more than make this a nastier, unfriendlier country for our small Jewish community – and indeed the rest of us.

Report: Israel suspects foul play after third Israir plane damaged at Luton Airport in under a year

Israeli aviation officials suspect foul play in an incident at London Luton Airport last week, when an Israir plane was damaged by the aircraft tug while it was being towed ahead of takeoff, Channel 12 reports.

According to the report, Israel suspects the damage was caused maliciously, with “nationalistic” intent, and is in contact with the relevant authorities in England to determine whether that is indeed the case.

Israir previously said it was the third instance of its planes being damaged at the London airport within less than a year, further increasing suspicion that it was not accidental.

The incident on Thursday evening left approximately 300 people waiting aboard the Israir plane as it sat on the tarmac for several hours.

The passengers had no air conditioning for part of the time, leading to “some medical incidents,” a passenger recounted after.

Israir blamed Luton for the three instances of damage, saying that “to our knowledge, no orderly investigation has been carried out by the airport’s management into these incidents.”

'Favorite Jewish uncle' and the limits of learning from Nazism

Few US Senate primaries this year carry greater implications for the Democratic Party's future than Michigan's August 4 contest. One of the race's leading candidates is Abdul El-Sayed, whose positions and endorsements place him squarely within the antizionist movement.

To many Americans, the fact that El-Sayed has affectionately referred to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as his "favorite Jewish uncle" would seem to settle any suggestion that his antizionism reflects anti-Jewish bigotry. El-Sayed plainly does not dislike Jews categorically. He admires one of the country's most prominent Jewish politicians and embraces him in explicitly Jewish terms.

That apparent exoneration reveals something important about how modern Western societies learned to recognize the villainization of Jews.

Since World War II, Nazism – which targeted all Jews for elimination – has been the West's definitive prototype of anti-Jewish bigotry. Measured against that prototype, an ideology that welcomes and even elevates Jews who share its own views appears disqualified from being anti-Jewish. Sanders's place in El-Sayed's political and personal imagination, therefore, appears to vindicate El-Sayed against any charge of villainizing Jews.

The prototype underlying that conclusion, however, was built on a fundamental mistake: treating anti-Jewish bigotry as inherently premodern.

The West traced a symbolic archive of images and accusations against "the Jew" back to centuries of religious hostility. Yet those origins tell us where the archive developed, not what the phenomenon essentially is.

Religion supplied the historical setting in which that archive accumulated around the Jew as the figure rejecting a supposed redemptive truth, but the Jew's role was portable. Once religious power gave way to modern secular forces, those forces inherited the archive, stripped it of God, and reconstructed it in the languages of race, psychology, and metaphysics.

But the West came to interpret anti-Jewish bigotry differently – as an ancient pathology that modernity had not yet eliminated. It therefore viewed Nazism as that pathology's definitive culmination, rather than as one modern form of anti-Jewish bigotry among others. Instead of remaining vigilant for other distinctly modern forms, the West built its postwar moral architecture around preventing Nazism's return.

After Auschwitz, Western societies rightly became extraordinarily sensitive to fascism, racial hierarchy, and explicit Jew-hatred. But the postwar order did not stop at recognizing Nazism's characteristics as dangerous. It went further and conferred moral authority on their perceived opposites. Anti-racism. Universalism. Internationalism. Nazism's traits became the map of evil, and the inverse of that map became the territory of good.

That framework overlooked a fundamental feature of anti-Jewish bigotry: it has never belonged to a single political ideology. Jews can be blamed for capitalism by one movement and communism by another, for racial inferiority in one context and racial supremacy in another, for refusing assimilation and for dissolving the nation, sometimes by the same accuser in the same decade.

Postwar Western culture trained itself to recognize the villainization of Jews primarily through Nazism's particular characteristics rather than through the role assigned to the Jew. In doing so, it sensitized itself to ideological form rather than symbolic function.

The consequence was that another modern anti-Jewish ideology could assume the shape of anti-Nazism – thereby not only avoiding being identified as anti-Jewish bigotry, but also acquiring moral authority within the postwar order.

That is exactly what antizionism did. Propagated by the Soviet Union and its Arab nationalist allies, antizionism reconstructed Zionism and Israel as enemies of humanity through a set of distinctly modern libels. Drawing on Nazi imagery and Holocaust inversion, it recast Jews as the new Nazis, perpetrators of the very evils – racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide – around whose rejection the postwar moral order was being built.

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06/06 Links: What D-day teaches about Israel, Iran, and unity; Restraining Israel Is Not the Answer; The SPLC’s real scam; Zionism, Jews and the coming inquisition

From Ian:

Coming together again: What D-day teaches about Israel, Iran, and unity

For many, an unanswered question prevails: Why is it that Europe, the United Kingdom, and Canada fail to recognize the similarities between the Germany of World War II and Iran?

There can be little doubt that these countries, by their desire to remain “neutral,” have become party to the projection of a dangerous negativity toward Israel and the Jewish people.

A most disturbing question is why those who came together to confront Hitler fail to see the Iranian leader’s plan to emulate him. It was Hitler’s Germany that barbarically killed six million Jews, and today it is Iran that openly states its desire to eliminate Israel, home to the world’s largest number of Jews.

The ultimate observation is that the Jew was the whipping boy of the past and is the whipping boy of today; the only difference is who holds the whip.

And what of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a political and economic alliance embracing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman, all of which have been attacked by Iran?

While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has compared Iran’s proxy network and regional expansion in the Middle East to Hitler’s pre-World War II annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, neither Saudi Arabia nor the others respond militarily to Iran’s assault on their respective countries.

The coming together of Israel and the US in their fight against Iran – which began on February 28 – epitomized the meaning of togetherness. Yet does it follow that this union has the support of America’s man in the street?

Yaakov Katz’s excellent article in last week’s Magazine highlights the increasing lack of support for Israel from the US public, embracing a high proportion of its younger generation, which will be voting for a new president in just over two years. It is the public that ultimately decides the policy of a country; and, observing which way the wind is blowing in the US, it does not look good for Israel.

The increasing possibility that Israel cannot rely indefinitely on support from the US brings us to the question of how we in Israel – possibly alone – will be successful in confronting those who wish to eliminate us.

Restraining Israel Is Not the Answer

Donald Trump is not known for hewing to convention, but this week he seemed to rerun a standard Beltway drama. During a phone call on Monday, the president called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "crazy" and pressured him to rein in the Israeli offensive in Lebanon. Two days later, the State Department announced it had brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon.

The seeming crackup in the Bibi-Trump bromance thrilled Israel’s critics and perturbed the Jewish state’s supporters. Some hope the close working relationship between Trump and Netanyahu is drawing to a close, others fear the entire bond between Washington and Jerusalem to be severed. Israel’s opponents think Trump’s actions to restrain Bibi show that the Jewish state is a strategic liability. But in reality, frictions like this between the two sides are common because of the value Israel provides the United States.

The most recent shouting has been over how to conclude the conflict with Iran. Israel and the United States severely damaged the Islamic regime’s leadership and war machine during their bombing campaign, but since it has not collapsed, their different priorities have emerged. Trump wants the Gulf Arabs’ oil to reach global markets again and to gain control of Iran’s enriched uranium without a return to major combat. Netanyahu wants Hezbollah to stop attacking northern Israel with drones and other long-range weapons. The mullahs claim the fighting in southern Lebanon, which Hezbollah started, is a serious obstacle to further negotiations about an interim agreement, so Trump is trying to find a workable compromise.

This sort of thing happens at the denouement of nearly every war that Israel has had to fight. The American goal in Middle Eastern conflicts usually is for its allies—including Israel—to successfully defend themselves, and then to reestablish peace in the region as quickly as possible. Threats to globally significant infrastructure, such as the Suez Canal or Persian Gulf oil refineries, make Washington nervous. More often than not, after fending off the initial attack, Jerusalem prefers to crush its opponents on the battlefield and destroy their ability to threaten the Jewish state for years or even decades.

This occurs regardless of how warmly the White House regards Israel. After the pan-Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1948 failed and Israel gained the initiative, Harry Truman halted David Ben-Gurion’s counteroffensive. A decade later during the Suez crisis, Dwight Eisenhower forced Israel and its British and French allies to withdraw from Egypt. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger stopped Israel just short of encircling and annihilating much of the Egyptian Army at the end of the Yom Kippur War. Ronald Reagan forcefully condemned Israel's operations in Lebanon in the 1980s, and George H.W. Bush did everything he could to keep Israel from responding to Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked missile attacks in the first Gulf War.

Both strategies have shown their value at times. Eisenhower thought sparing Gamal Abdel Nasser would win over Third World opinion in the Cold War, but all he did was empower a dictator who cozied up to the Soviet Union and undermined our allies. America would have benefited from a Nasser-less Egypt. Hezbollah rewarded Reagan’s concern for Lebanese civilians by bombing the U.S. embassy and a Marine barracks in Beirut, going on a decades-long spree of international terrorism, repeatedly attacking Israel, and immiserating generations of Lebanese. But if Anwar Sadat had been thoroughly humiliated in 1973 and lost the forces he needed to maintain his grip on power, he could not have spoken in the Knesset in 1977 and then made peace with Israel the next year.

Alan Baker: Can the Oslo Accords model still deliver peace after October 7?

Local realities further complicate any return to the Oslo model. The Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, fundamentally altered Israel’s security assumptions. The belief that territorial compromises, international guarantees, and external monitoring arrangements could provide sufficient security has been severely weakened. For many Israelis, the events of October 7 demonstrated that ultimate responsibility for national security cannot be delegated to international actors.

At the same time, increasing international pressure for immediate Palestinian statehood bypasses the very negotiating framework established by Oslo. The accords envisaged that permanent-status issues would be resolved through direct agreement between the parties. Efforts by foreign governments and international organizations to recognize Palestinian statehood in advance of negotiations effectively prejudge issues that were expressly reserved for negotiation. Such initiatives undermine the contractual foundations of the peace process and further erode confidence in international guarantees.

This dynamic is closely related to the widespread international promotion of the “two-state solution.” While the concept has become a diplomatic slogan, it was never included in the Oslo Accords. The accords intentionally left all final-status arrangements open for negotiation. Whether the eventual outcome would involve two states, a federation, a confederation, or another arrangement was to be determined exclusively by the parties themselves. The transformation of the two-state formula from a possible negotiated outcome into a predetermined international prescription departs from the original logic of the peace process.

Further complicating matters is the absence of a unified and authoritative Palestinian leadership capable of serving as a reliable negotiating partner. At the same time, Israel faces its own internal political and governance challenges, which affect national cohesion and international perceptions of stability.

Against this backdrop, the Abraham Accords offer an alternative and more encouraging model. Announced in 2020, these agreements demonstrated that Arab states and Israel can establish peaceful, productive, and mutually beneficial relations based on shared interests and direct engagement. The accords emphasize coexistence, mutual understanding, cultural exchange, and regional cooperation. Their success suggests that meaningful progress is achievable when parties choose pragmatic cooperation over confrontation.

The central lesson remains unchanged. International forums, judicial bodies, and unilateral recognition initiatives were never intended to replace direct negotiation. Efforts to impose solutions from outside may satisfy short-term political interests, but they cannot create the trust, legitimacy, and mutual acceptance necessary for durable peace.

As long as international actors continue to bypass rather than encourage negotiation, instability is likely to persist. A viable and lasting peace can emerge only from direct engagement between the parties themselves.

Until conditions exist for such negotiations, Israel will continue to rely primarily on its own capabilities to safeguard its security and national interests.

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02/10 Links Pt1: Australia must face up to its anti-Semitism crisis; Hamas’s Boasting Indicts the West; Mamdani and the collapse of ‘liberal Zionism’; What Did You Expect, Starmer?

From Ian:

Hamas’s Boasting Indicts the West

Oct. 7, 2023, displayed something different. Far from hiding its brutality, Hamas advertised it, filming and broadcasting sadistic cruelty. It touted the torture and execution of Israeli women and children as a great moral accomplishment, using the killing as a recruitment tool.

Recall the enthusiastic tone of that young man who called his parents from the phone of an Israeli woman he had just murdered, imploring his mother and father to open up WhatsApp. “Look how many I killed with my own hands. Your son killed Jews!” he told his father. His parents were overjoyed. “My son, God bless you,“ his father said. “I wish I was with you,” his mother added.

Rather than a coverup, this was a media event.

What explains the difference between Hitler and Stalin, who denied their atrocities, and Hamas? Could it be that Hamas knew that many in its Western audience, unlike in Hitler’s and Stalin’s time, would celebrate its crimes as noble resistance? If so, Hamas’s openness indicts our own culture or, at least, its intellectuals.

Within days after Oct. 7, American campuses exploded with anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric. Almost immediately, more than 30 Harvard student groups endorsed Hamas’s actions as justified. University presidents testified that the acceptability of calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people “depends on the context.”

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani argues, however implausibly, that the call to “globalize the intifada” is somehow ambiguous, he is at least paying La Rochefoucauld’s tribute to decency. That wasn’t the case at a rally at the Sydney Opera House held two days after the Oct. 7 massacre, when the crowd burned Israeli flags and chanted “Where are the Jews?” On the first night of Hanukkah in 2025, they were at Bondi Beach.

Today’s mass murderers no longer need to hide their crimes from the West’s educated elites, who applaud them. Terrorist boasting testifies to our own moral decline.

Sir Michael Ellis: Israel Thrives While Its Haters Flounder

The mullahs say they have their "fingers on the trigger" and most regional states are rather nervous. Meanwhile, Israel seems to shake it all off and get on with life. One supposes there is nothing like being attacked multiple times over the decades to build resilience. Despite leading a country only the size of Wales, Prime Minister Netanyahu has pointed out that within a decade, Israel's economy will be worth $1 trillion.

While the Iranian regime has been busy murdering protestors by the thousands, haters of Israel prefer to focus their efforts on trying to introduce a boycott of Israeli avocados. At the same time, the Government under Sir Keir Starmer has indefinitely paused a UK trade deal with Israel, thereby doing itself out of business with one of the world's leading high-tech innovators.

Egypt and Israel have recently signed the biggest natural gas deal in Israel's history, worth $35 billion. The Israeli Leviathan gas field will soon supply a substantial proportion of Egypt's energy needs. The UAE has signed a defense contract with Israel worth $2.3 billion for a new, highly sophisticated defense system to protect its civilian and military aircraft. This follows the German parliament approving a $3.5 billion expansion of the Arrow 3 deal with Israel. In total, the deal was valued at $8 billion.

Israel's military, diplomatic, economic and tech strength is extraordinary. But the nation's true strength rests on the happiness, positivity and industry of its people in the face of those who hate them. Israel is one of the world's players. The future bodes well for them. For the haters - not so much.

Australia must face up to its anti-Semitism crisis

This would be a betrayal of Jewish Australians, who this week were reminded once again what a radically different place their country has become to the one in which their parents and grandparents once sought refuge. On Monday, Israeli president Isaac Herzog arrived in Australia for a four-day visit, having been invited over following the Bondi massacre. He was met with enormous counter-protests. Signs were waved depicting Herzog and New South Wales premier Chris Minns – who, with his public displays of solidarity with Jewish Australians, has been an admirable outlier in the Labor Party – as Nazis. Speaking at the Sydney Town Hall, Grace Tame – an activist and former ‘Australian of the Year’ – said Herzog had ‘signed bombs sent to kill innocent civilians’. Nine protesters have been charged for various violent offences, including one man who is alleged to have bitten an officer.

Australia is now a nation that refuses to tolerate the presence of a leader of the world’s only Jewish state, yet at the same time, publicly mourns the death of Hezbollah chief Ismail Haniyeh – a man who dedicated much of his life to killing Jews. To say Australia has a problem with anti-Semitism would be an understatement. This is a full-blown crisis. The protests offered further proof, if any more were needed, of just how necessary it is to hold a royal commission into anti-Semitism.

McCarthy’s call for the commission to also focus on anti-indigenous hatred was not just a blow for Jewish Australians. Many Australians, regardless of background, would also have found her demands curious. There are, of course, small and odious pockets of Australian society where you’ll find racist attitudes towards indigenous Australians. Yet there is no shortage of attention directed at this form of racism, as any recent visitor to Australia could testify.

Great strides have been made towards indigenous advancement. Every public event begins with a Welcome to Country ceremony. More than half of Australia has been returned to indigenous Australians through native title agreements. As McCarthy’s own ministerial title testifies, there are entire government departments dedicated to ‘closing the gap’ between the living standards of indigenous Australians and white Australians. The wrongs visited on indigenous people, from settler violence to the forced integration of the Stolen Generation, were indisputably terrible. But Australia’s recent attempts to atone for them can hardly be faulted.

The royal commission must explore one issue – and one issue only. It must be laser-focussed on the explosion of anti-Semitism in Australia since 7 October 2023. This horrific development has already cost lives. It is the very least Australia’s Jewish community deserves.

Of course, a royal commission won’t bring back Alexander Kleytman, the Holocaust survivor shot multiple times trying to protect his wife on Bondi beach. It won’t bring back 10-year-old Matilda, the youngest victim of that dreadful pogrom. But it might help to prevent a similar evil from happening again. Albanese and the Australian Labor Party must be given no opportunity to worm their way out of it.

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09/09 Links Pt2: If ‘Palestine’ is born in blood, the world will reap the whirlwind; Tunisia denies Gaza flotilla claims of ‘drone attack’; Memorial for 68 IDF soldiers who fell in 2014 Gaza war

From Ian:

Dalia Ziada: If ‘Palestine’ is born in blood, the world will reap the whirlwind

Every day seems to bring a new, deluded world leader pushing a flawed framework on the Middle East, a region they do not understand. These leaders endorse recognition of a Palestinian state without any peace negotiations with Israel, which is effectively a reward for Hamas carrying out the atrocities of Oct. 7.

Countries worldwide, even unexpected ones like Japan, Canada and Australia, continue to say they may conditionally recognize such a state in the near future. But do they realize what they are endorsing?

Recently, Germany reversed its pledge to recognize a Palestinian state in the immediate future, as it came to realize what a dangerous precedent was being enacted.

Almost two years ago, I was forced to flee my homeland of Egypt at the hands of the radical Islamists, the same chauvinist fanatics who once vowed to “sabotage Western civilization from within.” As a liberal Muslim scholar of the Middle East, who cherishes the values of classical liberal democracy, and who owes the United States my education, my professional growth, and, most recently, my very life, I feel an obligation to sound the alarm against the Muslim Brotherhood and its most dangerous offshoot: Hamas.

Hamas, the Palestinian faction of the Muslim Brotherhood—designated by the U.S. as a Foreign Terrorist Organization—has run Gaza with an iron fist after it violently seized control from the rival Fatah party in June 2007 following a series of armed clashes. It was the mastermind behind and key perpetrator of the barbaric Oct. 7 massacre in Israel in 2023.

Hamas leaders purposefully exposed innocent civilians in Gaza to war so they could use their blood to gain legitimacy for their acts of terrorism, as well as win the sympathy and approval of the international community.

These facts are crucial to recall as several world leaders, under the deception of the Gaza war narrative cleverly crafted by Hamas’s propaganda machine in Qatar, seek to reward terrorism with the premature recognition of a Palestinian state.

Such a move will not bring the peace we all wish for. It will only serve to entrench Hamas, empower the Islamic Republic of Iran, deepen the region’s most chronic geopolitical conflicts and strip the Palestinians of the only real hope they deserve: a future free from Hamas’s tyranny.

Born in blood, this offer will give rise to more blood. The particular rotten proposal being offered would end the prospects for any final settlement short of violence because it essentially demands that Israel sign its own death warrant.

Western nations push for ‘Palestine’ at UN, Israeli experts urge strong response

A coalition of countries led by France—including the United Kingdom, Canada, Belgium, Australia and Portugal—are preparing to formally recognize a Palestinian state at the 80th United Nations General Assembly (Sept. 9–23) in New York.

Israeli legal experts warn the move will intensify political tensions surrounding the already fraught Israel-Palestinian conflict. They recommend Israel act decisively, urging it to make clear to its allies that any attempt to impose “foreign diktats” will come at a price.

Arsen Ostrovsky, a leading human rights attorney, CEO of the International Legal Forum and senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security, and Anne Herzberg, legal adviser at NGO Monitor, spoke with JNS about the implications of the planned recognitions.

Both agreed that Israel cannot afford to remain passive in the face of what they view as unilateral and destructive moves.

“Israel must make clear to other countries, as they have already, that they will not sit idly by in the face of unilateral recognitions of a Palestinian state,” said Ostrovsky, noting that Israel did well to reject French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent request to visit Israel, and to revoke visas for Australian representatives in Ramallah.

“These countries cannot expect it to be ‘business as usual’ as long as they conduct such actions,” Ostrovsky told JNS, adding that the Palestinian Authority, “which has been spearheading these initiatives,” must also be the subject of “punitive measures.”

He suggested holding its tax revenue and ceasing security collaboration. “You will also likely see some elements of the Israeli government calling for application of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria as a response,” he said.

J Street declares war on Israel

J Street’s portrayal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as “messianic extremists” is not just inflammatory—it’s anti-democratic. Israel is a vibrant democracy, and its citizens choose its leaders. To vilify an elected government and call for punitive measures against it is to reject the legitimacy of Israeli democracy itself.

J Street’s rhetoric drives a wedge between American Jews and Israelis, sowing division at a time when unity is most needed. Ben-Ami’s organization seeks to rip apart the longstanding bipartisan support for Israel in Congress and shepherd the Democratic Party into the anti-Israel radical camp.

J Street claims to be guided by Jewish ethics, invoking the principle “do not treat others as we would not want to be treated ourselves.” Yet it fails to apply this principle to Hamas, a terrorist organization that targets civilians, uses human shields, and openly calls for Israel’s destruction. By focusing its ire almost exclusively on Israel, J Street creates a false moral equivalence between a democratic state defending itself and a terrorist regime bent on annihilation.

J Street’s vision of peace—one that hinges on pressuring Israel into concessions while ignoring Palestinian murder, incitement, corruption, and rejectionism—is a fantasy, one rejected by Israel’s citizens. Real peace requires mutual recognition, security guarantees, and an end to terrorism. By calling for restrictions on Israel’s ability to defend itself, J Street empowers those who seek to destroy it. That is not peace advocacy; it is sabotage.

Ben-Ami may claim J Street supports Israel, but its actions tell a different story. By lobbying to cut off military aid, demonizing Israel’s leadership, and promoting a one-sided narrative, it has positioned itself not as a partner for peace but as an adversary. In doing so, J Street has declared war—not on violence or extremism, but on Israel itself.

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Letter of Infamy: When Rabbis Parrot the Settler Violence Lie (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Last week I addressed the accusation of “famine” in Gaza in a letter (HERE) signed by more than 80 Open Orthodox rabbis. This week, I want to look at the second charge in that same letter: so-called “settler violence.” 

To hear the rabbis tell it, extremist settlers are raining down bloody hell on “Palestinians.” But that is exactly false. Which suggests that the signatories have not at all done their due diligence before affixing their names to what stands as a very public condemnation of Israel at a time of extreme peril for the Jewish people.

If they had done the bare minimum research before signing their John Hancocks to that statement accusing Israel of not doing enough to combat “settler violence,” they would have discovered that only four months earlier, in April 2025, Israeli NGO Regavim had released a detailed report on this very subject, “False Flags and Real Agendas, The Making of a Modern Blood Libel: The ‘Settler Violence’ Narrative as a Weapon in the Battle to Delegitimize the Jewish Presence in Judea and Samaria and the State of Israel”

Regavim, which monitors land use and policy in Judea and Samaria, examined the UN database that is perpetually cited as proof of “settler violence.” What they found was that the numbers collapse under scrutiny, reduced to dust.

“The UN incident list we obtained distinguishes between 2,047 incidents of violence against Israelis and 6,285 incidents defined as violence against Palestinians… once one delves into the list of incidents, the clear conclusion is that the vast majority do not describe violence related to settlers, and certainly do not describe violence initiated by settlers against Palestinians. Among the 6,285 incidents… 1,361 were simply Jewish ascents to the Temple Mount, every one counted as ‘settler violence.’ Another 1,613 were general complaints, such as ‘entry onto land’ during tours or hikes, which do not involve assault or harm. Ninety-six involved legal infrastructure projects carried out by the State of Israel.”

This is the extent of the UN’s “evidence” of settler violence. Temple Mount visits. Land surveys. Legal infrastructure. In other words: ordinary life contorted into charges of violence. And when those distortions are stripped away, we are left with a big pile of nothing.

“After subtracting these cases, only 833 incidents remain, which the UN classified as settler violence against Palestinians in the Judea and Samaria, allegedly resulting in bodily harm and in some cases also property damage. This constitutes only ten percent of the original list, which sought to reflect alarming levels of severe violence by settlers against Palestinians in the Judea and Samaria. Not only did this review cut 90% of the events, undermining the foundation of the UN’s arguments and their consequences, but the remaining cases suffer not only from lack of credibility but also from a disgusting level of false accusation against the real victims.”

Ten percent. That’s all that survived the first cut. Yet these reports, too, are riddled with distortions. Almost half of the reported cases were clashes with both sides involved. Of the rest, some cases of "settler violence" were attributed to Israeli security forces, while others were Arab terror attacks against Jews—recast as ‘settler violence.' Blood libels dressed up as data.

As Regavim concludes:

“…examination of these cases revealed that in many of them, it is not settler violence of one kind or another, but rather the opposite: these are terror attacks by Arabs against settlers that ended with the injury or elimination of the attacker.”

Had the rabbis taken five minutes to investigate, they would have found this information—current, comprehensive, and devastating to their claim. Instead, they affixed their names to a letter built on entries in a database programmed to tell lies. Even the name of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik is invoked, as if to give the letter's distortions a veneer of authority. But the Rav, as he is known to those who revere him, would never have put his name on something so harmful to the Jewish people.

Which brings us to the names of the rabbis, themselves.

As my friend Julie P. on seeing the list of names helpfully pointed out, "Not one is Sephardi or Mizrachi."

Look down the list of 80 signatories. It’s tragic really. You’ll see Schudrich, Greenberg, Yanklowitz, Dolinger, Chernick, Feigelson, Schlesinger—names that could have come straight from an early, 20th century Lower East Side synagogue membership roster.

 

With one half-exception—a single hyphenated surname suggesting a mixed background—the entire coalition is Ashkenazi.

And this is telling. Sephardim, even those who are not religious in practice, are deeply respectful of rabbinic authority and tradition. Watching how they comport themselves in the presence of a sage is instructive. I have seen secular Sephardi women cover their arms and heads with a shawl when a rabbi entered the room. Nobody asked them to. They simply revere the rabbis who have guided their people according to the same traditions for generations. Perhaps it is that steadfastness that inoculates Sephardim against the hubris of lecturing Israel on “moral clarity” while parroting Hamas propaganda without looking deeper at the actual facts.

List of signatories

Rabbi Yosef Blau

Rabbi David Bigman

Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich

Chief Rabbi Michael Melchior

Chief Rabbi Jair Melchior

Rabbi Joav Melchior

Chief Rabbi David Rosen (former CR)

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz

Rabbi Dr. Yitz Greenberg

Rabbi Hyim Shafner

Rabbi Daniel Landes

Rabbi Herzl Hefter

Rabbi Shua Mermelstein

Rabbi Yoni Zolty

Rabbanit Mindy Schwartz Zolty

Rabbi Frederick L Klein

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky

Rabbi Michael Whitman

Rabbi Dr. Jeremiah Unterman

Rabbi Barry Dolinger

Rabbi David Silber

Rabbi Yonatan Neril

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz

Rabbi Isaac Landes

Rabbi David Polsky

Rabbi Baruch Plotkin

Rabbi Mikey Stein

Rabbi Elliot Kaplowitz

Rabbi Ariel Goldberg

Rabbi Ben Birkeland

Rabbi Ralph Genende

Rabbi David Glicksman

Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman

Rabbi Dr. Martin Lockshin

Rabbi Dr. Pinchas Giller

Rabbi Avidan Freedman

Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein

Rabbi Dr. Shalom Schlagman

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Ross Goodman

Rabbi Aaron Levy

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller

Rabbi Dr. Mel Gottlieb

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Feigelson

Rabbi Jonah Winer

Rabbi Dr. Michael Chernick

Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn

Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger

Rabbi Elhanan Miller

Rabbi Joel Hecker

Rabbi Michael Gordan

R. Sofia Freudenstein

Rabbi David Levin-Kruss

Rabbanit Myriam Ackermann-Sommer

Rabba Ramie Smith

R. Shayna Abramson

Rabbi Zachary Truboff

Rabbi David A. Schwartz

Rabbi David Jaffe

Rabbi Steve Greenberg

Rabbi Gabriel Kretzmer Seed

Rabbanit Rachel Keren

Rabbi Benyamin Vineburg

Rabba Dr. Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz

Rabbanit Leah Sarna

Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zierler

Rabbanit Sarah Segal-Katz

Rabbi Shimon Brand

Rabba Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez

R. Emily Goldberg Winer

R. Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Rabba Adina Roth

R. Dr. Meesh Hammer-Kossoy

Rabbi Drew Kaplan

Rabbi Dina Najman

Rabbi Emile Ackermann

Rabbi Daniel Geretz

Rabbanit Sarah Segal-Katz

Rabbanit Tali Schaum Broder

Rabbi Max Davis

Rabbi Tyson Herberger

Rabba Aliza Libman Baronofsky

At first, I wondered whether one surname on the list—Neril—might break the pattern. I had never heard that one before and thought perhaps it was Sephardi. But no. Rabbi Yonatan Neril is Ashkenazi, and best known for founding the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, an organization that promotes environmental action across faith communities. His presence on the list highlights the broader orientation of many of the signatories toward progressive and ecumenical causes, rather than toward Israel’s defense in its hour of need.

 
The rabbis who signed this letter of betrayal may have meant no harm to their own, but intentions matter little here; the effect is the same. That letter was like piling logs onto a raging fire—then dousing it with gasoline. 

History will not remember the rabbis' statement kindly. At best, the signatories will be judged naïve or misguided. Sad, but with tragic consequences for the Jewish people and in particular for Israel’s hostages and soldiers. The rabbis' missive jeopardizes Israel’s ability to free the hostages by emboldening the enemy, who now see that even Jewish clergy can be turned into weapons against the Jewish state.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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08/19 Links Pt2: Soviet twins: Anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism; Subliminal Blood Libels: The Hamas Campaign to Destroy Christian Zionism; ‘The Green Prince’ and the truth about Hamas

From Ian:

Soviet twins: Anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism

Modern anti-Judaism and anti-Israelism are twins. The womb from which they awakened to life was Soviet, which soon denied Jewish and Israeli individuals and groups even the smallest merit and strength of their reasons. Even today, Soviet-inspired political societies do not value an Israeli winner or a traditional Jew with a synagogue, culture, science, business and so forth. They are silenced; when they cannot be, lies are fabricated about everything they do. The focus falls on an alleged standard of living. The flag of privilege and injustice toward others is held aloft. Which others? Everyone.

Unquestionably, each nation-state can choose its elites and philosophies through its internal struggles, as a rule made up of betrayals and not of love for the people. But with such a reddish light, Israel makes no sense and nor do the Jews. There is no other example in history of a people returning home after two millennia, much less when this had long been predicted by their prophets. In that sand, where a few decades ago poor people rode on camels, there is now a scientific power that drinks from the sea, thrives in agriculture and exports food, medicine, security and technology.

Surrounded by enemies since its foundation, trampled by noisy majorities on the stages of supranational political organizations, the permanent target of delegitimization, dehumanization and application of double standards, condemned by celebrities and boycotted in all forms, this small nation without natural resources continues on its way without fearing anything or anyone. Many empires have disappeared before their eyes; Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans and all those that history has recorded up to the Nazis and the Soviets.

This is something that does not make sense, according to materialistic philosophies. Perhaps there is a people with an existence that makes sense. Influence, settlements and bellicism cannot explain everything. Israel and the individual and collective Jew should have disappeared if only matter counted. But no. The Jew exists, lives, suffers, dies and rises, sustained in tradition and bringing their dead back to life—in memory, in identity, in strength, in prosperity and courage.

The same is true of Israeli Jews. If the current logic prevailed, the nation would not be as strong as it is—nor would it be able to blow up enemy missiles in midair, monitor in real time the security of the Jewish Diaspora, create the most unbelievable devices or seek out Nazis thousands of miles away to bring them to justice. It does all this, and is still evaluating producing legislation with extraterritorial application to combat global antisemitism, which is practiced freely, and often in the most blatant way by the elites themselves.

The main cause of the Jewish and Israeli question was always spiritual. The very symbolism of the State of Israel reveals the shield of David’s kingship and the candelabra that once stood in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. The materialist may think well and write better, but his bases are all wrong. He dreams of the boulders in space and attributes no logic or meaning to them. The materialist denies the rationality that surrounds the universe, its meaning and its destiny. Everything is reduced to weak assumptions about energy, history, ego, power and justice. This is the creeping intelligentsia in which we live. This is the moral compass that tries to define reality in its own way. This is the amorphous mass that meditates on national interest in multiple countries. At no time does divinity cease to be a myth, and Jewish success escapes indifference.

The Kabbalistic sap of the Hebrew alphabet leaves bold marks in all civilizations. Emet, the Hebrew word for “truth,” stands upright, since it is written with two-legged Hebrew letters, and it is enough to exist. Sheker, the Hebrew word for “lie,” loses its balance because it is composed of letters with only one leg and requires constant balance and maintenance, obsessive insistence, theatricality, unfolding in the emotion of hatred; and matará, the word “intention,” reveals how and to whom the last fruit will be served.

Other societies come and go, but the Jews remain with Israel as their homeland.

How popular culture erases the Jews from the Holocaust

Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas combines Keneally’s and Styron’s elisions – non-Jewish rescuer, non-Jewish victim – to invent a non-Jewish rescuer and victim in the form of one child: Bruno, the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. It is a novel of stunning omission.

Boyne writes about two nine-year-old boys, German Bruno and Jewish Shmuel. At Auschwitz, Bruno meets Shmuel, the most un-Jewish Jewish child in fiction, and a prisoner. They realise they have the same birthday: “We’re like twins,” says Bruno. Shmuel agrees: “A little bit.” Boyne’s conceit is this: their fates might have been reversed. The German child could have been the victim; perhaps the Jew could have been the perpetrator. (When I am cynical, I wonder if this is a cautionary tale about being friends with a Jew. When I am yet more cynical, I wonder if Shmuel planned the whole thing.) In any case, they are the same boy. Bruno climbs under the fence to help Shmuel find his (presumably dead) father, puts on a pair of striped pyjamas, and is gassed to death with Shmuel.

The reader accepts Shmuel’s fate: he is already dead. (Another Jewish inmate mirrors this: when Bruno asks how long he has lived in Auschwitz, he says, “I think I’ve always been here.” He is one of Spielberg’s fated dead.) But we cannot accept Bruno’s death, because Boyne has used his skill to make us love him. You feel grief for him, because his fate is awry: he is not meant to be dead.

Shmuel is alive to nothing. He feels no anger, just placidity, and the reader feels no sadness, or guilt. Speech itself has been removed from Shmuel: his description of living in Auschwitz is: “It’s not very nice.” When Bruno causes him to be beaten, he says, “It’s alright, I don’t feel it anymore, I don’t feel anything anymore.” Bruno thinks the name Shmuel “sounds like the wind blowing”. I gagged at this: dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

The novel – and the story of popular Shoah culture - can be told in one scene. “I came home one day,” Shmuel says, “and Mama said we couldn’t live in our house anymore.” “That happened to me too!” shouts Bruno.

The more contemporary novels treat Auschwitz as a painted curtain, or Oz. Little Dorothy could always go home, she just didn’t know it. They are mindless.

John Donoghue’s The Death’s Head Chess Club (2015) has a Jewish chess player in Auschwitz play for his life. At the end, he says Kaddish for the SS because – well, they suffered too. Sophie’s Choice, the film The Zone of Interest (2023), and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas all discuss the anguish of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. It wasn’t easy being in Auschwitz in 1942 – for anyone! Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) should have been a musical comedy. “I’m just a number,” the tattooist’s lover tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” It is also, entirely accidentally, funny. At one point someone says: “Where is everybody?” Well, quite. Morris wonders why a Sonderkommando elects to live: “He too has chosen to stay alive for as long as he can, by performing an act of defilement on people of his own faith.” As in – one less life?

Ellie Midwood’s The Girl in the Striped Dress (2021) is “mostly based on a true story”: how the Slovakian Jew Helena Citrónová was beloved by the Waffen-SS soldier, Franz Wunsch, who protected her. In the novel the leading villain is a Jewish Sonderkommando, and Midwood has Helena marry Franz. In reality, Helena refused to speak to him after the war, moved to Israel, and married an IDF soldier.

This is only a small part of it, of course: it is an overwhelming glut, and it mirrors Primo Levi’s dream in Auschwitz, “varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they [survivors] had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to”.

The dreams were true. The glut exists because it is easy: in the end I think people are just too afraid to hear the truth. But you cannot love Jews if you refuse to understand what happened to them, and why; if you write myths around them and call it art. Still, it is what happened. We are everywhere and nowhere; we are fictional and real.

This is an extract from Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust, Tanya Gold’s essay for the Jewish Quarterly, out August 22.

Subliminal Blood Libels: The Hamas Campaign to Destroy Christian Zionism

Since Israel’s latest war began, Hamas and the global forces of anti-Semitism have engaged in a three-pronged propaganda campaign to cripple the Jews and Israel: (1) fool gullible leftists into supporting the victims of “genocide”; (2) rally Muslims throughout the West to terrorize Jews while pressuring supine governments; and (3) encourage Christians to withdraw their support for Zionism.

While many secularists have long ago discarded any sympathy for Jews or Israel—partly thanks to disinformation from the KGB in the last century and from the legacy media today—Hamas’s propagandists and their allies at The New York Times are well aware that the last major bastion of Western philo-Semitism is Christian Zionism. Therefore, they have embarked on a campaign to convince Christians that the Jews are the aggressors—even the persecutors of Christians themselves—in the cause of breaking the Christian-Jewish alliance.

In order to accomplish this rupture, Hamas propagandists and their mainstream media messengers have weaponized historical Christian prejudices, iconographic motifs, and sensitivities, some nearly 2,000-years-old. With many Western Christians on high alert against leftist assaults on their faith, especially since 2020, there has never been a more opportune time for Hamas-affiliated anti-Semites to plant seeds of doubt about Christian sympathy for Jews. And the enemies of Jews and Israel have had decades of practice, and success, on which to bank.

Pallywood
Nearly 25 years ago, arguably the most famous child on the planet was Muhammad al-Durah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy reportedly shot to death by a hail of Israeli bullets in a cross-street gun battle on September 30, 2000. The riveting video, narrated by Charles Enderlin of France2, depicted a firefight near Netzarim Junction in Gaza, culminating in the child’s death, huddled behind his father Jamal. “Here Jamal and his son Muhammad are targets of gunfire from the Israeli position,” narrated Enderlin. “Muhammad is dead, and his father grievously wounded.”

The result was a rabid, international wildfire of anti-Semitism, producing some of the first riots in which “Death to the Jews!” could be heard shouted in the streets of post-war Europe—all with Muhammad al-Durah as their sacrilegious saint. Only 12 days after the incident, two Israeli reservists who had accidentally wandered into Ramallah were brutally lynched and ripped into pieces to chants of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!” Usamah bin Laden even produced a recruiting video calling Muslims worldwide to jihad on behalf of the boy who “died at the hands of the Jews.” The infamous (staged) image of Muhammad al-Durah. (Talal Abu Rahma / France2 via Al Jazeera)

Only later was it revealed that the video of Muhammad and his father, indeed much of the footage shot that day, was fake. Meticulous analysis of the raw tapes showed instance after instance of men spontaneously falling down “wounded” and then being hurled into waiting ambulances; likely uninjured youths dripping in fake blood; nonchalant bystanders watching the action—even a “dead” man lying in the gutter talking on his cellphone—just yards from where Muhammad was “killed.”

Historian Richard Landes, then a professor of medieval history at Boston University, coined the term “Pallywood” as a result of his groundbreaking investigations. His 2005 short film Muhammad al-Durah: Birth of an Icon makes clear what was again confirmed years later in a French court: that the tape not included in the France2 broadcast was indeed staged and showed a living child pretending to be dead. Landes later called the contrived image “the first blood(less) libel of the 21st century.”

“Israel is losing me”
The al-Durah hoax was probably the most successful single piece of international war-time disinformation in history; but, outside the Muslim world and its immigrant enclaves abroad, especially in Europe, it mostly evoked anti-Jewish hatred from Western socialists keen on erasing generational shame over the Holocaust by replacing the Nazis with the Jews. It did not engender comparable Christian fury, and American Christian Zionism largely held steady throughout the first decade of the new century.

This war, however—the longest in Israel’s history, and with Arab Christian communities constantly in danger from Hamas using them as human shields during Israeli incursions—has proven different. On multiple occasions, Hamas operating in areas of Gaza containing churches has resulted in structural damage and the accidental deaths of Christian bystanders, beckoning medieval blood libel archetypes back into the open.

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07/24 Links Pt2: Holocaust Miseducation and the Nakba Narrative; Trump’s Columbia Deal; 50 well-behaved Jewish kids were kicked off a flight by a bigoted pilot

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Holocaust Miseducation and the Nakba Narrative

Yet the word “Jews” is noticeably absent from the NEA’s bullet point. This is deliberate: the NEA’s members don’t want to secretly slip Holocaust revisionism into lesson plans and quietly appropriate Jewish suffering for their own demented political purposes. They want their intentions to be made clear and public from the start. This is a fight they want to have, because it will force wavering members to announce and to demonstrate their loyalty to the union’s mission of miseducating America’s children.

And why might that be? Why would the NEA “want” the Holocaust for themselves, so to speak?

Well, under the heading “New Business Referred to the Board” we have a couple items that might answer that question.

One of these items is called “Palestine Nakba Education.” The guide claims that “[e]ducating about the Nakba is essential for understanding the Palestinian diaspora narrative and experience, including the ongoing trauma of our Palestinian American students today,” however, the NEA clearly wants to go all-in on the revisionism:

“The Nakba, meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, refers to the forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel.”

In fact, the Nakba was coined by Arab intellectuals to refer to the failure of the combined Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish state. In other words, Nakba literally is the mourning of a failed ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people three years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

Additionally, 750,000 Arabs in Palestine were not victims of “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.” Many of those who fled were forced to do so at gun point, no doubt. But many fled because the Arab leaders told them to get out of the way while the Jews were routed, and many others fled because of debunked stories of Zionist atrocities that were spread by Arab leaders in an attempt to rile up the Arab street but which often had the opposite effect.

No doubt those displaced experienced a catastrophe, and usually that catastrophe was at the hands of others. The catastrophe was real, but it wasn’t what “Nakba” was coined to describe, and it isn’t what is described by the NEA either.

Finally, the handbook has an item explaining that “NEA will use existing digital communication tools to educate members about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”

Such a program will no doubt go well with the Holocaust revisionism and delegitimizing of Israel planned by the NEA.

“Teaching anti-Semitism” used to be a phrase one used to refer to teaching about anti-Semitism. The NEA clearly means it to be taken literally.

What the Prime Minister should be saying on anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is being normalised in the UK. Stamping it out requires leadership at the highest level. This is the speech to the nation Prime Minister Keir Starmer should deliver:

I speak to you today on a matter I now consider to be a national emergency.

It is said that the greatest test of a democracy is not the experience of the majority but the way in which it protects the rights and wellbeing of the minority.

In the UK today, there are under 300,000 Jews. Jewish people make up just 0.5 per cent of our population. They are a tiny group who contribute a great deal to public life and communities across the nation.

I must tell you today that Britain is failing its Jewish community.

I also tell you that I am drawing a line in the sand. The Jew-hate we are seeing in our country must end now – and as the Prime Minister I am personally going to lead the fight against anti-Semitism.

For those who would like to pretend that racial hatred of Jews is not a very serious problem in our society today, let me put you straight.

We are seeing it on the streets of Britain on a weekly basis. Just last weekend, large numbers of protestors in London chanted “F--- your Jewish State”. Note the language here. Not opposition to the war Israel is fighting but a direct attack on Jews. An open display of racism.

The war between Israel and Hamas has divided opinion. I know that. But it should never be an excuse for the Jew-hate that is creeping its way into the fabric of our society and our national institutions.

Take schools. More than half of Jewish teachers have reported anti-Semitic abuse since the war in Gaza began. They are finding swastika graffiti in the classroom and facing chants of “F--- the Jews”. Some teachers are even fearful of disclosing their religion at work. This is entirely unacceptable. It should shame us all.

Then there’s the NHS. Jewish patients have been abused and left in fear, Jewish doctors and nurses have faced discrimination. In one case a nurse was confronted with the anti-Semitic trope of Jews “drinking blood”. It is hard to believe this is happening in our caring professions. Institutional blindness to anti-Semitism must end now.

The question we must all ask ourselves is: how do we stop this hate in its tracks? It requires leadership, courage and conviction and I am prepared to show it.

‘The shock is gone’: All too used to antisemitism, Parisian Jews weather post-Oct. 7 storm with aplomb

Walking through the bustling cobblestone streets of Le Marais, the historic heart of Jewish Paris, it’s easy not to think about antisemitism.

Once the center of Jewish life in the capital of France, Rue des Rosiers still pulses with trendy kosher and kosher-style restaurants, Judaica shops, and Hebrew signs. On a Friday afternoon in July, hordes of visitors buy challah for Shabbat and eat falafel on the street, chatting in French, Hebrew, English, and countless other tongues.

“People walk around freely in their kippot here,” a local Jew, Levi, mentioned in passing. “Parisian Jews don’t live in fear.”

Others would differ on that point.

Antisemitism in the city of more than 300,000 Jews — the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Europe — has reached historic highs in recent years, particularly since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking the ongoing war in Gaza.

That year, the number of antisemitic incidents around the country quadrupled to 1,676, according to the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), the representative organization of French Jewish groups. In 2024, that number dropped by six percent to 1,570, but remains alarmingly high.

Those figures don’t include countless cases that went unreported, particularly within the educational system, CRIF has noted.

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05/21 Links Pt1: Israel is still the world’s scapegoat; How the UN Invented a Blood Libel — and the Media Ran With It; Kneecap charged with terrorism over Hezbollah flag

From Ian:

Israel is still the world’s scapegoat

So why has Israel been singled out by the ICC and the ICJ, as it battles to cripple the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza? For starters, Israel is seen as an easy target for these international bodies – a kind of ‘low-hanging fruit’. This is largely because Western opinion has already cast it in the role of the villain in its conflict with Hamas. In the broader international arena, Israel is seen as the archetypal wrongdoer.

Of course, the reality is very different. Israel is the only democracy in the turbulent Middle East. It is also the only Jewish state in the world. It is currently engaged in a war against an anti-Semitic enemy that wishes to wipe it off the map. Israel is not a ‘colonial’ or genocidal oppressor, as is so often claimed, but a country marked by its own tragic history of invasion, violence and suffering. Yet with few sympathisers left on the world stage, Israel ends up being the convenient focal point for global indignation.

That is not the end of the story. The ICC’s aggressive stance against Israel is also a sign of deeper troubles among international institutions. In the era following the Second World War, a network of progressive lawyers, non-governmental organisations and activists – often working through the UN – set out to champion universal rules of warfare. Their goal was to dismantle the traditional notion of state sovereignty in favour of global accountability. However, that postwar consensus is now unravelling. Even the US, once a pillar of that world order, has resorted to sanctioning the ICC, claiming it plays favourites against both the US and Israel.

In fact, from the beginning, the ICC has struggled to earn universal support. While it was established as a guardian of international justice, major powers such as the US, China, India and Russia never signed up to it. Hungary has also recently signalled its discontent by removing itself from the ICC after a visit from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At their core, projects like the ICC and ICJ are a globalist challenge to national sovereignty and are deeply undemocratic. Laws gain moral authority from being passed by elected representatives of the people – something that international tribunals simply cannot replicate. Without democratic backing, these institutions too often fall prey to political agendas, rather than serving as unbiased arbiters of justice.

Against this backdrop, the prosecution of Israel has transformed into a high-stakes test for the credibility of bodies like the ICC and ICJ. This could be seen playing out at the ICJ hearing against Israel in The Hague last month. While lambasting Israel’s actions against Gaza and the UN, Palestinian counsel Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh urged the court to reassert the moral compass of the UN Charter. She warned that the international order was crumbling and expressed the ‘continuing desperate hope that international law might finally prevail’.

We should hope that these organisations continue to lose their clout. Then they will no longer be able to unjustly target a sovereign state like Israel for exercising its right to self-defence. The collapse of these hollow institutions cannot come soon enough.

Melanie Phillips: Keir Starmer's new admirers

Israel is stepping up the war in order to force Hamas finally to release the remaining hostages. Starmer, Macron and Carney complain this is “disproportionate”. What’s disproportionate about this when Hamas is refusing to release the hostages unless Israel totally capitulates? What’s disproportionate about continuously moving the Gazan civilians to relative safety — and food aid — in order to trap and target the remaining Hamas battalions? What’s disproportionate about controlling territory to prevent any more thousands of rockets and depraved attacks against Israeli civilians? What’s disproportionate about an overwhelmingly just war against genocide?

The statement threatens “further concrete actions in response” if Israel doesn’t halt “settlements which are illegal and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state”. The much-repeated claim of illegality is a lie. The Jews alone are legally entitled to live in the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria. And why are these residents said to undermine the “viability of a Palestinian state”? Israel’s population is 20 per cent Arab. Yet Britain France and Canada are in effect demanding the ethnic cleansing of Jews from a future state of Palestine.

And since the vast majority of Arabs living within Gaza and these disputed territories say repeatedly they support the October 7 attacks and want to destroy Israel and murder Jews; and since the Palestinian Authority declares its intention to wipe out Israel, pays terrorists and their families for the murder of Israelis and teaches the children in its schools to murder Jews and steal their land, the insistence by Britain, France and Canada on a Palestinian state means they have become the allies of genocidal fanatics against innocent victims. That’s quite an achievement.

The statement threatens to suspend trade negotiations with Israel. Really? Britain depends upon Israeli intelligence and its military know-how to fight its own battles against the same kind of fanatics that Israel is fighting. Is the Starmer government’s hatred of Israel so unhinged that it’s really intending to damage Britain by denying a trade deal — which Israel says wasn’t even on the agenda anyway?

At the same time as it issued this statement, Britain imposed sanctions on two illegal Israeli settlement outposts and three Israeli “settlers”. The UK Foreign Office accused the three of being involved in “threatening and perpetuating acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals.” Where’s the evidence of unprovoked attacks? Why is Britain arrogantly interfering in the internal affairs of another sovereign country?

Britain has sanctioned no Palestinian Arabs for the murderous daily attacks against Jewish residents of these areas. A few days ago one such resident, Tzeela Gez, was murdered as she was being driven to hospital for the birth of her fourth child.

The Starmer government ignored this latest atrocity against one of the “settlers” it has thus dehumanised and singled out for vilification. Instead it condemns the Israelis for trying to end such slaughter. “History will judge them,” said the Foreign Secretary David Lammy in a sickening Commons debate yesterday. “Blocking aid, expanding the war and dismissing the concerns of their friends and partners is indefensible and it must stop.”

Who on earth does he think he is? How dare he say Israel must stop defending its people. And this from a country that has so much Jewish blood on its own hands, going back to when British officials were the land’s colonial overlords — whose imperial disdain can be so clearly heard in Lammy’s tone — and who created the whole Middle East mess in the 1930s, when they tore up the UK’s treaty obligation to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza and offered instead to reward genocidal aggression by giving away part of the Jews’ entitlement to their aggressors, a murderous betrayal that Britain attempts to repeat to this very day.

JPost Editorial: When Hamas applauds you, it's time to rethink your stance

However, from Israel’s allies, there is no creativity, and no pressure on the real culprit: Hamas. Instead, they threaten sanctions on the country trying to get back its citizens.

Is this truly the smartest way to act towards an ally that has promoted and fought for Western values? Where, in that joint statement, was the equally weighted warning to the terrorist groups that birthed this entire operation: Hamas, its allies, and its parent backer, Iran?

As the Trump administration says it is closing in on a nuclear deal with the Iranian regime, where is the weight levied against Tehran to pressure Hamas? Why is Israel being singled out here?

An appeal to help Gazans, who are indeed suffering, is warranted. But by ignoring the larger context and who is to blame for the carnage in Gaza, the UK, Canada, and France are simply going for the easy target: Israel.

The proof in the pudding that the warnings by the three countries were misguided and damaging was the immediate reaction by the terrorist group, which “welcomed the joint statement issued by the leaders of Britain, France, and Canada, rejecting the policy of siege and starvation pursued by the occupation government against our people in the Gaza Strip, and the Zionist plans aimed at genocide and displacement.

“This position is an important step toward restoring respect for the principles of international law, which the terrorist Netanyahu government has sought to undermine and overturn,” it added.

Perhaps when terrorists who committed the worst massacre of the century agree with you, it is time to recalibrate your beliefs.

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