07/27 Links Pt1: Collapse of the Blood Libels; Hamas and its two million hostages; Guterres cements ‘infamous legacy’ with second term for UN rights chief

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: Collapse of the Blood Libels

Sometimes I think I am not angry enough, but the scale of the problem is almost too huge to be angry at, collectively. Towering rage must be split into smaller rages at each of the component parts of the blood libel machine. The fantastical Lancet “studies” salivating over hundreds of thousands of imaginary dead Gazans. AirWars’ pearl-clutching reports, drawing conclusions of civilian targeting in Gaza without a tenth of the evidence needed to draw said conclusions. Amnesty, B’tselem and all the other NGOs, releasing fraudulent genocide conclusions achieved only by changing the definition and parameters of genocide. The paid media squad of hacks, twisting and distorting and murdering the truth just to get one over on the Jewish state. South Africa, ripping apart the genocide convention at Iran’s behest, making it harder to punish real genocides in future.

The whole sorry mess sickens me, and now the great indictment of Israel is coming apart, one revelation at a time. This fact is not being reported by a single damned one of the media outlets that have spent years screeching over the war in Gaza to the exclusion of almost all else. Famine, deliberate attacks on hospitals, the slaughter of journalists and children, and systematic obstruction of aid: each allegation was broadcast as settled fact and then used to prove genocidal intent. The same newsrooms and universities that thundered these charges have shown remarkably little interest in the evidence that now destroys each of these allegations.

It is incredible. There is no aspect of the genocide allegation that has not collapsed.

Start with the famine claim. In August 2025, the IPC used two ways of measuring malnutrition in children: weight compared with height, and the size of a child’s upper arm. Gaza had no local data showing how those two measures matched up, so the IPC used an estimate from elsewhere in the region. It assumed the weight-and-height measure would find about twice as many malnourished children as the arm measurement.

The first large Gaza survey to use both measures found the reverse. Of 1,335 children surveyed in 2026, 0.5% were identified as acutely malnourished by weight and height, while 1.3% were identified by upper-arm measurement. That survey cannot tell us exactly what conditions were like in 2025. The later survey cannot recreate conditions in 2025, but it exposes the rotten foundation beneath a verdict presented to the world as scientific certainty: a key assumption behind the famine declaration had never been tested in Gaza itself.

The food figures are equally awkward. Official COGAT-based data show that about 1.01 million tonnes of food entered Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 17 January 2025, against an estimated requirement of 825,000 tonnes. From the October 2025 ceasefire to 7 June 2026, 1.78 million tonnes entered, against a calculated need of roughly 643,000 tonnes.

Of course, food crossing a border does not guarantee it reaches every family. Roads were destroyed, distribution failed, aid was looted, and Israel’s two-and-a-half-month block on aid in spring 2025 was a grave error. However, those qualifications cannot rescue the claim of a continuous Israeli policy to starve Gaza. The quantities of food that entered Gaza are simply too large.

The hospital narrative has also disintegrated. American intelligence independently confirmed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used al-Shifa for command operations, weapons storage, and to hold hostages. Hamas accounts now describe armed men, including senior officers, sheltering inside the hospital during an Israeli siege. Hospitals remained protected, and Israel still had to obey the laws of war, but the moral fairy tale of innocent hospitals attacked by the brutal IDF is dead. There is now endless evidence in the public domain of Hamas using hospitals for military purposes.

The casualty statistics have fared no better. The claim that 70 per cent of the dead were women and children became a fixture of global coverage. OCHA’s July 2026 snapshot, based on Gaza Health Ministry figures for 71,444 identified fatalities, placed those categories at 45.2 per cent. Adult men make up over 50% of the fatalities, from a pre-war adult male percentage of approximately 25% of the population. Not all adult men can be counted as combatants, but a figure repeatedly cited as proof of indiscriminate slaughter is now shown to be false when applied to the overall toll. The “hundreds of thousands” of dead under the rubble have likewise not materialised. That number is completely implausible, given Gaza’s mechanism for reporting the missing and the financial compensation incentives to use it.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Hamas and its two million hostages

When I spoke out against these trends, I was attacked viciously. I realised that many in the so–called pro–Palestine movement are deeply anti–Palestinian, for they are only interested in platforming and embracing views and experiences that conform to their beliefs. That a Gazan like myself – who lost family members in the war, who is largely deaf in his left ear following an Israeli bombing in 2001 and who has been on the front lines of providing humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza – could be dismissed for sharing the “wrong views” was an alarming sign of the degradation of this Western–based activism.

Furthermore, large segments of the Arab and Palestinian communities in the diaspora became their own worst enemies, enforcing conformity and promulgating extreme positions. They remained silent lest they be called traitors, sell-outs or Zionists. Speaking out against Hamas was somehow viewed as supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, endorsing the horrors experienced by Palestinian civilians or adopting Netanyahu’s and Israeli talking points, or as a betrayal of the Palestinian right to resist Israeli injustices. This simplistic reductionism was picked up by Hamas, which immediately registered the support for its actions in diaspora communities, particularly in the West and in the US, where political leverage matters most. The failure to call out Hamas weakened genuine pro–Palestine advocacy, which by default became associated with celebrations of October 7, finding excuses for Hamas’s heinous acts of terror, refusal to humanise Israeli victims of the attack (including hostages) and the abandonment of political aims that are actually achievable. Instead, a form of mass psychosis took hold of activists, academics, journalists, advocates, politicians and average individuals, all blinded to Hamas’s criminality against both Gazans and Israelis.

Undeterred, I have decided to proceed with sharing my truth. I saw and experienced Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza and witnessed its tactics, strategies and manipulation of an entire people. For nearly two decades, a fascist Islamist terror organisation has been holding over two million Palestinians as hostages to its suicidal, nihilistic project.

Launching the most brutal single-day attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and knowing the kind of devastating and deadly retaliation that this was going to elicit, was a deliberate, reckless endangerment of the Palestinian people: a betrayal.

The decision to launch the October 7 attack destroyed Palestinian lives and aspirations, but it was not the first such terrible choice.

It was a choice to reject the Oslo peace process and the 2000 Camp David proposal; it was a choice to squander the opportunity opened in 2005 by Israel’s withdrawal of settlements on a vanity resistance project that went nowhere for two decades; it was a choice after the 2006 elections to Islamise Palestinian society and waste opportunities to establish new civic and democratic life; it was a choice to antagonise moderates in Israel with suicide bombings, turning many of them against the peace process and helping the rise of the Israeli far right.

It was a choice to align the Palestinian people of Gaza with the likes of Hezbollah, Qatar, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood – failed ideologies and regional projects – just as previous generations of Palestinians aligned themselves with Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union and Gamal Abdel–Nasser’s pan–Arabism; it was a choice to keep Israeli hostages in Gaza for two years rather than surrendering them earlier to avert large–scale death and destruction and to save what could be saved of Gaza’s people and infrastructure.

I do not speak and have never claimed to speak on behalf of Palestinians or Gazans. No one can make this claim, for there is no single voice or entity that can capture or represent the diversity of Palestinian communities across the Middle East and the world. My account and my analysis are steeped in lived experience, connection to the land and extensive relationships with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Still, the cautionary lessons and observations that I discuss will be acknowledged by many in the Gaza Strip, and by Palestinians elsewhere, who often keep quiet.

I share my story in the spirit of seeking justice for my people. This story details Hamas’s horrendous impact on the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to freedom and independence. I experienced the tragedy of seeing my native homeland descend into chaos and disarray, a collapse that occurred in large part because of a group of Jihadi fascists who destroyed the Palestinian national project. This is why I focus on speaking out against Hamas.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Trump's Saudi Nuclear Horror Show

The [US-Saudi civilian nuclear] agreement threatens to weaken decades of US non-proliferation policy, ignite a regional arms race, embolden America's adversaries, and create security risks that future generations may be powerless to reverse.

The most controversial aspect of the proposed agreement is that it reportedly allows Saudi Arabia to develop domestic uranium enrichment capabilities under safeguards that fall short of the stringent standards previously demanded by Washington. While low-enriched uranium is used to fuel civilian nuclear reactors, the same technology can eventually produce highly enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons.

"[W]ithout a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible." — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, CBS News, March 15, 2018.

These words should have ended any discussion about permitting uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. They reveal that Riyadh views civilian nuclear capabilities not merely as an energy project but also as a potential strategic hedge against Iran.

[G]overnments change, regimes fall, alliances split, and today's friend -- even as a member of the Abraham Accords -- may not be tomorrow's ally.

[E]xtremist Islamist organizations continue to view the kingdom as both a battlefield and a prize. No one can predict Saudi Arabia's political landscape 20 or 30 years from now. A future period of instability, succession crisis, or regime collapse could deliver sensitive nuclear facilities, technology, or materials to actors whose goals are fundamentally hostile to the United States and its allies.

The greatest danger, therefore, is not Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or the current Saudi leadership. The greatest danger is the uncertainty surrounding whoever may rule the kingdom decades from now. Nuclear technology lasts far longer than political regimes.

The proposed agreement also abandons the "gold standard" that has guided US civilian nuclear cooperation for decades. Under the 2009 US-United Arab Emirates (UAE) nuclear agreement, Abu Dhabi accepted strict conditions that prohibited domestic uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing while granting comprehensive international oversight. These restrictions significantly reduced proliferation dangers.

The Saudi agreement reportedly discards many of these safeguards. It also reportedly does not require Riyadh to adopt the International Atomic Energy Agency's Additional Protocol, which allows inspectors short-notice access to undeclared facilities to detect clandestine nuclear activities.

The UAE would likely seek to renegotiate its own agreement. Turkey and Egypt would almost certainly demand similar privileges. Russia and China could use the American precedent to justify weaker safeguards in their own nuclear partnerships across the Middle East and beyond.

Instead of strengthening the global non-proliferation regime, the United States would be weakening it with its own hands.

Peace with Israel is not a prize awarded by Arab or Muslim countries. It is not something that should require American bribes in the form of nuclear technology or strategic incentives.

Peace serves Saudi Arabia's own interests. It enhances regional stability, strengthens economic development, attracts foreign investment, and improves security for all parties. Arab and Muslim states should pursue peace with Israel because it benefits their own people -- not because Washington offers dangerous concessions.

The United States should not become the architect of the next Middle East nuclear arms race.

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You cannot hate @Amnesty enough

This was posted by Amnesty Canada:

Luxembourg will not renew Israel Bonds for sale in Europe. 

Ireland, the current host country, and other EU states, must do the same and say no to Israel bonds since the proceeds could contribute to Israel’s genocide and other atrocity crimes against Palestinians.

For Amnesty, Israel is not only guilty of genocide by a definition it made up - it is defined by it. So if Israel's budget also goes towards saving Israeli lives with Iron Dome, towards a top notch health care system, towards giving money to underprivileged communities in Israel - all of that doesn't count next to their fake "genocide" narrative. Let's try to bankrupt Israel in the name of faux human rights!

And then Amnesty International tweeted:

Even if you believe the worst, Netanyahu was never tried nor convicted for anything. Calling him a war criminal is wrong, and a human rights organization normally gives people the benefit of the doubt. You know - it tries to uphold international law.

But not when it comes to Jews. 

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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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07/26 Links: Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’; Ruth Was Right; Karim Khan is gone. The ICC’s antisemitism remains; Ex-Dem NY gov compares Mamdani to famed segregationist

From Ian:

Adam Louis-Klein: Rwanda, Israel and the Inversion of ‘Genocide’

False accusations of genocide are nothing new. In 1993 Hutu intellectuals at the National University of Rwanda accused the Tutsi-associated Rwandan Patriotic Front of genocide. They circulated inflated casualty figures in an open letter to Pope John Paul II and others. The RPF did commit war crimes, but these accusations were propaganda. A year later, the Hutu regime carried out a genocide of the Tutsis.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was an “anticolonial” genocide. Just as the Oct. 7, 2023, attack was hailed by many anti-Zionists as an uprising against Western imperialism, the Rwandan genocide used accusations of genocide to legitimize its own execution.

I am an anthropologist studying indigeneity, postcolonialism and ethnic violence. On Oct. 7, I had been off the grid for months, pursuing field research in the Amazon. When I logged on to my computer on Oct. 9, I realized to what degree these vocabularies had become a weapon against Israel and the Jewish people.

The genocide accusation against Israel has traveled far and wide since Oct. 7, but its intellectual sources have rarely been scrutinized. Every major iteration of the accusation, I learned, flows from an academic framework that presents the accusation of genocide in Gaza as a consequence of Israel being a “settler colonial” state founded by Europeans who don’t belong in the Middle East. The network of academics behind this framing—whose ideas inform nonprofit organizations like Amnesty International and B’Tselem—is especially conspicuous in the Journal of Genocide Research.

That publication has been a proponent for changing, extending or rejecting the legal definition of genocide enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, formulated by Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. A. Dirk Moses, the journal’s senior editor since 2011, argues it is useless to distinguish intentional killing of civilians from collateral damage caused by strikes against terrorists. Colonial states are founded on dispossession, he argues—and when indigenous peoples “resist,” they are simply destroyed in the name of security.

Amnesty International turns Mr. Moses’ erasure of moral distinctions into a novel combination: Israel harbors “dual intent,” a neologism reading Israel as engaged in lawful warfare and genocide at once. For a permanently illegitimate colonial state, even legal self-defense spells genocide.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian at Brown University, is the highest-profile scholar to accuse Israel of genocide. He claims the support of a cast of characters ranging from Raz Segal, who less than a week after Oct. 7 described Israel’s entire history as an ongoing genocide, to Amos Goldberg, who has more frankly acknowledged that depicting Israel’s essence as genocidal doesn’t jibe with legal standards. All of them see Israelis as colonists.

As in Rwanda, anticolonialism and genocide inversion have converged. Israel is imagined not only as a state accused of genocide, but as a people whose identity as foreign settlers makes genocide their destiny.

Ruth Was Right

REVIEW: ‘If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews’ by Ruth R Wisse
To encounter Ruth Wisse is to learn from her, and I was blessed to be her student for the first time a decade ago. She, an eminent scholar of literature at Harvard, spent a weekend with us, a group of Jewish students in the Tikvah Fund’s then-nascent Collegiate Summer Honors program, doing what comes most naturally to her: teaching. She did so in her inimitable way. One of my friends described it precisely, remarking that Wisse was three-quarters Harvard professor, raising novel interpretations of the texts before us with erudition and articulateness, and one-quarter your bubbe at the Shabbat table speaking plain truths about the world. That persona made her all the more endearing and perhaps even more effective; from among her students that weekend I now count multiple brilliant young litigators, several professors and teachers, and a prolific member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

Declaring what is plainly, if painfully, true about the world is today rarely conceived of as the role of the professor. Wisse’s willingness to do so, that weekend and throughout her career, qualifies her as something more akin to a prophetess. With clear descriptions of the world taking shape in the late 20th century, courageous denunciations of its comforting misapprehensions and false pieties, and a call for Jews (and indeed all Westerners) to examine the crumbling foundation of liberal universalism, Wisse delivered a most unwelcome set of prophesies in 1992’s If I Am Not for Myself. Committing heresy after heresy among liberal Jewish company, she proclaimed that Soviet antisemitism was transmogrifying into Arab anti-Zionism; that "in misguided effort" Jews are "tempted to try to elicit from bystanders and witnesses the same pity" they had seen other victims enjoy; and that antisemitism "continues to be regarded as a disreputable sentiment achieving a certain legitimacy only when it travels under the cover of anti-Zionism."

No wonder the publisher Wicked Son deemed it worthy of republication in 2026, with new front matter including a preface from Wisse herself. These revelations, scoffed at in their time, could have been copied-and-pasted into the bewildered social media posts of Jews after October 7, 2023, confronting the liberal West’s failure to consign anti-Jewish politics to history. Indeed, anti-Jewish politics have only gained prominence since throngs of barbarians gathered throughout the West to celebrate the Hamas-led massacre and blame the Jews for their own misfortune. If Jewish families didn’t want to be burned alive, perhaps they shouldn’t have dared to live in a particular place at a particular time—to be colonizers, the newest category of un-person invented to ensure Jewish children would once again endure medieval horrors without weighing too heavily on the conscience of the enlightened liberal West.

Some definitions are necessary to understand Wisse’s simple but penetrating thesis. She speaks often of "liberalism," by which she means the consensus postwar view that humanity was on a positive moral trajectory, with reason prevailing over dogma and peace generally prevailing over war. Without castigating liberalism’s political manifestations—individual liberty, the rule of law, and so on—Wisse takes aim at liberal universalism, or the view that everyone, even avowed enemies of the Jews, could be reasoned with and ultimately pacified. Once-ubiquitous demands for Israel to give up "land for peace" exemplified this view; in hindsight they would be quaint if they hadn’t been so destructive.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel’s envoy to Britain: ‘I’ll feel safer back home, where there’s no anti-Semitism’

In April 2025, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, the acting head of mission at the Embassy of Israel in London, came within inches of a terrorist who was embarking on an attack. "I remember it very well," she says. "I was being urged by security to leave the embassy because I was the last one out at the end of the working day. And as I left, within two minutes he was climbing the fence." She was speaking on her phone at the time and didn't pay any attention when she brushed past Kuwaiti migrant Abdullah Albadri, whose head was wrapped in a red-and-white keffiyeh and sunglasses. Albadri, 34, told his mother, "I chose the path of martyrdom," then traveled to Kensington and tried to enter the embassy armed with two knives. Thankfully, he was tackled by police. In May, he was found guilty of terror offenses.

Grudsky Ekstein says Israel's leadership cannot comprehend the levels of antisemitism on Britain's shores. "Anti-Semitism is on the rise. We've seen the murders at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester and the stabbings in Golders Green. What Jerusalem doesn't see is such a clear link between those attacks and that permissive environment" which allows antisemitic rhetoric and blatant misinformation - like the lie that Israel has been committing "genocide" - to spread unchallenged.

The media, she points out, plays a major role in this incitement. "Broadcasting 'death to the IDF' chants on the BBC [during the 2025 Glastonbury Festival] was massive, because before that, I wasn't aware of the slogan. Since then, do you know how many protests I have seen with that 'death to the IDF' chant?"

Grudsky Ekstein is relieved to be returning home. On a day-to-day basis, she says, she often feels safer in Israel than Britain, regardless of the threat of missiles and terror. Does she have a final message to Britain before she leaves? "Put yourself in the shoes of Israel," she replies. "I know that there is a great empathy for the Palestinians. I get that. But you should understand that our democracy is also one that needs a friendly hand."

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Mahdi (Shiite Messiah) to make his miraculous appearance in August!

According to Jordanian news site Akhbar Hayat:

The Revolutionary Guard is one of the tools for paving the way for the appearance of the Imam of the Time in the arena of regional and international awakening, and the Quds Force plays the primary role in this field, says Abdullah Haji Sadeghi, representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader to the Revolutionary Guard.

These days in Iran, there is a growing belief among some circles within the Revolutionary Guard that Imam Mahdi will appear in August, and that the ongoing military confrontation with the United States, and the severe blows that Iran is being subjected to, will lead to his appearance to take command of the battle against the United States and defeat it.

I cannot find the August rumor anywhere else, but if it is true, then the IRGC would be crestfallen once September comes. 

By the way, there were "false Mahdis" in the 19th century like this one.

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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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07/25 Links: To Win the Peace, We Must Fund the War; Trump’s Lebanese Fantasy; Ireland Rebranded; 9/11 Families want to ban Mamdani from sacred 25th anniversary ceremony

From Ian:

To Win the Peace, We Must Fund the War

Donald Trump said Thursday that he is readying "a massive attack" on Iran, but the most consequential battle this week was on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders, Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, spoke to the Senate Appropriations Committee about a bill to offset the costs of the Iran conflict. The House passed a defense act including those funds the next day, but the Senate package remains in limbo.

Senators on both sides of the aisle raised questions not just about the funding itself, but also about the strategy for dealing with Iran and for some of Hegseth's unrelated but controversial decisions. Grandstanding in front of the cameras is par for the course in Washington, but even the Democrats should want to pass this bill.

For most Democrats, a no vote is a no-brainer. Even before anti-Jewish and pro-appeasement forces began to gain momentum, the party generally has viewed defense spending with skepticism for decades. Most members do not want to cast votes that could be seen as endorsements of Trump's campaign to cripple Iran's nuclear and conventional long-range missile programs. Even if they want to see the threat from Iran reduced, supporting the Obama-era nuclear deal is practically an article of faith in the party. And opposition parties usually fare best when they oppose whatever the president wants to do.

But, even so, there are strong reasons to let through the funds. The first is that blocking the supplemental will not compel U.S. forces to withdraw. Caine echoed an earlier warning from Admiral Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, that the services will cut elsewhere to keep up the fight. That includes reducing operations in other parts of the world, canceling training, cutting back on equipment and weapon purchases, and potentially even letting go of servicemembers who want to reenlist.

As the editors noted Wednesday, moreover, the campaign's estimated $37.5 billion cost is a reasonable price for taking the fight to a vicious and fanatical enemy. Even if the overall cost surpasses $100 billion, as some anonymous Washingtonians believe it will, defeating the "death to America" crowd would be money well spent.

A delay on the Hill might even prolong the war. The Iranian strategy is to hold out until economic and domestic political pressures force Trump into more concessions. The House, which voted on Wednesday for the Iran supplemental and on Thursday to limit Trump's war powers, is already sending mixed messages. Congress could inadvertently lead the mullahs to believe their strategy is working and encourage them to hold out longer. The surest way to peace is for the Iranians to conclude that antagonizing the United States is a losing proposition, not a pathway to further gains.

Lee Smith: Trump’s Lebanese Fantasy

So when Trump says that Lebanon has “been a very badly treated place and country, and we’re going to have it properly treated and treated with the respect it deserves,” he should know that Lebanon’s biggest problem is Lebanon. Sure, Hezbollah is an Iranian implant, but the Islamic Republic having the final word on matters of war and peace for more than three decades is evidence there’s something deeply wrong with Lebanon and its political culture that can’t be fixed with infusions of U.S. taxpayer money.

Thus, when Lebanese President Joseph Aoun visited the White House this week to ask for money, he was selling a mirage. The “ultimate objective” of the framework agreement, he said, is “ending the state of hostility between Lebanon and Israel forever.” But to reach that objective, “America needs to support the LAF,” said Aoun. “Without the LAF,” he continued, “everything will collapse.” And as he told a group after his meeting with Trump, the aid must be “immediate and unconditional.”

What he means is the same thing Lebanese officials have been saying since the United States started funding the LAF in 2006: You have to pay us to disarm the terror group that threatens our own sovereignty, but you can’t condition the aid on us disarming Hezbollah.

Could the Lebanese army plausibly disarm Hezbollah? If it can’t get the job done after two decades of U.S. handouts—since 2022 Washington has been paying LAF salaries directly—more cash now isn’t going to change the balance of power. The crucial issue is that the interests of the government and the army are so closely tied to Hezbollah that disturbing the status quo with an attempt at disarming it would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

Seen in this way, Hezbollah is Lebanon’s top investment vehicle. Without a terror group parked on the eastern Mediterranean that’s at war with a U.S. ally, and that poses a potential threat to offshore energy platforms while it’s engaged in drug- and human-trafficking enterprises around the world, Lebanon would have to join the long line of failed states waiting for handouts. But Hezbollah makes Lebanon the squeaky wheel that needs to be oiled, or else it’ll blow up in everyone’s face. It’s fundamentally an extortion racket.

Can’t the Lebanese make it on their own? They’re an inventive and industrious people whose diaspora has made invaluable contributions across the world—surely, they can make a go of it in their own country! Look at all the aides of Lebanese origin Trump has named to the diplomatic corps: Tom Barrack, Michel Issa, and Massad Boulos, all successful men. But that’s not how most people think in Lebanon.

The default impulse of the Lebanese, hardwired over the course of millennia, is to draw in larger powers to do their dirty work, basically treating them like the live-in maids from Sri Lanka and the Philippines that the country’s leading classes employ: Pretty up the house, but don’t disturb our daily lives by making inconvenient demands, or you’ll break something and ruin madame’s dinner party on the veranda. And so, if the Americans are paying, why go and do something crazy like fight Hezbollah and mess up the Italian leather sofa? And to keep the Americans paying, you need Hezbollah.

According to Aoun and other Lebanese in on the scam, taking on Hezbollah is a long-term process, very long-term indeed. “It’s going to take time,” says Trump adviser Boulos. “This is not easy. Nobody believes for a second that this is going to be an easy task in any way.”

Why, yes, the money is for strengthening the Lebanese military—just not for the purpose of getting rid of Hezbollah—but that’s not all Lebanon needs to rebuild Lebanese society. Because Hezbollah is Lebanese and not “a foreign mercenary force,” as Aoun told an audience of high-level administration officials at the Lebanese Embassy in Washington, Lebanon needs funding for programs to reintegrate Hezbollah’s “Lebanese citizens” back into the fabric of Lebanese society. And, added Aoun, Lebanon needs U.S. investment, lots of it—enough to at least match Iran’s decades-long “massive and sustained investment” that funded Hezbollah.

And yet, as Aoun warned, Hezbollah will continue to be an issue until the Americans “remove the root cause” for Hezbollah’s existence—the “Israeli occupation.” All Aoun means is that Trump has to pressure the Israelis to withdraw. That’s the Lebanese consensus because it’s Hezbollah’s position: Get the Israelis out, and we’ll rebuild our tunnels and restock our arms supply while the Americans pay us through you and protect us from future rounds of Israeli military action even as we prepare to renew the terror war with rocket and missile fire and plans to invade Israel’s north as Hamas sacked its south on Oct. 7.

Hezbollah is weakened, thanks to Israel, but nothing has changed with the LAF since Washington started paying it in 2006. What’s different is that the Iran war has illuminated what is real and what is fake, and who America’s allies are. The way to disarm Hezbollah is not by paying the LAF to protect it, but rather by letting Israel finish off the terror group on its border.

The Strange Story of Kurt Gerstein

When I tried to shift our conversation toward Gerstein, Tomasz gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “He was a member of the SS and part of the Nazi machine. We know his story,” he said. He was less interested in Gerstein’s biography than in his report and how it can be used to scrape the “rust” off Bełżec. “He gave us something from the interior, something about the activity of the camp, the process.”

“And was it a form of resistance for him to provide that kind of information?” I asked. Tomasz shook his head and sighed heavily. “That’s a good question. ‘I’ve seen everything here,’” he said, as if he were Gerstein speaking, “‘and I must give testimony.’ That’s the essence of his resistance. He was the witness. He went inside the Holocaust. He touched evil and he talked about his experience. He told the truth. He broke the silence. ‘I gave information to diplomats and embassies,’” he says, again as if he were Gerstein speaking. “‘I tried to do something. A little—but something.’”

After the war, Gerstein’s widow, Elfriede, and a handful of archivists created Kurt Gerstein House, an educational institution for children in Germany. They also built a collection of Gerstein’s personal documents and papers, including his report on Bełżec. Gerstein’s descendants and future generations of archivists kept adding to the collection, collaborating with organizations around the world to unearth ever more documents and to frame his story in a wider context. The House shut down in the early 2000s, though, having gone bust. The collection was then donated to the Evangelical Church of Westphalia.

Today, the collection is managed by the archivists Ingrun Osterfinke and Martin Kamp in Bielefeld, a small city in northeast Germany. They struck me as a dynamic pair, jumping between German and English to fine-tune individual words throughout our conversation, ensuring that no meanings were lost. I asked them if Gerstein is better known in Germany than he is in the United States.

“I can’t think of any situation where Germans nowadays are really familiar with the fate or the figure of Kurt Gerstein,” Martin said. “It’s very obvious, when we’re doing a tour through our archives, and we talk about the Gerstein collections, that not many people know anything about him.” This surprised me. Why isn’t he famous, like Oskar Schindler or Anne Frank? “The popularity of Oskar Schindler and Anne Frank is based on the successful media processing of their stories,” Martin said, dryly. “I’m pretty sure that before Schindler’s List, comparatively few people knew the name and story of Oskar Schindler. Plus, Anne Frank’s diary is an unusually dense and well-written source that documents the persecution of the Jews in Europe on a personal level and through the eyes of the victim. I have to say …” He leaned back in his chair, as if to let his thoughts settle. “I have to say that I find the comparison with Kurt Gerstein a bit difficult. He’s a much more ambivalent figure than Schindler. Schindler saved the lives of hundreds of Jews, which was personally dangerous for him. Whether Kurt Gerstein really joined the SS only to gain insight into the murder machinery and to inform the outside world is open to doubt.”

“And figures like Anne Frank or Oskar Schindler are easy to understand,” Ingrun added. “Anne Frank’s diary is a real, singular document, and Oskar Schindler’s success is measurable. He saved a measurable number of people. Kurt Gerstein didn’t succeed measurably. His efforts to inform the Allied nations didn’t succeed. His actions and his motivations are all complex and not easy to comprehend,” she said with a resigned laugh. With all these thoughts in mind, I asked how they thought Gerstein resisted Nazism, if at all?

“That’s a very difficult question to answer,” Martin said. “It basically depends on whether you believe Gerstein’s statements to be true. And maybe that’s what we can learn from his story: that categories like perpetrators, bystanders, and resisters, and even victims, can be extremely difficult to define.” We discussed this point for a moment. As someone who was almost certainly sympathetic to the Nazis at the start, and who then turned on them, and who then joined the SS for uncertain reasons, and who then gathered information on the Nazis’ murderous activities, and who then failed to achieve anything with that information, and who finally ended his own life after going into Allied captivity voluntarily, Gerstein, you could argue, was a perpetrator and a bystander and a resister and a victim.

Ingrun took a slightly warmer view. “If we believe everything in Gerstein’s Report,” she said—and from the way that she talked about him, I think that she did—“then he resisted Nazism in not giving up his beliefs, his convictions, and his conscience.”

It is clear that Kurt Gerstein never looked away from Nazism or its crimes. He committed himself to telling the truth because it was the truth, he constantly interrogated his convictions, and he set out to gain knowledge however he could and to inform others of the crimes he witnessed. The ripples of these simple acts spread through the generations in ways that he could never have predicted. His report has been used as evidence in trials against Holocaust perpetrators and Holocaust deniers, for example, and by historians trying to understand what the Holocaust was and how it happened. He may not have been able to save any lives or stop any part of the Holocaust. But he did successfully resist the possibility of it being forgotten.

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07/24 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: A tsunami of lies; Global Intifada, Local Mayor; Streeting’s cynical smears against Israel prove he’s not fit for office

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A tsunami of lies

The threat posed by Mamdani needs to be identified correctly. He’s using far-left populism to advance the destruction of America. But he doesn’t want to replace it with a rainbow-hued nirvana. He wants to replace it with Islam.

Despite his adherence to Shia Islam, Mamdani’s behavior corresponds to the strategy of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has set out how it will conquer America by infiltrating democratic institutions and using them to push the Islamist agenda.

Mamdani constantly makes references to Islam. He has cheered the growth of Islam in the city, repeatedly visits mosques and Islamic centers including ones linked to the Iranian regime, and said that America should follow the example of Islam and Mohammed’s teaching on migration and sanctuary.

Not only does the mayor need to be called out as an Islamist plant; action needs to be taken against him as a danger to America.

Pointing out that Mamdani could be denaturalized and deported, the head of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, has said that the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate evidence that before becoming an American citizen in 2018 he “knowingly provided funds or services to Hamas or another terrorist group—and concealed this from immigration authorities.”

The monumental onslaught on truth and facts about Israel has knocked the West off its moral compass. A despairing Ferguson wrote that, as a teacher, his aim was to ensure that people learned the lessons of history, including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it’s adopted by a modern state. “Yet today,” he laments, “I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized.”

Ferguson implies that reason itself has been defeated. Such demoralization, while entirely understandable, risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Truth is being defeated because none of the custodians of the public sphere is standing up for it. People need to start calling out the agents of this contagion and holding their feet to the fire. And that includes Jews calling out Jewish anti-Zionists, too.

Andrew Fox: Streeting’s cynical smears against Israel prove he’s not fit for office

The High Level Military Group, comprising retired senior officers and officials from Nato countries, entered Gaza and questioned IDF personnel. Its submission to the International Criminal Court described Israel’s civilian-harm precautions as unprecedented and rejected the claim that the conduct of operations showed an intent by senior leaders to starve civilians or commit unlawful killings.

That judgment is also mine: Israel’s institutional policy is to operate within the law of armed conflict. No serious military observer expects a force in a long, brutal war to avoid all individual crimes. Gaza has credible cases requiring investigation and, where proved, prosecution.

Amid the social media outcry, no evidence whatsoever has been presented of a systematic policy of targeting or massacring civilians, nor of deliberate or carpet bombing. At the same time, we may certainly identify incidents that may indicate individual war crimes. The distinction between individual criminality and state policy is elementary. Streeting blurs it.

The most revealing absence from his analysis is Hamas. Gaza was not a neutral city over which Israel chose to pour fire. The IDF confronted a battlefield Hamas had spent years engineering. It built an extensive tunnel system, concealed shafts and weapons in civilian structures, booby-trapped buildings and roads, fought from densely populated areas, and denied the IDF clean targets. My own analysis of Gaza’s destruction found that much of the damage stemmed from ground manoeuvres, engineering demolitions, and the neutralisation of IEDs and tunnels, rather than air strikes alone.

Armoured bulldozers, explosive breaches, and tunnel collapses produced the lunar landscape now presented on social media as self-evident proof of criminality. Those images record a battle within a militarised enclave. They are not a legal judgment.

Hamas designed this terrain both tactically and narratively. By embedding military infrastructure throughout the civilian environment, it forced Israel into destructive urban combat and then presented every collapsed building and civilian death as evidence of criminal intent. Its information operation depends on removing Hamas from the frame. Streeting has obliged. He spoke of Israeli standards without addressing the adversary’s tunnels, IEDs, hostages, or the systematic exploitation of civilian sites.

Britain should scrutinise its allies and friendship does not require silence. Criticism from a defence secretary must be grounded in military analysis, not in televised devastation and casualty figures whose legal significance is routinely misunderstood. Streeting’s job now includes understanding how an enemy weaponises law, media and civilian suffering against democracies. A minister susceptible to that approach will impose impossible standards on allies, only to see those same standards used against British troops in the next urban war.

Streeting should ask the Ministry of Defence lawyers and operators for a serious review. If he still believes Israel fell below British standards, he should publish the basis: which incidents, which intelligence, which legal test and which British comparator. If he cannot, he should withdraw the charge. A defence secretary who cannot distinguish the horror of urban warfare from evidence of unlawful warfare is unfit for office.

Editor's Notes: Germany’s ‘good Jews’ thought they were safe, New York should pay attention

On Tuesday night, the mayor of New York posted a two-minute video to explain that he cannot arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

He had been promising to arrest him since December 2024. At some point, the city’s lawyers told him what any first-year law student could have told him, and so he made a video. That was the news in it. The other hundred seconds were the reason he bothered.

Israel was targeting neonatal care centers. It was starving countless people. It was gunning down hundreds of aid workers and journalists. Americans were paying for the bombs that do the killing. Netanyahu was the architect of a horrific genocide, a war criminal, not welcome in New York City. Washington should arrest him instead.

October 7 did not come up. There is only one “bad” country outside the United States, and it’s Israel. Not China. Not the Islamic Republic of Iran. Not North Korea. Only Israel.

By Wednesday morning, Zohran Mamdani was at City Hall suggesting New Yorkers go protest Netanyahu at the United Nations in September. Protest, he said, is one of the bedrocks of this city. He also said he is committed to representing all New Yorkers, whether they agree with him or not.

The UJA-Federation, which does not usually talk this way, opened its statement with “Shame on you.” The Orthodox Union said the video “endangers Jewish New Yorkers” and that the mayor peddles “lies and misinformation that risk inciting further violence against Jews.” Gadi Eisenkot, who has spent his political career trying to get Netanyahu out of office, called it “pure antisemitism, with no basis in fact.”

Eight months ago, 33% of Jewish voters in the city put him there.

That number is what sent me into the German archives. Jews backing a movement that hates them is not a new story. I wanted to know how close the match was.

More of it matched than I wanted. Some of it does not match at all.

Max Naumann
Max Naumann was not a crank. Berlin attorney. Captain in the Bavarian Army. Iron Cross First and Second Class, 15 months at the front. When he founded the Association of German National Jews in 1921, respectable people signed up, including the chief editor of one of Germany’s biggest daily papers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes he had money behind him, from established quarters of German Jewry.

His theory was that antisemitism is a reaction. Germans were not born hating Jews. They were reacting to things Jews did. To the Eastern European Jews showing up with foreign manners. To Zionists saying out loud that their loyalty was somewhere else. To Jewish writers who made fun of German patriotism. Take away the provocation and the hatred goes with it.

Everything else follows from that. If Jews cause it, Jews can stop it. Naumann wrote it out in his first bulletin in September 1921: Every decent antisemite admits decent Jews exist but calls them exceptions, and he will stop being an antisemite once we prove “we are not a handful of deserters but an army.”

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07/24 Links Pt1: Two Israelis killed in Samaria terrorist attack; ICC removes Karim Khan as prosecutor; Mojtaba Khamenei more interested in nuclear weapons than predecessor

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: We deserve better: Three years after October 7, Israel still waits for an investigation

Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, Israelis are still waiting for one of the most basic obligations the outgoing government owes its citizens: A full, independent investigation into the worst security failure in the country’s history.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government informed the High Court of Justice that it will not be able to complete legislation establishing its proposed political commission to investigate the failures surrounding Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

In response to petitions challenging its failure to establish the probe, the government said the legislation would instead be completed after the October 27 elections. Further attacking the judiciary, it also argued that “it is not appropriate for the court to rule on the matter or intervene in it.”

The government’s explanation for the delay should be unacceptable to every Israeli.

Much has been argued – both in the Knesset and on Israel’s streets – over whether a political commission or a state commission of inquiry is the appropriate mechanism. The coalition has repeatedly opposed a state commission, standing firmly behind its objections to an independent inquiry.

Its first argument has been that it is impractical and inappropriate to investigate the events surrounding October 7 while Israel remains at war. The second is that Chief Justice Isaac Amit is not viewed as legitimate by many members of the coalition, raising concerns that any commission he appoints would lack public confidence among a significant segment of the public. 'Scheduling constraints' prevented Oct. 7 probe legislation finalization

Even if the government’s objections to a state commission are genuine, they still do not explain why it failed to follow through on its own proposal for a political probe – one specifically designed to address those concerns by replacing Supreme Court appointments to the committee with members selected through a Knesset-led process.

According to the government’s response to the High Court, the legislation could not be finalized because of “scheduling constraints.”

That justification is nothing short of insulting.

Members of this government have spent nearly three years hearing the pleas of bereaved families demanding a commission of inquiry. They have heard them inside the Knesset. They have heard them outside their homes and offices, where grieving relatives have stood for months demanding answers, accountability, and transparency.

Some of those Israelis lost sons, daughters, spouses, parents, and friends on October 7. Others fought for up to 505 days until their loved ones returned from Hamas captivity. All have carried an unimaginable burden while waiting for the state to confront its own failures.

Responding to those families by citing legislative scheduling conflicts is a slap in the face.

The explanation becomes even harder to accept when viewed alongside the coalition’s legislative blitz carried out during the Knesset’s final weeks before its dissolution.

In those weeks, the coalition found time to pass legislation it considered politically essential: A bill preventing the enforcement of draft orders against ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, legislation enshrining Torah study as a fundamental value in Israel’s Basic Law, a bill restructuring the powers of the attorney-general, and sweeping reforms to Israel’s broadcasting sector.

In passing said bills, the government demonstrated that when legislation is considered urgent by the prime minister, it can move with remarkable speed.

Trump admin’s $200 million to Red Cross offers chance to press it over Oct. 7 hostages, B’nai B’rith tells JNS

The Trump administration should use Thursday’s announcement that it is providing more than $200 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, to demand that the ICRC “show accountability for its shameful performance during the Israeli hostage crisis,” Rabbi Eric Fusfield, director of legislative affairs at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS.

The U.S. State Department stated that the aid to the ICRC and IFRC will go toward disaster and humanitarian assistance. “Today’s contributions support organizations that respond quickly when disasters strike, provide unparalleled access to people in need in conflict settings, and leverage preexisting worldwide disaster and humanitarian response infrastructure,” it said.

Fusfield told JNS that “the ICRC failed every test with respect to Israelis held captive by Hamas terrorists.”

“They never met with the hostages, never assured them comfort or medical supplies, never demanded proof of life and never did anything to speed their release,” he said. “The ICRC has much to answer for, and the U.S. and the international community should demand those answers.”

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The Phrase That Makes Antisemitism More Justified to the Left

Liberals have historically protested the loudest against prejudice of every kind. This includes traditional antisemitism of the "Elders of Zion" type, people targeting Jews because they are Jewish. 

Yet in the 30 months since October 2023, as antisemitic incidents in the United States have surged. Jews now the target of more raw hate crimes than any other group. we are not seeing anything close to a proportionate liberal outcry.

Why not?

A recent study, by psychologists Jordan Moon, Michael Barlev, and Steven Neuberg, helps explain. One reason, it turns out, is structural rather than incidental: hating Israel functions as a license for hating Jews, and it is a license that works almost exclusively on the political left.

The researchers asked 270 Americans to rate a series of fictional people, each described in a single sentence as disliking a minority group. One version read: "[Name] doesn't like Jews." No further explanation. Rated on a 7-point scale, this person was disliked by everyone — and disliked most by the most left-wing respondents in the study, more than by the more conservative ones. So far, the finding matches what everyone already believed: liberals are the most reliably intolerant of intolerance.

Then the researchers added six words: "...because [Name] strongly disapproves of Israel and its war in Gaza." 

This barely made a difference among the most conservative respondents. Liberal ratings, however, moved dramatically — from the single harshest judgment recorded anywhere in the study to a score statistically indistinguishable from how the most right-wing respondents treat an antisemite with a similar excuse.

Adding that phrase made the far-left's opinion of an antisemite rise to virtually the same level as the most far-right respondent. Those six words took the demographic most opposed to prejudice and made them, for that one sentence, essentially as forgiving of antisemites as their ideological opposites - an increase of about 1.5 points on a seven point scale from extreme dislike to extreme like for the most liberal.

No other prejudice showed a statistically significant shift when given similar justifications. 

It isn't that liberals have become generally tolerant of antisemitism — absent a justification, they remain its sharpest critics, by a wide margin, exactly as their reputation suggests. It's that one particular justification has been granted an exemption nothing else gets. The researchers tested a comparable excuse for anti-Black prejudice ("more likely to commit crime") and anti-Muslim prejudice ("culture conflicts with Western values"); neither moved liberal raters at all. Only the Israel-Gaza justification worked, and it worked by a wide margin, and it worked only on the left. 

Mediation analysis in the same study points to why: liberals who heard the Gaza justification inferred that the speaker shared their politics, and inferred he probably wasn't bigoted more generally — just narrowly focused on this one issue.

Interestingly, the word "Gaza" seems to be a major reason for the needle to move. When the wording of the justification was "because [Name] believes that Israel violates the human rights of Palestinians," there was still a liberal shift, but smaller. 

Generations of the mantra "anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism," produces this kind of result. Once a movement insists loudly enough that opposition to Israel carries no risk of being mistaken for hatred of Jews, it isn't just providing cover for people who already sincerely hold that distinction. It is training an entire audience — the audience claimed to be most committed to fighting prejudice — to suspend its own judgment about antisemitism the instant the word "Israel" enters the sentence. 

Which helps explain the increase of anti-Zionist attacks on synagogues.  Antisemitism is increasingly justified by antizionism. 

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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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07/23 Links Pt2: Antizionism Kills: the danger of Zohran Mamdani; Jake Sullivan Can’t Sleep; Rachel Moiselle: Why Ireland Became Europe's Most Antisemitic Country

From Ian:

Due to blogger's wobbly, yesterday's (22nd) links are in the comments here.

NYPost Editorial: We know why Mamdani keeps banging the Israel drum — vibes are all he can offer his base

Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally felt compelled to admit he couldn’t order Benjamin Netanyahu arrested, so his consolation prize for his fanbase was a new Oval Office-style address late Tuesday where he repeated the whole litany of post-Oct. 7 pro-Hamas agitprop — without, of course, even mentioning the genuine atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.

When you can’t deliver substance, go big on vibes.

The “arrest” thing was always pure fantasy, a story the global left-Islamist alliance tells itself about “international law.”

Neither the United States nor Israel ever signed on to the International Criminal Court under which the bogus “indictment” was laid; indeed US law forbids honoring any ICC warrants.

If Mamdani didn’t know the truth before Tuesday, it’s because he didn’t want to; either way, he kept talking about arresting Netanyahu because the idea cheers his pals and irritates his enemies.

Which is why the “oops, I can’t” speech had to repeat all the “genocide” lies in spurious detail, including fury over a starvation that never happened and a slaughter of aid workers that never took place.

From the start of his campaign, Mamdani’s mayoralty has rested on visions of magically transforming New York City into a Big Rock Candy Mountain of free stuff, social revolution and bitter tears for the enemies of the socialist agenda: homeowners, rich white people, Zionists.

But delivering on his material promises is another matter.

Mamdani’s Netanyahu bluster is a smokescreen for his real goal: crushing Americans’ freedom

For 25 years, US administrations on both sides of the political aisle shared the concern that corrupt nations would use the court to bypass the fairest justice system in the world and subject Americans to politically motivated prosecutions.

As a result, the court holds no power or legal authority over our nation.

After all, we have the US Constitution.

Article II gives the president primary control over foreign affairs, and the Supremacy Clause means that federal law overrides state or city actions in that arena.

The Founders vested this power in the federal government alone, specifically to prevent rogue local officials like Zohran Mamdani from dragging the nation into diplomatic disasters.

Moreover, the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002 blocks state or local agencies from cooperating with the ICC.

Congress passed the ASPA precisely because lawmakers feared ICC harassment of American troops and officials for political reasons.

Mamdani knew all this — and that, under New York State law, he’d have been exposed to possible criminal prosecution for unlawful imprisonment or official misconduct if he actually ordered Netanyahu’s arrest.

So on Tuesday, he had no choice but to roll back this particular Trojan horse he’s been using to conceal his real agenda.

For him, this episode was just the first skirmish of a much longer war.

He was testing globalization’s dangerous waters by using an easy scapegoat, Israel’s Netanyahu, for cover.

And now everyday Americans will be the guinea pigs for his project.

This is a long play: If Mamdani’s advocacy succeeds and American mayors and governors start acting on ICC papers, it hands legitimacy to a corrupt foreign court — and to adversaries that could target our service members with warrants at home and abroad.

Mamdani was willing to demand the arrest of a foreign head of state under ICC law, and on Tuesday he indicated he would advocate the same for his constituents who are subject to ICC warrants.

The recent incident at Park East Synagogue was instructive.

When members held an event about Israel inside its doors, Mamdani allies attacked it — and Mamdani himself used ICC propaganda to blame the victims for being harassed.

The mayor’s willingness to weaponize ICC decrees against New Yorkers engaging in First Amendment protected activities was shocking and dangerous.

On Tuesday, he made his mission and agenda clear: He wants foreign governance supplanting US sovereignty.

He’s advocating a globalized rule of law influenced by adversarial nations to “impart justice” on Americans.

Our service members, leaders and everyday citizens will be left vulnerable to the weaponized warrants of nations that despise us if he gets his way.

A mayor playing diplomat to appease a radical base is dangerous enough.

But a mayor actively working to erode the sovereignty that protects his constituents is a threat to the republic itself.

Huckabee calls Mamdani an ‘evil antisemite’

U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee lashed out at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, calling him an “evil antisemite” in the wake of his recorded message branding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”

“Would be easy to say NY Mayor is just an ignorant bigot, but he is not dumb,” Huckabee tweeted.

“He’s an evil anti-Semite who deliberately lies about serious things like ‘genocide’ to stoke Jew hate. If anyone should be arrested, it’s the Mayor of NY for incitement. NYC should be ashamed,” the diplomat said.

Eve Barlow: Antizionism Kills: the danger of Zohran Mamdani

I am a British Jew who fled antizionism in 2014. I told my story. I am calling upon you: Soviet Jews, Yemeni Jews, Iraqi Jews, Egyptian Jews, Libyan Jews, Polish Jews. We need your stories. I cannot tell them for you. Tell your story of fleeing antizionism. The same sickness with the same lies of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonizing” is spreading like wildfire in an ignorant America among the same racists who pushed you to flee. The same lies recycled - lies that existed decades before any war in Gaza. The ignorant do not know. They are on social media. Tell your story. I will share it. We need your testimony. Do not hide. I need you. We all do.

Today is Tisha B’Av; the day many Jews partake in fasting to mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by our enemies. Last night, Mamdani did as predicted. To prove he is not an antisemite, he tweeted a sunny Tisha B’Av greeting to Jewish New Yorkers, wishing them a peaceful fast and reflecting on Jewish resiliency, mere hours after calling their people’s elected leader a war criminal who should be arrested. This is an abuse tactic known as narcissistic love bombing. Mamdani may pretend he’s no antisemite, but he is proudly antizionist. Antizionism is racism. Name it.

It is mad living in a time when those of us with pattern recognition and strong lived experience look at Mamdani and the DSA and see the Cold War, while the progressives see utopia. There is a smokescreen between us and them, and we are so behind in figuring out how to bring the wall down.

Antizionism is not criticism of a government. It is the organized denial of Jewish self-determination - the only people on earth whose right to a state is treated as uniquely illegitimate. No other nation is subjected to this singular campaign of eliminationist rhetoric. It is Jew-hatred with a progressive veneer, and it kills. It kills by gaslighting victims into silence. It kills by normalizing the idea that Jewish self-defense is the real crime. It kills by creating the moral permission structure for the next October 7, the next synagogue attack, the next Jewish student forced to hide their identity.

Listen to Jews, or make the same mistake the German citizens of 1938 made while that era’s charming violent man smiled for the cameras.

One day it will be as shameful to have been an antizionist in this period as it was to have been a Nazi in the 1930s. The patterns are the same. The cult is the same. The stakes are civilizational. Shake off your attachment. Antizionism is a hate movement. And hate, when left unchallenged, always kills.

Please watch this video, maybe my most important to date, and share it as widely as you possibly can. We are in big, big trouble. Jeremy Corbyn was a mere chopped liver cracker in comparison.

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07/23 Links Pt1: Americans Keep Buying the Same Used Car from Iran; Trump: US-Saudi nuclear deal contingent on Abraham Accords acceptance

From Ian:

Due to blogger's wobbly, yesterday's (22nd) links are in the comments here.

Iran Must Never Have a Nuclear Weapon

For months, the Commander-in-Chief has repeated a clear endstate: Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon. That objective is the only outcome consistent with American security, Israeli survival, and the prevention of nuclear-armed theocratic blackmail of the global energy system.

Iran's nuclear program is not a technical problem that can be solved by bombing centrifuges or stockpiles. It is a political-military program driven by a regime whose founding ideology and operational doctrine treat the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a means to destroy Israel and, ultimately, confront the U.S. As long as that leadership remains, the program can be reconstituted.

The June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes and the far larger February 2026 campaign severely damaged Natanz, Fordow, and related sites. Yet, the regime's scientific cadre, its archival blueprints, and its procurement networks survived. With residual scientists, data, and institutional knowledge intact, Iran can drastically shrink the timeline to a nuclear weapon in the near future despite recent setbacks.

"Managing" or "monitoring" the regime over time is a strategic illusion. It places the burden of eternal vigilance on future administrations that may lack the will, the congressional majorities, or the public support to act when Iran next sprints for the bomb. We have already watched this movie with North Korea. The difference is that a nuclear North Korea can be contained; a nuclear Iran cannot.

The permanent elimination of the regime's nuclear weapons ambition is achievable only by removing the regime that harbors it. Unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in 1945 is the relevant historical precedent. Germany and Japan were not "managed." Their regimes were destroyed, their ideologies discredited, and their war-making capacity permanently dismantled.

Leaving the Iranian regime in power after we have already killed its Supreme Leader and degraded its military is not prudence; it is strategic incoherence. Continuing to pursue diplomatic settlements with a proven non-compliant actor simply defers the day of reckoning.

Americans Keep Buying the Same Used Car from Iran

In Washington, negotiations are viewed as a pathway to an agreement. In Tehran, negotiations are viewed as another means of waging conflict. For Americans, an agreement represents the finish line. For the Iranian regime, it is, at most, an interim waypoint. Americans seek a resolution; Iranians seek an advantage.

For more than four decades, every time the U.S. has sought progress, the same Iranian "hardliners" have suddenly emerged as obstacles that must be appeased. Another small concession. Another limited sanctions waiver. Another symbolic gesture. Only then, perhaps, can the talks continue. From the Iranian perspective, this is the negotiating strategy.

There is little sense of defeat in Tehran. The regime's internal narrative is one of resilience. From the regime's perspective, the mere fact that the world's leading superpower continues to seek its consent constitutes a psychological and strategic victory in its own right. The U.S. increasingly appears to be responding to a tempo set by Tehran. Instead of rewriting the rules of the game, it seeks to negotiate more favorable terms within the existing framework.

In nearly every negotiating cycle, Americans convince themselves that an agreement is just around the corner, while Iranian leaders conclude that a little more patience will improve their bargaining position even further. Perhaps the question in Washington should no longer be, "What new proposal should we put forward?" Instead, policymakers should ask, "Why do we continue to assume that the other side views negotiations as serving the same purpose that we do?"

An operational alternative does exist. The U.S. possesses ample military capabilities to place overwhelming pressure on the Iranian regime. Rather than pursuing a costly ground invasion, Washington could impose a sustained maritime blockade.

Such an approach, however, would require strategic patience, political endurance, and a willingness to absorb retaliatory costs - qualities that successive American administrations have lacked. Consequently, the U.S. will most likely pursue yet another negotiated agreement.

Netanyahu’s insistence offers a clear hint of what lies ahead

“Call us when you’re serious,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in the early 1990s.

Under the current Republican administration, with the current Likud prime minister, Washington is still answering the phone. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are speaking, although no longer every day.

Something has been amiss in relations between the White House and the Prime Minister’s Office since the war with Iran became more complicated. The president’s inner circle is smaller and more closed than in previous administrations, and gaining access to it has become increasingly difficult. The Americans are making it clear to the Israelis that they are running the war and that everything is fine, thank you very much. But it is evident to everyone that Israel is moving into the back seat.

As a seasoned politician, Netanyahu presumably knows how to recognize deliberate distancing. One example came when Vice President JD Vance said, “Israel’s standing in America is not good, and I don’t think anyone can dispute that.” Last week, Vance had already made clear that he occupied the “sensible center,” between those who see Israel as a problem and those who see it as an asset. That is interesting, but the president’s silence is even more so.

And then there is Saudi Arabia. This week, Trump granted the kingdom the civilian nuclear program it had long sought, contrary to Israel’s position and without the broader package deal Israel had wanted. Former President Joe Biden held up a similar move in an effort to link that incentive to the Abraham Accords. His successor went ahead without tying the two together. Lindsey Graham must surely be turning in his grave.

This is already the second time that has happened. After all, lifting the sanctions on Syria also eliminated the possibility of securing a peace agreement with Israel. And all this is unfolding while the departure of Wing of Zion, Israel’s official aircraft for the prime minister and president, is delayed again and again.

The situation also has implications for the election.

I once heard a campaign strategist say that as far as Israelis are concerned, everything happening in the Middle East is foreign news until missiles begin landing here.

Mossad says it foiled Iranian plot to infiltrate Israel, attack senior officials

Working with foreign intelligence services, Israel foiled an Iranian plot to send operatives into Israel to harm senior Israeli officials, the Mossad intelligence agency said in a statement on Thursday.

The effort, led by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, involved turning to criminal organizations, who would in turn recruit people inside Israel or who could enter Israel for gathering intelligence on a target, then carrying out an attack.

Two criminals living in Iran under the protection of the Intelligence Ministry — Baba Mahuzadeh Haji Jafan, also known as “Babak”; and Mehmet Nadim Ya’it, also known as “Nadim” — recruited Turut Ozkor, a criminal living in France who went by the nickname “Philip.”

The handlers of Babak and Nadim in the Iranian Intelligence Ministry are named by the Mossad as Asadollah Behzad Oskhari, Vahid Matzoumi, Mohammad-Hossein Zoghi and Hamid Qasemi.

Oskhari was killed in Israel’s 12-day bombing campaign against Iran in 2025 and was a key figure in plots to attack Jewish and Israeli targets worldwide, said the Mossad.

Philip was tasked with recruiting a cell of foreign nationals who would enter Israel, it added.

He traveled to Iran on several occasions to meet handlers and be paid, according to the statement.

Philip was expelled by France, while Babak and Nadim remain in Iran.

“Despite the attempt to avoid an Iranian fingerprint, the proxy method repeatedly demonstrates the carelessness of the operatives on the ground, leading to the exposure of their handlers in Iran,” said the Mossad.

The Mossad worked with Shin Bet and foreign intelligence agencies to uncover the network, the statement added.

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This is the kind of "barbarity" we need more of - Thousands of Jews visit the Temple Mount

From Jordan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Affairs has condemned the extremist Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, and a number of members of the Knesset and extremist settlers who stormed the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Quds Al-Sharif, under the protection of the Israeli occupation police, and the attacks on worshippers, and the provocative actions of extremists and the police, and raising Israeli flags, and inciting groups; a blatant violation of the historical and legal status of the holy Al-Haram Al-Sharif, and desecration of the sanctity of the mosque, and a blatant escalation, and a barbaric behavior, and unacceptable provocation.

Here's the Arab News edit of this blatant desecration and barbarism:

Jews walking around and singing. 

To large swaths of Muslims, Jews breathing is "barbaric behavior."  After all, the videos they show to prove that Jews are insulting them, "storming," acting "barbarically," never show anything more than Jews respectfully praying and touring the Temple Mount. 

Arabs have mounted attacks on Israelis from their "holy Al-Aqsa Mosque." They play soccer and volleyball and parkour. The only reason the police restricted Muslim entry today is because they wanted to ensure that the Jews wouldn't be attacked. 

Christians visit the Temple Mount. Jews visit the Temple Mount. They are not the ones who act barbarically.

But if this is barbarism, we need to see much more of it. 

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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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