07/21 Links Pt1: What the U.S. and Iran Are Fighting Over; Foreign Threats Breed Self-Sufficiency; The inconvenient truth about Gaza’s ability to govern; The UN Has Run Out of Alibis

From Ian:

Is an Abraham Security Alliance Possible in the Middle East?

Is a greater Middle East security alliance, encompassing Israel, Lebanon, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and beyond, a realistic prospect? Or will Hamas- and PLO-supporting Turkey replace Israel as the U.S. administration's preferred regional partner?

In his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in July 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu floated an "Abraham Security Alliance," a NATO-style framework open to states that "have made peace with Israel and those that will."

In February 2026, Netanyahu unveiled what strategists call the "Hexagon Alliance": Israel's technological and security core, linked to India's manufacturing weight, Greek and Cypriot Mediterranean corridors, Emirati economic channels, and Somaliland's Red Sea oversight. Lebanon has since agreed to direct negotiations with Israel. Syria's al-Sharaa government has held direct dialogue with Jerusalem.

Nonetheless, there appears to be a strategic shift inside the U.S. administration: beyond personal rapport between Trump and Erdogan, there is a growing view that Turkey can assume roles Israel has traditionally played, engaging Arab states wary of Iran. Ankara is exploiting this opening, positioning itself as the Islamic world's next leader, replacing the Iranian regime's role as regional hegemon and becoming Israel's principal long-term strategic competitor.

Despite Turkey's upgraded military presence in the Middle East and East Africa, Erdogan has not operationalized his threats on Israel. He has avoided military confrontation thus far, and has refrained from disrupting Israeli operations in Syria, despite housing and training Hamas on Turkish soil. Notwithstanding Turkey's malign regional behavior, the U.S. administration still is considering Turkey as a politically "lower-cost" regional security manager.

If the Abraham Security Alliance is to mean anything beyond aspirational rhetoric, the U.S. must expand the Abraham Accord alliances. Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Somaliland, Greece, Cyprus, and others are realistic candidates. However, the expanded security alliance will depend on a strong U.S., Israel, and Gulf Arab foundation that would be shaken by Turkey's neo-Ottoman imperial ambitions and destabilizing influence.

Foreign Threats Breed Self-Sufficiency

There are people who imagine that cutting American aid would irreparably damage the Jewish state. Yet Israel defeated the Arabs in June 1967, again, as it did in 1948, without any U.S.-supplied weapons.

Precisely because of Israel's long history of denials and embargoes by the British and U.S. governments, its nine million people are enough to support disproportionately large and diverse military industries.

This state of nine million is one that can research, develop and manufacture the world's heaviest battle tank, a full range of tactical and strategic missiles, and the interceptors that inaugurated humanity's first instance of space warfare two years ago.

Israelis reacted to the start of U.S. military aid after the Six-Day War with deep, genuine gratitude, eagerly pursuing any opportunity to reciprocate.

Israel's Mossad was inside the Soviet Union, which the CIA could only watch from afar, and offered up all it uncovered.

After its October 1973 tank-warfare victories, Israel supplied the U.S. Army's tacticians with every bit of data for their, and NATO's, revolutionary "fight outnumbered and win" manuals, explicitly based on the desperate Golan Heights fight in which 200 Israeli tanks destroyed four times as many Soviet-built Syrian tanks.

In my many encounters in Israel over the years, I have heard a great eagerness to contribute Israel's research and development talents, whose fruits are now built into some of the most capable U.S. weapons, most conspicuously in the F-35 fighter jet, whose innovative helmet-mounted piloting system was entirely developed in Israel.

Israel's pilots sat in their cockpits for hours to reach and bomb Iran's distant missile launchers, which were attacking U.S. bases and U.S. allies, as well as Israel itself.

Israel would never refuse any military help it could provide, as countless U.S. officers have known for decades.

Michael Doran: What the U.S. and Iran Are Fighting Over

Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is a die-hard jihadi. For him, the officials negotiating with Washington serve as infidel handlers: officials who translate the demands of the IRGC into language acceptable to Western diplomats.

The IRGC struck ships that transited the Strait of Hormuz without coordinating with it to enforce Vahidi's interpretation of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed in mid-June. Vahidi never accepted the U.S. view that Iran would reopen the strait and treat it as an international waterway rather than a sovereign asset.

Trump has opted for a campaign of calibrated escalation designed to force Vahidi to accept the American definition of the MoU, seeking to impose enough pain to make the status quo untenable without igniting a wider regional war. But this theory expects Vahidi to place the welfare of Iranian society above the institutional interests of the IRGC.

Trump's ongoing campaign is unlikely to eliminate the drone threat. Intermittent drone attacks on commercial shipping are enough to drive insurers from the market and achieve severe disruption. Vahidi recently struck a desalination plant in Kuwait with ballistic missiles that are also hard to eradicate.

This reveals how profoundly warfare has changed. The era in which U.S. airpower could rapidly neutralize a regional adversary at acceptable cost is ending. It is being replaced by a more contested, attritional environment in which weaker states can buy time and impose significant costs.

These battlefield realities are already reshaping American strategy. Washington will increasingly prize allies that possess battle-tested militaries, functioning defense industries, advanced intelligence, and practical experience defeating missiles, drones, and hardened targets. It will prize, above all, allies that help the U.S. understand and counter the emerging Sino-Russian-Iranian military system. Israel meets those criteria. Very few others do.

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Some everyday antisemitism in Egypt's venerable Al Ahram newspaper

Ashraf Abdel Moneim writes in Al Ahram that Israel is trying to characterize the seven front war it is in as a religious war.

He quotes Netanyahu from October 7, 2023 saying that Israel is in a war. Specifically, he said, "Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not in an operation, not in rounds of fighting—we are at war."

Somehow, Moneim then goes on a lengthy description of the halachic differences between a religiously obligational war and a discretionary war, claiming that Israel is falsely positioning the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere as obligatory. But Netanyahu never used that terminology - this idea is simply made up. 

It is the last paragraph that shows that this is not meant to be a sober analysis of how Jewish Israelis view war. 

Numerous arguments and sophistries force us into a contemporary reality with a people who never tire of invoking the tricks of their forefathers—the Sabbath-breakers. These were the people whom God forbade fishing on the Sabbath, yet they resorted to a superficial trick: they set their nets on Friday to trap the fish, then proceeded to catch them on Sunday—thinking they had deceived God and circumvented His purpose. But this trait seems deeply ingrained in them; the text forbids them from waging an expansionist war except under strict conditions and in purely defensive circumstances. So they manipulate the situation by fabricating an existential threat, then play with terminology, oscillating between a "religious war" and an "expansionist war," thus fulfilling the condition formally and legally... to benefit from its advantages!

The Sabbath-breaker story is in the Quran and elaborated in hadiths. It is about a community of Jews who lived by the sea but Allah tested them by having the fish only appear on the Sabbath when fishing is not allowed. Some of the Jewish fishermen defied Allah and set traps on Friday to catch the fish on the Sabbath, ignoring warnings from others in the community. Eventually, Allah lost patience and turned them (and those who did not object)  into monkeys. 

Moneim is comparing Netanyahu's fictional use of the words "obligatory war" for a war of expansion as a modern way that Jews try to violate God's commandments.

The irony is that Moneim is wrong about the Sabbath and wrong about the war. 

There is nothing that stops a Jew from setting a trap before the Sabbath to catch animals and collect them afterwards. This is explicit in the Mishnah; the only disagreement is whether the traps should be set early enough to theoretically catch animals before the Sabbath (Beit Shammai) or can be placed immediately beforehand (Beit Hillel and normative halacha.)  The authors of the Quran seem to have been familiar with Talmudic sources, so they should have known this — they may have made up the halacha to illustrate the made-up story, which exists nowhere but the Quran. 

And attacking an enemy that not only attacked you first, but has stated its intent to continue to do so, is without a doubt an obligatory defensive war under halacha, even though Netanyahu did not use that language.

The lesson? Don't trust antisemitic Muslim scholars to define Jewish law (or history) for you. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/20 Links Pt2: Ireland’s hypocritical anti-Israel law is a win for Hamas — and a challenge to Trump; Rare burnt First Temple-era beams unearthed in Jerusalem after 2,600 years

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Ireland’s hypocritical anti-Israel law is a win for Hamas — and a challenge to Trump

In 1977, Congress prohibited US companies from participating in boycotts of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.

Decades later the Trade Promotion Authority law, passed during the Obama administration, specifically condemned “state-sponsored unsanctioned foreign boycotts of Israel.”

That’s exactly what Ireland’s law is.

US laws ban American companies from complying in any way with an impermissibly discriminatory boycott like Ireland’s.

That puts American companies operating there in a legal bind.

Moreover, the law requires the Treasury Department to maintain a “current list of countries which require or may require participation in or cooperation with an international boycott.”

American companies doing business in countries listed as boycotters face tax and other penalties if they abide by their requirements.

Until now, Treasury’s list was made up solely of Arab states like Syria and Iraq — and it’s gotten steadily shorter, as more Arab countries have made peace with Israel and started normal trading relationships.

Now Treasury must promptly add Ireland to its official list of boycotting countries: If Dublin wants to act like Damascus, it must be treated as such.

Irish legislators seek to pressure Israel to completely withdraw from Judea and Samaria, and to dismantle all Jewish communities there.

But Israel did exactly that with Gaza in the 2005 Disengagement — and Hamas turned it into a terror base.

Ireland claims its move upholds international law, but its hypocrisy is glaring.

It has imposed no similar rules on goods from other disputed territories — or on China, despite Beijing’s massive and ongoing human rights abuses.

Ireland isn’t about to shutter its movie theaters showing “The Odyssey,” even though parts of it were filmed in Western Sahara, which the United Nations regards as occupied territory.

Its ban applies only to Jewish towns.

President Donald Trump’s first administration clearly stated its opposition to Ireland’s law — heck, even the Biden administration warned Dublin of “consequences” if it moved forward.

But animosity to Israel runs so deep in Ireland — the only criticism the law got from opponents was that it doesn’t go far enough — that its legislators decided passing a symbolic Israel-bashing bill is more important than good relations with Washington.

Perhaps they think America is bluffing?

Regardless, imposing trade restrictions on a US ally as it fights alongside us in a hot war is deeply disrespectful.

But Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly considering a similar measure — so Trump must nip this trend in the bud.

The United States must make it crystal clear that no matter which countries choose to impose sanctions on an ally, they will face the consequences of US law.

Ireland's Antizionism

In the sports world, opposition to Israel has grown significantly in the past few weeks and months. Nowhere has this been truer than in the ongoing campaign to cancel the upcoming Ireland-Israel football match scheduled for October. Left-wing politicians and the establishment media took the lead in advocating for a complete cancellation of the game, even if it would hurt Irish football in the long run. The media ran with the story every day, all with the same ideological bent.

When the game was moved from Dublin to a yet to be determined neutral venue, the very same people who complained about Israeli football players and fans visiting Ireland’s largest city argued that moving the game deprived them of the right to protest the Israeli team in person. The country’s largest trade union has even called on the national broadcaster not to air the game. This demonstrates that these activist groups were not interested so much in the outcome as in the process, for it allowed them to keep the issue alive in public discourse, with the establishment media eagerly amplifying the most extreme antizionist voices.

This gets to the heart of antizionism, for it doesn’t purport to offer constructive solutions to deeply entrenched problems, so much as to provide an ongoing justification for a constant campaign of vilification directed against Israel and the majority of the world’s Jews who support its right to exist in peace and security. Quite a few of those who agitated against the game being played in Dublin, who have been silent on the Islamic Republic’s massacre of their own people, couched their opposition as being borne of out of a commitment to being “anti-genocide.”

This implies that Israel’s war against Hamas was a deliberate act of genocide rather than the result of having to fight a war in a densely populated area, in which the enemy deliberately used civilian infrastructure to wage battle. This is a key component of antizionist discourse, which has employed “genocide” as a rhetorical weapon and as a libel. Nothing exemplifies the degree to which antizionism has taken over the Irish public sphere quite like the degree to which sundry politicians and journalists have used this term as a factual representation of what has occurred in Gaza over the last three years, with little regard to international jurisprudence. Those Irish antizionists who employ the term “genocide” do so not to highlight civilian suffering in Gaza — which is indeed very real — but to whip up hatred against Israel’s very existence and to downplay the Holocaust’s place in western collective memory. This is especially alarming, considering the lack of historical knowledge about the Holocaust among many in Ireland, particularly young people.

Antizionism, once institutionalized, limits the spaces in which Jews, if they identify with Israel in any manner, can freely operate. One recent incident which showcases the depth to which antizionist thinking has taken root in Ireland is the cancellation of a Dublin fundraiser for Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. The Dublin National Concert Hall, which was meant to host the event, which was to include the performance of a play about October 7, decided to cancel the event following an antizionist campaign by local activists who accused MDA of being “complicit in genocide.” Significantly, no other venue has stepped up to offer to host the event.

While it is certainly true that antizionism has infiltrated the public sphere in numerous western democracies, there simply is no equivalent to the degree to which it has taken root in Ireland and in the Irish media, which focuses disproportionately on Israel in its news coverage. This is not meant to be a slight on everyday Irish people, many of whom have expressed alarm at the speed at which antizionism has become normalized in myriad aspects of Irish society. Rather, it should be seen as a warning sign for all those interested in promoting pluralism and tolerance and the viability of a peaceful, long-term settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of all, it is a reminder that antizionism remains a distinct manifestation of Jew hatred, one that continues to threaten both the viability of Diaspora Jewish communities and the classical liberal underpinnings of western democracy.

David Collier: How an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Became a Community Note on X

The risk of long-term reputational damage needed to be addressed. I went back to the site where the graffiti had been drawn. Several days had passed, and I had no idea what I would find. The graffiti itself had gone, but two freshly painted patches on the pavement were immediately visible. Someone had covered it over. It was a relief. I may have been fighting a nonsensical conspiracy claim, but the approved Community Note had given the allegation the appearance of official endorsement.

I posted footage of the covered-up graffiti on X and requested a review of the Community Note. Thankfully, that was enough for the note to lose its approved status. It wasn’t, however, enough to stop the abuse or silence the conspiracy theorists.

There was one more thing I could do to close this case completely.

The FOI Request That Closes the Case
If park staff had painted over the graffiti, there should be a record of it. Because Trent Park is managed by Enfield Council, that record would be obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act.

On Saturday 27 June, attaching the photographs in my possession, I submitted the request.

I have now received the response.

As the brilliant fictional detective Adrian Monk would say at this point in the investigation: “Here’s what happened.”

On 24 June at 19:08, just over two hours before members of my family walked through the park, a concerned citizen sent an email to Councillor Alessandro Georgiou, the Conservative councillor of Cockfosters ward and leader of Enfield Council. The email is explicit in its detail, mentioning both the swastika and the Star of David.

To his credit, at 22:42 that night, Cllr Georgiou sent a response, thanking the sender, and copying in an official council account, asking for the graffiti to be cleared “ASAP.”

At 10:35 on 25 June, Lisa Smart, Head of Urban Green Spaces at Enfield Council, responded that the council aims to remove offensive graffiti within 24 hours and that she would instruct officers to deal with it.

I was also provided with timestamped images, showing that the council workers had arrived to deal with the graffiti within that 24-hour window, at just after 8:00 on the morning of 26 June.

The timestamps show the graffiti thirty-five hours after my photograph had been taken. Both the swastika and the crossed-out Star of David remain clearly visible, along with the stain in the centre of the pavement. So much for the claim that the markings had simply been drawn in water. According to the council’s account, the combination of the heat and the way the graffiti had embedded itself into the surface meant officers eventually had to paint over it, as the photographs show:

By 11:44 on 26 June, the graffiti had been covered over.

The following day, I returned to the site and filmed the footage I posted on X.

Case closed.

The Bigger Lesson
The disturbing aspect of this story is that a system intended to combat misinformation elevated a conspiracy theory into an apparently authoritative statement with real-world consequences.

The burden was then reversed. Those making the accusation produced no evidence. The Jewish target had to spend weeks obtaining official records simply to restore the presumption of innocence.

This time, documentary evidence happened to exist. Had the graffiti been removed some other way, the Community Note would likely still be there today, giving permanent credibility to a baseless accusation.

Systems that determine “truth” are vulnerable to organised falsehoods, popular prejudice and institutional bias. When the subject is Jews or Israel – where hostile narratives already circulate widely – that vulnerability becomes especially dangerous.

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07/20 Links Pt1: Benny Morris: Omer Bartov - What Went Wrong?; Deborah Lipstadt: UN ‘failing Jewish people greatly’; Iran FM says he has never met new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?

A review of Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov; 243 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 2026)
Late in the book Bartov describes a post-7 October visit to Israel and a meeting with Israeli students. He says he came away shocked. “They had not only internalised a particular view that had become commonplace in Israel—namely that the razing of Gaza … was a legitimate response … but had also developed a way of thinking that I observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview, and self-perception of German army soldiers in WWII [again, the comparison to the Nazis!] … Hamas as human animals—and of the wider [Gaza] population as less than human … Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault … If Hamas carries out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop two-thousand-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding under or close to these shelters … The way people’s eyes glazed over whenever I mentioned the suffering of Palestinian civilians … was deeply unsettling.” (I wonder whether Bartov’s eyes “glazed over” when he was told of the suffering of Hamas’s victims, many of them tortured and raped. But, of course, he has a point about the progressive Israeli dehumanisation of the Palestinians—but he ignores the coin’s other face, the parallel dehumanisation of the Israelis by the Palestinians).

Bartov’s descriptions of various episodes in the conflict are speckled with distortions and marred by tendentiousness; this is not a book scholars will excavate for facts. For instance, Bartov repeatedly states that the Zionist forces “expelled” the Palestinian population from the territory that became the State of Israel—when, in fact, most simply fled from the actual or potential battlefields (and some were ordered or advised to leave—as in Haifa on 22 April 1948—by their own leaders). The most that can be said is that the Israeli government refused to allow the refugees to return to their homes and lands after the war, not exactly the same thing.

The decades of British rule were characterised, Bartov tells us, by the “familiar processes of a settler colonial takeover of land and resources from the indigenous Palestinian population.” The American, South African, and Australian “settler-colonial” paradigms, to which he is alluding, featured brutal armed conquest and confiscation of indigenous lands. In Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, the Jews acquired lands from very willing Arab sellers—nothing before 1948 was conquered. And the country had, and has, no “resources” to speak of.

But the sad truth is that Israeli internal demographic and political trends and the constant Islamist violence and genocidal threats have derailed the Zionist project, transforming it from a positive, moral enterprise to something teetering on the edge of an abyss. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as in Bartov’s peroration, that Israel today is “bloody-minded … [and] paranoid” and is now “heading down the path of theocracy and apocalypse.” I would advise waiting a bit before making a definitive judgment. Let’s see what sort of government the Israeli general elections, scheduled for 27 October, wash up and whether they will alter the current downward spiral.

But one thing is already clear: Bartov’s book, and his journalistic “Israelis are genocidaires” campaign that preceded it, have, objectively speaking, assisted the Islamist terrorists in their effort to destroy the Jewish state. This is something he will have to live with.

Friedman: A Palestinian state will destroy Abraham Accords

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman said in Congressional testimony released on Monday that efforts to create a Palestinian state would fatally undermine U.S.-led negotiations to achieve normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries.

In a written statement submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, Friedman said that attempts to link the two issues were “destined for failure” after Oct. 7.

“Israel already has done the two-state experiment and that folly almost destroyed the Jewish state,” Friedman wrote. “Talk of a Palestinian state in the halls of Congress or the palaces of Europe is just wildly out of touch with the realities on the ground.”

The former envoy to Jerusalem argued that countries like Saudi Arabia that might seek to join the 2020 Abraham Accords agreement that normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco “understand those realities well.”

“A Palestinian state will not advance the Abraham Accords; it will destroy them,” he said. “It will consume the region with even more conflict and violence.”

“The fact that the Abraham Accords did not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a feature, not a bug, of the deal,” he wrote. “The accords sent a clear message to the Palestinians that the days in which they held the Middle East hostage had ended.”

Khaled Abu Toameh: Iran's War on the Arabs: Time for the Gulf to Stand with Israel

Over the past week, the Iranian regime has demonstrated once again that its ambitions extend far beyond destroying Israel.

It is a war against the entire Middle East and, ultimately, against the United States and the West.

Tehran then launched missiles and drones not only against US assets but also against infrastructure in Arab countries across the Gulf, in addition to Jordan, presumably so they would pressure US President Donald J. Trump to call off US firepower and return instead to waste-of-time negotiations for a waste-of-time "deal" that Iran would not honor in the first place.

In reality, the negotiations have been worse than a waste of time... The negotiations actually caused harm. They gave the regime time to retrieve missiles it had hidden and to resume firing, with targeting assistance from China and Russia, on US forces and allies in the Gulf.

Iranian regime ideology rejects peaceful coexistence and normalization between Arabs and Israelis -- as does the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, currently embodied by Qatar and Turkey.

Taken together, these terrorist organizations form what Tehran proudly calls the "Axis of Resistance." It is, in reality, an axis of terrorism. Its purpose is not just to destroy Israel. Its objective is to spread Iran's revolutionary Shiite Islamist ideology, undermine moderate Arab governments, expel American influence from the Middle East, and ultimately wage jihad (holy war) against the West.

The Arab states therefore have every reason to openly align themselves with the United States and Israel in confronting the Iranian threat.

This is not about choosing sides in someone else's conflict. It is about defending their own sovereignty, their own interests, their own citizens, and their own future.

The lesson of the past week: So long as the regime in Tehran remains committed to exporting its "Islamic Revolution" and maintaining its network of terrorist proxies, there can be no genuine security or stability in the Middle East.

Until the Iranian regime abandons its expansionist ambitions or loses the capacity to pursue them, the Middle East will remain trapped in recurring cycles of violence. Until then, the Arab states would be wise to recognize that this is their fight as much as Israel's.

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The Australian Islamophobia Report That Never Defines Islamophobia

When Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal recommended adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism in July 2025, the backlash arrived within days. The Jewish Council of Australia argued that Segal's plan entrenches a selective approach to racism that serves political agendas. UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul and Greens Senator David Shoebridge said the definition's broad framing conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism itself. Amnesty International warned that the plan risks weaponizing criticism of Israel to silence protest. We've discussed how meritless these arguments are - the IHRA definition explicitly allows criticism of Israel that is similar to criticism of any other country - but that doesn't stop the IHRA foes from making up their arguments. 

Even if the IHRA definition is vague in parts - and it is - it is at least a definition that can be argued about. It provides a basis for discussion. 

But how can one discuss Islamophobia without defining it?

 Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik wrote an entire  report on Islamophobia while explicitly rejecting any definition of what the report is about. It states in its opening pages that it "does not seek to define Islamophobia, but to convey its pervasiveness and impacts." Malik announces the absence in his introduction, as though declining to define the prejudice he was appointed to fight were a mark of rigor rather than a way of dodging the fight Segal had just walked into.

How can a government combat Islamophobia without first saying what it is? The report has no answer, only sixty pages describing effects and never the boundary that produces them. Does Islamophobia cover criticism of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization that governs Gaza in Islam's name? Does it cover calling Muhammad a pedophile, on the ground that Aisha was nine when the marriage was consummated? Does it cover criticism of Islamist ideology as a political movement, the way criticism of Christian nationalism or Hindu nationalism is treated as ordinary political argument rather than bigotry against Christians or Hindus? Nobody can answer any of these questions from Malik's report, because the report commits to no fixed test any of them could be run against. Every real or imagined objection raised against the IHRA definition — that it is political, that it is elastic, that it lets the aggrieved party decide unilaterally what counts as hatred of them — applies a hundredfold to a report that has no definition to be elastic about. A bad definition can be amended on the floor of Parliament. A missing one has nothing to amend, because there is nothing written down to point to.

The report does gesture towards answering some of these questions. For example, it says that its recommendations are not aimed at censoring "the dislike or critique of Muslims or Islam." But stating intent is not something that has legal teeth, and ultimately the report is meant to be implemented in law and policy. The surrounding text is next to worthless.

And the very next section demonstrated this clearly. It says that critique of Islam should be "grounded in respectful and lawful debate." what, exactly, does "respectful" mean? It is itself never defined. The cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban is not respectful. Does this document say that it is prohibited? The free speech implications are far deeper and wider than anything in the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

Another ambiguous part of the report is the heckler's veto. It wants to prohibit prejudice and hate that "incite discrimination, hostility or violence." The sentence never says whose hostility, or against whom. The natural reading is hostility directed at Muslims. Nothing in the text rules out the opposite reading, in which a cartoon that provokes an angry or violent response has thereby incited the violence, and the cartoonist rather than the rioter becomes the source of the harm. Malik does not endorse that reading anywhere in the report but neither does he disagree with it.  If the Muslim  community is offended, there is little in the report to say that it is not presumed to be Islamophobic. There is nothing comparable in the IHRA definition. 

The clearest evidence that Malik's ambitions ran well past "Islamophobia" as any dictionary would use the word sits in two of his recommendations the Albanese government rejected. Malik asked for a Muslim advisory panel with standing input into how counter-terrorism law gets applied, a direct line into the operational judgment of Australia's security agencies. He also asked for a separate commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, distinct from Islamophobia and expressly framed around the Gaza war. Bigotry against Palestinians and Arabs is not bigotry against Muslims; Malik's own report concedes the two intersect without being identical. A commission built around Gaza-war grievance, empowered by a report that already treats offended feeling as evidence of harm, could functionally have provided a state-sanctioned mechanism for relabeling criticism of Hamas, of Palestinian nationalism, or of Islamic Jihad rockets as a form of racism — chilling exactly the political speech, disproportionately Jewish and Israel-sympathetic, that such a commission would exist to examine. That they were proposed at all tells you Malik was reaching for something considerably larger than anti-Muslim bigotry, and that the Islamophobia part of the report is meant to be interpreted liberally and not narrowly. 

A definition is not an optional preface to a report on fighting a named prejudice. It is the precondition for the report meaning anything at all. Segal wrote hers and has spent a year defending it clause by clause. Malik skipped his and has spent the same period being praised for restraint he never showed, producing a document more sweeping than Segal's, more elastic than Segal's, and far more open to being weaponized than Segal's — because there was never a written purpose to be held to in the first place. That the government adopted two-thirds of it anyway, in the same month it is still absorbing the previous report's IHRA controversy, is the part that should be mystifying. 

A missing definition is not a safer definition. It is the one with no limit at all.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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

From Ian:

Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Here's a new one: coding Jews as "deer" in a town council meeting

NJ.com reports that an antisemite spoke at a Ocean Township meeting, ostensibly complaining about deer, which was really meant as an antisemitic screed, using "deer" as a dog whistle for Jews.

Ocean Mayor John Napolitani said George used references to the township’s deer population as a metaphor for Jewish people, prompting the mayor to have him removed from a July 9 meeting.

The dispute stems from a meeting George attended in June, when the activist — who describes himself on social media as a Christian, public speaker and anti-Zionist — urged the township to curtail herds of deer he described as “out of control.”

In his statement, George suggested the township could move the deer to “Ocean County or upstate New York.”

“It’s impossible to distinguish one deer from another,” George said. “You can try to be friendly with them, but they’re extremely skittish.”

At the meeting, Napolitani and other officials said they would consider ways to address George’s claims, treating his comments as a genuine concern about wildlife.

Napolitani said after the meeting, he and his colleagues learned George’s references to deer were intended as a metaphor for Jewish people.

The speaker is Jeff George, who calls himself "JerseyGoy" online.

His Instagram and TikTok is filled with antisemitic garbage - often "anti-Zionist" as well. 

He has over 30,000 followers on Instagram.

George has spouted much more explicit antisemitic screeds to other local councils. In March he told the Long Branch council that the Jews "control the military industrial complex, the news media, the music industry, Hollywood, big tech, big pharma, and all the big banks and banks around the world. They control the ultraprocessed food industry, specifically designed to make us all sick. They own and control all the smut and filth used to subvert Christian society. They were responsible for both world wars. They were responsible for the attacks on 9/11. They were responsible for the COVID pandemic and the poisonous injection that they falsely labeled a vaccine. They were responsible for Jeffrey Epstein and the child sex ringing operation that was used to control US politicians, celebrities, and billionaires through blackmail. And it is more than apparent that international organized Jewry controls our Congress, our president, this council, this mayor, and the mayor's corrupt brother, Congressman Frank Pallone. Whether it be through blackmail or bribery, I cannot be certain, but it is obvious you people have been compromised. Your allegiance is to a foreign nation and not to America. "

Local council meetings have become a hotbed for antisemitism, introduced by anti-Israel speeches nationwide and now the right-wing antisemites are getting on the bandwagon. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/18 Links: Is Israel Actually More Isolated Than Ever?; How Trump Can Avoid the Vietnam Trap; What Ro Khanna, Tucker Carlson, and Rahm Emanuel have in common

From Ian:

Richard Goldberg: Is Israel Actually More Isolated Than Ever?

Why do conservatives break against Emanuel’s claim of Israel being isolated?

Many of these conservative leaders have a lived experience under pro-Islamist, Marxist rule, which informs a world outlook that embraces a technologically innovative, culturally vibrant, and terrorist-fighting democracy like Israel. These leaders see Israel for what it is: a strategic asset. And when they come to power, strengthening bilateral relations with Israel is a Day 1 action item.

Here in the United States, support for Israel is an investment in helping secure another American century – one defined by winning the AI arms race, unlocking quantum computing, controlling the periodic table and mastering advanced energy solutions.

That Israel is a democracy with shared Judeo-Christian values whose fight against terrorism and unmatched intelligence service saves countless American lives remains true – but that is only the foundation of the relationship. The future primes more. Israel is a technological juggernaut that can help us preserve another American century is tomorrow’s promise. It is why, as America’s National Defense Strategy notes, Israel is a model ally.

It’s also why Israel’s position within non-traditional multilateral frameworks continues to strengthen. The Abraham Accords have expanded to include Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority country. Turkey’s rise alongside U.S.-brokered peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is bringing Yerevan and Baku closer to Israel. Greece and Cyprus are doubling down on their Eastern Mediterranean strategic partnership with Israel, too.

It might be a surprise for people to learn that Venezuela – just a few months ago the headquarters for Iran in the Western Hemisphere with no relations with Israel for a generation – welcomed Israeli aid into Caracas after last month’s devastating earthquake.

So, when Rahm Emanuel declares Israel more isolated than ever, why is it that we instinctively nod our heads and think it’s true? There are indeed alternate universes where it certainly feels true: the dystopian United Nations; the cadre of click-bait podcasters feeding a Marxist-Islamist-Nazi medley of talking points to young people with no living attachment to World War II and no memory of September 11; and the media coverage of Emanuel’s own party, which now openly embraces communists, terrorist sympathizers, and people with Nazi tattoos.

The socialist ascendancy within the Democratic Party is a very real phenomenon that threatens American support for Israel. An Islamist ascendancy in Western Europe is very real, too, with negative effects on relations with a Jewish state.

But from the Western Hemisphere to Europe to the Middle East to India, Israel is not as isolated as you think.

How Trump Can Avoid the Vietnam Trap

So far, this stage of the conflict with Iran has not gone as Trump had hoped. As he told Fox News, at the beginning of the year he thought regime change was possible. Much of the senior Iranian leadership died in the early stages of the air campaign, but the regime survived their passing. The blockade and continued bombardment inflicted significant damage to the Iranian economy and military, but Iran's closure of the Strait roiled global oil markets. Trump eventually settled for a lopsided MOU.

Thankfully, the setback with Iran is nowhere near as costly as in Vietnam. Fifty-thousand Americans lost their lives in Southeast Asia due to hostile action, whereas the number of American casualties in this conflict is far lower. This stage of the conflict with Iran has only gone on months, rather than years of ground fighting in Vietnam, and the effects of the war on the public have been much less grave.

But another defeat would nonetheless damage the country and Trump's presidency. Americans do not like to give important concessions to a weaker foe, especially one that is obviously bent on our destruction.

The Iranians appear to have determined that they have more to gain by reigniting the war than by continuing to negotiate. They are trying to block the Strait again and relaunching attacks on the Gulf Arabs and U.S. bases in the region. The Houthis in Yemen are also threatening to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, the other route Saudi oil can take to reach Asia.

Trump has decided "the only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength." He described a series of increasingly painful strikes on Iranian infrastructure that will occur "unless they get to the table and negotiate." Those strikes are now underway, and the U.S. military is once again blockading Iran.

The Trump coalition will be demoralized if this new round of fighting keeps the price of oil high enough to hurt Republicans in the midterms and results in even worse terms than the MOU. But Iran can only take so much damage before its economy collapses and the mullahs face severe internal threats to their rule.

Trump can accelerate that process. Rather than bombing the Iranians into accepting American concessions, he should bomb them into offering new ones of their own.

Lee Smith: JD Vance’s Big Crashout

Blaming Jews for his failure is also evidence of a more organic problem with Vance: namely, his character. It’s a bad sign when elected officials evade responsibility for their own mistakes when the point of the job is to take on responsibility for the well-being of others—in his case, 350 million others.

NFL coaches and players typically spend Mondays reviewing footage of the weekend’s game to ensure they don’t make the same mistakes next Sunday. The VP should watch the game reel: What did you, JD, get wrong about the MOU? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have laid into all the Trump supporters who criticized my Iran deal, and probably I should have kept my validators from threatening American Jews by saying that if they didn’t like my moderate stance on Israel, wait till they got a dose of “real antisemitism.”

Then there’s my choice of outside mediators, like Asim Munir, the Pakistani field marshal. I talk a lot about how our interests diverge from Israel’s, but the same military Munir leads hid Osama bin Laden for five years. Maybe Pakistan’s interests don’t always sync with America’s? Was I wrong to take policy guidance from Trita Parsi, the Iranian-born think-tank expert whose work, said a U.S. district court judge, was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime”? Maybe the whole idea of trying to make a deal with Iran was wrongheaded. After all, the people who most vocally supported my efforts had worked for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and those guys have been trying to put the boss in jail for a decade.

Vance blames others for his blunders because that’s the emotional content of his 2028 presidential campaign: grievance and self-pity. He has to keep performing it for the young middle-class white men he hopes to attract, based on the theory that America has been waiting for a political movement for white kids who believe the country betrayed them because they had to settle for their safety school. In truth, it’s going to be hard to convince enough of the young white men at, for instance, Ole Miss—where Vance famously boasted that “this president isn’t controlled by Israel”—that they have it worse off than their fathers and grandfathers when they’re at a famous school with an SEC football team and a 97% acceptance rate where three-quarters of the student body is white and most of them are girls, which gives the boys a big and eager dating pool.

Shouldn’t someone tell Vance that privileged grievance is a losing message and that to win the imaginations of young white guys, he should draw from his biography? Hey, fellas, time to bear down, as I did. Go to school, work hard, there are lots of fantastic opportunities out there for smart, ambitious guys, especially now with the rise of artificial intelligence. It truly is a brave, new world! Don’t be a resentful loser. Respect women, meet a nice girl, start a family. And don’t smoke dope. My first book is about what substance abuse does to families. That’s why I won’t go on Rogan anymore—he’s a good guy, but a pothead. I don’t want any of you guys thinking he’s a role model, so I’m not going back on that show until he dumps his bong.

In the end, of course, all this is on the president. He can sideline Vance, who has been undermining him from day one on Iran and other matters, but he hasn’t. The fact is that it’s not just Trump’s problem but also a problem for 77 million other Americans who went out to the polls for him, and now time is running out. If he can’t get the job done, which includes disciplining his number two, odds are ever increasing that in two and a half years, millions of illegal aliens will be gathered at our southern border, waiting for the next far-left Democrat to be sworn in.

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07/17 Links Pt2: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation; The DSA Is a Trojan Horse the Democratic Party Must Drive Out; Debating Peter Beinart on the Right of Return and Other Matters

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Scapegoating the Jews

The ugly reality of a Democratic Party that’s now dancing to an anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Islamist tune was on display this week with another visitor to Israel, the possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna of California.

In an outrageous PR stunt cooked up with radical Israeli anti-government activists, Khanna made an unauthorized visit to a sensitive area of the “West Bank,” where he claimed to have been detained, harassed and even threatened by Israeli security forces who sided with violent settlers.

As video footage subsequently revealed, there was no violence and no harassment. It was a stunt designed to further the agenda of turning Israel into a pariah state—a situation that Emanuel blames on Netanyahu but which has actually been created by a poisonous narrative of lies to which both Emanuel and Vance have contributed.

This unconscionable onslaught is now the driver of politics on the Wwestern left and in parts of the American right.

In Britain, Andy Burnham, who next week will become prime minister after a bloodless coup in the governing Labour Party, made a point of threatening further punishment of Israel over Gaza as his first statement on foreign affairs.

This week, he went one stage further. Having refused to spell out to the British public his intentions for government, Burnham gave an interview to podcaster and former sports broadcaster Gary Lineker, who left the BBC after sharing a post about Zionism that depicted a rat—a Nazi image for Jews. When Lineker referred to the “genocide” in Gaza, Burnham conspicuously failed to challenge him.

For Britain’s incoming prime minister to use such an anti-Jewish dog-whistle—and as a priority—is an ominous signal indeed.

The surreal prominence of the Israel issue in domestic politics is due to a poisonous cocktail of factors, including Islamist influence, the dominance of the intersectional left and the West’s loss of its own cultural bearings, including the notion of objective truth.

What’s becoming ever more apparent, however, is that political leaders are scapegoating Israel because things are going wrong for them, both at home and abroad, and they cannot understand why. Refusing to acknowledge what they’re up against, they blame the Jews.

Israel, America’s indispensable ally, is now making plans to develop its own independent weapons supplies and nurture other alliances against the danger of a possibly hostile future U.S. administration.

Emanuel came to Israel to lecture it that it was in danger of losing America. In fact, with the iron having entered the soul of the Jewish state as a result of Oct. 7, America is in danger of losing Israel.

Brendan O'Neill: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation

The whole report is crazy. It analyses 3,733 Speccie articles about Islam and related issues. It found that 57.4 per cent of them were ‘biased’ or ‘very biased’. Bear in mind that this includes me calling Hamas cunts. It mauls Spectator writers for ‘delegitimising the idea of Islamophobia’ (guilty as charged), for using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, and for obsessing over ‘so-called “grooming gangs”’. Keep up – they’re called rape gangs now, given the reams of evidence we have that these gangs of mostly Pakistani men raped hundreds of white working-class girls. Seems it’s not only ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ to be outraged by the mobbing of an Israeli woman but also by the subjugation of English women.

The report wangs on about me, Douglas Murray, Julie Burchill, Gavin Mortimer, Rod Liddle – fine company! Burchill – who’s also a spiked columnist – rattles the pious pricks because she ‘defends the right to make jokes about Islam’. Call the ayatollah! ‘We’re always told that making jokes about Islam is “punching down”’, she wrote in March 2023. ‘But tell a migrant worker-slave in Qatar or a gay man in Dubai or a spirited woman in Iran that the world’s wealthiest and fastest growing religion is powerless.’ The CfMM’s fun-sponge scribes accuse her of ‘invoking human-rights abuses’ in ‘three separate state contexts’ and ‘attribut[ing] them collectively to Islam as a unified religious force’, which has the effect of reinforcing a moral ‘asymmetry’ that is… oh, I can’t go on. The humourlessness is asphyxiating. Guys, someone disagrees with you. It’s fine. You’re going to give yourselves a hernia.

It’s so telling which articles of mine get on their wick. I’m criticised for saying there has been an ‘orgy of anti-Semitism’ in the West since 7 October. I’m slammed for saying the keffiyeh classes are motored less by ‘concern for Muslim life’ than by ‘contempt for Israel’. I’m accused of using the word ‘Islamist’ in a ‘broad, undefined’ way. O’Neill is too vague in his piece on ‘what he calls the “Jew hunt of Amsterdam in 2024”’, the report says. Erm, it wasn’t me who called it a ‘Jew hunt’ – it was the anti-Semitic mob itself, which expressly hit the streets in order to ‘hunt’ the ‘cancer Jews’ who had travelled to watch Maccabi Tel Aviv.

And of course I’m told off for my pieces on the rape gangs. Especially a 2017 piece in which I commented on the ‘palpable reluctance’ of the state and polite society to ‘confront the particular problem of some Muslim men’s disdain for white working-class girls’. Apparently that’s Islamophobic. It isn’t. I stand by every word. The safety of working-class girls matters to me infinitely more than your feelings.

There’s a side-splitting irony in this bonkers report. It quotes a phrase of mine from a Spectator piece I wrote 11 years ago. It quotes it three times, including in the foreword, which is written by Peter Oborne. That phrase is ‘dainty sensibilities’ – I was criticising the cloying offence-taking of the professional misery guts who stink up our activist classes. How dare you say we are exhibiting ‘dainty sensibilities’, asks this 146-page report about the mean media and its mean words. You couldn’t make it up. But the CfMM is right about one thing: I am making a ‘civilisational judgement’. I judge that Hamas is morally inferior to Israel, that Islamism is morally inferior to secularism, and that shitting your pants when you read something you don’t like is morally inferior to just laughing it off. And everyone is welcome on my civilisational side: Christians, Jews, Muslims, ex-Muslims, non-believers, everyone. Because we don’t discriminate against people, only against ideas.

The DSA Is a Trojan Horse the Democratic Party Must Drive Out

Nowhere is the DSA’s radicalism more dangerous than in its commitment to anti-Zionism. For the DSA, opposition to Israel’s existence is not a secondary foreign-policy debate; it is a litmus test anchored in its governing text.

Analysts note that the DSA functions as a strict ideological enforcement mechanism: any candidate or member who deviates from its anti-Zionist platform or affirms Israel’s right to exist faces swift expulsion or denial of endorsement. Its platform explicitly names Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, hardcoding anti-Zionism as a fundamental tenet.

This hostility is a proxy for animus toward Western civilization and American global leadership. By aligning with hostile anti-Western regimes under the banner of “anti-imperialism,” DSA drags mainstream politics into a dark arena.

This dynamic is bigger than any one candidate. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani built an agenda that strips antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to Israel, while Kiros pledged to end all military assistance.

For the Jewish community, the danger is immediate: the DSA’s rise is tied to an effort to strip antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to the Jewish state.

The Trojan Horse and the “Dirty Break
The DSA’s core deception is presenting itself as part of the Democratic Party while advancing ideas at odds with the party’s values. It does not see itself as a wing of the party; it sees the party as a host organism to be drained and discarded. As documented by political journals like City & State New York, today’s DSA organizers are explicitly executing what they call the “dirty break.” They use the Democratic Party’s ballot access, volunteers, and credibility as tools of convenience while building an independent Marxist-aligned infrastructure designed to break away and destroy the party from within.

The organization’s youth wing formalized this as an official strategy in a 2022 convention resolution. Even former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison put it bluntly to DSA candidates: if you don’t support the party, don’t use its ballot line, volunteers, or resources to get elected.

Political reporting confirms this “party surrogate” or “party-within-a-party” model. Through structures like the “Socialists in Office” committee, elected DSA officials are bound to caucus weekly, coordinate legislative action, and vote as a unified socialist bloc answering to an external organization rather than the Democratic Party or their broader constituency.

Time to Purge the Poison
For years, the Democratic establishment has responded to this insurgency with quiet accommodation, fearful of alienating a vocal activist base. Every act of appeasement has only legitimized a group working toward the party’s dissolution. The victories in New York and Colorado prove that the time for polite disagreement has passed.

I have spent years arguing that antisemitism is never only about Jews – it is a leading indicator of a society’s broader institutional and moral health. The DSA’s rise fits that pattern. Hatred of Jews has historically been the ideology radical movements borrow when they need a common enemy to attack the liberal establishment.

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07/17 Links Pt1: Sa’ar: Radical left, terror groups form ‘operational alliance’; Ro Khanna uses Jewish lives as fodder for presidential ambitions; IDF kills Oct. 7 infiltrator, Hamas platoon commander in Gaza

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Vance is the variable in the partisan divide on Israel

America’s two major political parties were given an opportunity this week to show where they stood on the alliance with Israel and gave the nation a clear answer to the question. In a vote on a proposal put forward by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to cut all military aid to the Jewish state, the partisan split was stark.

Massie, who was defeated in a GOP primary earlier this year, was the sole Republican to back the idea of ending support for Israel, with every other one of the 215 members of the caucus opposing it. A majority of House Democrats joined him in voting for the proposal. In all, 103 Democrats voted in favor of it, with 98 opposing and 10 others voting “present.”

A stark partisan divide
The vote made it clear that national polls revealing the decline in backing for Israel—largely driven by partisanship—are reflected in Congress. At a time when antisemitic blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza or being an “apartheid” state have been mainstreamed by liberal publications like The New York Times and routinely endorsed by many Democrats, the overwhelming majority of Republicans reject these lies and still support Israel. There are now votes on record in both the House and the Senate that show the majority of Democrats support ending the alliance with the Jewish state, while, other than outliers like Massie, all Republicans oppose the idea. It means there is no avoiding the conclusion that the Democrats are on their way to becoming the anti-Israel party, if that hasn’t happened already.

Due to retirements and primary results, the number of anti-Israel Democrats will be far larger in the next Congress. That leaves the GOP, which will be rid of Massie next January, in a position to claim that anyone who cares about Israel ought to be looking at them as their only viable political home.

Yet there is one reason for holding off on describing the debate about Israel and antisemitism as one in which partisanship is the key indicator. And his name is Vice President JD Vance.

While House Republicans were holding the line against the tide of anti-Israel sentiment sweeping the country, Vance went on the most-listened-to podcast this week and made it clear that he is not to be counted among those who share that position.

In a three-hour interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” that spent as much time discussing the July Fourth White House UFC extravaganza and the fact that one of the fighters there called former first lady Michelle Obama a “man” as it did policy questions, the vice president nevertheless demonstrated that he was not among those who value the alliance with Israel. To the contrary, he was eager to blame Israel, its government and its American friends for the fact that his excursion into foreign policy with a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran has become a fiasco.

Vance nods to the ‘groypers’
Given a chance to demonstrate his mettle as a negotiator in what appeared to be a new version of President Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” reality show, Vance’s performance bore comparisons to his predecessors in the Obama and Biden administrations. He not only stubbornly defended the ludicrous notion that the Islamist terrorists running Iran could be enticed to rejoin the civilized world by means of Western bribery and diplomacy, but scapegoated the Israelis and the pro-Israel community for his failure.

In a clear pitch to what might be considered the “groyper” antisemitic wing of the American political right, he said: “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to, like, actually shift us away from [negotiations] because they want to continue the military campaign.”

He acknowledged the downward trend in support for Israel in the United States. But then, as veteran conservative commentator Rod Dreher noted in The Free Press, Vance’s position “sounds like scapegoating; a contemporary version of the ‘stab in the back legend’ (Dolchstosslegende) that German generals conceived and spread in 1918 to blame Jews and socialists for Germany’s World War I defeat and their own leadership failures.”

Vance rightly rejected the ridiculous charge that it was Israel’s fault that Trump chose to pursue a longtime U.S. foreign-policy goal by attacking Iran to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons and spreading terror. And yet he still cited stories about efforts by Israelis and supporters of Israel to influence public opinion in the United States as evidence that this is undermining the administration. He considers criticism of his Obama-like appeasement of Iran to be somehow wrong, while not acknowledging that frenemy nations like Qatar spend exponentially more to spread support for Islamist ideas and hate for Israel in America than Israel’s backers.

It was a dismal performance by the vice president, whose record when it comes to standing against the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism has been, at best, equivocal. While he is on record for opposing Jew-hatred, his public statements have shown him as unwilling to confront or oppose antisemites as Democratic leaders such as former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Tom Barrack promotes Middle East trade alignment cutting out Israel

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack on Friday promoted a new regional trade and security alignment in the Middle East centered around Iraq, Turkey and neighboring Arab states, appearing to sideline a similar regional project including Israel.

Speaking at the U.S.-Iraq Business Summit, Barrack told attendees that Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who visited with President Donald Trump at the White House this week, is considering a transformative agreement “that will make the Strait of Hormuz” — which has been effectively shut down due to the Iran war and continued hostilities — an “afterthought in two years” by shifting trade that usually passes through the waterway to overland routes.

“What this young leader [al-Zaidi] has in mind — aligned with Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt — is a program that will make the Strait of Hormuz an afterthought in two years,” Barrack said. “We’re going from just-in-time delivery on boats through these minor straits to just-in-case delivery going the other way.”

The proposal appears to serve as an alternative framework to the stalled India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which has faced roadblocks following regional turmoil and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. While the original IMEC agreement included Israel as a vital transit point connecting India to Europe via the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the newly envisioned corridor relies instead on a coalition featuring Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

The State Department also released a statement on Friday welcoming the announcement of cooperation between Iraq and Syria on the “rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Iraq-Syria crude oil pipeline as a priority infrastructure project of bilateral and regional strategic significance.”

“We feel the chaos on one side, but actually, what’s happened is a brilliant realignment of security and strategic alliances in the region,” Barrack said in his remarks, with “Iraq being at the forefront of a new strategic security alliance.”

Bruce Pearl: Ro Khanna uses Jewish lives as fodder for presidential ambitions

California Congressman Ro Khanna announced last weekend that “Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine. When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.”

Khanna was trying to turn 90 minutes on an Israeli road into political capital, asking supporters to imagine what Palestinians endure every day if even a member of Congress could be treated this way.

Powerful politics. But an incomplete story.

Khanna’s office says his trip to Israel was financed with campaign funds. Before it began, his staff reportedly told the Israeli Embassy it would be a private visit, with no official meetings.

According to a source involved in the planning, Israel nevertheless offered meetings with survivors of the Oct. 7 terror attack and others affected by the conflict.

Those offers, the source said, were declined.

Apparently, Khanna’s delegation was more interested in reinforcing a conclusion about the Jewish state than testing one.

I’ve assisted in taking members of Congress through Judea and Samaria (West Bank) with the US-Israel Education Association. Serious congressional delegations coordinate these visits carefully.

When we visit predominantly Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, we travel with Jewish guides and buses marked with Hebrew lettering. When the itinerary includes lands with mostly Palestinian Arab populations, we switch to Arab guides and buses clearly marked in Arabic.

For Khanna’s delegation to move through an Israeli-populated area relying on a single Palestinian Arab activist as a guide was an invitation to exactly the kind of confrontation that followed.

Not because of “Israeli apartheid.” Because of Israeli funerals.

During the Second Intifada, Palestinian suicide bombers turned Israeli buses, cafés and family restaurants into terrorist targets. Israel’s security architecture was built in response to that harrowing reality.

To debate the checkpoints without recalling what produced them is to explain the lock while forgetting the burglar.

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