11/01 Links Pt2: The Freedom to Be Sharansky; Chuck Schumer’s Ultimate Betrayal; Thom Yorke vs the anti-Israel bigots; Sally Rooney’s anti-Israel intolerance

From Ian:

Gil Troy: The Freedom to Be Sharansky

Historians rarely write in collaboration with those who make history. A few years ago, I was fortunate to do just that.

Natan Sharansky at 76 starts his workdays at 5:30 a.m. He has been married to Avital for 50 years, although she adds “minus 12” because she refuses to count the ones during which the Soviet authorities forcibly kept them apart as they dared to defy the Communist system and seek emigration to Israel. Those years of separation include the nine from 1977 to 1986 when he was trapped inside the Soviet prison system, including stays in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo jail and Perm 35 in the Gulag archipelago.

In 2018, as he completed another nine years—his near-decade leading the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Jewish world’s largest nongovernmental organization—Sharansky felt compelled to recount some key episodes and lessons of his life in his effort to balance the twin goods of freedom and identity, thoughtful patriotism and civil dialogue. He asked me to co-author that book.

We made an odd couple. I was raised with my name, “Gil Troy,” to fit in as an American while being a proud Jew, living in one of the most Jew-friendly countries; he was forced to stand out despite his perfectly Russian original name, “Anatoly,” because he was a Jew living in one of the most Judeophobic countries. I spent most of the 1980s at Harvard, learning to be an American historian. He spent most of the 1980s in the Gulag, fighting to stay alive as a political prisoner. When I first noted our Harvard-Gulag ’80s gap, without skipping a beat, Natan quipped, “That means I have moral clarity, and you don’t.”

Miraculously, Avital’s unlikely but determined campaign of persuasion—during which she crisscrossed the globe and lobbied Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, and many others for years seeking their assistance in securing the freedom of her husband—finally paid off. In 1986, many of us watched Sharansky zigzag across the Glienicke Bridge connecting East and West Berlin after a KGB agent had told him to “walk straight” to freedom, a final act of defiance.

But that’s not actually what we saw. In fact, after landing in East Berlin, it was on the airport tarmac that the then-named Anatoly Shcharansky (note the Russian letter “shch” he bore as the opening sound of his surname rather than the softer Hebrew “shin”) zigzagged away from his Communist captors into a waiting car. In a 1988 speech, Ronald Reagan said of that moment, “It was one of those moments when laughter and tears commingle, and one does not know when the first leaves off and the second begins. It was a vision of the purest freedom known to man, the freedom of a man whose cause is just and whose faith is his guiding light.”

By the time he had reached the bridge, he was already free and no longer had Communist masters to disobey. Nevertheless, people keep telling him, and me, how they are still inspired by that moment, which I’m sure they are, only it wasn’t on the bridge!

Although we wrote the book collaboratively, the most pressing question I was trained to ask as a biographer stayed with me: What made this man tick? There were 250 million Soviet citizens, including 2 million Jews. Why did he become not just a refusenik—a Jew who sought and was then refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel—but one of the few Jewish activists who also worked as a dissident with Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet human-rights movement? That synthesis made him the regime’s most famous political prisoner. And how did he endure nine years of solitary confinement, punishment cells, hunger strikes and forced feeding, yet then emerge with a ready smile and quick wit?

Sharansky explains, matter-of-factly, that in 1967, when he was 19, the anti-Semitic jibes he had grown up enduring suddenly changed form. After Israel won the Six-Day War, even close friends started joking about his being a bully and not a coward. Fascinated that something that happened in a country he had never visited could change people’s impressions of him, he started learning more about the Jewish state and his Jewish identity.

“Once I discovered my identity, I then discovered my freedom,” he explains. Still, discovering your freedom is not the same as fighting for it.

Editor's Notes: The dilemma of raising children during the war is almost like 'Life is Beautiful'

Beyond the tragedy, we also witness the incredible resilience of our people – thousands of initiatives aimed at bringing light into these dark days.

People reach out with stories of kindness, courage, and unity, hoping we can give them a platform, a voice in this storm. And while we long to honor each one, the hard truth is that we can’t.

We don’t have enough time, enough staff, or enough space on our pages to truly do justice to every single story. It’s a painful compromise, one that eats at us, but it’s the reality we’re up against.

In the end, though, we keep going because that’s what we’ve always done. In a way, being Jewish has always meant living on, pushing forward, and finding light amid the darkness.

We may be shaken, but we are not broken. We have no time to fall into despair because our purpose keeps us grounded.

Getting the news to you – truthful, fast, and clear – is our mission, even as our own hearts are sometimes weighed down by it all.

There’s an unbreakable resolve in us. We won’t allow ourselves the luxury of crumbling.

We keep going, keep telling the stories, keep bearing witness, because it’s our role.

As a father, as a journalist, and as a Jew, I look at these challenges, these daily battles, and realize they are woven into who we are. And, as always, we’ll endure.

When Jews Lived Under Muslim Rule

The Land of Israel is Different
As we mentioned, yes, there were golden eras in the history of Arab-Jewish relations. However, a claim put forward by some ardent anti-Zionists is that things were actually better for Jews in the land of Israel under Islam and before Zionism came on the scene. It is saying that Zionism changed the dynamic. And in that sense, they are correct, but only insofar as it introduced a Jew who fought back – not in terms of antisemitic attacks and persecution.

First, let’s begin with the basic fact that the Muslim Arab conquest of the land of Israel in 636-37 was a settler-colonial enterprise. And they are proud of it, calling it the “Palestine Conquest” - Fatah Filastin (yes, the same word Fatah, “Conquest”, is used as the name of the movement currently in charge of the Palestinian Authority). After the occupation, the majority of Christians in the land of Israel adopted Islam and Arabized and the building of new synagogues was banned.

With the construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691 and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 705, the Muslims established the Temple Mount as an Islamic holy site. Jews were banned from it for the next 1,000 years. Periodic social and economic discrimination in the following centuries caused substantial Jewish emigration from the land of Israel.

Other notable events under Muslim rule include:
- The expulsion of the Gaonate – the main Jewish academy of learning and religious authority – in 1071, after Jerusalem was conquered by the Seljuq Turks.
- The imposition of a dhimmi tax on Jews and Christians and the curtailment of their rights, with more intense enforcement in the 10th and 11th centuries. In the Mamluk period (13th-16th centuries), the dhimmi laws were cranked up to include additional discriminatory practices intended for humiliation. Jewish and Christian communities declined precipitously.
- The Mamluks also banned Jews (and Christians) from the Cave of Our Patriarchs in Hebron. To this day, you can still see where Jews had to stop for about 700 years, on the seventh step leading into the building, until Israel put an end to the ban after the Six Day War in 1967.
- In the 18th century, Jewish communities throughout Israel were extorted and oppressed by local tribal and regional chiefs. In Jerusalem, Ottoman authorities restricted the number of Jews allowed to live there and expelled all Ashkenazi Jews from the city due to a debt some of them owed to Muslims.
- In 1831, Muhammad Ali of Egypt took over the land of Israel. In 1834, there were 33 days of looting and murder targeting Jews in Tzfat (Safed) and Hebron. More than 500 Jews were murdered, unknown numbers of women were raped, property was ransacked and looted, and synagogues were set on fire.

That’s all before the Zionist movement as we know it was a thing.

Then there’s this inconvenient fact, which is worth noting even though it does relate to a time after the Zionist movement was already well established: there are more than a dozen Jewish communities in the land of Israel that were destroyed by Arabs before 1947. But not a single such Arab community.

This partial review is a corrective to manipulative misinformation promoted by anti-Israel terror-apologists on US campuses, in European streets, and in the international media. It is admittedly far from comprehensive. However, an honest and open-eyed review of Arab-Jewish relations can provide a new perspective on our history as Jews, on the Middle East generally, and on the State of Israel’s struggle for survival.

Of course, this does not mean that Israel is always right. Just a reminder that views on current events should be grounded in reality – however complex it may be.

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10/31 Links Pt2: Purging Jews From the Arts; Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada; Bubble-Wrapping Coates; Ministries cut ties with Haaretz

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Purging Jews From the Arts

You are to be unpersoned, that is, if you write about Israel without denouncing the Jewish state—a rule that is intended to disqualify Jewish writers of any and every nationality—or if you are Israeli and have not renounced your country and your people, like any Good Jew apparently would. Israelis are currently under fire from seven fronts in a war that began with an explicitly genocidal invasion by Iranian proxies, and if you do not do something to help the cause of exterminating your own people, you are heretofore banished from the arts.

I’m not sure it’s possible to top the reaction from the poet Gillian Lazarus, who said:

“The likes of Sally Rooney would boycott the likes of Amos Oz, David Grossman and Yehuda Amichai. It’s as if a composer of advertising jingles boycotted Mozart.”

Look, if Sally Rooney could write like Howard Jacobson she would probably not be trying to purge her competition.

But she can’t, and so we all must suffer.

As I said, what’s interesting about Rooney is seeing who else joins her fatwas—especially if they don’t have to. Arundhati Roy is on the list calling for a loyalty oath for Jews in the arts, sadly. Jonathan Lethem, too. Other fellow listers: Jasbir Puar, an academic who invented a blood libel about Jewish organ harvesting; Naomi Klein, professor of “climate justice”; Mohammed El-Kurd, who accused the Jewish state of having an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood”; and other such literary luminaries.

The loyalty oath has made something of a comeback among Western institutions, especially in the academic world, where Jews are occasionally permitted to participate in campus activities as long as they publicly call for the ethnic cleansing of their fellow Jews from whichever part of the world is currently trying to expel them.

Then there is the other angle to the purge: In addition to being irredeemably immoral, it’s also very stupid. Fania Oz-Salzberger, daughter of the late Israeli writer Amos Oz, responded on social media: “My late father, Amos Oz, would have been sad, disgusted, but proud to be banned by these 1000 writers and literati. And ban him they would. Not because he didn’t care for the Palestinians, of course he did, but because he’d be the first to tell these virtue signallers that they are historically and politically ignorant.”

I would go further and point out that Amos Oz, simply by being both an Israeli cultural giant and an advocate for Palestinian self-determination, did more for peace every moment he was alive than Rooney and Kushner will do in a lifetime—not least because a cultural boycott of influential left-leaning figures can only sabotage the Palestinians who want statehood and isolate them from likeminded Israelis.

But that point is only relevant if you believe Sally Rooney and Rachel Kushner and the other inquisitors are interested in helping Palestinians. If they only care about harming Jews, then this purge makes perfect sense.

Howard Jacobson: Political boycotting of the arts paints a picture of tyranny

Thus, to be a boycotter you must believe there is a hierarchy of compassion and condemnation. Only those whose anguish is as vociferous as theirs are allowed a voice. What makes this inquisition so grotesque is that the inquisitors are themselves artists or art-enablers.

Art matters. The pleasure we take from looking long at a painting or grappling with a complex novel or symphony is not some idle luxury. It transforms, invigorates and inspires. It redeems that belief in our shared humanity, which it is so easy, especially in angry and divisive times like these, to lose. And it does that not by confirming what we already think and feel, but by daring us to risk everything we hold dear on the turn of a single page. Creativity, in whatever sphere, is the means not of finding but of losing ourselves.

Everything must be permitted for artists but the silencing of their fellows. To boycott authors, agents or publishers on the grounds that they hold views objectionable to you is to violate art and the part it has played in stirring and individuating the imaginations of men and women since the first cave drawing appeared.

Art is not to be confused with a post on social media. It is not a statement. It is not susceptible to thumbs-down disagreement for the reason that it doesn’t invite thumbs-up consensus. It is not an echo chamber. It is a meeting place, not only of people who read and look and listen differently to one another, but of the hostile and the loving, of the real and the imagined, of colours that are not meant to go together, of words that clash and contradict.

Those who cannot bear such vitality of contradiction congregrate with the like-minded in a safe space they call a boycott, but for which the real word is tyranny.

BHL Boycott Backfires

Fortunately, in the case of Mr. Lévy’s Israel Alone, this cynical pandering to antisemites, ideologues, and to those who worship at the altar of the bottom line backfired. Education may enlighten the prejudiced, which is why Mr. Lévy’s book is so urgently needed, but there are few antidotes for stupidity, except the free market, which is working brilliantly in this instance. Interest in the book is quite robust and will undoubtedly have a positive effect on sales. So, we owe thanks to Shelf Awareness for the unintended consequences of its malfeasance.

We are pleased to add that our organization, in partnership with B’nai B’rith International, has raised funds from generous private donors to purchase and distribute for free thousands of copies of the book to college students around the country. Mr. Lévy will also be speaking in November at select American and Canadian universities. As he explained, “curbing this hate begins by going to the source.” It is abundantly clear that far too many universities and far too many journalists have failed to provide what Americans need to understand about Israel and the Middle East.

Censors can cause a lot of short-term damage, but history tells us that they ultimately lose and their disgrace follows. This comes from the first-century Roman author Tacitus: “When what has been created is persecuted, its authority grows. Neither foreign despots nor others who employ such savagery beget anything except infamy for themselves and glory for those they persecute.”

The ironic good news is that despite the efforts of Shelf Awareness, many more people are now aware of Israel Alone. They can make up their own minds about its message.

Bubble-Wrapping Coates

CBS News is in turmoil following an appearance by Ta-Nehisi Coates that actually included probing questions about his new book on Israel. All it took was one interview during which Coates received some pushback for the legacy media to lose its mind and denounce the CBS anchor, and for the network to quickly rebuke him. Top CBS newsroom brass—i.e., woke PR types with zero actual newsroom experience who now run the network—apparently believed Coates should be coated in bubble wrap and only given friendly questions, preferably fed to him in advance.

But babying American intellectuals is not the American way. Feuds and sharp elbows have been a long-standing part of the American intellectual tradition—and signal the public’s appreciation for robust debate.

One of the greatest feuds in American intellectual history was between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman. Hellman was an apologist for communism, something for which McCarthy had no patience. In 1980, McCarthy went on the Dick Cavett show and famously said of Hellman that “everything [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman responded with a $2.25 million libel suit, which was never resolved before her death in 1984.

Cavett’s various shows, which ran on multiple networks from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, often served as a showcase for great American intellectual brawls. After Gore Vidal lumped together Charles Manson, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer for their poor treatment of women, Mailer was understandably incensed. Shortly afterward, Mailer appeared with Vidal on an episode of Cavett’s show. Things were headed south while the two men were in the green room, where Mailer headbutted Vidal. They didn’t get much better on camera, with the two men trading barbs and Mailer at one point approaching Vidal menacingly. Cavett thought Mailer was going to take a swing at Vidal, but he didn’t, and just angrily pulled the papers Vidal was holding from his hand.

Mailer was still mad six years later when he saw Vidal at a cocktail party at Lally Weymouth’s New York apartment. In front of an impressive crew of literati, Mailer threw a drink in Vidal’s face and followed up with a punch. As Vidal wiped the blood from his face, he responded with a retort that landed harder than Mailer’s blow: “Norman, once again words have failed you.”

Vidal also feuded with the author Truman Capote. They didn’t trade physical blows, but instead took swipes at each other in the press. Vidal sniffed that Capote’s prose was like Carson McCullers, combined with “a bit of Eudora Welty.” Capote countered that Vidal got his literary influence from the New York Daily News.

Vidal was threatened with physical violence in perhaps his most famous feud, with National Review founder William F. Buckley. The two men appeared on ABC News during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Vidal had prepared extensively for the debates and got under Buckley’s skin by calling him a “crypto-Nazi.” An angry Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” For the rest of his life, Buckley regretted that loss of composure.

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10/30 Links Pt2: The betrayal of literature; The warnings from history are piling up for ‘non-Zionist’ Jews; Jewish Man Severely Wounded in Brooklyn Stabbing

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The betrayal of literature

It’s a fair bet that the authors and publishing professionals who have called for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions didn’t anticipate the scale of revulsion and outrage they have caused.

After all, given the current tsunami of hatred and insanity directed at the Jewish people throughout the west, they may well have thought they were merely going along with the overwhelmingly accepted narrative in “progressive” circles — in other words, anyone whose opinion was worth bothering about — that Israel should be shunned as a pariah because of the war in Gaza.

Hundreds supporting a campaign organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, alongside Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books, have signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions which they claim have been “obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades” and have thus been “complicit in genocide”.

“We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” they write.

Among the signatories are award-winning authors Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, children’s author Michael Rosen and actress Miriam Margolyes.

The reaction to this letter from within their own creative world has been seismic. More than 1000 leading names in the entertainment industry have hit back. A counter-letter has been published by the Creative Community for Peace, signed by writers such as Lee Child, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Herta Müller, Sir Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag Montefiore, David Mamet, Lionel Shriver and Elfriede Jelinek as well as names from film and TV.

Howard Jacobson said he was “staggered” that the boycott signatories could dream they had a right to silence other writers, while Lionel Shriver said they had sought to “intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals”.

Let’s remind ourselves against whom Israel is currently fighting: genocidal enemies who carried out the worst single set of atrocities against the Jews since the Holocaust and who openly declare their aim to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. Instead of supporting the resistance to such evil, Rooney, Roy, Rosen and their fellow signatories are actively pumping out the propaganda lies being invented to promote that unspeakable cause.

The Guardian reports:
Institutions that have never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law” will also be boycotted.

But there are no “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” in international law. The only inalienable legal rights to the land belong to the Jews.

These much-garlanded authors and hangers-on aren’t targeting people because of what they are said to have done. They are attempting to silence Israelis because they have failed to express the only approved opinion by opposing their own government’s actions. That’s a totalitarian impulse to crush all dissent. And there’s worse still. As Lionel Shriver has written:
But the intention is not only aimed at punishing Israel’s tiny cultural institutions. The boycott seeks to go well beyond the signatories and intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals. That includes writers who disagree with the organisers and do not believe that the IDF’s effort to root out Hamas qualifies as genocide as well as a range of Jewish writers in and outside of Israel whose views on this war may be tortured or finely nuanced. Because we must all speak as one.

The tactic Shriver is aptly describing is designed to set one Jew against the other, to act as a kind of proxy assassin on behalf of the Jew-basher who can thus claim to have clean hands.

Sir Simon Schama, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Howard Jacobson lead 1,000 intellectuals in open letter against boycott of Israel

Over 1,000 literary and entertainment stars from around the globe have signed an open letter in support of freedom of expression and against discriminatory boycotts.

The signatories of the letter include Lee Child, the creator of Jack Reacher, philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, actor Jeff Garlin, historians Sir Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, novelist Howard Jacobson and musicians Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons of Seventies rock band Kiss.

This broad and united call from prominent members of the literature and entertainment world to unequivocally voice support against boycotts represents the first of its kind.

Last week, an online petition was launched calling for a boycott on Israeli publishers, book festivals, literary agencies, and publications, organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, attracting support from authors Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy.

The letter in response, published on Tuesday, states that regardless of one’s own view on the war in the Middle East, “boycotts of creatives and creative institutions simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred.”

It adds, referencing October 7, that the signatories “continue to be shocked and disappointed to see members of the literary community harass and ostracise their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative in response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”

The motivation behind cultural boycotts, it argues, is “illiberal and dangerous”, and contrary to the “liberal values most writers hold sacred”.

“In fact,” the letter continues, “we believe that writers, authors, and books – along with the festivals that showcase them – bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue, and can affect positive change.”

It concludes by calling on “our friends and colleagues worldwide to join us in expressing their support for Israeli and Jewish publishers, authors and all book festivals, publishers, and literary agencies that refuse to capitulate to censorship based on identity or litmus tests.”

Other signatories of the letter, rejecting boycotts against authors and literary institutions, includes essayist Adam Gopnik, Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet, actresses Mayim Bialik, Debra Messing and Julianna Margulies, investor Haim Seban and Nobel Prize Award winner Elfriede Jelinek.

Aviva Klompas: Time for a Reckoning With Antisemitism in the U.S.

Hate, once it is unleashed and legitimized, will spread and mutate, targeting other minorities and vulnerable groups and, eventually, anyone who dares to question the mob mentality. Antisemitism in America isn't just a Jewish struggle; it's a fight for America's future.

But it's a fight that we are failing to recognize, address, and commit to winning.

How do we change course? One piece of encouraging news is that Americans are actually paying attention to the Middle East. Recent polls show that 62 percent are closely following the Israel-Hamas war, and 81 percent express greater sympathy for Israel than Hamas.

The reason is clear: most Americans understand that Israel is fighting for its very survival against terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, whose explicit mission is to annihilate Israel. But what many may not fully grasp is that these groups' ideologies aren't limited to the Middle East. Their virulent strain of hate, deeply rooted in antisemitism, has spread beyond the region and found fertile ground in Western democracies, including the United States.

So even as Americans recognize the high stakes in Israel, there remains a troubling disconnect to what they recognize at home. Only six percent of voters consider the Israel-Hamas war a top priority for the country, and a mere two percent list antisemitism as a pressing issue. These figures highlight a dangerous gap between perception and reality.

For Americans, supporting Jewish communities should be reason enough to confront antisemitism. But if more is needed, we must also recognize that the foundational principles that underpin American democracy cannot survive in a society where hate and intolerance are given space to flourish. When bigotry takes root, what follows is a breakdown in the social contract that binds us as a nation.

American Jews are under attack. If antisemitism continues to fester unchecked, it won't be long before other groups face the same threats.

How we respond today will define the nation we are tomorrow.

The warnings from history are piling up for ‘non-Zionist’ Jews

The protest was at the JW3 community centre on the Finchley Road last week. JW3’s offence was to host a conference sponsored by Haaretz, the left-wing Israeli newspaper that reliably covers Palestinian despair in Gaza and the West Bank. It was convened to discuss the future of the region, including the questions: How do allies committed to liberal democracy relate to a hard-right Israeli government? Who are the Palestinian partners for building a common future?

The insinuation of these question is that a hard-right Israeli government is to be feared and there is, potentially, a common future for Israelis and Palestinians. Delegates included Rula Hardal, a Palestinian and CEO of A Land For All, a Palestinian-Israeli NGO dedicated to a two-state solution; and Ayman Odeh, an Arab-Israeli member of the Knesset.

But answering these questions did not tempt the protesters who gathered outside the gates. These questions, it seemed, should not be answered. They should not even be asked. Instead, again, slogans – we should have learnt to fear slogans – and laughter. The laughter troubles me particularly: for people apparently agonised by war, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

“You look like pigs,” said one to the assembled Jews. “No one likes you. You lot reek.” “We are protesting against the Zionist entity which is well-known to be prolifically based in London,” said another, “and this is one of the venues that likes to host the Zionist entity and those who are complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians by the Israeli settler-colonial state.” “There is only one solution,” sang the rest. “Intifada revolution.” (The police stood by, but that is for another column.)

The second thing was a rebuke offered by David Miller, notorious on these pages, to non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in a series of posts on his X/Twitter page. It was designed, perhaps unconsciously, to mimic a trial.

“Exhibit C,” he typed, “on the problematic status of some of the progressive Jewish milieu.” He named, for instance, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky.

Surely these are immaculate comrades? Chomsky, who considered Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank “much worse than apartheid?” Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry?

But in 2012, Miller reminds us, Finkelstein wrote this, on the two-state solution: “The flaw in the BDS movement is that it selectively upholds only Palestinian rights, and ignores Palestinian obligations. Under international law, Israel is a state. If you want to appeal to public opinion on the basis of international law, you can’t suddenly become an agnostic on the law when it comes to Israel.”

It seems that even non-Zionist Jews will be soon be required to leave the community of the good. The warnings from history are piling up.

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10/29 Links Pt2: The World Doesn’t Care About Your Partisan Politics; Trump or Kamala? Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris Debate; Don't Call It a Hate Crime Against a Jew

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The World Doesn’t Care About Your Partisan Politics

American foreign policy is always something of a hostage to the domestic politics of the moment. While this might be the unavoidable byproduct of democracy, it can greatly distort our understanding of the world and the coherence of strategic planning.

The Israel-Iran-Ukraine-Russia linedance provides a steady stream of examples, but never has it brought as much clarity to the mismatch between U.S. partisan politics and American grand strategy as it has in recent days. Republicans tend to favor Israel but not Ukraine, and Democrats, the reverse. Our enemies, of course, see it very differently.

Just before the weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Russia has supplied the Houthis—the Iranian proxy in Yemen that has been shooting missiles at commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea—with “targeting data” to help sink ships, kill civilians, and sabotage the supply chain. “The data,” the Journal explains, “was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen.”

That sentence is a handy organizational chart. The Houthis aren’t merely supported by Iran, the Houthis are Iran. And the Russia-Iran alliance has become so tight that Vladimir Putin is helping the Iranians retaliate against the U.S. and Israel for having the temerity to counter Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and, more specifically, for America’s modest support for Ukraine’s existence against Russia’s eliminationist war machine.

Russia wants to bleed Western resources in the Middle East because Moscow is bleeding resources in trying to destroy part of Europe. Russia is angry that it is bad at war, so it is making more war.

And birds without feathers flock together, so Moscow and Iran have expanded their partnership wherever possible. That includes Russia’s provision of air-defense systems to Iran and Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles to Russia.

Both of which took a literal hit over the weekend.

As the Times of London reports, one of Israel’s targets in its recent strikes included fuel mixers for missile production: “Early analysis of the impact of the strikes suggests that Iranian missile production has been badly affected, reducing Tehran’s ability to export weapons. Without the ability to mix fuel, Iran may be forced to appeal to China or other suppliers to help it restock, a process that could take many months.”

The Times saw the records for one Iranian missile delivery to Russia, in late August, about three weeks after Reuters reported that the two countries had signed a contract for Iran to provide several hundred to Putin’s forces. That could be delayed by as long as two years now.

And what of the air-defense systems provided by Russia to protect Iranian airspace? Gone. Israel destroyed one in April, and “on Saturday Israel systematically destroyed the remaining three S-300 batteries at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and the Malad missile base.”

The fact that Iran might become dependent on China to rebuild its ballistic missile stock is another piece of the puzzle. China already buys most of Iran’s oil exports. Beijing has also been boosting Iran in the propaganda war, especially on social media where China has the largest user audience and a repressive censorship regime.

Author coming to St. Louis urges Jews to rethink alliances amid rising left-wing antisemitism

In Benjamin Ginsberg’s latest book, “The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, The Right, and The Jews”, he urges Jews to “wake up” to the threat posed by left-wing antisemitism in the United States.

Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author, coauthor, or editor of 36 books.

The Jewish Light spoke to him in advance of his appearance at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival at 1 p.m. Nov. 7. Some of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the new American antisemitism you explore in your book?
“Most Jews are accustomed to right-wing antisemites, going back to the Nazis and the antisemitism of the right in Europe. What’s new for Americans – and I don’t think American Jews have quite wrapped their heads around this – is that the main antisemitic threat today comes from the left. We see thousands of students and some non-students screaming about Zionism in the streets of New York and Philadelphia and other cities. And I was horrified when I watched the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT – let’s call them ‘The Three Stooges.’ They were not willing to say whether students running around screaming ‘death to the Jews’ are in violation of their campus speech code, and the reason for that is that they’re afraid of liberal forces on their campuses. I thought, ‘This is sort of the end of things as we know them.’ We are at a point in American history where people can be openly antisemitic, certainly on college campuses and some elements of the news media. It’s become possible once again – it hadn’t been for decades – to publicly criticize the Jews. So we need to rethink our position in the United States, and think about who our friends are and who our enemies are, before it’s too late.”

You argue that Jews in the U.S. should forge alliances with evangelical Christians and other Christian Zionists who vocally support Israel. Why are those alliances important?
“When I say to Jewish friends, ‘You should take seriously the Christian Zionists,’ they say, ‘Oh, no, they just want to convert us.’ I talked one couple into going to a little convention where you had Jewish leaders and Christian Zionist leaders. They came away amazed and said, ‘You know, these people do have some strange ideas, but basically they are incredibly supportive of Israel.’ And that’s right. We need people who support Israel; doctrinal differences we can argue about later. Liberal, well-educated Americans sneer at this, but it’s not to be sneered at: There are millions of Bible-believing Christians who view the creation of Israel – and the astonishing victory by Israel over its foes in the 1967 Israel-Arab war – as things that were predicted in the Bible. And they’ve put pressure on the U.S. government (to support Israel). I think Jews are always reluctant to shift their alliances, to realize that their friends of yesterday aren’t their friends today.”

Prof. Phyllis Chesler: Please answer my burning questions

Did you see Michelle Obama stump for Kamala Harris? She is really one angry woman. Her fiery appeal was to "y'all," and perhaps she mainly had black folk in mind. What do y'all think? What has Michelle got to be so angry about?

Obama? He's the former President who barely acknowledged his white mother and white grandparents who brought him up. In his first book, he focuses mainly on the black African father who abandoned him and never looked back. What kind of man does this? Did you ever notice this, ponder upon it? And why did he unleash Iran's evil power? Choose the mullahs to stabilize the Middle East?

Why do I keep doing it, reading the NYT? Am I a masochist? Do you read it too? Well, some of us have to keep up with the daily anti-Israel libels, the kind of lies that always, always, lead to violence and then to pogroms--and worse.

Yesterday, the NYT's described Israel's "foray" into Iran as "retaliatory" and as an example of "Israel's Shadow War." That's their lead front page story. Add to that an article that is sympathetic to Gazan cancer victims in Jordan who are facing psychological battles of displacement (five photos of them); two articles that are actually sympathetic to Iran (!!!), which praise the mullahs for their "muted response" and "restraint.

The largest state sponsor of global terrorism is described as a country that is "aware of its 'responsibilities for regional peace and security.'" Oh yes, there's another article about how outraged media groups are about the Israeli strikes that (inadvertently) killed journalists in Lebanon--Israel's actions are described as a "war crime," and as "deliberate aggression."

As usual, but Oh My God! Not a word about Iran's aggression and that of its' many terrorist proxies; no sympathetic photos of displaced Israelis, wounded Israelis, murdered Israelis. There are now 769 mostly very young soldiers and reservist fathers who were killed in battle; 891 civilians who've been murdered; 76 police officers and ISA agents who've also been murdered. There are 101 Israeli captives still being held hostage in Gaza. An offer of 100K for the release of each one, no questions asked, has led nowhere.

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09/17 Links Pt2: Bad News for the Jews; Beware distinguished professors rewriting history; Fetterman rips NYTs for spreading Hamas propaganda

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Bad News for the Jews

What ought an American Jew think when reading the news every day? It is a discouraging way to start a Monday morning. But we are way past that. Because this type of news consumption is also a Tuesday morning thing, and a Wednesday morning thing, and on and on. If you spend Shabbat offline, it is getting difficult not to wince when turning the phone back on each Saturday night.

Which is, I think, a point that goes ignored outside the Jewish community. There isn’t a particularly outrageous story that has singularly instilled fear in the Jewish community. There is, instead, an unlifting smog blanketing public life. It’s ugly, it’s unhealthy, and it narrows a person’s scope of vision.

It’s also selective. Take tomorrow’s congressional hearing on hate crimes. Republicans in the House hold the majority, so they have been able to hold House hearings exclusively on outbreaks of institutional anti-Semitism, such as those that occurred at universities around the country. GOP senators would like the upper chamber to follow suit, but Democrats hold the Senate majority so any focus on anti-Semitism must be watered down to an insulting degree.

“Tuesday’s hearing is a first for the Senate since Oct. 7 and the proceedings are not shaping up as a bipartisan effort,” reports Jewish Insider. “Judiciary Committee Republicans have been urging Democrats for months to convene a hearing on how the uptick in antisemitism on college campuses is violating the civil rights of Jewish students — similar to their House GOP counterparts’ hearings with embattled university presidents earlier in the year.”

You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but you’d be wrong. Every single instance of anti-Semitism listed above is the result of progressive ideological activism, and therefore Democrats have decided to make the hearings about the “rise in hate incidents across the country, particularly targeting the Jewish, Arab, and Muslim communities.”

There is no trend of hate crimes against any community that is comparable to what the Jewish community has been experiencing. Jews and only Jews are seeing their civil rights come under relentless attack on campus. Tomorrow, thanks to Democratic leaders such as Dick Durbin, the United States Senate will invent a false equivalence between the victims of anti-Semitism and the perpetrators, so that criticizing anti-Semitism itself will be seen as a violation of Americans’ rights.

So that’s where we are: Monday’s news was full of reports of Jews being attacked with little or no concern expressed by the authorities. Tuesday’s news will be about the Senate making a public mockery of Jewish concerns. What’s the forecast for Wednesday? Expect more smog.

It’s absurd that anybody would be comfortable with this being Jews’ daily experience in America for even a week. It’s now been that way for nearly a year. Let’s not get used to this.

Why Bernard-Henri Lévy thinks supporting Israel is a matter of human rights

Despite the sobering title of his new book, Israel Alone, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy does not truly believe the Jewish state is lacking in friends. In fact, he thinks all democrats — with a lowercase “d” — should be aligned with Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks as the Jewish state stares down an increasingly tangible Iranian threat.

“It is not only the Jews who are concerned. It is really in the existential interest of the West. But not only the West — the Global West,” Lévy told Jewish Insider in an interview on Monday amid a spate of public appearances in the United States to promote his new book’s publication in English.

That’s not because Lévy expects people around the world who support democracy to reflexively back Israel. He knows that would be naive. Instead, he thinks supporting Israel is needed because Hamas’ murderous incursion into southern Israel last year represents a turning point for the cadre of anti-democratic forces gaining ground around the world.

“I knew that there was a constellation of forces which were aligning with each other — Iran, China, Russia, Turkey, radical Islam like the Taliban and [the] Muslim Brotherhood. But I was not sure that the process was so advanced,” Lévy explained. By “Global West,” he means supporters of democracy anywhere, even those living under authoritarian regimes.

Israel’s battle against Hamas in Gaza is more than a small regional fight against a terror group, Lévy argues. It’s an existential battle for all of the West against Iran, and the other authoritarian nations with which Tehran aligns itself.

“I think of my friends, Iranian women who go to Tehran and Isfahan with fire in the wind, if I think of my friends — lawyers in jail in Turkey — I’m really concerned for them if Iran wins,” said Lévy. “If Israel happens to lose, it will be a disaster for all of them, for all the militants of human rights all over the world.”

Israel Alone is a relatively slim volume, using sparse prose to describe the horrific events of Oct. 7 and their world-shattering impact on Israelis and Jews and, Lévy hopes, for democrats the world over. Lévy, who first traveled to Israel in 1967, flew to Israel on the morning of Oct. 8. At the time, he didn’t know that a book would come from it; that decision came a few days later, after visiting Kibbutz Be’eri and, later, a meeting with Yoni Asher, whose wife and two young daughters had been taken hostage. (They were freed in November.)

“I realized with a chill that the world had just witnessed an event whose shockwaves and blast effect would change the course of all our lives — including my own,” Lévy wrote toward the start of the book.

The book raises several questions stemming from the Oct. 7 attacks: Why Israel? What to make of the settler-colonial narrative targeting Israel? Why has there been such fierce denial of the attacks? And, most painful for Lévy, how should Israel’s backers make sense of the innocent Gazans killed in the ensuing war? Lévy attempts to answer them with a philosophical precision, placing the events of the past year in a broader historical context.

This moment, Lévy argued, should be one of moral clarity. “Even during the Cold War,” he stated, “we have never been in such a critical situation, we democrats.”

$1M offered to LGBTQ advocacy groups to host Pride parade in Gaza, West Bank

A watchdog group that aims to expose hypocrisy announced Monday that it would donate $1 million to “Queers for Palestine” or any US LGBTQ advocacy organization to host a gay pride parade in Gaza or the West Bank.

Anti-Israel groups such as “Queers for Palestine” have surfaced across America since the Hamas terror group attacked Israel on October 7, but homosexuality remains deeply taboo in the Palestinian territories.

Gay and transgender people in Gaza and the West Bank face a significant level of persecution and are often subjected to horrific acts.

New Tolerance Campaign (NTC) President Gregory T. Angelo, who is gay and the former president of Log Cabin Republicans, said the campaign is a “wake-up call” to anyone who identifies as part of the “Queers for Palestine” or “Gays for Gaza” movements.

“I don’t want people to just shrug off this campaign as some kind of publicity stunt or something that is supposed to be comical. It actually is a legitimate offer,” Angelo told Fox News Digital.

“This campaign emerged to call out these purported advocates of LGBT equality and put our money where their mouths are,” he continued. “I think that this is a real opportunity for these groups to legitimately step up and host an event that would either highlight the fact that the Palestinian territories are not indeed a good place for LGBTQ individuals to be living, or it could be a breakthrough moment for pluralism and peace in the Middle East.”

The New Tolerance Campaign said it secured commitments for the $1 million prize and will begin publicizing the offer with mobile billboards circulating around Columbia University in New York City, the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. and UCLA in Los Angeles.

“Obviously, the $1 million prize is something that is flashy. It was designed to get attention; it was designed to turn heads. But the greater drive behind this project is one of equality and broad human rights,” Angelo said.

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05/12 Links: US withholding ‘sensitive intelligence’ on Hamas from Israel; Europe's public vote shines for Eden Golan at Eurovision; Israel marks first post-Oct. 7 Memorial Day

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Liberal media is still in denial about post-Oct. 7 antisemitism

Seven months of an unprecedented surge in antisemitism that has turned American college campuses and even K-12 schools into hostile environments for Jews has changed a lot of minds about the issue. The willingness of much of the political left to downplay or even justify the atrocities of Oct. 7—and then to flip the narrative about the war that Hamas started to one in which the victims of terrorism are somehow the real villains of the story—has shocked even many political liberals into rethinking their assumptions about where the real danger for Jews lies.

But not The New York Times.

As two lengthy news features published in the paper this week confirmed, the flagship of liberal journalism in the United States hasn’t let events or the reality of a post-Oct. 7 world interfere with their ideological or political agendas.

In one story, the newspaper devoted the time of four reporters to take a deep dive into contemporary antisemitism. But the result of what is described as their extensive research is that they have come to the conclusion that the real culprits are not the people who seek the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, legitimize a genocidal terrorist movement as justified “resistance” or attempt to allow those responsible for the mass murder of 1,200 people to get away with it. Instead, the Times believes that the problem rests with (surprise!) Republicans who are rallying in support of a beleaguered State of Israel and who are opposed to the deluge of Jew-hatred on display in the American public square since the current war began.

In another article, the paper reported a congressional hearing about the growing problem of antisemitism in K-12 schools throughout the country as primarily one about how those in charge of these institutions scored points against members of Congress who care about the issue.

These are just two prominent examples out of many that could be pointed to that show how the Times and other liberal media outlets manipulate coverage of this issue to promote their own partisan agendas. They are worth noting precisely because they illustrate how ideological agendas work to present a distorted picture of an antisemitism crisis that serves primarily to deflect attention from the real cause.

In this case, that means denying or downplaying the fact that the principal engines of antisemitism in 2024 America are left-wing ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality, which grant a permission slip to Jew-hatred. The pervasive influence of these toxic ideas in American education has helped to indoctrinate largely ignorant students to parrot what earlier generations might have easily understood to be Soviet-era Marxist propaganda about Zionism being racism and Israel being an “apartheid state” against which all “resistance”—even the orgy of rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that Palestinians carried on Oct. 7—can be justified.

Israel’s PR-War Pandemonium

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.

Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)

When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”

And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”

The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”

“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.

Lowy’s lament: ‘I know how insidious antisemitism can be’

Looking in from the outside, Sir Frank Lowy is shaken by what is happening in Australia. He’s been watching as antisemitism seeps into the country and weakens its famous sense of “a fair go”.

This is new, something he never experienced in his 66 years in Australia.

“When I arrived in Sydney in 1952 and got a job in a factory, I was seen as a ‘New Australian’ and I took it as a term of endearment, not exclusion.

“In the canteen, we ate our sandwiches together and no one remarked on my foreignness or questioned my religion.

“And in six decades of running Westfield, I never experienced antisemitism. Once, a newspaper referred to me as ‘a Jewish businessman’. I objected, and it never happened again.”

While many believe the current conflict in Gaza has not led to antisemitism in Australia, Lowy has seen it before, and he does.

“In Europe in the late ’30s and ’40s, I experienced it directly. I know what it feels like, and I know how insidious it can be.

“In Europe back then, it had become safe for people to express antisemitism, and now it’s becoming safe to do so in Australia. It may take a different form, but the feeling is the same, and it’s deeply disturbing.”

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04/15 Links Pt2: Israel’s Splendid Isolation; Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism; Exposed: UNRWA’s Rigged “Independent” Review

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Israel’s Splendid Isolation

So maybe there is a certain type of rueful wisdom to be taken from these undeniable statistics. Maybe the thing is, Israel doesn’t need the support of the international community and the Council on Foreign Relations and the panel on Washington Week in Review and the jawboners at the Aspen Institute and the billionaires who drink ambrosia from the boots of tyrants at Davos. Maybe the thing is, Israel is a nation that has had this miraculous rise because it has a purpose, which is something most other countries do not have or need, and something that Thomas Friedman and his ilk are (again) too unnerved by to understand.

Israel is engaged in a purpose that is both world-historical and outside history. It exists as a refuge and haven and homeland for the world’s most stateless people, and its claim to statehood is not just due to its need for protection but based in part on a literally transcendent claim. That’s why I say it exists outside history as well.

To ensure the continuity of its existence, Israel must act. First, it must beat back those who would destroy it and who have been coming at it relentlessly since the day it was founded—genocidal evildoers whose Amalekite faces are now showing themselves even in America, really for the first time in our history.

Second, it must not only survive but thrive, because the fulfillment of its purpose depends upon it slowly making Jewish power a simple and undeniable and enduring reality in a world that has not known such a thing before—and is, as I said before, unnerved by it.

That was, in fact, happening during the 2010s with the Abraham Accords—until that progress was halted in part by a bizarrely feckless Biden administration that decided to hinge our national policy toward the world’s most important oil-exporting nation on the murder of a single person in a consulate in Turkey several years earlier. The fact that Israel had grown the way it had grown and shown how to be an innovative nation in a region mired in backwardness was its calling card.

But perhaps it was too focused on hurrying time along. For over the course of the past decade, Israel somehow found itself, like the sightless Samson in John Milton’s imagining, “eyeless in Gaza”—and made itself vulnerable to the worst single event in its history. At least Samson had been blinded by enemy Philistines; Israel’s leaders blinded themselves. They didn’t see the gathering danger because they wanted to look elsewhere and do other things.

Its response has, yet again, isolated Israel. That isolation is wearing away at the determination of some Israelis to see this war through to victory or is causing them to despair that there can be victory. It is a hateful thing, the isolation. It is unjust, it is foul, it is hypocritical, and it is, of course, anti-Semitic at its root.

But as the past six decades have shown us, when it comes to Israel’s purpose as both a change agent in history and a representative of a force outside of history, the isolation doesn’t matter at all. They—we—are not isolated. They—we—are chosen.

Christine Rosen: Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism

In fact, the decision to downplay the anti-Semitic threat from the left is deliberate. Left-leaning media do not like to cover the behavior of their own, as the inconsistent coverage of the Jew-baiting members of the Democratic Party’s “Squad” during the past several years attests. Mainstream reporters at outlets like the New York Times take great pains to provide context and explanations for Representative Ilhan Omar’s blatant anti-Semitism, for example. A 2019 piece gave Omar and her defenders ample space to claim she was being unfairly targeted for criticism because she was a progressive Muslim woman while glossing over the fact that she had repeatedly accused Jews of having dual loyalties.

Amid the current conflict, it’s evident there is tacit agreement among most in the mainstream media that because Israel is defending itself by trying to root out Hamas in Gaza, the behavior of protesters is somehow justifiable and acceptable—but only because it involves Israel and the Jews.

This goes well beyond the deliberately misleading stories and factual errors about the war that have appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post. As Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff outlined in National Review, in a deep dive of the Post’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war, the newspaper “has been a case study in moral confusion and anti-Israel bias” and has “violated traditional journalistic principles that have shaped coverage of foreign conflicts by American newsrooms for decades.”

Similarly, a recent story in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, a long-time editor and reporter at National Public Radio, described how NPR “approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms,” which meant “highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”

By contrast, imagine if an elderly African-American civil-rights activist were being heckled and bullied with racist taunts while trying to speak before a red-state city-council meeting about the need to properly recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Every major newspaper, magazine, and television and cable network would air nonstop coverage of the event.

The double standard at work in mainstream media has become impossible to ignore and is a sign of a deep moral failing in the profession of journalism: When it comes to threats and attacks against Jews, integrity is sacrificed on the altar of ideological conformity. Thus the self-proclaimed seekers of truth became handmaidens to barbarity and the world’s oldest and most destructive hatred.

Seth Mandel: The Evil Campaign to Remove Jews from the Public Square

In her book People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn recounts the furious response she received once when she mentioned, in a lecture, that the common story of immigration officials changing Jewish family names at Ellis Island is a myth. Immigrants’ names were taken from ship manifests, which were compiled using the immigrants’ own passports. Inspectors were there to confirm, not record, each passenger’s name.

Name-changers in the early-20th century were often Jews, but they were much more likely to be already-settled middle-aged parents of children who were pursuing a trade or a degree in higher education. In 1932, according to the historian Kirsten Fermaglich, 65 percent of those petitioning to change their name had Jewish-sounding last names. Most of the name changes—for Jews and non-Jews alike—at this time were motivated by the desire “to abandon ‘foreign’ names that were ‘difficult to pronounce and spell’ and to adopt instead more ‘American’ names,” Fermaglich writes. “These individuals were hoping to shed the ethnic markers that disadvantaged them in American society by taking on unmarked, ordinary names that would go unnoticed.”

This came at a time when public opinion in the United States had been turning against immigrants for a decade. Especially Jewish immigrants. A restrictive immigration bill would become law (over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto) in 1917. Momentum would soon get rolling toward another, even more restrictive one in 1924. Because immigration law was country-of-origin focused, there could be no official “Jewish quota.” But there were quotas for the parts of Europe that Jews were seeking to leave, and those quotas could be reduced in favor of more “desirable” countries of origin.

“The Hebrew race… in spite of long residence in Europe, is still as it has always been an Asiatic race,” thundered prominent immigration restrictionist Prescott Hall. Bolshevism, he said, was a “movement of oriental Tatar tribes led by Asiatic Semites against the Nordic bourgeoisie.” The historian Howard Sachar quotes a U.S. foreign-service officer inveighing against the Polish Jews seeking to come to America: “They are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” Most of them “lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit, and the majority of this percentage is mentally incapable of acquiring it.”

That last line was intended to convey the point that assimilation into American ways was impossible for Jews. Therefore, one was right to be suspicious of them—whether or not they were born in America. Thus no one with a Jewish-sounding last name was spared the suspicion that he might not ever be truly American. Clubs and hotels and even residential neighborhoods tightened their policies excluding Jews. In 1922, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell repeatedly encountered potential donors who demanded to know how the president planned to “leave our university free of this plague.” Official quotas were still controversial, but the Ivies ultimately figured out the same thing the congressional crafters of immigration quotas did: You could limit your intake of Jews by adjusting geographic quotas. By the 1930s, Harvard had dropped its share of Jewish enrollment from over 25 percent to 10 percent, and Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Swarthmore had gotten their Jewish share into the single digits.

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04/08 Links Pt1: The Right Dishonourable Foreign Secretary; Germany Stands by Israel; Islamic Jihad spokesman admits taking over hospitals

From Ian:

In Six Months, Everything Has Changed for Israel

On Oct. 6, Israel appeared on the cusp of a new era of recognition from the Muslim world, close to a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that would move it to the center of a realigned Middle East after years on its fringes. The historic conflict with the Palestinians that had defined its existence for most of its 75-year history appeared to have finally receded into the background.

It all changed on Oct. 7.

Today, after a bloody attack that might have brought it the world’s sympathy, Israel is closer to being a global pariah than ever before. Its Saudi peace deal is on hold. The Palestinian question is again roiling its Arab neighbors. It is in open argument with its main ally, the U.S. And its physical living space has been shrunk by dangers on its northern and southern borders.

In six months, the world has turned upside down for this small nation. On Oct. 7—or Black Sabbath, as Israelis now call it—the Jewish state experienced a fundamental shock that upended its sense of security and belief in the strength of its military. It responded with a heavy-handed invasion of Gaza that in much of the world’s eyes left it the aggressor and its attackers the victims. The resulting isolation could be more of a threat to its future than the attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7. “Israel’s longevity is in question for the first time since its birth,” said Benny Morris, an Israeli historian. The only time Israel faced a similar existential threat, he said, was in its war for independence in 1948, when it battled five Arab countries and local Palestinian militias.

The outpouring of global sympathy on display after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust has dwindled, having been replaced by images of starving and dead Palestinians in Gaza. Images projected across the world show swaths of the Gaza Strip turned into rubble. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities, whose numbers don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

This week, the killing of seven aid workers trying to feed desperate Gazans appears to have punctured the notion for much of the world that the Israeli military isn’t running amok in Gaza and has caused a rethink by the U.S. about its support for Israel.

Normalization with Saudi Arabia is on hold, while ties with Arab allies such as Egypt and Jordan have frayed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have thronged the streets of Western capitals, at times calling for Israel’s demise. A surge in antisemitism has shocked and alarmed not only Israelis but Jews across the globe. It is all strengthening a feeling inside Israel that the country can only rely on itself.

Israel faces a dilemma where it wants to be loved by the West, but needs to be feared by its enemies in the Middle East to ensure its long-term existence, said Micah Goodman, an Israeli author and philosopher.

“That’s the catch-22 we’re in,” he said.

Melanie Phillips: The Right Dishonourable Foreign Secretary

Is Britain’s Foreign Secretary unaware that Israel has again agreed terms for a ceasefire that Hamas has again rejected? Can he really not understand that the only conditions under which Hamas would release the hostages would be Israel’s total surrender and the release of all its Hamas prisoners?

Does he really fail to grasp that the hostages with whom Yahya Sinwar has reportedly surrounded himself are the Hamas leader’s ultimate bargaining counter to protect his life, and so he will never voluntarily give them up? Is Cameron really so badly informed that he thinks a man like Sinwar would choose to go into exile rather than die the “martyr’s” death he craves if he is defeated, taking the hostages with him? Does he really imagine that the unconscionable threat posed by the psychopathic, religious fanatics of Hamas and its equally fanatical patron, Iran, can be solved by political means?

Surely Cameron, with his first-class degree from Oxford and reputedly stellar intellect, cannot possibly be so stupid and ignorant as to think like this? But the only alternative to that is that he is driven by profound malice towards Israel. And Cameron is an honourable man.

Then comes the article’s zinger. For it turns out that Cameron is indeed well aware that Hamas has refused a deal that releases the remaining hostages. So he says:
We all want to see an end to the fighting, but we must face up to the difficult question: what should we do if Hamas refuses a deal and if the conflict continues?

What indeed. And then he comes up with this astonishing answer:
We cannot stand by with our head in our hands, wishing for an end to the fighting that may well not come — and that means ensuring the protection of people in all of Gaza including Rafah.

As an occupying power, Israel has a responsibility to the people of Gaza. But it also means that the international community must work with Israel on humanitarian efforts to keep people safe and provide them with what they need.

Ordinary civilians must be safe and able to access food, water and medical care. We need the UN, with the support of the international community, to work with Israel to make practical, deliverable plans to achieve this in Rafah and across Gaza.

He doesn’t want a solution that ensures the protection of all the people of Israel. He want instead a solution to protect all the people of Gaza — while Israel, the victim of the monster born from the people of Gaza, has to produce it. The absolute and overriding requirement to protect Israel against further genocidal attack from Gaza is nowhere in Cameron's vision. His only gesture is a meaningless bromide about wanting
the people of Israel and the people of Gaza to be able to live their lives in peace and security.

Yes, Gaza’s civilians should be protected as far as possible from the war — but this cannot take precedence over the requirement to stop Hamas once and for all. It is Israel that is threatened with being wiped out, not the people of Gaza. They are the unfortunate casualties of the Hamas strategy to maximise the numbers who die in order to turn the west against Israel — an infernal manipulation of gullible westerners that has worked to the letter — plus the refusal by Egypt to open its border to the Gazan refugees, and indeed the refusal by every other Muslim state to allow any of them in.

Moreover, the majority of Gazans voted for Hamas, still support Hamas, and exulted over the October 7 pogrom. Untold numbers of “ordinary” Gazans took part in that pogrom, murdered Israelis, took them hostage and are currently keeping some of them locked up in their homes where they are reportedly using them as slaves. And the vast majority of Gazans, when asked, say they support the further killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel.

These are the people whose welfare Cameron is more concerned to protect than the lives of the Israelis who would continue to be subjected to genocidal attack if he had his way.

This is presumably what he means by Britain aiming to “exercise leadership in the region and at the United Nations”.

For Cameron is an honourable man.

Kurt Schlichter: Israel Is Risking Losing This War by Caring What People Who Hate It Think

Israel is risking losing this war because it is focusing more on avoiding criticism from its enemies than winning. I blame Benjamin Netanyahu in large part, but also our incompetent and loathsome alleged president. Now, I’m not one of those reflexive Bibi haters, and while I certainly don’t think the United States should have a say in who Israel chooses to lead it, I do believe in accountability. The disaster of October 7 happened on his watch, and he should’ve resigned the day after, but that’s not up to me or up to any American. What is up to me as an American is who our president will be next year, and it can’t be Biden again. But the desiccated old zombie aside, Bibi needs to go. He screwed up on October 7, and now he appears to be screwing up this war.

The problem is not that Netanyahu has been too harsh, as our idiot president claims. It’s that Netanyahu has been too gentle (Yes, I understand a war cabinet is leading Israel, but he is still the face of it.). And too slow. Joe Biden has betrayed every ally America has had, from South Vietnam to Afghanistan and Bibi somehow imagined that creep would not sell-out Israel? Speed was of the essence. Why was Rafah not glass months ago? Netanyahu waited, and that gave Biden the time to sell out Israel.

Restraining was a mistake. The fact is that Israel has, to a far too great extent, tried to fight this war on terms that would satisfy its leftist enemies in the United States and other anti-Semites around the world. That was an error from the beginning. Israel’s strategy should have focused on victory, not on trying to mollify its critics. They will cry no matter what. Let them cry over defeated terrorists. Do you know what mollifies critics most effectively? Winning. Israel should’ve done that, and fast. But it didn’t. Despite the courage and skill of the IDF, who are a credit to their great nation, Israel’s leadership chose to fight this war and is still fighting this war in a manner that allows others who do not have Israel’s best interest at heart to dictate its strategic and tactical prerogatives. That is a grave error. That is putting Israel in danger.

Israel has three main related strategic military objectives at the moment. First, Israel needs to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Second, Israel must eliminate Hezbollah on its northern border. This Jihadi militia is dug in inside Lebanon with enough Iranian-supplied rockets to devastate Israel’s infrastructure, as well as having the ability to launch October 7-style attacks. And third, Israel must destroy Hamas in Gaza. A surviving Hamas can launch more October 7-style attacks and has promised to do so if able.

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03/25 Links Pt2: The UN sows the seeds of its own demise; The Red-Right-Hand Apologists; US: Israel using weapons legally, not blocking Gaza aid

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Loser of the UN Resolution: Biden

The pauper’s diplomacy of the Biden administration was on display today as it facilitated the passing of a UN Security Council resolution heavily weighted against Israel.

Every minor concession to moral decency was rejected in favor of “an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan.” Beggars can’t be choosers, explained Biden’s ambassador to the UN after abstaining from the vote, thus allowing the resolution to pass: “We did not agree with everything in the resolution. For that reason we were unfortunately not able to vote yes. However, as I’ve said before, we fully support some of the critical objectives in this non-binding resolution.”

Let’s be crystal clear about why this was a bad resolution.

Last week the U.S. put forth a version of the resolution that was vetoed by Russia and China. That version asked for Security Council backing for “diplomatic efforts to secure such a ceasefire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages.” [emphasis added]

If you don’t connect a long-lasting ceasefire to the release of the hostages, you are telling Hamas to walk away from the negotiations led by the U.S. to secure those two aims. After all, that same UN ambassador fumed at the time, “we should not move forward with any resolution that jeopardizes the ongoing negotiations.”

Russia’s deputy UN envoy disagreed, insisting that everyone should be comfortable with telling the hostages to rot: “At the coordination stage, almost all Security Council members expressed the view that the demand for an immediate ceasefire should not be conditional on the release of hostages or the condemnation of Hamas.”

Today, the Biden administration declared Russia to be correct. Let the hostages rot or else Joe Biden may lose a few thousand votes in Michigan.

As for the cynical use of “Ramadan” in the ceasefire, the Biden administration should be ashamed of itself for enabling it. The language implicitly portrays Israel’s counteroffensive as a war of religious persecution, or at the very least contempt. That alone will inflame the violent resistance to the mere survival of the Jewish nation. Was there a Hanukkah resolution passed by the UNSC that demanded the release of hostages? Yesterday was Purim; the holiday came and went without a UNSC demand for Hamas to at least return the children it is holding. Next month is the holiday of Passover, in which we recount our ancestors’ prolonged suffering while they were held against their will. How does the godforsaken nest of cretinous trolls at Turtle Bay plan to honor that one?

Intl. law expert: Biden team's moral backbone collapsed

Prof. Anne Bayefsky, president of the Human Rights Voices NGO and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights, spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva Monday about the US government's decision to abstain rather than use its veto against a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza during the month of Ramadan.

"The failure of the Biden administration to veto this resolution is a shocking redefinition of American priorities: mollifying Iran and its terrorist partners is on the ascent while supporting Israel in its existential battle against terror is plummeting," Prof. Bayefsky said.

She noted, "Last week the United States "demanded" the UN Security Council finally condemn Hamas for the October 7th atrocities - which the Council has never done. The Arab group of states, the Russians and Chinese said no. Just forty-eight hours later, the moral backbone of the Biden team collapsed. The United States allowed the adoption of the third Council resolution since October 7th that fails to condemn its perpetrators."

"Moreover, in her statement before the Council American Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield said Hamas should achieve a ceasefire - in effect saving the terror organization and its plans for more October 7's - with the release of one hostage! In her words: “A ceasefire can begin immediately with the release of the first hostage.” American hostages have been abandoned in Hamas hell holes, by their own government. And U.S. credibility and honor has taken a tremendous hit - to the detriment of Israel, the Jewish people and America," Prof. Bayefsky concluded.

David Singer: The UN sows the seeds of its own demise

Guterres has been responsible for filing only documents from 1947 – not from 1917 - with the International Court of Justice in relation to the UN General Assembly seeking the Court’s advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The Court’s opinion will be based only on those documents lodged by Guterres– which will exclude the Court considering the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and the 1936 Peel Commission.

Guterres has been the UN front man – supported by UNESCO head Tor Wennesland - pushing for the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab state between Israel and Jordan as called for in Security Council Resolution 2334 adopted on 23 December 2016 – when Obama refrained from vetoing it - that misleadingly claims Jews have no legal right to live anywhere west of the Jordan River. Rescinding Resolution 2334 remains an imperative to rectifying this anti-Jewish canard.

Guterres and Wennesland have refused for the last 18 months to bring before the Security Council for its consideration an alternative solution emanating from Saudi Arabia - authored by an advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution published in Al Arabiya News on 8 June 2022. Their extraordinary decision ensures the 100 years-old Jewish-Arab conflict will continue – not end.

Emboldened by these clearly anti-Israel UN decisions – increasingly strident Moslems have caused Jewish communities worldwide to become greatly concerned for their own safety as they foment demonstrations around the globe calling for Palestine from the River to the Sea to be free of Jews – supported by lawyers from Australia to artists in the USA signing letters calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza War.

Under Guterres’s leadership the UN has become the epicentre for fostering anti-Israel hatred and Jew-hatred.

The UN has lost its moral compass and is sowing the seeds for its own demise.

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02/15 Links Pt2: The antisemitism crisis is out of control; Australia’s Descent Into Jew-Baiting Chaos; Tlaib Votes ‘Present’ on Condemnation of Hamas’ Sexual Violence

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The antisemitism crisis is out of control

The Labour leader either loses the support of the Muslims or the Jews. But he can’t afford to lose either, the first on grounds of electoral math and the second on grounds of the party’s foundational claim to moral decency.

The Conservative government is also in a mess over this problem. It has expressed horror at the rise in British antisemitism and called it “utterly deplorable.” Ministers cannot begin to address it, however, unless they call out not just support for Hamas but support for the Palestinian cause itself.

They have not done so. Instead, the accepted line is that Hamas is bad but the Palestinian cause is fine.

Worse still, Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, like his counterpart in the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has repeatedly demanded the establishment of a Palestinian state after the end of the war in Gaza.

Not only would this pose an insupportable danger to Israel from Palestinian Arabs no less committed than Hamas to the genocide of the Jews, but through such rhetoric, Cameron and Blinken are tacitly endorsing the antisemitism being inescapably promoted through the Palestinian cause.

In America, under the pressure of the presidential election later this year, the Biden administration is desperately trying to pacify the Democrats’ interrelated pro-Palestinian and Muslim constituencies.

It is doing so through an increasingly harsh attitude towards embattled Israel, with Blinken ramping up demands amounting to surrender to Hamas and the State Department sanctioning four Jewish “settlers” while defaming all Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

Last week, a delegation of senior officials was dispatched to the key Democratic stronghold of Dearborn, Mich., to grovel to the Muslim community there. The principal deputy national security director, Jon Finer, actually apologized for the White House statement marking 100 days after Oct. 7, which focused on the tragic plight of the hostages and the brutality of Hamas, and expressed contrition for “missteps” in America’s support for Israel.

In both Britain and America, the Muslim vote is increasingly distorting politics. The consequences are potentially devastating.

The UNRWA Obstacle

This current problem is the result of the original sin, the original problem. As UNRWA became entrenched, its mission was no longer to settle the refugees and their sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, great-great-grandsons, but rather to keep their dream of “going home” alive. That is, to keep a sinister and disruptive vision for the Palestinians, one in which Israel somehow ceases to exist as the millions of supposed exiled Palestinians go back to places that were resettled decades ago by other people.

Such a vision should not come as great surprise, because UNRWA is an international organization by name and funding only. It gets its allocations from a naïve, or baleful, world, it draws its legitimacy from being an agent of the international community. But in fact, it is a Palestinian organization funded by outsiders. Other than a few foreigners in managerial positions, almost all UNRWA employees are Palestinians. In Gaza, they are Gazans, and, in most cases, supporters of Hamas. They get their salaries from you — Americans, or Canadians, or Norwegians — and they work for Yahya Sinwar, a coldblooded killer and a master of violence. They work for him in two ways: as perpetrators of terrorism, or perpetrators of hate.

Note this: When UNRWA takes care of schools and medicine in Gaza, all expenses are paid by you. It’s not because there’s no money in Gaza to fund these activities; it is because Hamas takes that money and uses it for other purposes, such as arming itself, digging tunnels, firing rockets. UNRWA is an agency whose work gets Hamas off the hook of having to provide for the population of Gaza. Hamas is engaged in violence, while UNRWA keeps the people of Gaza fed, clothed and schooled. That’s a convenient arrangement for all parties involved. Hamas has free hands to do what it wants to do, UNRWA has a mission that keeps it viable. All this is well known and documented. You can read all about it in the above-mentioned book. There’s no news – except for the fact that we were suddenly made to realize that UNRWA is not a nuisance, it is a threat that must be dealt with. It is a threat that should be eliminated along with Hamas rule. There are less corrupt and less political aid agencies that can replace UNRWA, such as USAID, the World Food Program, and other groups that already have functioning operations in certain Palestinian areas.

The most eager supporters of this decision – to eliminate UNRWA – ought to be those who want to someday see a cure for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The cure will not come when the world funds an organization whose main activity is to keep a wound open, to preach the gospel of victimhood, to educate the next generation of people with no dream other than the destruction of other people’s homes and country. That this organization is also swarmed with terrorist supportive employees is not a bug, but a feature. You can’t run an army by staffing it with pacificists, you can’t run a school by staffing it with illiterates, you can’t run an orchestra by staffing it with only deaf persons – and you can’t run an UNRWA believing that its workers will be a peace-loving, solution-seeking, peace-promoting bunch.

So, as they say, don’t let a crisis go to waste. Winning the war and keeping UNRWA would be a wasteful thing to do.

Why the UN Hates this Man

The United Nations, I think it’s safe to say, has moved beyond parody to farce.

Created in the wake of the Holocaust with the primary goal of preventing future world wars and genocides, its number one target of condemnation since 1967 has been the only Jewish state.

Russia and China are permanent members of the Security Council, tasked with “the maintenance of international peace and security.” Current members of the Human Rights Council include China, Qatar, Cuba, and Sudan. The Commission on the Status of Women finally unloaded Iran, but still includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China.

Since 2015, the General Assembly has condemned Israel 140 times; the total against all other countries combined: 65.

Still, the U.N.’s treatment of Israel remains its most barbaric affectation. In 1975, the U.N. declared that Zionism is racism. Since 2006, more than half of all condemnatory resolutions in the Human Rights Council have targeted Israel. Since 2015, the General Assembly has condemned Israel 140 times; the total against all other countries combined: 65. Israel has been made to face the International Criminal Court, because in the morally corrupt human rights industry, Israel’s self-defense amounts to a war crime.

And then there’s UNRWA, whose tight alliance with Hamas no doubt makes ISIS jealous.

Much of the above came to light when in 2004 a Canadian named Hillel Neuer became executive director of UN Watch, a human rights NGO in Geneva, Switzerland. Under his leadership, UN Watch has become the leading force against what he calls the “U.N.’s pathological discrimination and delegitimization of Israel.” He regularly calls out countries and their leaders on human rights abuses, which is what the U.N. would be doing if its mission hadn’t become politicized.

None of this makes him very popular at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. “When I walk into the room at the U.N., if looks could kill, I’d be dead by a thousand blows,” Neuer told the Jerusalem Post.

On Feb. 7, a bipartisan group of 12 U.S. legislators sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging him to demand that U.N. Secretary General António Guterres and the head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, resign over the revelation that a dozen members of UNRWA staff were involved in the Oct. 7th massacre: seven staffers infiltrated Israel; five helped to kidnap Israelis and provide ammunition. In addition, the IDF found that Hamas stored weapons in UNRWA buildings; used UNRWA resources for terrorist activities; and built tunnels under UNRWA facilities. And a recent Wall Street Journal report estimates that roughly 10% of UNRWA employees — 1,200 — are linked to Hamas.

Who initiated this call for their resignations? Hillel Neuer.

I was lucky to grab some time with @HillelNeuer of @UNWatch to get some insight on the United Nations & the most criminal scandal of our time: the participation of @UNRWA staff in rape, murder & kidnapping - paid for by our taxes

How could this happen?

We discuss#replaceUNRWA pic.twitter.com/V3uaEp1apz

— leekern (@leekern13) February 15, 2024

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